SOURCE: “Heroic Infidelity: Novella 15,” in Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, edited by Dora E. Polachek, Hestia Press, 1993, pp. 62-76.

[In the essay that follows, Cholakian traces the tensions within Marguerite de Navarre's authorial voice and identifies a “feminine difference” in her retelling of traditional narratives.]

One of the questions raised by present-day debates about women and literature is that of what constitutes a feminine difference in women's writing. In teasing out an answer to this question in the Heptaméron, I want to use two approaches. The first is what Nancy K. Miller calls “overreading” or reading for a woman's signature. Its purpose is “to put one's finger—figuratively—on the place of production that marks the spinner's attachment to her web” (“Arachnologies” 288). Miller suggests that such overreading “involves a focus on the moments in the narrative which by their representation of writing itself might be said to figure the production of the female artist” (“Arachnologies” 274-75). Expanding both her metaphor and her method, I want to argue that overreading a woman's text should also involve putting one's finger on the places in it where the process of writing has rewoven what was originally fabricated by male authors.

The second approach is inspired by François Rigolot's perception that feminine writing cuts across disciplines, raising issues that cannot be resolved by conventional literary analyses:

L'inscription du sexe dans l'écriture pose des questions complexes dont on n'a pas fini de débattre et qui mettent en jeu des concepts anthropologiques (construction socio-culturelle des rôles sexuels), philosophiques (problème de la subjectivité: qui parle? qui écrit?), linguistiques (niveaux de l'énoncé et de l'énonciation), grammaticaux (infractions à la loi des genres) et psychanalytiques (refoulement des pulsions sexuelles).

(7)

Rigolot's catalogue of “concepts” (anthropological, philosophical, linguistic, grammatical, and psychoanalytical) provides a useful way to sort out the various strands that make up the gendered difference of a woman author's text. I want, therefore, to keep them in mind also as I overread one of Marguerite de Navarre's novellas for a feminine signature.

One of the most logical sites to look for differences between men's and women's writing is in the places where women have imitated their masculine predecessors. The Heptaméron is an obvious case in point, for, as its Prologue states, it is a self-conscious attempt to duplicate the Decameron, with one important difference—the proviso that all the stories must be true. To be sure, claims of veracity in French novellas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were often nothing more than a rhetorical convention, a traditional way of introducing an old tale that had been around for centuries. But as scholarly research has proved, a high percentage of the Heptaméron's novellas are based on historical events. If we are looking for feminine difference, surely this conspicuously marked distinction deserves careful scrutiny. Why does this woman author take such care to define her stories as non-fiction? What does she mean when she says she does not want “gens de lettres” and their “art” to have any part in this project? And why does she fear that “la beaulté de la rethoricque” will in some way impair “la verité de l'histoire” (9)?¹ Does her insistence on telling the “truth” have something to do with making it clear that although she is imitating a man's text she is writing as a woman?

Here, as Rigolot foresees, the insights of linguistics, structural grammar, and psychoanalysis can be helpful. Narratologists have demonstrated that narratives are moved forward by desire. When somebody wants something, something happens. It is important, however, to remember that desire functions on all the levels of enunciation. What does desire look like in a woman-authored text? Does Marguerite de Navarre enunciate her desire to write for and about women within the conventional plot that often makes women the objects of masculine desire? Does she compensate for the fact that women in fiction are almost never defined as subjects?

Miller has argued that for women, desire is not erotic but “an impulse to power … a fantasy of power that would revise the social grammar in which women are never defined as subjects” (“Emphasis Added” 41). Does the Heptaméron inscribe this fantasy of power? Does it attempt to supply the lack that Lacan equates with the lack of the phallus? Or, as some have suggested, does it reinscribe women's oppression under patriarchal structures?²

