The Decameron, Days Two and Three

5. Story 3.1: In story 2.7 we read about a ‘mute’ woman who does not speak because nobody speaks her language. Here we read a story about a ‘mute’ man in a convent. What are the differences / similarities here? How do you read this ‘muteness’? How might this play into a politics of gender, power, etc. that may or may not be related to speech? Use specific examples from the story to support your analysis.

Whereas Alatiel is "mute" because of a situation over which she has no control - an act of God that leaves her shipwrecked in a strange land - Masetto chooses to be mute for his own advantage. Both main characters end up having a whole lot of sex, but Alatial, again, is a more passive participant whereas Masetto's whole goal in going to the convent is to have intercourse with the nuns. Alatiel, as a woman, is seen as helpless because of her inability to communicate with those around her. Masetto, however, a brawny male figure, uses false muteness as an end to a means. For him, muteness is not a disability but rather a tool. "The place is far hence and none knoweth me there," says Masetto. "I can but make a show of being dumb, [and] I shall for certain be received there." He consciously chooses to be mute because he knows he can get away with the disguise and also because it will give the nuns a sense that their secrets are safe with him. It's like having cake and eating it too! Masetto understands, in a crude way, that language used for effective communication will undermine his master plan. He has nothing without having secrecy on his side. So, by essentially removing the ability to use language to communicate the latest in nunnery newsflashes, he plays up how powerful speech can truly be.

Alatiel, on the other hand, wants to use speech to communicate with those around her, but cannot. After being shipwrecked, she and her ladies try to explain their situation to the first men to rescue them, but "perceiving that he understood them not nor they him, they made shift to make known to him their misadventure by signs." Signs might get the job done, but they don't give the same full and wholesome sense of understanding that language does. Later in the tale, when Alatiel meets up with Antiochus, it is his comprehension of her language that makes him so attractive to her. After all, he is conventionally the least attractive of her bevy of mates: he is old ("a man in years") and low-status (he is a servant to Osbech). I imagine that his back would give out if he tried to sweep her off her feet. Nevertheless, the wheels of love are greased because Antiochus is "urged by love and know[s] her tongue (the which was mighty agreeable to her, as well as it might be to one whom it had behoved for some years live as if she were deaf and dumb, for that she understood none neither was underst[oo]d of anyway)." For Alatiel, initially a chaste and honorable woman, her inability to communicate conventionally (i.e. through speech) with those around her forces her to find other ways to communicate: namely, through sex.