A Thesis
entitled
Seeing Double:
Marie de France's Use of Twins and Hybrids in her Lais
By
Monica A. Sass
As partial fulfillment of the requirements for
The Bachelor of Arts Degree
with Honors
in
English
Thesis D
Dr. Christina M. Fitzgerald
Dr. Melissa Valiska Gregory
The University of Toledo
DECEMBER 2014 Abstract
Despite the presence of so many pairs, twins, and doubles in Marie de France's Lais,
few literary scholars have taken up this trope as a subject of serious inquiry. I
explore Marie's use of doubles in the La& and propose that the doubles and hybrids
found in the La& reflect the idea of instability of self and identity that Marie
struggles with because she is a hybrid as well. In my paper, I explore medieval
authorship and discuss how Marie is a hybrid and concerned about identity. I then
do a case study of Le Fresne and use Mathilda Tomaryn Bruckner's argument that Le
Fresne sets up a model for twinning. I then discuss Bisclavret in terms of twins and
hybrids found in the lai that reflects instability. Finally, I look at twins and hybrids across the Lais as a collection and weave in Marie's sense of self. Ultimately, my reading of Marie's Lais enriches our understanding of medieval authorship and the importance of identity by means of her use of doubles and hybrids within the collection. Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Christina M. Fitzgerald and Dr. Melissa Valiska Gregory for
their support, encouragement, and guidance throughout this process. Without their time and dedication, I would not have been able to fully develop my thesis. I would also like to thank my family and friends because their love and support ensured I would keep believing in myself.
111 Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii
Acknowledgements ...... iii
Table of Contents ...... iv
Introduction ...... 1
Chapter l, Marie, Prologues, and Medieval Authorship ...... 4
Chapter 2, Le Fresne ...... 10
Chapter 3, Bisclavret ...... 14
Chapter 4, Doubling and Hybrids Across the Lais as a Collection ...... 19
Conclusion ...... 29
Works Cited ...... 30
iv Introduction
We know virtually nothing about the twelfth century Anglo-Norman poet Marie de
France; she remains almost anonymous. We know that she was trilingual because
she wrote in French, English and Latin, but the rest of what is known about her is an
educated guess. For example, since she was trilingual there are two possibilities of
who she could be. The first option argues that she was an abbess, the second option
supports that she was of noble birth, and both explain how she wrote and spoke in
three different languages. Yet, despite that anonymity, what we do know -- the
multiple languages, for instance -- lets us see a Marie of many identities.
Also multiple are the approaches to her work. Marie's most famous work are
her Lais, which are short verse tales whose main focus is romance, though many
other themes have been found within them. Since the Lais contain so many themes,
scholars tend to have different focuses. For example, Heather Arden, Michelle
Freeman and June Hall McCash read the Lais with the role of women in mind, while
scholars such as Emmanuel Mickel and Sarah-Jane Murray look for love and ethics
as the main theme. The works of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner and Judith Rice
Rothchild take yet another approach to reading the Lais: they focus on the
similarities found within the Lais. Rothchild looks at two particular Lais, Bisclavret
and LanvaI, and she discusses how the two are parallel to each other, while
Bruckner uses Le Fresne as a model for twinning and compares it to Lanval and
Chevrefoil.
A multitude of critical approaches and conclusions suggests a multiplicity of 2
meaning in the Lais, which is appropriate, given that the instability of identity and
meaning is one of their recurring themes. Instability takes many forms in Marie's
Lais as a collection and in single stories. When examining the Lais as a collection, we
see that they are difficult to categorize. For instance, story tellers originally sang the
tales in Breton (or so Marie claims), but Marie wrote them down and expanded
them in French, intending for them to be read. Marie invokes the oral tradition when
she writes in the prologue to Guigemar, "Listen, my lords, to the words of Marie" (3,
emphasis mine), putting her in what we might call "the aural tradition" of literary
romance. Since Marie's otherwise literate work falls into the in-between "aural"
tradition, scholars have argued where to categorize them in terms of what existing
tradition they fall under. The Lais also hold a dual citizenship, of sorts, since they can
be considered both French and British. Marie wrote the stories in French for
French-speaking nobles, but she wrote them in England, and she based them on
stories from Celtic Brittany. The Lais do not fall into one definite category, which
makes them unstable because they can belong in two or more places. The Lais can
be classified as a hybrid because a hybrid is made up of one entity that can be two or
more things. An example of a hybrid, besides the Lais, is Bisclavret because he is
both wolf and man. Along with hybridity, the Lais generate doubles and doubleness
throughout the collection.