I believe that an answer to these questions lies in the Prologue's promise to tell the “truth.” By insisting that her stories are not fictions, Marguerite de Navarre is in fact asserting her authorial power. She is challenging the misogynistic falsehoods about gender relations that narrative fiction had been recycling for centuries. Both the Decameron and the early French collections of tales were imbued with the antifeminism of the medieval fabliau from which they descended. They depicted Eve's daughters as deceitful, lascivious, and unfaithful. By banishing “gens de lettres,” who, following the lead of Jean de Meung, routinely used art and rhetoric to defame women, Marguerite de Navarre was rejecting a literary tradition that misrepresented her gender. She was claiming the right to tell about love, marriage, and infidelity from a feminine point of view.³

With this understanding that “telling the truth” is a crucial component of the author's signature because it marks the site of difference, I want to read Heptaméron “15” against Decameron 100—the story of “patient Griselda.” My purpose in so doing will be to examine further how Marguerite de Navarre's rejection of the art of fiction is linked to the question of feminine desire on both the narrative and the discursive levels. I have chosen to compare these two novellas because while both raise questions about what women want and how they can get it, their heroine's behavior is diametrically opposed, and the stories themselves inscribe quite dissimilar attitudes towards the art and uses of narrative.

In Boccaccio's story, a nobleman named Gualtieri insists on marrying a peasant-girl, only to subject her to a series of harrowing trials designed to make sure that she is the perfect wife, that is, a totally submissive woman. First, he pretends to kill the children she has borne him; then he repudiates her and sends her home to her father, with nothing but a shift to cover her nakedness; and finally he makes her oversee the preparations for his second marriage. Through all of this, Griselda steadfastly maintains that his desires are all that matters. At last, when Gualtieri has tested her patience to the utmost, he reveals that their children are still alive and reinstates her as his wife. This story is a textbook example of the conventional plot, in which the hero's desire objectifies the woman.

Its heroine was widely extolled as an example of Christian charity and held up to wives for emulation in the Middle Ages.⁴ This does not seem to be the Decameron's real purpose, however, for at the end of the tale, the narrator Dioneo suddenly undermines this encomium to feminine virtue by stating that he wishes Griselda had gotten even with Gualtieri when he sent her home in her shift by trading her caresses for more elegant attire.⁵

His aside reminds us that in framed narrative, desire can have many owners or “niveaux de l'énoncé et de l'énonciation,” to use Rigolot's terminology. Desire can belong to the protagonist, the narrator, or the author. Here it appears in the form of a storyteller's desire for an entirely different plot. It suggests that stories are ephemeral constructions that can be easily remade by reassigning desire from a man to a woman. Thus Griselda, instead of passively conforming to Gualtieri's desires, could just as easily have assumed agency and done what she wanted, which would have resulted in an entirely different ending.

Or could she? Dioneo does not stop to wonder what would actually have happened if Griselda made such a move. His suggestion that she could have exchanged her caresses for a new wardrobe should give us pause, however. What, after all, does Gualtieri's wish say about the economic options open to women who want to follow their desires? The well-dressed Griselda would still be dependent on the vagaries of masculine desire and therefore hardly free to do as she wished. It may be true that Gualtieri would get his comeuppance in what would become yet another tale of comic infidelity. (Isn't this really what Dioneo wants? By transforming Griselda into an object that would circulate more freely among men, wouldn't he be punishing Gualtieri by making him a cuckold?)⁶ Yet it is hard to see how Griselda's situation would be substantially improved in this scenario. On the contrary, she would be relegated to one of the least respected categories of women.

What is at stake here is the role of pleasure in the art of fiction. Dioneo is not really concerned with the exemplary value of his heroine. In fact, the ease with which he dismisses her heroic virtue indicates that such a woman would not be to his taste, and that if given a choice between Griselda and a lady of the streets, he would prefer the latter. Such women can be enjoyed, and laughed at, with no strings attached, just as fictional plots can bring unlimited enjoyment to narrator and listener if they are transformed in the blithe way Dioneo suggests. Indeed, Dioneo's wish, coming as it does after the last tale of the Decameron, conveys the possibility of a never-ending story that can be revised again and again as the narrator desires.

