In her 12th century romantic Lais, Marie de France imagines the ideal medieval woman. These women, rather than predictably enforcing the patriarchal standard of the time, act as a social critique of medieval misogyny. In Le Fresne and Guigemar, the ideal woman is a damsel to be saved, an object to be earned, a lovestruck girl who must give in to the male hero. She lacks true agency and does not oppose her male lover. In Bisclavret, when the wife uses her agency to oppose her husband, she takes on common medeival anti-feminist tropes and becomes the lai’s antagonist. Lanval’s fairy lover contrasts Bisclavret’s negative representation of female agency: as a non-human, the fairy lover can command respect without submitting to the wills of men. These three types of women—the ideal lover, the villain with agency, and the respected fairy with agency—can be viewed as a commentary on the treatment of women in a patriarchal society. Whether women submit to the unattainable patriarchal ideal or use their agency to contradict it, the conceptual ideal woman acts as a control measure that mentally, socially, or physically harms all women. Only when a woman possesses supernatural abilities can she more or less escape the standards surrounding the ideal woman.

 

In Le Fresne, the ideal woman is constructed as a subservient female lover who submits to her male lover’s desires beyond what many would consider reasonable. The lai follows an abbey-raised girl named Le Fresne who falls in love with Lord Gurun. When he asks her to leave the abbey and become his love, she does so willingly. However, later in the lai, he decides that he must wed a different lady of finer nobility, and Le Fresne is “hidden away” to allow for the new wife to come into his life (line 349). Before Gurun, Le Fresne had spent her life “hidden … / within the abbey” (lines 232-233). In a constricting patriarchal society like that of the Lais, love offers a form of escape for women who lack the means to uplift themselves. When Gurun gives his love to Le Fresne, he is also giving her a chance to be seen, to become part of society and stop living a life of isolation. However, the parallelism between being “hidden” in the abbey and in Gurun’s castle suggests that, despite being offered Gurun’s love, nothing has really changed for Le Fresne. In this way, Gurun has failed her. Le Fresne, however, is the ideal of a female lover; she does not have the means nor the agency needed to leave Gurun. Le Fresne instead accepts her new position in the castle and serves her lord, going so far as to “kindly” serve her lord’s new bride (line 378). Le Fresne is more servant than lover, refusing to fail her lord even after he has failed her. She gives in to her lord and lover beyond what many would consider reasonable because her existence defies reason. Le Fresne is the ideal incarnate, the very embodiment of how society wants their women to act. By showcasing a female lover whose actions transcend reasonable expectations, the ideal is portrayed as a near-unattainable goal. Only in a fairytale can a woman achieve the goal, and even then, she must sacrifice her agency and her own desires to do so.

           

While Le Fresne portrays the unattainability of the ideal woman, Guigemar considers the mental struggle of women who, in trying to live up to the ideal set by men, cannot possess true agency. The idealized female lover in Guigemar undergoes a transformation from a character without agency to a character who seems to possess agency; however, this transformation only occurs at the will of a man. At the beginning of the lai, the lady—whose very lack of a name implies subservience to her soon-to-be hero and lover Guigemar—is trapped in an enclosure by her jealous husband. She has neither the physical ability nor the boldness to “go out if he does not order it / if [her] lord does not ask [her]” (lines 351-352). Her physical prison is an embodiment of the mental prison that keeps her from defying society’s image of a demure woman. When she escapes her island prison, it seems that, through this act of agency, she has escaped her mental prison as well. However, her escape only comes after meeting and falling in love with Guigemar; the “free will” she exhibits is not free at all, but it is conditional upon her love and service to a man. Later in the lai, the lady loses her physical freedom again when another lord holds her captive, implying that in a patriarchal society, she can never be fully free. Even after finding a seemingly “happy” ending with Guigemar, she remains trapped in her mental prison, as it is under “his command” that she acts, not her own agency (line 495). The lady in Guigemar represents a more genuine and realistic embodiment of the ideal woman compared to Le Fresne. Through the lady’s imprisonment and struggle with her agency, society’s standards are painted as a prison, leaving the lady mentally trapped and powerless if she hopes to achieve the ideal before her.

