Community, Survival, and the Arts in the Boccaccian Tradition

This essay brings Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” into dialogue with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a fourteenth-century Italian text. Though different in scale, both texts start with an experience of plague and follow a group of people who withdraw into a restricted community to survive the disease through art. The outcomes are wildly different, however: death, for Poe’s characters; a return to their homes, for Boccaccio’s. Firstly, I consider Boccaccio’s text for its justification of the characters’ decision to escape the city, their manner of living together, and their stories’ content. Crucial here is that the Decameron is, in its fuller title, “cognominato Prencipe Galeotto” [surnamed Prince Galehaut], an Arthurian and Dantean reference that highlights art’s potential to be morally dangerous. Secondly, I examine Poe’s story as a kind of tragic, deviant Decameron, lacking the reason, order, and constraints that Boccaccio stresses in the construction of his ideal community. I read Poe’s Prince as another Galehaut: a seductive intermediary who leads his followers via art to death. Thirdly, I reflect on our experience of a student–staff book club at SELCS in UCL, to consider what sort of story-telling community we created in the time of Covid-19, in the wake of this Boccaccian tradition. Ultimately, I see our activities as having been most similar to a third text, Marguerite de Navarre’s Boccaccio-inspired Heptaméron, given Marguerite’s reflections on the role of art in a crisis and the unfinished nature of her text.