I have chosen to read Heptaméron “15” against Decameron 100 because it pursues to one logical conclusion Dioneo's idea for a new twist to the Griselda scenario. Reversing the economic status of Gualtieri and Griselda, it takes as its protagonist a rich heiress, who is referred to simply as “ceste dame,” or “la dicte dame,” or “ceste pauvre dame,” which seems to make her a stand-in for Every Lady. She has married a poor man in spite of her family's objections, but when he turns out to be unfaithful, she rejects the patient, passive model exemplified by Griselda and decides to get even by engaging in extramarital “friendships.” This, therefore, is a lady who follows the devices and desires of her own heart, as Boccaccio's narrator wishes Griselda had done.

As Freccero has pointed out, the place of desire in women's texts of this period, and especially in the Heptaméron, is not easily determined. Marguerite de Navarre's world, Freccero writes, seems to be one in which “women desire to occupy traditional places in society,” where women are praised “only in those traditional and traditionally self-sacrificing roles that have been assigned to them by male Renaissance treatise writers” (298). In general, Freccero's assessment is accurate. Many of the Heptaméron's stories are told with the intent of refuting the age-old allegation that women are basically lascivious. They seek to add their female protagonists to the roster of “good women,” who have repressed their desire, or annihilated it altogether, out of heroic virtue.

This preoccupation with proving that women are virtuous had its literary origins in the Querelle des femmes. But, as Rigolot reminds us, it is also important to place it in its socio-cultural context (7). In the aristocratic and royal circles in which Marguerite de Navarre moved, important political alliances and even the welfare of nations depended on marital exchanges. The passionate woman who acted on her desire represented a dynastic threat, for she could bring down the whole structure by endangering the legitimacy of the line. This actually happened in the first half of the fifteenth century when suspicions about the queen caused many to suspect that the Dauphin was a bastard; and nothing less than divine intervention via Jeanne d'Arc was required to establish him as the true heir. The valuable woman then was the one who lacked desire, whose inviolable honor guaranteed the father's name. Judy Kem makes an important point in this regard: Studying the tales of comic infidelity in the collection, she concludes that adultery in the Heptaméron is censured most adamantly when the couple has children. In this economy, then, women learned to desire what made it possible for them to survive and prosper—and this was chastity (feminine virtue).

Thus the heroine of “Novella 15,” who pursues her desire by marrying for love and then seeks consolation outside marriage, is something of an anomaly in the Heptaméron. She is a deviation from the heroic/virtuous stereotype put forth as their true exemplar by the pro-woman devisants (especially Oisille, Parlamente, and Longarine).

The lady does not, however, live happily ever after. Her efforts to achieve autonomy fail because of her lack of power, a lack from which Griselda's husband Gualtieri would not suffer in either the original scenario, or in the one imagined by Dioneo. When the husband in “Novella 15” discovers his wife's dangerous propensities, he first threatens to kill her, and then ships her off to his sister. Embittered and impotent, she remains a virtual prisoner until after his death. Punished for pursuing her desire, she becomes an example of what not to do.

What about the desire of the narrator, however? If Dioneo's final comments force the Decameron's reader to reflect on the instability of fictional plots and the multiple levels of desire in framed narratives, they should incite the Heptaméron's reader to even greater efforts, for the interaction between narrator, other narrators, plot, and authorial discourse is far more complex in Marguerite de Navarre's collection.

“Novella 15” is told by Longarine, who seems to be somewhat ambivalent about it. On the one hand, her heroine's plight is presented with great sympathy; and if her conduct is not ultimately condoned, it is certainly made to appear understandable, and perhaps even justifiable. We learn that as a very young bride who was heiress to a great fortune, she was consigned to the care of an older woman, so that her husband could spend her fortune and enjoy his mistress. We hear that he not only refused to sleep with her but did not even give her money to buy suitable clothing. We are told that she was so starved for affection that she fell in love with a gentleman who took pity on her, only to be deserted by him when the king warned him to stop seeing her, and that it was her bitter desire to get even with her unfaithful husband that drove her to seek out a second lover. Only at the very end of the tale, is our sympathy for her allowed to waver slightly, when we are informed that after her husband's death, she immediately took another lover, without waiting for the previous one to return and marry her.⁷