Many of the Lais feature twins or doubles, and a twin or a double represents a
multiplication of identity or being. For example, the stories of Guigemar and Equitan show doubling, as do Yonec and Milun, because the stories mirror each other; however, the endings of these mirrored stories are the opposites of one another. Guigemar ends with the couple being together, while Equitan ends with the couple
dying. The ending of Yonec and Milun differ because Yonec ends with Yonec killing
his stepfather; while Milun ends with the stepfather dying naturally and mother and
father are reunited. Likewise, Le Fresne demonstrates doubling within itself as well
as with other stories, such as Equitan, Laustic and others. Le Fresne resembles
Equitan because they are both concerned with lineage and offer morals in their
tales, while Le Fresne and Laustic have similar neighbor dynamics. The Lais repeat
this phenomena of doubling in almost every story, either within itself or across the
collection. Even Marie's own authorial persona is multiplied, split and doubled.
More precisely I would argue that she presents herself as a hybrid because in many
different areas, she is two different things, which makes her identity unstable. I propose that doubling and hybrids reflect the instability of the self and identity and that they represent an extension of Marie because, like her characters and stories, she is also an unstable self. 4
Chapter One:
Marie, Prologues and Medieval Authorship
In order to get to the core of understanding the Lais of Marie de France, the idea of
female authorship in the medieval period must be explored. Unlike today, many
texts in the medieval period were composed in collaboration, meaning that many people were involved in a text's creation, therefore assigning one single person as an author proves to be a challenge and causes them to be quite unstable because scholars cannot pinpoint exactly which author created the text (Summit 91). Female literacy also plays a role in making positive identification a challenge. Scholars continue to reveal new evidence that women in the medieval period were in fact literate, which means that there are more candidates who could be these anonymous female writers. The anonymity of these writers, according to Jennifer
Summit, reveals that "the act of writing is not an expression of individual identity or selfhood, the hallmarks of modern authorship; to the contrary, it produces a space where identity and selfhood--along with the signs of gender that they carry are-- suspended" (95). Marie's lack of a stable identity is therefore not uncommon during this period. This act of staying anonymous also comes from religion because according to Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, God is the first author, while the second, human author's main job is "to diminish rather than assert personal identity" (5). Though Marie is not fully anonymous (we know her name and her origin), she remains anonymous enough that scholars have few ideas of who she
was, thus her identity remains unstable.
Like the characters in her Lais and the text itself, Marie takes on the role of an
unstable hybrid as well because she is one person who has multiple identities.
Marie represents both a French and an English person and so when classifying her
in regards to literary tradition, she cannot be clearly categorized as one or the other
because she is both. She represents a French author because her origin lies within
France and she writes in the French language, yet she wrote in England for the court
there. Our struggle of categorizing her is virtually the same struggle that we face
trying to categorize the Lais as a whole collection.
Marie faces yet another facet of being a hybrid: she is both a woman and a
writer and this hybridity shows in her general Prologue and in the prologue to
Guigemar. In her general Prologue, Marie presents herself as a confident writer
because she begins the Prologue by saying "whoever had received knowledge / and
eloquence in speech from God / should not be silent or secretive / but demonstrate
it willingly" (1-4). She knows that she demonstrates the skills and knowledge that is
needed to undertake such a task. Not only does she know she has the skill to write the Lais, she also, as pointed out by Summit, gives us a detailed description of writing process:
The custom of the ancients--
as Priscian testifies--
was to speak quite obscurely
in the books they wrote, 6
so that those who were to come after
and study them
might gloss the letter
and supply its significance from their own wisdom. (9-16)
Essentially, glossing the works previously written is what Marie does with the Lais because she has the knowledge to translate them from songs (lais) to written poetry. A type of doubling also occurs in this Prologue because the author writes and the reader interprets (glosses), and together we produce meaning.
Not only does Marie write the Lais down, but she is confident enough to expand on them as well. This expansion can be seen threaded throughout several of the Lais, but it is best seen in the prologue to Bisclavret. In this prologue she states,
"a werewolf is a savage beast / while his fury is on him / he eats men, does much harm / goes deep into the forest to live" (9-12). She expands on this by changing the characteristics of the werewolf. Bisclavret is not savage while he is in werewolf form; he enjoys his freedom while running around the forest. The story only shows savage behavior from him after his wife betrays him, and not before. Marie cements her confidence in her work and ability by dedicating the Lais to a king, presumably
King Henry II. To dedicate a work to a king would take an enormous amount of confidence because one would not know if he would like it or not. Marie is confident enough in herself that she takes that chance to please the king with her Lais.
While the general Prologue shows Marie as a confident writer, the prologue to
Guigemar, which directly follows the general Prologue, reveals her to be anxious, as if her being a woman somehow undermines her ability. Her anxiety that she feels is 7
apparent when she writes:
But anywhere there is
a man or woman of great worth,
people who envy their good fortune
often say evil things about them;
they want to ruin their reputations.
Thus they act like
vicious, cowardly dogs
who bite people treacherously.
