Literary Analysis Of The Heptameron

“The Heptameron” was written by one of the greatest women who have ever lived in France, Marguerite de Navarre. Initially being in an arranged marriage with a duke and eventually marrying king of Navarre, while leading her people and fighting for France, the lady represented an icon of Renaissance. For Marguerite, writing was a way to express all of her uncertainties and doubts that’s been torturing her mind. It took ten characters, half of each sex, to depict complexity of writer’s overthinking and different perspectives on worries such as love.
Marguerite depicts love as something that can harm, and more often than not, harms women rather than men. In one of the stories Longarine says: “Your wives are so good, and they love you so much, that even if you gave them horns like a stag’s, they’d still convince themselves, and everybody else, that they were garlands of roses!”. This implies that women are thought off as objects of desire who are responsible for their men’s satisfaction that they would do anything it takes to accomplish their objective. Moreover, it implies that men take that for granted, meaning that all they care about is their satisfaction and that they take no women’s need into consideration at all. That’s when other storyteller, Dagoucin, replies by saying that: “When a man has everything he needs in order to be contended, it is very unreasonable of him to off and seek satisfaction elsewhere.” This is where we run into contradiction in Marguerite’s writing as she says that there is dishonesty and infidelity in a man-woman …show more content…
She wants to believe that it is pure and divine, yet everything that she’s witnessed throughout life doesn’t let her have at a piece of mind. Number of storytellers make a perfect representation of a scale of these insecurities as they never come to an agreement despite all of the overthinking and looking at the issue from various