On the other hand, Longarine betrays her embarrassment about her heroine's conduct by apologizing twice because her tale is not “à la louange des femmes” (116). She first justifies telling it by saying that it proves women are as courageous and intelligent as men. Afterwards, she says she wanted to warn men not to mistreat their wives, by showing how even a noble-hearted woman can give way to anger and vengeance. Then in a final remark, she undercuts both this lesson and her compassionate exposition of the motives behind her heroine's infidelity, by saying that women should never give way to despair as this lady did, but should always remain virtuous no matter what: “Bienheureuses celles en qui la vertu de Dieu se monstre en chasteté, doulceur, patience et longanimité” (128). Thus Longarine ends up condemning her heroine and wishing for the story of Griselda.

It seems that storytellers are never satisfied! Yet if we compare Dioneo's critique of his heroine's patience with Longarine's critique of her heroine's lack of patience, I think there are significant differences. Dioneo's suggestion does not emerge from any sincere concern for Griselda's welfare. Finding her long-suffering insufferable, he wants to metamorphose an icon held up to generations of women into a veritable prostitute, a woman who would trade sex for stylish clothes. I would argue that Longarine's reflections, on the other hand, can be tied to a sincere concern for women's welfare and a desire to teach them to avoid the difficulties her heroine encountered when she rebelled against being a “patient Griselda.”

As the Prologue promises, this story is true to life, that is, its characters are subject to social and cultural constraints that cannot be bypassed in the interests of telling a good story or achieving a happy ending. As Wright comments, while Boccaccio's stories “emphasize comic and temporary reversals of gender imbalance,” Marguerite's depict “individuals' attempts to assert sexual equality and the social obstacles they encounter” (27).⁸ In fact, the plot of “Novella 15” is a chronicle of the heroine's head-on collisions with the harsh realities of her situation. Neither the fact that she is richer and higher-born than her husband, nor the fact that she married him of her own free will gives her the power Gualtieri possessed. On the contrary, she even lacks the means to buy herself proper clothes. In the social milieu represented here, it would seem that rich and well-born married women are not much better off than Griselda was.

When this neglected lady decides to find happiness outside marriage, she comes into direct conflict with the truth about how things operate at a Renaissance court. The “old-boy network” prevents her from bringing dishonor on her husband; and after the king's warning, her admirer's ardor is immediately quenched. Far from worrying about her feelings, his main concern is to assure her husband, who has been watching him from the window, that he is complying with the king's orders. For these men, ties to other men take precedence over romantic entanglements, and they all work together to control female sexuality.

Her second attempt to find a substitute for her husband calls attention to another cruel reality: Although a wife had to suffer her husband's infidelity in impotent silence, he had the right to kill her if she was unfaithful to him. Furthermore, there is no indication that his jealousy stems from his love for her. It is based solely on his right as her husband to have exclusive possession of her body.

Torn between her desire for her lover and her fear of the consequences, the rebellious heroine finds herself struggling helplessly against a system that defines her as her husband's property. This explains the series of inconsistent maneuvers that degenerate progressively into hysteria in the last part of the story. (Let me add parenthetically that I think her bizarre and irrational behavior at this point in the novella illustrates a phenomenon I have analyzed elsewhere. Unable to pursue their desires, the Heptaméron's heroines act in ways that defy logic and confuse the reader.)⁹

When her husband comes upon her and her lover reading a book, her actions demonstrate her complete loss of control. She jumps onto a table and runs away as if he were pursuing her with a sword. He draws the obvious conclusion and warns her that if she ever speaks to this gentleman again, he will kill her. But no sooner has she promised to obey, than she sends for her lover and is confronted a second time by her suspicious husband. Trembling with fear, she promises to tell the truth if he will spare her. Then, once he has agreed, she proceeds to castigate both him and the double standard by which he judges her. In the last scene she is shown mocking her guards as she is carried off to live under her sister-in-law's surveillance.