I don't propose to give up because of that;
if spiteful critics or slanderers
wish to turn my accomplishments against me,
they have a right to their evil talk. (7-18)
The fact that Marie mentions both "a man or woman of great worth" (8) suggests a type of hybrid identity because she may see herself as writing like a man, but as a woman. This mindset would propose the idea that Marie is anxious about her female identity, therefore she must write like a man in order for her work to have credence.
Marie writes about treachery, spite and evil talk in this prologue, and though she is defying it by continuing to write, the worry and anxiety is ever present. It seems that some of the worry comes from people not believing her tales because she writes,
"the tales-- and I know they're true--" (19). By saying this, she tries to convince her readers that she is confident in herself, yet it comes off as a worry that people won't believe in her stories or her abilities. Marie is clearly worried about how people will 8
react to her project, yet an air of confidence is still present because she regards
herself as a person of great worth. The statement of confident writing in the general
Prologue and the anxiety she feels in the prologue to Guigernar are nearly in the same place, though the anxiety section is a few lines longer, which reflects the idea that Marie is a hybrid because neither feeling takes precedence over the other.
The general Prologue and the prologue to Guigemar show Marie as a woman and as a writer, which adds another facet to her hybridity. According to Robert
Stein, Marie shows that her creativity can be seen as both masculine and feminine.
He argues,
... the world of writing as it is represented in the prologue--
composed of text, history, genealogy, Latin--
is set against the world of oral performance--
speech, memory, adventure, vernacular. The unspoken in this
dichotomy is its structural core; the world of writing is socially
fully male; the world of speech, female. (288)
Marie shows herself as both a writer and a woman in the genre of her work. While she did compose the Lais, which according to Stein are masculine, the Lais were generally sung, which adheres to Marie's feminine side. Not only is Marie a hybrid in the sense that she is both woman and writer; she is also both feminine and masculine ("a man or woman of great worth" (8)), which amplifies her hybridity.
Marie's hybridity sets in motion the themes of doubles and hybrids in one lai and the Lais as a collection. Since Marie's identity is unstable due to her hybrid state, instability by means of doubles and hybrids take form in the characters' quest for 9 self identity and the character are then doubles of Marie. 10
Chapter Two:
Le Fresne
The story of Le Fresne begins with neighbors who are identical to each other,
figurative twins in a sense. According to the lai the two neighbors "were rich men,/
brave and worthy knights./They lived close by, with the same region;/each was
married" (4-8). According to Mathilda Bruckner, Le Fresne sets up a model for
twinning because it is the first lai to have twins and the lais that follow continue to
follow that model.She argues that "characters in close proximity to each other
appear identical until some event in the plot allows them to achieve distinction through difference" (947). Bruckner makes the case that this model of twinning is seen throughout the Lais as a collection, and she further uses Lanval and Chevrefoil to show this. Laustic, to which I will return later, is another example ofa lai that follows this model of twinning. The neighbors in Le Fresne do achieve distinction when the one set of neighbors give birth to twin sons. The twins themselves are doubles because of the mere fact that there are two of them. This birthing of twins, while it should be a joyous occasion, has the opposite effect for both families. The wife who did not bear the twins slanders the wife who did by saying "it never was and never will be / possible for such a thing to happen / that a woman could have / two sons in one birth / unless two men had lain with her" (38-42). While this slander ruins the reputation of the mother of the twin boys, it also comes back to haunt the slanderer. In a cruel sense of irony, the slandering woman became 11
pregnant with twins and while this birthing of twins would return the neighbors to
the original model of no distinction between them, the slandering woman gives
birth to twin girls, not boys and therefore, the distinction remain. The fact that the
families in this lai produce two sets of twins, male and female, ties back to Marie and
her masculine and feminine sides, and it suggests that both parts of her want to be
represented in Le Fresne.
In continuation of the theme of doubles, Le Fresne has twin subplots whose
endings rely upon the removal of Le Fresne herself. According to Bruckner, the first
subplot revolves around "identity and inheritance threatened" (947). The mother knows that the inheritance and identity of her children, and herself, will be questioned after having slandered her neighbor for having twins. In order to keep their identity and inheritance from being questioned, the mother decides to abandon one of her daughters, Le Fresne, thus removing her. Child abandonment presents itself in another lai: Milun, which I will return to later. The second subplot that revolves around the removal of Le Fresne, according to Bruckner, also ends with the abandonment. Le Fresne falls in love with a noble man named Gurun and while they have their affair, everyone loves her, except Gurun's knights. According to the lai:
They often urged him
to marry a noble woman,
and to get rid of this mistress of his.
