One can see that Boccaccio’s extensive detailing of Gualtieri’s unwarranted and cruel acts towards Griselda serve to underline the notion that women can tolerate more adversity than men can. Griselda’s patience comes back to reward her in the end−Gualtieri acknowledges her virtuous behavior and declares that she has passed his test−but not before the audience comes to understand that Griselda, and by extension women, can tolerate more hardships than men. Throughout all of these tribulations, Griselda maintains a calm demeanor and simply acquiesces to all of Gualtieri’s absurd demands even the vassals that once doubted her background and character now laud her for her saintly patience. To prove her worth, Gualtieri decides to test her: calling her names, leading her to believe he murdered her children, and even divorcing her and remarrying (791-96).
In the story, Gualtieri’s vassals coerce him to choose a woman for a bride−Gualtieri decides to choose Griselda, a poor young girl of lower-class birth.
Boccaccio most emphasizes this increased tolerance in the story involving the Marquis of Sanluzzo, Gualtieri, and his bride Griselda. As a result, women typically endure large amounts of hardship. This increased tolerance for adversity may stem from a basic lack of options: if women are facing some sort of hardship, they have no power to try to eliminate their problems. While this trait is not as prevalent throughout the stories, Boccaccio demonstrates that women tolerate more adversity than men do. Overall, it is fair to say that Boccaccio does portray women as outshining men in many respects−some positive, and some negative.īoccaccio portrays women in The Decameron as being hardier than men. Furthermore, in the instances where the male character appears to triumph or surpass the woman, men usually achieve victory through underhanded means. When examining stories where Boccaccio details male-female relationships, it emerges that women are stronger, more lustful, and more cunning. Although the one hundred stories deal with an array of topics, when Boccaccio compares men and women, it appears that he favors women as the better sex in terms of both good and evil. In The Decameron, Boccaccio demonstrates that while they may not have significant social standing, women do have an upper hand in most aspects of the male-female relationship. As with most societies until relatively recently in history, women were not allowed to have a significant role in society, other than that of a wife and mother. In the society that Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron is set in, women generally are held in a lower social standing than men.
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