Despite her wealth, despite the fact that she married the man she loved, despite her efforts to take charge of her destiny, was this lady better off than Griselda, who was rewarded for her patience in the end? Clearly, Longarine does not think so. Thus although this narrator's true desire may be to teach men not to neglect and exploit their wives, she gives in to traditional wisdom and exalts the virtues of the “good” woman.

Such a move is not uncommon in the Heptaméron. Oisille's remarks at the end of the seventh day go even farther. After the tragic story of how the chastelaine de Vergi was seduced into the joys of illicit love, she concludes by advising women to avoid romantic entanglements altogether, because sooner or later they always lead to grief:

Il me semble que vous debvez tirer exemple de cecy, pour vous garder de mectre vostre affection aux hommes, car, quelque honneste ou vertueuse qu'elle soyt, elle a tousjours à la fin quelque mauvays desboire.

(418)

Longarine urges patience and long suffering under the conjugal yoke; Oisille exhorts women to convert sexual passion into mystical adoration of the divine lover; but both speak out of concern for women and their fear of what will happen to them if they give way to erotic desire.

But does Longarine's desire for peace with honor, at any price, coincide entirely with the author's desire? As all those who have tried to interpret Marguerite de Navarre's intentions have quickly learned, the author's voice is almost always silent in this text.¹⁰ She allows her devisants to do all the talking. Yet I believe that careful attention to the way this story is focused reveals that the author is subtly subverting the message that Griselda's way is the only way. If in the end the narrator disavows her heroine, the story itself seems to be encoding a different agenda.

As I have already pointed out, despite her unvirtuous conduct, the heroine of “Novella 15” is portrayed as a sympathetic character. She is intelligent, beautiful, sensitive, and articulate in a way that recalls the heroically virtuous women of the Heptaméron—Floride in “Novella 10,” Rolandine in “Novella 21,” or Marie Héroët in “Novella 23.” She has almost nothing in common with the wanton wife of “Novella 29,” who hides her priest-lover in the attic, or the “folles” of novellas “20” or “26,” who give themselves to their grooms.

Furthermore, if we are made to feel sympathy for her, we are led to feel just the opposite for the male characters. We might even discern an anti-masculine bias at work here. Although the husband is said to be charming and attractive to women and a great favorite with the king, none of these qualities manifests itself in his actions. At the beginning he is selfish, neglectful, and unfaithful, and later, after he discovers his wife's affair, he is unsympathetic, tyrannical, and cruel. He is totally unmoved by her eloquent outburst and refuses to take seriously her contention that he is more blameworthy than she. Although it may be true that, for a man of his milieu, cuckoldry was a fate worse than death, nothing he says or does arouses the reader's pity.

Nor are we given much to admire in the lady's two lovers. The first bows cravenly to the king's will and goes out of his way to get back into the husband's good graces. He does not bother to reply to her bitter reproaches, nor does he seem particularly moved by them. The second follows much the same pattern. After learning that the husband intends to kill him, he also makes a big point of assuring him that he has not violated the lady's honor. He does not hesitate to accept her ring, which he pawns to pay for his travel expenses, and later, when the husband demands the return of the ring, he is all too happy to keep both the money and the diamond she sends to replace it. Although the denouement speaks of his disappointment when he comes back after the husband's death to finds the lady already taken, it is possible that, like the husband, he simply hoped to marry her for her money.

The most telling indication of what the author wants to do here is the way she focuses the reader's attention on the heroine's thoughts and feelings, carefully explaining their origins and tracing their evolution. In the beginning the lady can only submit, Griselda-like, to a situation beyond her control, waiting day in and day out for a husband who hardly sleeps with her once a year. She is confined to a feminine space in which she functions as a spectator who does not even understand what is going on.

But little by little, as she matures and grows more beautiful, she develops an awareness of herself that makes her realize she is “digne d'estre aymée” (117). This inspires her to abandon the patient, passive approach and find out why her husband is neglecting her. She hires spies and learns that he is spending all his time with another woman. Her first response to this knowledge is in the time-honored tradition of the helpless female: She sinks into melancholy, dresses in black, and refuses to go out in public. But when, to her surprise, she receives an offer of friendship, she is so starved for affection that she gratefully accepts it.