They'd be pleased if he had an heir
who could succeed to 12
his land and inheritance;
it would be much to their disadvantage
if he was deterred by his concubine
from having a child born in wedlock. (316-24)
Thus, after talking with his knights, Gurun heeds their advice and removes Le
Fresne as his mistress. The removal of Le Frense raises the question Marie's motives
of why her female protagonist must be removed in order for the plots to be
resolved, a point that I will return to.
Unstable identity continues to weave itself throughout Le Fresne, in regards to
Le Fresne's mother. The role and identity of the mother remains a topic of debate
among scholars. While scholars such as Bruckner argue that the mother's role is
that of a twin because she plays the part of good and bad mother when it comes to
her daughters (948), I argue that she is a hybrid, rather than a direct twin, for the
mother is one person, who has two sides to her, just as Marie is. We see Le Fresne's
mother as bad because of her treatment of Le Fresne; she abandons her and when
upon meeting her again, wants to get rid of her for Codre's sake. This moment of
removing one for the other makes the mother more complicated, for she is showing
both the good and bad sides of her in the fact that she is acting for the sake of Codre.
The mother also shows her good and bad hybridity in another instance: discovering
Le Fresne. When the mother first bears the twins, she decides that she must dispose
of one and she declares "I'd rather make that up to God / than live in shame and
dishonor" (93-94). She shows that she is a bad mother by deserting one of her children in order to keep her good name intact. In the second instance, the mother 13 redeems herself the second time that she discovers Le Fresne. When her husband enters the room that contains his wife and daughter, the mother "hugged and kissed him / asked for forgiveness for her crimes" (458-59). Confessing her crime and asking for forgiveness shows the mother as being good because she admits her mistakes and asks for forgiveness.
The placement ofLe Fresne helps set up the model of twinning as well, even though it is the third lai in the collection. While the first two lais, Guigemar and
Equitan, feature themes of twinning that I will discuss later, Le Fresne is the first lai to have twins and hybrids within the story itself. Subsequent lais, such as Bisclavret and Yonec, follow this model of twinning. Marie uses Le Fresne as a way to explore identity by presenting herself within her characters. Marie can be seen as the mother because both of them are considered hybrids in their own right; the mother deals with a good and bad dichotomy, while Marie deals with being a confident writer filled with anxiety. Marie presents herself as a version of Le Fresne as well.
The plots revolve around the removal of the heroine, which is similar to the medieval practice of remaining an anonymous author. Marie never fully removes Le
Fresne from story, which is analogous to Marie giving us her name, for she is not completely removed from the role of author. 14
Chapter Three:
Bisclavret
Bisclavret immediately follows Le Fresne in Marie's collection of lais and this set up allows the continuation ofLe Fresne's model for twinning. Like Le Fresne, where
Marie shows twinning more than hybridity, Bisclavret follows that model, though
Marie gives her readers more instances of hybridity in this lai. In short, Bisclavret is a lai about a knight, Bisclavret, who transforms into a werewolf three nights a week.
When his wife finds out, she hides his clothes, which he needs in order to transform back into a human, and Bisclavret is sentenced to spend the rest of his life as a werewolf. Eventually, the king finds out and returns the clothes to his loyal knight.
Bisclavret is arguably a hybrid since he is both man and wolf. Unlike Marie, whose hybridity cannot be seen physically, Bisclavret's transformation can be seen, and he also chooses the days in which he wants to transform from man to wolf. The split between humanity and bestiality should be clear, yet in Bisclavret's case, it is not always so apparent. Bisclavret, in the opening of the lai, is given the description of being "a fine, handsome knight/who behaved nobly / He was close with his lord / and loved by all his neighbors" (17-20). This description of behaving nobly and being loved by everyone would suggest that he acted like a decent human being; however, Marie presents her readers with evidence that perhaps he did not always act in such a kindly human manner. Consider what his wife says to him when she questions him about his whereabouts. She says "I'd very much like to ask you one 15
thing / if I dared / but I'm so afraid of your anger / that nothing frightens me more"
(33-36). This being frightened by his anger could mean that he has acted wolfishly
towards her before, meaning that he can act like a beast even in human form.
