The South
Carolina Modern Language Review
Volume 1,
Number 1
The
Making of the Man: Woman as Consummator in the
Lais of Marie de France
by Judith Barban
Skilled
in the art of falconry, adept at arms, fearless of death, generous and loyal,
the Arthurian knight stands an incomplete man in the Lais of Marie de France.1 The rite of passage into manhood is afforded
him by a woman. Wife, lover or mother,
she is sometimes wise, sometimes innocent, often a victim and always justified
by the author, even when her behavior is in conflict with traditional Christian
mores. Marie presents her readers with a fine variety of ladies, each faced
with her own set of difficult circumstances.
Much effort has been made to show the similarity of situations among the
tales, to ascribe a deliberate architecture to their arrangement;2
nevertheless, it is still their difference, the uniqueness of each that
prevails. Indeed the individuality of
each story, of each hero and heroine was doubtless a central concern of the
author. In my analysis of Marie's
female personae I will set them in contrast to the men they fulfill, and, while
preserving the particularity of each character and her dilemma, elucidate
Marie's view of the twelfth-century woman and her crucial role in courtly
society.
Greatly
influenced by the Metamorphoses and
the Remedia Amoris of Ovid, Marie
makes love her principal theme. Unlike
the legendary figures in the romance of Tristan and Iseult, her lovers seem
more real to the reader, more like ordinary people to whom extraordinary things
happen. They are not great kings and
queens presented in a grand saga, but rather typical knights, mal mariées,
and members of the gentry whose individual dilemmas are briefly delineated in a
short story form. In her general
prologue Marie, in traditional medieval fashion, insists on the veracity of the
events (aventure) recounted in the Breton songs (lais), which she
sets in narrative poetic form. Love in
Marie's tales, although not always as tragic as that of Tristan, is equally
exalted. Its linear progression in the male protagonist is generally recognized
by researchers. Commenting on the
function of love in the Lais, Hanning
and Ferrante write: “Unlike earlier medieval epics, in which heroic values are
universally acknowledged even though cowardise or treachery may cause their
subversion, twelfth-century courtly tales and romances usually portray the
protagonist's gradual discovery of real values through love” (5) and elsewhere,
“ . . . as soon as love begins to control prowess, directing its energies to
bind together rather than to separate the love unit, the insuperable social
obstacles to love's fulfillment simply disappear” (179).
In Marie's first tale,[3]
Guigemar, the woman is both predictor and precipitator of the knight's
future fulfillment. Symbolized by the biche
blanche (white hind) in this poem, the woman as consummator is a
paradigm of purity and pathos.
Appearing with her fawn, thus paralleling the Madonna and Child, she is
pierced by Guigemar's hunting arrow, a figuration of the sex act. Curiously, the arrow rebounds into the
knight's thigh. The rejection of the
arrow is a symbolic representation of the knight's one flaw, as announced by
Marie at the beginning of the story: he is indifferent to love. Before expiring, the doe prophetically
explains to Guigemar that he can never be cured of this wound: De si ke cele
te guarisse/Ki suffera pur tue amur/
Issi grant peine e tel dolur/K'unkes femme taunt ne suffri (until a
woman comes to heal you, a woman who will suffer great pain for your love,
greater than any other woman has ever endured, 114-117).
Early in the poem a correlation with the Tristan
legend is evident. Like Tristan,
Guigemar drifts in a vessel. Although
more lavish than Tristan's simple boat since its seams are invisible, it has a
beautiful silken sail, and is equipped with candelabra and an elaborate bed
inlaid with cypress and ivory, carved a l’ovre Salemun (according to the
art of Solomon) and covered with rich material, this vessel, like Tristan’s,
takes him seemingly by magic or divine design to the woman who will heal
him. He is found and nursed back to
health by this lady-love-to-be. She is
his healer, but not yet his liberator. Both knight and lady are imprisoned: she
in an external prison—the garden walled in down to the sea and the tower kept
locked by her jealous old husband, Guigemar in an internal prison of
impotence. Awakening to love, Guigemar
passes from the confines of his prison to hers.
Unlike Tristan, however, Marie's knight remains
totally non-resistant to his destiny.
He accepts it without question and yields to it immediately. Whether fortuitous or intentional, Guigemar
is the first knight the reader encounters in the only manuscript containing all
twelve narrative poems. In this position
he establishes the pattern for the others.[4] Deprived by nature of sexual desire, carried
away by the phantom vessel, submissive to all his lady's requests, he is a
model of passivity.[5] Even when the lovers are discovered by the
husband, Guigemar grabs a club but is incapable of striking his assailant: he
is led back to the magic ship and sent home where he helplessly bemoans his
lost love.
