ABSTRACT
Marguerite de Navarre will offer greater verbal power to the women in her text by introducing sensitive women’s issues from a feminine perspective and with an exemplary tone. In the Decameron it is the 1348 plague, while in the Heptameron it is a flood. In terms of Biblical symbols understood by the intended audiences, both plague and flood are representative of God’s judgment upon the wickedness of mankind. Narrative power and strategy, then, resides with the teller, while the power to interpret and analyze remains the domain of the listener/reader. Both the Decameron and the Heptameron contain embedded narratives which relate potentially sensitive information. In order to undermine the weight given to masculine speech and render the empowerment of the feminine voice more palatable, Boccaccio subverts narrative structure. For Marguerite, the feminine voice is diffused through the refraction which occurs through narrative screens, such as embedded narrations, textual gossip, ellipsis, and the splitting of the authorial consciousness.