The transference of behavior, from beast to man, suggests that the opposite is
possible as well. When Bisclavret changes into a werewolf, he must act as a human
when he life is at stake by the king's hunting party. In order to survive "he took hold
of the king's stirrup / kissed his leg and his foot" (147-48). Bisclavret acted as a
knight and paid homage to his king and lord, which suggests that even when he
transforms, he still is able to act like a human. But Bisclavret in wolf form also has
the ability to act like a beast when he needs to. Upon seeing his wife who betrayed him, Bisclavret taps into his beastly side for "when Bisclavret saw her coming / no one could hold him back / he ran towards her in a rage / now listen to how well he avenged himself/he tore the nose off her face" (231-35). Tearing the nose off his wife's face clearly indicates that he is adhering to the beastly side of him; however, the king and the court do not see it that way. During his stay at court, Bisclavret has never acted as the beast that he is, except when he bites his wife's lover and when he attacks his wife. The king and his court still see him as a beast who can act as a human because in both instances, the court blames the victim. The wise man to the king states "he's never touched anyone / or shown any wickedness / except to this woman / By the faith that I owe you / he has some grudge against her / and against her husband as well" (245-50). Though Bisclavret acts like a beast and is in beast form, the king and the court still see the human side of him, despite his appearance and actions. 16
While Bisclavret shows physically that he is a hybrid, the king depends on his
actions, much like the mother in Le Fresne and Marie, to show his own hybridity. The
king, like Bisclavret, can be considered both man and beast due to his actions. Peggy
McCraken argues that when the two meet in the woods, their actions are the same:
The king's encounter with the wolf comes as the end of a hunt,
and the king's pursuit is not so very different from the wolf's
actions. Both are hunting, the king for sport, and the wolf to
live. So if the king sees the wolf as like himself, like a man, we
might speculate that the wolf could see the king as like himself,
like an animal. (215-16)
Seeing each other within themselves suggest that both the king and Bisclavret are
aware, on some level, of their hybrid states. Since the king can see himself in
Bisclavret, he acts like a human towards him, spares his life, and takes him home with him. As a noble person would do, he treats his guest in a kindly manner: "He commanded all his followers / for the sake of their love for him, to guard Bisclavret well / and under no circumstances to do him harm / none of them should strike him
/ rather, he should be well fed and watered" (170-74). This extreme kindness that the king shows to a wolf indicates that McCraken is right in her claim that the king sees himself in the beast, for if the beast acts like a human, then the king acts like a beast. This trend of the king acting as the wolf does continues throughout the lai.
When Bisclavret acts beastly towards his wife and her lover, the king follows suit, for he takes the advice of the wise man and "detained the knight / At the same time he took the wife / and subjected her to torture" (262-64), which shows that the king 17
acts as savage as Bisclavret does in his wolf form.
While both the king and Bisclavret are hybrids, they also are twins of each
other. Bisclavret acts both like a human and like a wolf in both of his forms, while the king does the same. It seems like when one of them acts a certain way, the other mirrors that action. To this end, the king and Bisclavret do not have a stable identity whatsoever because of their hybridity and their being figurative twins causes them to be interchangeable. If we look solely at the actions of these two characters, they are virtually the same person; what distinguishes them are their names, much like
Marie is distinguished from other medieval authors because of her name. If we did not have her name and looked solely at the text, she would be interchangeable with the other anonymous authors because so few are named. The fact that Marie gives us her name could point to some feelings of anxiety about being interchangeable with other authors -- as reflected in the interchangeability of her characters because she wants to stand apart from these anonymous authors.
The theme of doubling continues with Bisclavret's wife; she herself is not a twin, but her actions are doubled and put the plot into motion. The action that is doubled is that she betrays Bisclavret twice: first, she hides his clothes, condemning him to a life as a werewolf and second, she marries the man that helped her achieve her goal, even though she is still married. What causes the betrayals, according to
Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante, is the fear and lack of trust she has in her husband:
Faced with the dark side of her husband's nature, she forgets
all his virtues.., and desperately arranges to free herself by a 18
double betrayal. She accepts the favors of a suitor she had
hitherto scorned, and exploits his desire to serve her by
instructing him to steal the werewolf's hidden clothes, thereby
preventing his return to his human shape. Her husband thus
disposed of, she marries the suitor. (102)
Harming and Ferrante miss the fact that this double betrayal leads to another double that Marie presents later in the story. When Bisclavret bites offthe wife's nose, the trait of being noseless is passed on to her female children, which was set off by the wife's betrayal. This trait of being passed on from generation to generation may be another projection of Marie's anxiety. It suggests that she may feel that her actions
(writing) and their consequences may be passed on to the next generation of female authors. Like in Le Fresne, Marie revolves the plot around the removal of the protagonist, again suggesting that Marie feels that she should have remained anonymous, which adheres to her anxious side. Bisclavret is removed from his role of knight when he is transformed into the wolf, just as if we remove Marie's name, she is removed from the role of author. However, Marie restores Bisclavret back into a knight and thus does not remove him from the story, which shows that even though Marie feels anxious, her confidence wins out in gisclavretjust as it does in Le
Fresne. 19
Chapter Four:
Doubling and Hybrids Across the Lais as a Collection
While the first two chapters discuss doubling and hybrids in a single lai, this chapter
focuses on doubling and hybrids that appear across the collection. The doubling and
hybrids seen in the collection can range from themes to actual hybrids that have
something in common with a character in another story. An example of a theme that
is doubled is child abandonment. As mentioned in the Le Fresne chapter, Milun also
deals with child abandonment. In Milun, the title character and the lady have an
affair, and a child is conceived. They are not married, and the lady is betrothed to another, so in order to give the child its best chance (in contrast to the mother in Le
Fresne, who gives up her child for selfish reasons), they give the child to the lady's sister, who will take care of him until he is of age. While Le Fresne's mother gives her a ring and silk cloth to ensure that the people who find her knows she is noble,
Milun and the lady instruct the sister to "give him the ring and the letter and command him to keep them so that he can find his father" (84-86). Milun and the lady want to keep their child, but know that it would not be safe for the child, therefore they give him a way to find them again. The mother in Le Fresne wants to keep her distance because the threat of rumors about her is still very present in her world. In this single instance of abandonment, two motifs arise from it. The first is the parents giving the child away and second is using objects as means of recognition. 20
This double abandonment and use of objects as a reminder that the children
are noble creates hybrid children, for Le Fresne is noble by birth but grows up
believing that she is of a lower class since she lives with an abbess; therefore, she is
actually both. This uncertainty of class identification can be traced back to Marie, whose identity is unclear. Scholars have long debated who Marie was. If she was the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou, she would be the sister of Henry II and it would explain how she was able to write in three languages, for she would be of noble birth. If she was the abbess at Reading, however, it would still explain her knowledge of three languages. Since we have no definite answer, Marie, like Le
Fresne, is both noble and part of the clerical estate.
