The Lais of Marie de France

The beautiful lady who is the subject and object of amorous attentions is a dominant archetype in the Lais. The description of Le Fresne is fairly typical of the Lais’ female protagonists: “[T]here was no fairer, no more courtly girl in Brittany, for she was noble and cultivated, both in appearance and in speech. No one who had seen her would have failed to love and admire her greatly” (64). The lady’s beauty, good manners and ability to inspire devotion, cause her to resemble the Virgin Mary, the prime female object of worship in the Lais’ Catholic setting. On his approach of the lady, the chivalric lover treats her as a goddess or saint, offering her gifts, compliments, and beseeching her to bestow her favor on him. In a similar manner to a religion, the lady becomes a motivating force for the knight in all his deeds. For example, in Chaitivel, the four lovers “wore her love token, a ring, sleeve or pennant, and used her name as a rallying cry” (106). Thus, the knights joust for the lady as they might for a patron saint, as their constancy to her has a religious element.

The lady is guarded, sometimes physically by an old, jealous husband who imprisons her in a tower, and sometimes by her personal desire to maintain a good reputation and not appear promiscuous. She therefore does not give into her lover’s demands without preconditions. For example, in Yonec, the lady asserts the condition “that she would make him her lover, provided he believed in God,” while in Equitan, the lady tells her socially superior suitor that she needs time to reflect on his offer, for fear of compromising her own position (88). Such hesitation ensures that the lady has the courtly modesty and social awareness that the audience would expect before she gives into her desires, which are no less enthusiastic than the knight’s.

In some Lais, the lady’s desire to receive amorous attentions is such that she makes the first move. For example, Guilliadun actively seeks out Eliduc, the knight of whose virtues she had “heard tell”, and invites him to “relax for a while with her”, taking him by the hand and asking him to sit by her on a bed (114). She is actively flirtatious with this man of good repute, before a personified Love “summoned her to love him” and makes her “go pale and sigh” (115). Although, as in Guilliadun’s case, the lady may be bold in her approach of a man, when she truly desires and loves him, suffering is an essential component of the experience. The lady’s capacity to suffer when she is deprived of her knight would endear her to a Catholic audience, who would be familiar with notions of female suffering from their knowledge of the Virgin Mary’s suffering for Jesus.

The Lais feature variations on the theme of the virtuous, love-suffering lady, and they differ in their attitudes to premarital sex and adultery. The narrator does not defame an adulterous woman if she falls into the category of a mal mariée who was forcibly married off to an older man she does not love. However, Bisclavret and Equitan both feature women who are punished and denounced for disloyalty to a worthy husband. In these Lais, the ladies resemble Eve, the first woman, who betrayed God and Adam in favor of a third party, Satan. Like Eve, the women start off fair and courtly before losing all of their appeal when they sin. The narrator relishes in relating how “evil can easily rebound on him who seeks another’s misfortune,” as she shows the transgressive ladies gaining a physical aspect that mirrors their evilness when they are scalded to death, as in Equitan, or disfigured, as in Bisclavret (60). However, the Lais do not universally doom a traitorous woman. In Le Fresne, the woman who betrays her neighbor by defaming her is punished but eventually forgiven when the twins that caused her shame are celebrated at the family’s reunification. Arguably, the Lais differ in their treatment of transgressive women because they were derived from multiple sources. The original storytellers themselves likely had varying opinions on the subjects of female treachery and marital infidelity.

Another variation on the lady is Lanval’s fairy, who combines superlative feminine beauty with more power than any man in the Lais. The fairy approximates the appearance of a powerful knight when she rides into Lanval’s trial on the “white palfrey” of nobility, with “a sparrowhawk on her wrist and behind her there followed a dog” (80). Here, the bird of prey alludes to her huntress-like nature, while the dog symbolizes her ability to inspire loyalty (80). Her courtly authority and unrivalled power to manifest and create likens her to Marie, the narrator. Through the figure of the fairy, Marie fantasizes about what a lady could do if she had all the gifts known to humanity —feminine beauty and softness combined with the creative potency associated with men. The fairy is not merely a lover but a transformative, awe-inspiring figure. 

The knight—a man who wears metal armor, serves a sovereign lord, and competes in jousting tournaments that support his own personal honor—features in all of the Lais. Apart from Le Fresne and Laüstic, all the Lais are named after a particular Breton knight, which categorizes the stories in the genre of chivalric adventures. However, the Lais are less concerned with the knights’ professional conquests than with their romantic ones. With the exception of Bisclavret, who serves a king, the knights’ main purpose in the Lais is to win and be reunited with their beloved lady, after surmounting several obstacles. Character-wise, the typical knight hero is like Lanval, endowed with “valour, generosity, beauty and prowess” (73). The knight’s success on the battlefield and in ladies’ hearts often makes him the subject of envy and slanderous talk, which, as in Eliduc’s case, forces him to head abroad and serve a foreign lord. Knights in the Lais are wanderers who need a life of action in order to earn and maintain their fame.

While the knight is a hero, he can often find himself in the position of an underdog who must prove himself to earn his reputation and a lady. For example, the knight in Laüstic endures the fact that his beloved is his neighbor’s wife and therefore out of bounds; the knight in Les Deus Amants must bear the weight of his lady on the steep climb of a mountain if he is to marry her; and Lanval is “very downcast in another land”, not knowing where to seek assistance. The knight’s position of misfortune elicits the audience’s sympathy and sets up a contrast with how far he stands to rise during the course of his adventure. The knight is hardly ever autonomous; he must nearly always seek help to get what he wants, either from the lady, who is his co-conspirator in the romance, or by some supernatural agent. The knight in Les Deus Amants, receives the assistance of a potion and the inspiration of his beloved, who has starves herself to be a lighter burden when he carries her up the mountain. However, the knight, a mere mortal, must face the reality of death, as in Les Deus Amants, when he falls victim to his body’s human weakness, or in Yonec when the spikes kill the knight disguised as a bird disguise.

The knight’s ability to be wounded, both in battle and in love, is a key part of his appeal. Both Lanval and Guigemar come under suspicion when they show “no visible interest in love” (44). Guigemar is considered “a lost cause”, while Lanval is accused of having “no desire for women” and enjoying himself with the “well-trained young men” in his company (76). The charge of sodomy would be a grave transgression, both within the Catholic Church and the code of chivalry. While a modern reader would be sympathetic to Guigemar and Lanval’s deviance from the heterosexual norm, by the standards of Marie de France’s medieval audience, their failure to be ardent towards women would seem like an unforgivable defect. Given that both knights eventually succumb to the charms of women, their previous states of indifference serve as a dramatic foil that heightens the contrast with their eventual love-struck nature.

The knights in the Lais are distinguished by their loyalty to a particular lady, as the ability to serve one woman reinforces the chivalric wanderer’s sense of identity. However, in the case of Eliduc, the matter becomes more complex, as his professional need to exchange one location for another leads to a similar change in his amorous desires. When he finds that Guilliadun replaces Guildelüec in his affections, he believes that his “heart was firmly trapped,” associating the change with having to shift his allegiance from one king and country to another (117). When he and Guildelüec decide that he must dissolve his marriage and be with Guilliadun, it is a symbolic acknowledgement that his travels and adventures have fundamentally changed his identity, and that his loyalties must shift accordingly.