This painstaking exposition of the successive stages through which the wife passes before entering into an extramarital relationship makes two things clear: First, she has been deeply wronged by a husband who is her social inferior and who has benefited shamelessly from her money; and second, if she has not been as patient as Griselda, she has certainly suffered without complaint enough marital abuse to bring on what we would identify today as a serious depression.

The author not only focuses the story on the wife's grievances; she gives her an eloquent voice with which to plead her cause. The heroine's gradual transformation from spectator to actor culminates in two bitter monologues that invite analysis by another of the concepts Rigolot lists—the meaning of subjectivity. As Benveniste has argued, linguistically speaking, the subject is established through language.¹¹ In these passages, speaking for herself, out of her own desire, the heroine accedes fully to the status of subject.

It is at this point, where the author revises what Miller calls “the social grammar in which women are never defined as subjects” (“Emphasis Added” 41), that Heptaméron 15 differs most radically from Decameron 100. There Griselda consistently constitutes Gualtieri as the subject:

My lord, deal with me as you think best for your own good name and peace of mind, for I shall rest content whatever you decide. … My lord, look to your own comfort, see that you fulfill your wishes, and spare no thought for me, since nothing brings me pleasure unless it pleases you also.

(817-18)

By contrast, the wife's monologues eloquently justify her behavior and trenchantly denounce the men's.

The first of these monologues is directed at the cowardly lover who submits to the king's edict. Far from sympathizing with his dilemma, she sarcastically mocks him for feelings so “petite et foible” (118) they can be extinguished on command. Taking full responsibility for her desire, she points out that she did not have to ask anyone's permission to fall in love with him; and furthermore, she says, she has no use for a love that is so far from perfect. This outburst constructs the lover as morally and emotionally inadequate, while the heroine now emerges as both passionate and articulate.

The second speech is still more scathing. It takes place after her husband has discovered her friendship with the second suitor. In it she confronts him with the inconsistency of his behavior, pointing out that it was he who was unfaithful to her for many years. Why, she asks, could he break his marriage vows with impunity, while she, who only contemplated doing so, is threatened with death? In this long tirade, which is the rhetorical climax of the novella and one of the great feminist moments of the Heptaméron, the beleaguered heroine gives vent to all the rage and frustration that Griselda never uttered. Nor do I think it is an overstatement to say that she also speaks for French noblewomen of her day, and especially those depicted in the Heptaméron, who were humiliated and oppressed by unfaithful husbands. Thus although the wife does not have the power to defeat the system, the author gives her the power to denounce it.

Marguerite de Navarre has created here a particularly compelling manifestation of what Gilbert and Gubar have called the “madwoman in the attic”—the female character who reacts to the social and ideological constraints of her condition not with resignation but with rage. Indeed, the Heptaméron's compassionate depiction of this lady's slow descent into desperation, must constitute not only one of the earliest but one of the strongest woman-authored representations of the “madwoman.”

As the wife inveighs against her husband's neglect and unfaithfulness, she also reveals a crucial fact the reader does not yet know. She was the one who insisted on the marriage:

Entendez, monsieur, que jamays femme n'ayma autant mary que je vous ay aymé … mes parens me vouloient marier à personnaige plus riche et de plus grande maison que vous, mais jamais ne m'y sceurent faire accorder, dès l'heure que j'euz parlé à vous; car, contre toute leur oppinion, je tins ferme. …

(122)

Thus, we learn at last, it was a woman's desire that set the plot in motion. This is really her story from beginning to end.

The heroine's tirades lay bare the split in the text between the author's desire to speak out strongly against the double standard and her realization that in real life there is no easy way out of Griselda's dilemma. The Decameron's narrator/author is a maker of fictions who can exercise absolute control over plot and character in the pursuit of textual pleasure. But in the Heptaméron, stories are subject to the constraints of verisimilitude. The pleasure of reinventing Griselda as a new and triumphant heroine is closed to Marguerite de Navarre because as she knows all too well, in her world women who try to satisfy their desires pay for it dearly. This is why she has Longarine reimpose the Griselda model at the end.