Le Fresne also sets up the model for twinning, as discussed earlier, and the model continues with Laustic because the neighbors resemble each other. The two men in Laustic are so similar that the wife cannot tell the difference between them; as a result, she falls in love with essentially the same man twice. Sarah-Jane Murray argues that the men "are virtually interchangeable. They have similar homes and appear to have equally fair dispositions, which contribute to the good reputation of the city..." (3). Like the neighbors in Le Fresne, something must occur to cause a distinction between the twin neighbors, and in Laustic, the distinction arrives when it is mentioned that one neighbor had a wife, and the other is a bachelor. By setting up the distinction, it allows the plot to be put into motion: the wife begins to have an affair with her bachelor neighbor. Arguably, the wife falls in love with the same man because the two men are indistinguishable; in addition, both of their identities are unstable because once engaged in the affair, there is no distinction between the two 21
men.
While Marie uses neighbors that mirror each other as a theme that is threaded
through the Lais, she also uses lineage to reflect unstable identities. Take again the
lai Le Fresne; Gurun knows how important lineage is because he gives up his love in
order to achieve an heir that would be accepted. His role as a leader is also
questioned because of his lack of an heir, thus so is his identity because it is
dependent on producing a child that would take his place when he died. Other lais,
besides Le Fresne, demonstrate a fear of lack of lineage. For example, in Equitan lack
of lineage not only concerns his knights, but the people as well. He, unlike Gurun, is a
king, therefore, his lack of lineage is slightly more problematic than Gurun's. Equitan
decides to have an affair with a married woman, so if any children are born, they will be illegitimate. The people of his kingdom do not approve of his actions.
According to the lai "the king loved the seneschal's wife for a long time/, had no desire for any other woman;/he didn't want to marry,/and never allowed the subject to be raised. His people held it against him" (197-201). While the fear of no heirs being born are mirrored in these two lais, the decisions the lords make are opposite of each other, even though Equitan faces the same unstable identity as
Gurun does: they both need a legitimate child to cement their identities as leaders and carry on their legacy. The anxiety that Equitan and Gurun feel about their legacy is the same anxiety Marie feels in establishing her own legacy and legitimacy as a woman writer.
Following the same line of having a lack of lineage is the theme of illegitimate children being born, which disrupts the legitimate family line; Marie shows this 22
disruption in two of her Lais, Milun and Yonec. In Milun, the lady is not married at
the time she conceives her child, while the lady in Yonec is. Both women have to face
their situation differently because while a child out of wedlock is mirrored, the
conditions in which they live are not. The lady in Milun, as discussed, gives her child
away and hopes that he will find her again some day. The lady in Yonec must keep
her son because her husband murders her lover, and thus becomes Yonec's
stepfather. Marie creates these two men, Yonec and Milun's son, as hybrids because
they are both noble, and yet illegitimate because they were born out of wedlock.
This split of nobility and illegitimacy suggests that perhaps Marie's identity does
point towards her being the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou because she
would have enjoyed the perks of being noble, but she would endure the stigma of
being illegitimate, thus her identity would be unstable.
