Boccaccio's Teseida: The Breakdown of "Difference"

Both epic and romance, Boccaccio's Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia deals with love and war in a Pre­Christian world. The Teseida treats the complex dynamics of human desire and the seemingly inevitable interactive violence to which human passions give rise. As James McGregor observes, the Teseida above all "shows the failure of pagan efforts to rule the irrational side of human nature and argues implicitly, therefore, for the necessity of Christian faith" (44).

But what is the text's presentation of how and why pagan society is doomed to violence? I submit that he failure of pagan society in the Teseida is both rooted in and reflected by the breakdown of language itself. Symbolization based on rigorously maintained binary oppositions is the cornerstone of Teseo's Athenian society. This society is highly vulnerable to the destabilizing influence of anything that appears to tend toward its opposite, such as women who seem to be men, men who act like beasts, and humans who believe themselves gods. Teseo's Athens cannot tolerate nondifferentiation. The Duke participates in and at the same time struggles against confusion of identity. He fights with the formidable weapons of reason, logic, language, and law. The thematic structure of the Teseida seems determined above all by the need to present civilization with a series of challenges all of which are heavily imbued with the language and the imagery of nondifferentiation. Through its complex and often ambiguous narrative, as well as its thematic and linguistic structures, the text implicitly condemns the futility of human efforts to "symbolize" in a world deprived of the ultimate referentiality that can become known to humankind only through the Incarnation.
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for the full article, see "Boccaccio's Teseida. The Breakdown of Difference and Ritual Sacrifice." Annali D'Italianistica 15 (1997): 85-98.