Marie de France is one of the most influential female writers and poets of the medieval era. Her work is what little remains of her, carried through the years by other authors taking inspiration from her work. While little is known of her personal life, her work speaks volumes to the condition of women in the medieval era. Marie de France’s lais are full of rich imagery and references to mythology and folklore, but primarily focus on the concept and intricacies of love and relationships. Her work primarily stems from the beginning of the era of courtly love, which was a literary convention invented by various authors of the Middle Ages, including Marie de France. The era of courtly involved arranged marriages for purely political alliances and motivations, leaving plenty of men and women in unhappy, unhealthy, and loveless relationships, with few exceptions. However, often these unhappy nobles would find someone they did love, and would court them secretly as a way to cope with the shambles that was their marriage. While the concept of courtly love was considered a literary trope, it had many parallels to real marriages of the Middle Ages, ripe with sex and scandals.
Marie de France, however, took these relationships and turned them into a modern view of love. Many of her lais are surrounded by radical views of love for her time, including topics such as sexuality and polyamory. The women in the lais are almost always in unhappy relationships, but never for the same reasons as the last. Some of the women never loved their husbands to begin with, one was wooed by another man of a higher social status, and still another leaves her husband because he’s a werewolf.
“Bisclavret” tackles the subject of a knight and wife in a loving relationship, but the knight is hiding a secret from his wife: he’s a werewolf. For three nights each week, he transforms into a monster of some kind. His wife pesters and begs to hear his secret, though the husband is reluctant. He tells her that he’s worried that she will be afraid of him and leave their marriage. Already, the issues are arising. She pries into something he is reluctant to share, and disrespects his boundaries. The argument can also be made that he shouldn’t be hiding anything from his wife, which is the
Finally, the knight tells his wife his secret. The wife decides to leave her husband and run away with another knight that had pined after her for a long time. She even goes as far as to steal her husband’s clothes, stashed in a bush, preventing him from turning back into a human. According to the poem, the husband was a noble man and the marriage was a happy and healthy one:
A handsome knight, an able man,
Marie de France, “Bisclavret”
He was, and acted like, a noble man.
His lord the King held him dear,
And so did his neighbors far and near.
He’d married a worthy woman, truly;
Always she acted so beautifully.
He loved her, she him: they loved each other.
Her betrayal is unprecedented. This leaves room for speculation for what her motivation is. The wife in “Bisclavret” is more problematic than her monster-husband. There are many ways that the knight’s lycanthropy can be interpreted: conflicts of sexuality, emotional burdens, disability, a secret from his past, or simply that he is a werewolf. Regardless of how it is interpreted throughout history, the themes of “Bisclavret” remains steadfast: loyalty, understanding, and acceptance. The wife chooses to practice none of these virtues, and instead leaves her husband when she realizes living with him will be inconvenient to her. She treats him as a burden, something she wants to ignore and cast aside. She even goes as far as to hurt him further, by stealing his clothes. The man that covets the wife is also to blame, for he knows that he shouldn’t love her but he does, and approves of her plan to leave him and take his clothes. The knight should have been able to trust someone who also served the same king, but he ends up betrayed by him.
The knight wanders as a werewolf until he stumbles upon the king and his men on a hunt. He runs up to them and bows before the king. The king keeps this beast as a form of pet, and he is beloved by the people because of how gentle and loyal he is. The king sees the good in this beast, contrasting the wife’s treatment of him. The beast doesn’t harm anyone, until one day the knight that his wife ran away with enters the court. He bites at him, chasing him off. Then his ex-wife enters the court, and the beast had never hurt anyone except his ex-wife, when he bites her nose off. The knight is angry because of the way he was treated by her, but the king is understanding of him and even makes the connection that somehow this woman must have wronged the beast. He had never hurt anyone else before. When the wife confesses what she has done, the king clothes the beast and leaves him to sleep, and he turns back into the knight he once was. The king doesn’t cast him aside, but embraces and kisses him. The knight had found a place that accepts him and whatever the audience believes he’s plagued with: real lycanthropy or a metaphoric trauma.
Marie de France’s ideology that she pushes in most of her lais is the idea that people get what they deserve. Liars and adulterers are killed or severely punished. People in miserable relationships are given second chances or someone else to love. She presents the notion that there’s a difference between leaving someone who loves you and someone who doesn’t. While the wife in “Bisclavret” left her loving husband because she simply didn’t want to “deal” with him, the wife in a different lai is given a different fate.
The story of “Milun” follows the greatest knight in Wales, whose name is Milun. He falls in love with a baron’s daughter and they conceive a child, but the noblewoman is afraid of tarnishing her reputation because they weren’t married. She hides the pregnancy and sends her son to live with her sister and be raised in secrecy. This story is much different from that of “Bisclavret.” The noblewoman is powerless in this story, fearing the downfall of her reputation and perhaps that of her father’s and Milun’s reputations. The son then grows to be a powerful knight, and joins a tournament at the Mont Saint-Michel where he is reunited with his father, knowing the son by a ring the mother gave him. The son decides that to kill the mother’s husband, and when they arrive in Wales, they hear the news that her husband has already died. Milun is now able to marry his love, and the family lives together thereafter.
While the wife in “Bisclavret” is able to simply cast aside her loving husband for someone else, the noblewoman is unable to marry who she wants because of her social position. The selfishness of one woman is envied by another, who cannot choose who she wants to love. Milun’s son, upon learning of the injustices his mother and father faced, decides to kill his mother’s husband in order to solve the problem. Milun is even ready to help when they travel to Wales, deciding that he would fight for his love rather than let it stagnate. The only thing that prevents bloodshed is the fortunate coincidence that her husband has already died. The noblewoman is freed from an unloving marriage and is free to marry who she wants rather than have her father dictate it, and is reunited with her son that she was forced to give up at birth.
The implications and social lives of women in the Middle Ages is a fascinating and understudied subject in much of literature, simply because not many women were allowed to learn how to read and write. Marie de France’s work is vastly important because of her female perspectives on the issues of love and marriage. Many women were forced into political marriages that their father would choose for them. Husbands that mistreated their wives would be enraged to find out when she cheated on him, but often men had no standards when it came to mistresses. Women were intended to remain faithful to husbands that would not.
Marie de France, for someone who lived centuries ago, has a fairly modern grasp of love and relationships. Her morals stretch into strange, new territory for her era. She believes that adulterers are awful and should be punished, but loveless marriages are even worse. It’s proven in her work time and time again that adulterers never end up with a happy ending. They are killed or punished in some way, like in “Bisclavret” when the wife has her nose taken off. Loveless marriages often end up dissolved in her poetry, and women are given a second chance. She does not defend women that don’t deserve it, and the women she portrays can be just as villainous as the men, which is a literary angle that I find is sometimes disliked by radical feminist perspectives. Marie de France does not care if the perpetrator is a man or a woman, she only cares that they receive the ending that they deserve.
Works Cited:
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2017, March 08). Marie De France. Retrieved September 24, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-de-France.
Marie de France, et al. The Lais of Marie De France. Penguin Books Ltd, 1999.
Sprockets and Springes 