Another theme that doubles itself throughout Marie's Lais is transformation
from beast to man and vice versa. This transformation has already been seen in
Bisclavret: he changes from man to wolf and back; meanwhile, Muldumarec, Yonec's
father, transforms from hawk to man and back. While this transformation seems to
be his choice, Michelle Freeman argues that "... the phenomenon of metamorphosis
at first glance centers on the male figure, but gradually the reader becomes aware of
the transformation wrought by a female character" (245). Freeman's claim holds true for both cases. Muldumarec transforms for the sake of his lady, so that she can be happy, while Bisclavret's transformation is brought on his wife's fear of him, rather than the desire that the lady feels for Muldumarec. The fact that Muldumarec dies, while Bisclavret survives suggests that Marie is anxious about her writing 23
because it shows two characters in similar situations, but they have different
outcomes. While I agree with Freeman's analysis that a woman is the cause of
transformation for these characters, she fails expand that thought to the La& as a
collection. They transform from oral songs to a written text; they transform from
being sung in Breton to be written in French. Marie, a woman, wrought the
metamorphosis of the Lais, therefore Freeman's claim can be applied to Marie as
well as the female characters mentioned. This transformation of text and characters
reflect instability of identity because neither the character, nor the text, can be
categorized as one or the other.
Marie transforms the La& from oral songs to written text so that she can
communicate with her readers. Communication by means of objects is a motif that
Marie threads throughout almost all of her Lais, which suggests that communication
concerns Marie especially the communication of her own 'object,' the Lais. For
example, the couple in Guigernar communicate via belt and a knot in Guigemar's
shirt. The lady must wear a belt "that she would wear next to her bare flesh /
tightened about her flanks / Whoever could open the buckle / without breaking it or
severing it from the belt / would be the one he would urge her to love" (571-75). In
turn, he would wear a shirt with a knot in it, and the knot could only be untied by her.
Marie also uses birds as means of communication in three successive lais:
Yonec, Laustic and Milun. While each is used for communication, how they are used differ. In Yonec, the hawk transforms into a man in order for him to speak to his lady and free her from her misery. In Laustic, the husband traps a nightingale and 24
"killed it out of spite / too vicious an act / and threw the body on the lady" (114-17).
Throwing the bird at the lady communicates that the husband has ended the affair
between her and their neighbor. Finally, the couple in Milun uses a swan to carry
letters back and forth to each other. Using the objects in order to communicate
demonstrates the idea that the objects are a type of language, which reflects a
double of Marie because she can speak three languages. Marie uses the Lais to
communicate with her readers, and she does through an object: a manuscript. This
is part of her transformation of the Lais from oral to literate vehicle of
communication, thus still speaking to a kind of hybridity. She wants her identity to
be remembered, just as her characters want their lovers to remember them, which
is why they all use objects to communicate their desires.
While Marie may be using communication as a way to be remembered, she
may also be using it to communicate moral proverbs to her readers, seeing how
revenge or slandering come up in Marie's Lais. She ends Equitan by saying "whoever
wants to hear some sound advice/can profit from this example:/he who plans evil
for another/may that that evil rebound back on him" (307-10). The wife and
Equitan plan to kill the loyal seneschal, and in return they are killed instead. This
moral can be applied to Guiegrnar as well. Kinoshita and McCraken argue that "this
boomerang effect is familiar to us from Guiegmar, in which the arrow of the
protagonist shoots at the white doe 'rebounds' and strikes him in the thigh, causing
the wound curable only by the woman who will suffer incomparably on account of his love" (58). Le Fresne supplies Marie's reader with another moral, which is
similar to the one given in Equitan. In Le Frense, a woman speaks ill of her neighbor 25
who has just borne a set of twin boys. She disgraces her by saying that she had to
have had carnal relations with more than her husband for this to occur. Later, this
slanderous woman becomes pregnant with twins. She laments by saying
I'm in disgrace, that's certain.
My Lord and all his kin
will never believe me
when they hear about my bad luck;
indeed, I condemned myself
when I slandered all womankind.
Didn't I say it never happened-- that a woman could have twins unless she had lain with two
men? Now that I have twins, it seems to me
my words have come back to haunt me.
Whoever slanders another never knows when it will rebound
on him; he may speak badly about someone who's more
deserving of praise than he. (76-90)
The mother being punished for slandering another because of jealousy resembles
Marie in her prologue to Guigernar where she says that when people are
accomplished, others say hurtful things about them and she describes these people
as "slanderers" (16). Marie's and the mother's speech mirror each other because
they both say that speaking ill of someone never yields good results, but it also
shows the hybridity of them. Marie's confident part of her sees herself as an accomplished person because she fears that people will slander her, and that fear adheres to her anxious side her. The mother's speech shows her realizing that 26
slandering her neighbor was wrong, thus it exhibits the good side of her, yet instead
of confessing, she opts to abandon her child, which shows her bad side. Therefore,
Marie sets these morals to show her readers that everybody's identity is unstable
because we very rarely make a decision based on one side of us.
