Story/Novel Eight, Day One, The Heptameron
"A man having lain with his wife, believing that he was in bed with his servant, sends his friend to do the same thing; and the friend makes a cuckold of him without the wife being aware of it."
The Facts Text: "Story Eight" in The Heptameron Author: Marguerite de Navarre
Genre: Renaissance lit, Romance, Frame narrative Year: 1558
Available: Public Domain (Free!)
Content Warning: Story Eight features the Renaissance trope of the Bed Trick, or in other words people engaging in sexual activity not knowing/consenting to the true identity of their partner. In other words Dubious Consent. I don't really go into this in my blog post but I mention it in the last paragraph of "The Fiction" section if you want to skip it. If this content could be triggering for you please take that into consideration. Read safely and responsibly! (As a side note these stories were written in the Renaissance and contain attitudes towards sex, gender, violence, and consent that we would consider very outdated. If you decide to explore or read other stories in The Heptameron please keep that in mind!)
The Fiction
Alright, so, there's a bit of history to cover with this one. The Heptameron is a collection of short stories published posthumously and written by Marguerite de Navarre, Princess of France, and Queen of Navarre. (Which, I just think it's cool to read stories written by a Queen) She was inspired by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron. The Decameron is a frame narrative in which ten people self-isolate from the plague and each one tells a story for ten days making up a collection of one hundred stories. Marguerite de Navarre died before she could finish her attempt at a Decameron for France, writing up to 72 stories, and so the collection was named the "Heptameron" meaning "seven", the number of days she was able to get up to in her collection.
In The Heptameron ten characters through forces of nature, bandits, and bears (oh my) all end up taking shelter in the same abbey in France. With nothing to do, these ten people (five men and five women) decide to entertain themselves by telling stories that are supposed to be true, and mostly end up being about love.
The story I have linked for this week is "Story Eight", told on Day One of the characters' entertainment/isolation. (This week's post makes the honorary "pandemic reads" list) Its a very Renaissance story featuring a lusty immoral husband, cuckholdry, and a Renaissance trope all theatre fans should be familiar with: a bed trick gone wrong.
Basically, the husband tries to seduce one of his servants, and brags to his neighbor/friend about this. This neighbor makes him promise that if he ever gets the servant, he can sleep with her too. The servant gets tired of being hit on by the husband and goes to the wife, who tells the girl to lead the husband on and summon him to her chambers that night. The husband sleeps with the woman he finds in the bed, not realizing its actually just his wife in place of the servant. He then calls on his friend to have a turn with the "servant" too. The wife thinks the man that has entered her bed is just her husband returning and lets him have sex with her (hilariously noting that he is much better at it this time). The next day the husband realizes he let his friend sleep with his wife not his servant and learns he made a cuckhold of himself.
The Feeling So if this happened to someone in real life the non/dubious consent happening on the part of frankly all three parties involved would be disturbing. But, because its a Renaissance story, and just a story not real life its actually pretty funny. One interesting thing to note is that in the Renaissance, intention really mattered when it came to sin. This means that the story completely frames the husband as the character most in the wrong, not the wife. Although she ended up sleeping with another man, she thought he was her husband, and so in terms of intention/sin she actually did nothing wrong. Meanwhile the husband thought he was committing a sin (adultery) but he actually just ended up sleeping with his own wife. Still for his bad intention karma comes around when he cuckholds himself by giving his friend a turn. Its an absurd bed trick story, one that plays for comedy rather than tragedy, and its one of the more fun reads in The Heptameron.
To be completely level with you, while I usually focus in on one short story, this week's entry isn't really about "Story Eight". I just really wanted to talk about The Heptameron. The main reason being I love a frame narrative. The ten storytellers at the abbey, and their complicated interplay of relationships, affairs, and differing world views prompt the different stories they tell each other each day. At the end of each story Marguerite de Navarre writes a scene in which these ten storytellers discus or argue about the story that has just been told, often prompting the telling of the next story. The interplay between the storytellers is very cool, and often more interesting than the stories they tell.
As I said I love a frame narrative: a story or stories within a story. Most frame narratives are almost all inherently meta textual, or put a different way: they are stories about stories, and well, as someone who is writing a blog about stories you can imagine that this is exactly my jam. The complicated dynamics of the ten storytellers, and the fact that each of their stories is in some way a response to each other means that most of the individual short stories in The Heptameron are about love, while the frame or collection itself is about the act of storytelling. Frame narratives!
Unlike The Decameron, in which Boccaccio's characters isolate from a plague, Marguerite de Navarre's are stranded after a flood. Still, this is a frame story about bored people stuck in isolation together telling each other stories. On the one hand, I can't imagine how much harder this current pandemic would be without technology and easy access to streaming services at our fingertips. On the other hand, there is a part of me that wonders what a deca, hepta, or whatever-pre-fix-you-give-to-a-years-worth-of-stories-meron would look like in our modern world. What would a collection of stories look like if you and whoever you've isolated with or been in closest communication with during the pandemic each told a story a day for a year? There's a part of me that desperately wants those stories. But, as they are still being written for now we look to the past and see how even hundreds of years ago people connected most strongly through the act of storytelling.
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