The lady's suffering, as predicted by the
white hind, is intolerable. Unlike her
lover, the lady refuses to accept her circumstances as inalterable. Suicide is her only recourse. As she walks toward the sea to drown
herself, she confronts her fate and, by doing so, sets another course of events
in motion, events which lead to the recovery of her love. When the lovers are finally
reunited—ironically by a second man who is holding her against her will, the
lady spurs her lover to act: Amis, menez en vostre drue (My love, take
your beloved away, 836). Now Guigemar
can meet this opponent with force of action.
He captures the castle, kills the would-be-lover, and leads away his
mistress. Guigemar emerges a perfected
knight whose chivalric activity has now become a means to a worthy end, not an
end in itself. Hanning and Ferrante
also see a transformed Guigemar: " . .
. the knight who scorned love has become the knight who fights under its
banner; his impulse to dominate is now wholly subservient to his desire to
possess a woman without whom he remains incomplete" (58, emphasis
mine).
The third poem in
the manuscript, Le Fresne, is the only one of the twelve whose title is
the name of the female protagonist, in contrast to eight titles referring to
the hero. Like most of Marie's
principal characters she is victimized, in this case, from birth.[6] Abandoned by her mother, raised lovingly by
an abbess, seduced by the noble lord Gurun who takes her away as his mistress,
Le Fresne submits to her fate. Even
when under pressure from his vassals Gurun is married with great ceremony to a
girl of noble birth (who is, unbeknownst to all except the reader/listener, Le
Fresne's twin sister), the girl is dutifully committed to her ex-lover/lord to
the point of preparing the matrimonial bed.
It is at this point
in the narrative that Le Fresne's act of self-abnegation parallels that of the
lady in Guigemar. She replaces the old
unattractive bedcover with the beautiful brocade cloth in which she had been
wrapped for abandonment. It is this
link to her past and true identity which she willingly relinquishes out of
unselfish love for Gurun. There is an
immediate reversal of fortune for all concerned, as the mother recognizes the
brocade. The first marriage to La Codre
(the sister) is annulled, and Gurun Unques si grant joie nen ot! (Had
never known such great joy, 498).
Le Fresne's dilemma
is in one respect similar to the one faced by Guigemar's mistress: she is (to
be) separated from her lover by a third party.
In Guigemar it is the husband, in Le Fresne, it is her
sister, although Le Fresne is unaware of this kinship at the time of her
sacrificial gesture. Yet Le Fresne's
nature is quite different from her counterpart in the first tale: Le Fresne
shows no self-pity. She has either
learned to conceal her grief or has the makings of a saint. It would appear that her act of sacrifice
sprang from pure and innocent love tinged perhaps with gratitude for having
been rescued from a loveless life in the convent. Guigemar's lady acted out of despair; Le Fresne was motivated by
simple love and gratitude.
Nevertheless, each acted from the heart, and each was rewarded. One could also note the eventual pay-off for
La Codre's willingness to hand over her new husband to a long-lost sister, for
Marie tells us that she returned home with her parents and subsequently was
married mult richement (very richly).
Building her story
line on material from the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d'Enéas
as well as on elements from the biblical episode of Potiphar's wife and the
Celtic concept of a mysterious otherworld, Marie introduces the idealized woman
in Lanval and sets her in contrast to the Arthur’s Queen Guenevere (the
Potiphar’s wife’s of this tale). Here
the author's view of the ideal female role in society is clear: she is a
rectifier of wrongs, a benefactor, and in a very literal sense a "dream-come-true." Appearing from the otherworld to the
despondent, self-pitying knight Lanval, she provides pleasant company for her
knight in his times of loneliness when as a foreigner in the service of King
Arthur he is without close companions (until he becomes a cause célèbre).
She abundantly supplies him with material wealth to more than make up for the
neglect on the part of Arthur when doling out money and gifts to those in his
service. Like the lady in Yonec,
Lanval can cause his dream-lover to appear to him by simply desiring to be with
her. Unlike the dream-lover in Yonec,
however, Lanval's lady is invisible to others until the finale when she makes
her grand appearance at Arthur’s court.
Accused of
homosexuality by Queen Guenevere whose love he has scorned, Lanval breaks his
promise to his fairy mistress and in anger and indignation reveals her
existence to the queen. While Arthur
and his court are deliberating Lanval's guilt or innocence on the false charges
made by the queen, the reader/listener experiences the dilemma: should the lady
uphold her word never to appear again or should she come to rescue her hapless
lover? Reminiscent of the biche
blanche, she arrives clad in pure white.