And yet, in spite of the fact that the heroine's behavior is finally repudiated, I think that this story inscribes not only the heroine's desire for love but the author's desire to be done with the everlasting patience and long suffering of Griselda. If the lady in “Novella 15” remains incapable of triumphing over the obstacles that block her, she is nevertheless awarded the status of subject.

The author's desire to tell the truth is thus satisfied on both the narrative and the discursive levels: First she reveals the truth about women's oppression. Then she denounces it.¹² This way of writing both for and against Griselda as a role model is of course typical of the Heptaméron, which is a highly dialogic text. But it seems to me that it is also a peculiarly feminine practice, inscribing as it does both the desire for power and the recognition of its lack.

Overreading Heptaméron “15” against Decameron 100 brings to light the woman author's hidden signature. It can be recognized in her reweaving of the old narrative that made a joke of adultery; in her “truthful” representation of how women's sexuality was controlled in a Renaissance court; in her analysis of feminine desire; and in her constitution of her heroine as a subject through language. This is not the same old story of comic infidelity. It is threaded through and through with the strands of feminine difference.

Notes

1. All citations are from the Garnier edition of Michel François.

2. Freccero sums up as follows this point of view (with which she does not concur): “Marguerite de Navarre … is said to assign women the roles of moral and spiritual guardians of society, the preservers of the holy institution of marriage against the fickle and anarchic waywardness of men” (298).

3. My interpretation of what is meant by “truth” agrees with Freccero's, who writes, “truth becomes a subjective matter of motivation or intention” (302). I am using it in the sense of “true to life,” not as Polachek uses it to signify ultimate or universal Truth.

4. See Allen.

5. Allen believes that Boccaccio's hidden agenda was sexual liberation for women.

6. In this regard, it is instructive to read Sedgwick's analysis of homosocial ties and how they relate to cuckoldry (49-66).

7. Bernard takes her to task rather harshly for this (315).

8. Wright compares and contrasts Heptaméron 15 with Decameron VI, 7, the story of Madonna Filippa, pointing out that the heroines of both give eloquent speeches in which they condemn their husbands' behavior while justifying their own (29). Her analysis of novella 15 concurs with mine: “The tale … portrays a rigid enforcement of gender differences at the same time that it proves them to be completely arbitrary” (30). Bernard sees a similarity between the heroine's tirades in Heptaméron 15 and Ghismunda's in Decameron IV, 1 (311-13).

9. See Rape and Writing, chapter 7.

10. Bowen points out that if we did not possess Marguerite de Navarre's other works, it would be almost impossible to know her point of view from the Heptaméron (25).

11. “It is in and through language that man [sic] constitutes himself as subject because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality which is that of the being” (224).

12. Bernard relates this authorial desire to have it both ways to Marguerite de Navarre's resistance to imposing closure on her novellas (315).

Works Cited

Allen, Shirley S. “The Griselda Tale and the Portrayal of Women in the Decameron.” Philological Quarterly 56.1 (Winter 1977): 1-13.

Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971.

Bernard, John D. “Realism and Closure in the Heptaméron.” Modern Language Review 84.2 (1989): 305-18.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G.H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

Bowen, Barbara. The Age of Bluff: Paradox and Ambiguity in Rabelais and Montaigne. Urbana, Chicago, London: U of Illinois P, 1972.

Cholakian, Patricia Francis. Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Freccero, Carla. “Rewriting the Rhetoric of Desire in the Heptaméron.” Contending Kingdoms. Ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 298-312.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Kem, Judy. “Sins of the Mother: Adultery, Lineage, and the Law in the Heptaméron,” in this volume, pages 51-59.

Marguerite de Navarre. L'Heptaméron. Ed. Michel François. Paris: Garnier, 1943 (frequently reissued).

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