The Tale of Griselda: A Fitting Finale?
The Decameron closes with what is arguably its most unsettling story: the tale of Griselda (Day 10, Novella 10), narrated by Dioneo. A humble peasant woman is chosen as a wife by the Marquis Gualtieri, who subjects her to a prolonged, cruel test of her obedience — pretending to kill their children and replacing her with a younger bride — before finally revealing it was all a test. Griselda endures without complaint.
Readers across the centuries have responded to this story with everything from admiration to outrage. Understanding it requires looking carefully at Boccaccio's framing, the voice of Dioneo, and the literary tradition the tale deliberately engages with.
Dioneo as an Unreliable Narrator
One key to reading this story is recognizing who tells it. Dioneo is the Decameron's designated rule-breaker — he holds special permission to tell whatever story he likes, regardless of the day's theme. Throughout the book, he tends to tell ribald, irreverent tales. Placing this morally extreme story in his mouth is a deliberate authorial choice.
Boccaccio's narrator, Dioneo, actually condemns Gualtieri explicitly within the tale, calling his behavior senseless and cruel. This built-in critique signals to the reader that we are not simply meant to celebrate Griselda's patience as a virtue to be imitated, but to question the entire scenario.
Patience as Performance and Survival
A more contemporary reading frames Griselda not as a passive victim but as an agent who uses the only tool available to her: perfect, visible compliance. In a world where she has no legal recourse, no family power, and no social standing independent of her husband, her endurance is a form of resistance through performance.
- Class dynamics: Griselda rises from peasant to noblewoman and never loses the dignity that comes from within, not from rank.
- Audience awareness: She is always conscious of being watched; her patience is partly a public act.
- Moral victory: By the story's end, it is Gualtieri who appears monstrous to the court, while Griselda is praised by all.
Intertextual Roots: Petrarch and Beyond
Boccaccio's tale drew on an existing folkloric tradition, and the story was quickly translated into Latin by his friend Petrarch, who reframed it as an allegory of the human soul's obedience to God. This is a fascinating divergence: Boccaccio wrote a troubling human story; Petrarch spiritualized it into something entirely different.
Chaucer later adapted Petrarch's Latin version in The Clerk's Tale, adding his own ironic commentary through the Envoy. This chain of retellings shows how the same story can carry radically different meanings depending on its framing.
Why This Story Still Matters
The Griselda tale remains powerful precisely because it refuses easy resolution. Boccaccio does not tell us whether Griselda was right to endure, or whether Gualtieri deserves his happiness at the end. He presents the situation with what critics have called a kind of moral neutrality — and invites us to decide.
This ambiguity is central to the Decameron's literary project. In a world devastated by plague, the text insists on the complexity of human behavior, avoiding simple moral fables in favor of rich, troubling human drama.
Further Reading
- Compare this tale with Chaucer's Clerk's Tale in the Canterbury Tales
- Read Petrarch's Latin version, De insigni obedientia et fide uxoria
- Examine modern feminist literary criticism of the tale by scholars such as Millicent Marcus