Her cortège evokes that of Queen Iseult, and her beauty is detailed in
the longest passage containing physical description in any of the Lais. Her act of sacrifice is simple yet powerful:
La pucele entra el
palais:
Unkes si bele n'i
vint mais!
Devant li rei est
descendue,
Si que de tuz iert
bien veue.
Sun mantel ad laissi‚
cheeir,
Que mieuz la
peussent veeir
(The maiden went into the palace. Never before had so
beautiful a creature entered therein. She alighted in front of the king in the
sight of all. She let her cloak fall so
that they could have a better look at her, 601-606).
By dropping her cloak of purity this representative from
the invisible world becomes incarnate, she is a word-made-flesh who has come to
forgive and save her recreant knight.[7]
In the story of Yonec,
a mother acts as woman-consummator of her son.
Like the maiden in Lanval, the father/lover is otherwordly. Although he shares some properties with his
female counterpart, he is quite visible and vulnerable. Capable of transforming himself into a bird
at will, he flies into his lady's room where she is locked and guarded by her
husband's sister. When her lover is mortally wounded by the husband's trap, the
pregnant lady, the most daring of Marie's females, leaps unharmed from her
tower and follows the droplets of her lover’s blood through a dark tunnel into
his world. Unlike Lanval in Avalon, she
is not permitted to stay in the otherworld but must return to the real world
with a mission to avenge her lover's death.
It is in her role
as revealer of truth to her son that the mother performs her function as
consummator. Coming upon the tomb of
her beloved by chance not long after the dubbing of her son, she finds the
occasion propitious to hand over the sword:
Or vus comant e rent s'espee,/Jeo l'ai asez lung tens gardee (I now commend his [your father's] sword to
you. I have kept it hidden long enough, 533-534). Just as Le Fresne yielded up an object which connected her to her
past identity, so the mother gives up the one object that was her raison
d'être. Her immediate expiration on
the tomb unites the lovers in death.
Yonec has now become a knight with an honorable purpose. The murder of his parastre not only
avenges his father's death but also wins the fealty of his father's
vassals. This mother’s obedience to the
command of her dying lover—to give his sword to their son and recount his
death—provoked the young man to action and brought him into full knighthood.
More than any other
of the Lais, Eliduc lends itself to sententious
interpretation. It is tempting to see
religious symbolism and biblical allusions throughout the poem: the storm episode, the candelabra, the
weasel resuscitation episode, the distinction between carnal love and
“caritas,” sin and punishment. We must
be careful not to err on the side of post-Reformation fundamentalist
moralizing. The Christian parallels are
implicit but never explicit in this poem or any of the others. Marie makes it clear that God is merciful to
true lovers, as if God himself were the designer of their fate. Their sins,
including adultery, are considered forgivable, if not already forgiven for
love's sake. It is stretching the
proposition to consider Guilliadun—the maiden with whom our married hero falls
in love—as the aggressive instrument of evil when she invites him to visit her
and gives him gifts he willingly accepts (Nelson 38). There is no hint of condemnation of Guilliadun for her actions,
since she is totally ignorant of Eliduc’s marital state, a fact Eliduc has kept
hidden not only from Guilliadun but from her father, his new lord, as
well. During the storm episode the
sailor who dared accuse Guilliadun of sin is the one duly punished.[8]
Eliduc, like all of
Marie's sympathetic heroes and heroines, is victimized. He is falsely accused of betraying his
original lord. It is not surprising
that false accusations abound in Marie's stories, for, as she reveals in the
prologue to Guigemar, she herself was a victim of slander. Eliduc finds it necessary to leave his
homeland. Marie also seemed to have
compassion on those who, like herself, were living away from their homeland or
their natural environment: Lanval, Bisclavret, Le Fresne, Milun.[9] Yet Eliduc is a good vassal both to his old
and new lord; in a strange land, far from his wife, he meets a beautiful and
worthy damsel and falls in love with her.
The circumstances are not unusual in any given century, certainly not in
Marie's time. The young lady is his equal in worthiness and beauty—a
justification for love as explained by Marie herself in another of the stories,
Equitan: Amurs n’est pruz se n’est egals (Love is not worthy, if it is not between
equals, l. 141).
Eliduc, like most
of Marie's principal characters, is not to be judged too harshly; he is merely
human: forgetful, indecisive, acting on impulse. The wife in Le Fresne is at the threshold of
infanticide to save herself from public shame; the senechal's wife in Equitan
gives in to the wooing of a king and plots the death of her husband; Lanval
cannot hold his tongue before Queen Guenevere; Eliduc in anger kills one of his
sailors. Marie does not parade saints
and sinners before her listener/readers.
