De Marguerite

Marguerite de Navarre ridiculed men’s obsession with women’s appearance in the Heptameron. In his sonnets, Francis Petrarch continuously praised the beauty and appearance of his beloved Laura giving no attention to her inner virtues: “Thus we shall then together see a marvel—our lady sitting on the / grass and with her arms making a shade for herself” (Petrarch lns. 9-10). De Navarre, on the other hand, showed her contempt for men’s shallowness towards their relationship with women in the Heptameron.  

Bornet’s wife, upon finding out that her husband was plotting an affair with their maid, tricked her husband and taught him a lesson. Bornet’s wife showed her husband how his mind was clouded by the thoughts of lust when she said: “You must have been blinded by desire to pay such tribute to my body—after all you’ve had me long enough without showing much appreciation for my figure. So it wasn’t because that young girl is so pretty and so shapely that you were enjoying yourself so much” (de Navarre 1645). She proved to her husband that the appearance of women would not affect the pleasure men obtain from sex by taking the place of the maid on their date without her husband knowing. Thus, men who used women’s appearance as their excuse for cheating on their wives were merely driven by lust, for Bornet failed to differentiate the body of his wife from that of the young maid. A greater punishment of embarrassment was delivered to the unfaithful husband at the end of the story as “[t]he husband was branded as a cuckold without his wife having done a single thing to disgrace herself” (de Navarre 1645).

Works Cited

De Navarre, Marguerite. Heptameron. Trans. P. A. Chilton. Beginnings to 1650. Ed. Peter Simon. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 1640-1647. Print. Vol. 1 of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Martin Puchner, gen. ed. 2 vols.

Petrarch, Francis. Sonnet 34. Trans. Robert M. Durling. Beginnings to 1650. Ed. Peter Simon. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 1622. Print. Vol. 1 of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Martin Puchner, gen. ed. 2 vols.