A Tale from the Decameron (1916)
by John William Waterhouse
From Wikipedia on The Decameron’s frame story:
In Italy during the time of the Black Death, a group of seven young women and three young men flee from plague-ridden Florence to a deserted villa in the countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the evenings, every member of the party tells a story each night, except for one day per week for chores, and the holy days in which they do no work at all, resulting in ten nights of storytelling over the course of two weeks. Thus, by the end of the fortnight they have told 100 stories.
Frame Tale is an open-ended genre, in which an outer story or “frame” provides a structure within which other, shorter stories can be told. In the first frame, the Prologue, we get the event of telling the story.
Some examples are the Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Thousand and One Nights, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Some reasons for frame tales:
- a frame tale is a way of organizing short stories
- a frame tale allows a narrator to go outside of a linear narrative
- a frame tale shows that things affect one another and that actions cause reactions – often what happens in an inner story will affect the frame story as well
- a frame tale gives background to a story
- a frame tale gives an explanation of why things happen as they do
Some characteristics of frame tales:
- they are associated with travel
- each frame must be told by an eye witness
- they will have multiple characters and multiple perspectives
- not every frame is thematically joined to every other frame
- they tend to be open-ended
- they allow for a diversity of experiences, and not always positive ones
Ultimately, frame tales are evocative of boundlessness and infinity, which is a characteristic of ancient Arabic culture.