What we do see in most of her characters, male and female, is the human
condition with its virtues and frailties—the capacity for slander and murder on
the one hand, the capacity for sacrifice and caritas on the other.
If anyone is
without blemish in the Lais, it is the women of Eliduc. Guildeluec, by the willing sacrifice of her
position as Eliduc's wife, makes possible Eliduc's parfite amur (perfect love, 1150) with Guilliadun on the
one hand and, eventually, the devotion of his entire heart to God. The similarity of the names of Eliduc’s two
women, Guilliadun and Guildeluec, is no coincidence. They are personifications
of the duality of love: Guilliadun embodying the fin amors (physical
courtly love) lauded by the troubadours, Guideluec representing agape,
divine selfless love. Viewed in this
light, the story of the man with two wives becomes an allegory of love which
prefigures the work of Guillaume de Lorris in the Roman de la Rose.
Judith Rice
Rothschild has convincingly described the majority of female personae in the Lais
as "controlling women." It is
the woman who takes the initiative, while the male remains content or resigned
to the status quo, especially in matters of love. The women of the Lais are resourceful. They are often
labeled pruz—a term usually applied to the likes of Roland and Olivier,
a term which has been
defined as possessing "the ability to adapt skill and power to a
particular need" (Burgess 134). These women live in a world where human weaknesses or
circumstances sometimes create dilemmas from which the victims would like to
extract themselves. Their efforts
sometimes precipitate the destruction of others and occasionally the
destruction of themselves as well (Equitan, for example). Whether through assertive behavior (the
dream lady in Lanval, the mother in Yonec) or self-abnegation (Le
Fresne, the lady in Guigemar, Guideluec in Eliduc), the woman
plays a key role and serves to turn the tide in the affairs of men, sometimes
abruptly (Lanval), sometimes over protracted time (Le Fresne). She is a deflector of destiny in her own
individual way. She is perhaps not so
much the controlling woman, but an active force, a primum mobile
who alters the course of destiny for her sons and lovers.
Notes
1 All quotations from
the poems of Marie de France are taken from Les
Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner
(Paris: Champion, 1981).
Numerical references are to the line numbers of the poem (story) in
question. All translations are my own.
2 See Margaret Boland’s Architectural Structure in the Lais of Marie de France (New York:
Peter Lang, 1995).
[3] The order most frequently followed by editors and translators of the Lais is that of the Harley 978 manuscript housed in the British Library. It is the only manuscript that contains all twelve of the lais ascribed to Marie de France. It is to this arrangement of the Lais that I refer.
[4] The sleeping knight, a figure which appears several
times in the Lais, exemplifies Marie’s vision of the knight as
unassertive prior to his quickening by love through the self-abnegation on the
part of the beloved.
[5] Some critics see Guigemar as an aggressor from the
outset of the poem. This conception of
the hero is based on a questionable translation of lines 57-58 (De tant i
out mepris Nature/Ke unc de nule amur n’out cure) as “He had so
scorned nature that he had no desire for love.” A more interesting translation makes Nature the subject of the
first clause: “Nature had so mistreated him in that he had no desire for love.” Thus translated, Marie evokes sympathy for
Guigemar while revealing his passivity.
[7] Brewster E. Fitz (“The Storm Episode . . .”) proposes
a gloss of the Lais on three levels, the highest of which is “the Ultimate
Sacrifice of the Logos Incarnate” (543).
Deborah Nelson’s view of Eliduc (“Eliduc’s Salvation”) as an
allegory of the temptation and fall of man and his subsequent redemption could
also be applied to Lanval. Thus
forgiven, the knight can now go with his otherworldly lover to a blissful
existence in Avalon—an interesting reversal of the Prince Charming role.
[8] Fitz sees this episode as an example of the lowest
level of his proposed tri-level gloss of the story: “the base sacrifice of the
sailor at the bottom of the social pyramid” (543). The guilty ones are Eliduc and his men who have abducted
Guilliadun (albeit willingly on her part) from her father; she is the only
innocent on board.
[9] Sankovitch appears to be investigating the theme of alienation in the Lais when she examines the “wild places” in each of the stories. She contends that each of these “non-social” zones is necessary to the advancement of the plot (25 ff).
Works Cited
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Burgess,
Glyn. “Chivalry and Prowess in the Lais
of Marie de France.” French Studies
37.2 (April 1983): 129-42.
Fitz, Brewster
E. “The Storm Episode and the Weasel
Episode: Sacrificial Casuistry in Marie
de France’s Eliduc.” Modern
Language Notes 89 (1974): 544.
Hanning, Robert
and Joan Ferrante. The Lais of Marie
de France. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1978.
Lorris,
Guillaume and Jean de Meun. Le Roman
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