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The wife in Bisclavret, as a woman who uses her agency to oppose her husband, can be read as a juxtaposition to the ideal woman depicted in the majority of the Lais. In Bisclavret, the wife’s negatively gendered stereotypes are paired with her harsh mistreatment to create a woman who is both the villain and the victim. Bisclavret’s wife, upon discovering that he is a werewolf, steals his clothes in an act of betrayal, which leaves him in an indefinite state of wolfhood. However, the wife does not betray Bisclavret simply out of malice. Her betrayal derives from a combination of fear and a lack of options: “She was terrified by this adventure, / and she thought hard about it, / how she could get away from this” (lines 99-101). She even goes so far as to give herself to a knight “she had never loved,” likely because she feels this is her only way out (line 107). The wife becomes a villain because that is what society forces her to become. The Lais’ patriarchal society limits her options so that betraying her husband is the only way she can use her agency to oppose him and save herself. However, only a few lines of the poem allude to this reality. In sidelining the wife’s conflicts and uplifting Bisclavret as the hero, the wife’s story mirrors the story that patriarchal societies tell of women: if a woman opposes her husband, she is the villain no matter the circumstances. To further cement the wife’s story in patriarchal reality, the wife’s act of betrayal—this act of agency that opposes her husband—is coupled with traits commonly used in support of antifeminist ideas. These ideas include the wife’s inability to “act appropriately on the discovery of a secret, capacity for…deceitful speech, and insufficient loyalty to her…husband” (Wood 62). As Bisclavret is the story’s hero, the readers, through a binary lens, view his wife as the villain. In doing so, the readers view these antifeminst-aligned traits as part of her villainy and ignore her complex situation; they fall prey to the sexist way in which the Lais frame women’s agency and become complicit to the gendered violence acted against the wife at the end of the story. When Bisclavret, in wolf form, sees his wife again “he tore the nose from her face! / What worse could he have done to her?” (lines 235-236). Ending the lai with a violent attack on the wife perpetuates the violence toward women who oppose their husbands. If not literal, it is a social violence that marks and ostracizes the woman from society, which is doubly implied by visibly marking the wife with the loss of a nose. In the lai, this noseless feature becomes hereditary, plaguing future women of the wife’s line. This generational feature suggests that the wife’s gendered violence is not a one-off instance but something that spans beyond her own story and into the lives of many women seeking to possess true agency.

 

As a contrast to Bisclavret’s wife, the fairy lover in Lanval can command respect while using her true agency to oppose her male lover, which she does when she initially refuses to visit him after he breaks his promise to her. The fairy lover in Lanval is beyond what any human woman could achieve. Not only is this the case in terms of beauty—“in all the world there was none more beautiful” (line 550)—but also in terms of how she presents her beauty. For example, Lanval first finds her “on a very beautiful bed … / in nothing but her shift” (lines 94-96) with “her side … entirely uncovered” (line 103). As a fairy, she exists outside of the constraints of the Lais’ patriarchal society, and therefore the fairy does not need to conform to its standards of decency or submission. She can be more than what any human woman could be, allowing her to transcend the rule that women who oppose their husbands cannot command respect. Furthermore, the relationship between the fairy lover and Lanval subverts typical gender roles. This subversion places the fairy lover in the male role, which further gives her space to oppose her lover without the consequences seen in Bisclavret. As would be typical for a man, the fairy lover supports Lanval financially: “She gave him still one more gift: / he will never again want for anything / but that he will have as much of it as he likes” (lines 135-37). Furthermore, whereas the women are usually approached by lovers in the Lais, the queen approaches Lanval, further feminizing him and supporting a narrative in which the fairy lover takes on the typically male role. The fairy lover’s non-human ability to transcend societal barriers and her masculine-coded role implies that a woman who opposes her male lover can only exist positively in fantastical worlds; even then, her feminine power is limited, as the fairy woman must take on typically male traits to command the respect that men receive naturally.

 

The depiction of various types of women in Marie’s Lais adds a layer of social criticism to readings of her work. Her romantic Lais reveal the nuanced ways in which unattainable medieval standards harmed all women, whether that be in the form of limited agency or direct violence. As scholars continue to study Marie’s Lais, it is important to recognize that the Lais’ women may exist as more than plot devices to advance the men’s stories. Instead, these female characters may be their own variety of weapons, used to expose and criticize the harmful patriarchal practices that held women down.

Works Cited

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Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation. Edited and translated by Claire M. Waters, Broadview Press, 2018.

 

Wood, Lucas. “Of Werewolves and Wicked Women: Melion’s Misogyny Reconsidered.” Medium Ævum, vol. 84, no. 1, 2015, pp. 60–88. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2016641862&site=ehost-live&scope=site.