While Marie does show that everyone's identity is unstable based on decisions
we make, she also shows that identity can be unstable based gender on and the
names that we are given. Marie shows us doubles with the names given to the men
and women in the Lais. Every male main character in this collection is given a name,
and some of the time, their name is the title of the lai, Milun, Equitan, Lanval,
Guigemar and Bisclavret, while only four women are given a name (Le Fresne, La
Codre, Guildelurec and Guilliadun), and Le Fresne is the only one to gain a title. I do
not suggest that Marie believes that male characters are more important than
female characters, however; I agree with June Hall McCash who argues that "... the
depiction of so many anonymous women in the lays accurately reflects the fact that
medieval society frequently tended to view women as mere extensions of men, or as
people whose identities depended merely on their function in society" (98-99).
Leaving most of the female characters anonymous may have been Marie's way of
giving tribute to her fellow female authors who decided to remain anonymous,
while she creates Le Fresne and the others as a way to memorialize herself. Since
scholars do not know the identity of Marie, it is possible that she was not married,
therefore she could not be an extension of a man, therefore her identity solely rests
on her occupation: an author. This could be the reason why she lends her name to her works because it is her only way of having an identity, albeit an unstable one. 27
Characters are not the only literary devices used to demonstrate instability.
The plots of the Lais show instability because within the collection, Marie writes two
sets of two lais whose plots mirror each other: Guigemar and Equitan, which appear
back to back, and Yonec and Milun, which only has Laustic to separate the two. While
the stories are mirrored, the outcome of them are opposite, which suggests that
Marie is confident in her ability to write the Lais, but is anxious about the reception,
therefore writes the different ending to the same story. Guigemar's and Equitan's
main plots revolve around the twelfth century love theme in which both
protagonists face the same traits and face the same situations. Ferrante and Hanning
argue that
... both are hunters, both experience the first sufferings of love
during a sleepless night and soliloquize about their pains and
fears; the commonplace of love as a wounded is applied to
both; both woo married women and overcome their objections
in dialogues.., finally, after a long, happy period of secret
liaisons, each pair of lovers is discovered by the husband. (70)
The similarity ends with being discovered, for in Guigemar the lovers are
reunited, while in Equitan, the couple dies.
Just as Guigemar is the anti-Equitan, Milun is the anti-Yonec and just as the
former has a mirrored stories, so does the latter. As Ferrante and Hanning argue
"Milun resembles Yonec in many particulars, but its characters and situations are
treated in a strikingly different fashion" (177). Both stories involve a woman who had no choice in her husband; both use a bird as means of communication; both 28
conceive an illegitimate son, but the similarities end there. While in Yonec, the son
decides to kill his stepfather to avenge his biological father, and succeeds in doing
so, Milun's son makes the same decision, yet his stepfather dies before he can take
that step to unite his parents. Within these four Lais, Marie writes doubles; for
example, Equitan and Yonec ends with the deaths of the adulterous couples, while
Milun and Guigemar ends with the adulterous couples being reunited. While this
reflects Marie as a hybrid because the same plots have different endings, which
suggests she was anxious with her writing, there is also a possible explanation for
the different endings. The couples in Guigemar and Milun resemble love not born
out of cupidity or lust, while Equitan's couple begins their relationship in quest of a
lustful relationship.
The double motifs of twins and hybrids work on a macro level of the collection
as well as in individual tales. This suggests a kind of twinning itself, and sets up a theoretically possible multiplication into further levels, multiple manuscripts, for example. That very multiplication suggests mutability and instability of form. Most scholars use Harley 978 because it includes all of the Lais, while other manuscripts only include a few. That not every story is included in every manuscript speaks to the instability of the text, 29
Conclusion
All of the doubles and hybrids found in Marie's Lais all come back to the author
herself because of her hybrid state. She shows her concern with her identity
throughout all of her tales by using doubles and hybrids to reflect that nothing is
stable. She uses mirrored stories with different endings, doubles and hybrids as a way to show twinning as across the Lais as a collection.
Marie's hybrid state comes in many forms. She is both English and French; she is confident and anxious; and she is masculine and feminine. Though she defies anyone who speaks against her by continuing to write, her anxiety is present throughout the Lais. We see her anxiety in the mirrored stories (Yonec and Milun and Guigemar and Equitan) and with the fates of Bisclavret and Muldumarec because they are essentially the same stories, but have different endings. This suggests that she is worried about their reception, therefore she gives her readers two different endings to the same story. Her anxiety presents itself in individual lais as well. The double sets of twins in Le Fresne amplify her masculine and feminine sides because she wants both of them to be represented, and she fears that one side of herself is not enough to fulfill her readers. Marie and her Lais are both hybrids and we will never be able to pin them down to one singular meaning because they have so many identities. My reading of Marie's Lais has enriched our understanding of why she used so many doubles and hybrids in her work. 30
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