Marie De France: the Subversive Poet Of
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MARIE DE FRANCE: THE SUBVERSIVE POET OF ANGLO-NORMAN ENGLAND _____________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills ______________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English: Literature _______________________ by Melissa L. Williams Summer 2016 Copyright by MELISSA L. WILLIAMS 2016 All Rights Reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE ........................................................................................................... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 2. MARIE’S FEMINIZED HYBRID FORM: SETTING THE LATIN COMMENTARY TRADITION TO THE MUSIC OF THE VERNACULAR ROMANTIC POEM ............................................................... 7 3. “LE FRESNE”: FEUDAL MARRIAGE AND THE FEMINIZED FAIR UNKNOWN .................................................................... 20 4. “LANVAL”: PRIMOGENITURE AND PATRONAGE IN A FEMINIZED FANTASY SPACE .................................................................................................. 33 5. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 47 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................ 52 iii ABSTRACT Marie de France was a poet who most likely wrote her works during the twelfth century in Anglo-Norman England. Her lais are a collection of twelve short, lyrical romances that she claims to have translated from Breton stories that originally circulated orally. Marie uses the themes and structure of the prologue to her lais to position herself as a critic and commentator of her texts in the predominantly masculine Latin commentary tradition. She applies this critical frame to common romance tropes and motifs that often served to affirm masculine ideals and political structures. The lais “Le Fresne” and “Lanval” both depict motifs that were familiar to medieval readers, but Marie subverts to motifs to comment on the plight of women in Anglo-Norman England. Marie uses her status as critical narrator to establish feminized spaces in her stories and give voices to women who are normally silent subjects to feudal politics. 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Modern readers are accustomed to reading original texts written by authors whose names are prominently displayed on flashy book covers. In medieval England, readers had no such expectations. Authority and identity were far less important to the vernacular literary culture, and medieval writers were valued for their ability to translate and reimagine existing stories rather than their ability to invent new ones. During the Anglo- Norman period in the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, English society was influenced by a multitude of languages and cultures. Old French vernacular literature emerged in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries “as a literature of transcription and translation” (Kinoshita and McCracken 7). Existing alongside the vernacular culture was an academic, scholarly culture that drew heavily on the ancient Latin tradition of glossing and analyzing important texts. The Latin tradition focused on scholarly, often scriptural or classical texts that were regarded as truth, while the vernacular tradition encompassed works of fiction like lyrics, folk tales, fables and lais. Marie de France was a well-known literary figure who most likely wrote during the twelfth century in Anglo-Norman England. Among other texts, Marie is believed to have composed a collection of lais, which are brief courtly narratives that she claims to have translated from Breton, the Celtic native language of Brittany. While the lais themselves are clearly situated in the romantic, anonymous, oral tradition of vernacular fiction, Marie uses the prologue to her lais to position herself as a literary critic and 2 commentator in the Latin tradition of glossing and analyzing important texts. She then applies this critical frame to familiar romantic tropes and motifs to create a subversive feminized space that speaks to the concerns of women who lived in Anglo-Norman England. Critical readings of Marie’s work vary widely. R. Howard Bloch discusses the characterization of Marie by other critics as “simple, naïve, natural, spontaneous, delicate, modest, clear, sincere, comforting, [and] Christian” (19), noting that these qualities are often aligned with femininity, and argues instead that “Marie is among the most self-conscious, sophisticated, complicated, obscure, tricky, and disturbing figures of her time—the Joyce of the twelfth century…Marie was not only a woman but she was also a poet” (19). Bloch rejects a feminized reading of her works, and fails to take her gender into account for his analysis of her texts. Instead, he focuses on Marie’s use of language, her consciousness of the transformative effect of translation, and the interpretive role of the reader. Although he begins his text by quoting Virginia Woolf, a female modernist writer who was arguably as sophisticated, complicated and disturbing as her male contemporary James Joyce, his comparison of Marie with Joyce and his de- emphasis of what he calls Marie’s feminized qualities characterize Bloch’s reading as distinctly masculine. Feminist scholars, too, have turned their attention to Marie’s work. In their text, Marie de France: A Critical Companion, Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken are interested in the cultural and linguistic intersectionality of Marie’s texts, and they emphasize a gendered reading. Their approach is situated in the context of social and 3 political changes taking place in England during the twelfth century, noting “our guiding principle is not the search for authorial intention, but the identification of textual effects that may or may not reflect a gendered perspective on the part of the author”(11). They go on to argue that, “the Lais imagine ways in which women can manipulate and exploit feudal social structures, and they imagine the ways in which those structures may be changed through women’s desires and even women’s agency”(11). Since Marie is often regarded and celebrated as the first female English writer, it is necessary and appropriate to read her texts through the lens of gender while also acknowledging her sophistication and linguistic skill. Gender is especially relevant for readings of medieval romance literature, as the romances often served as models of ideal courtly behavior for knights who were more used to the battlefield than the court, and for the ladies who would become their wives and lovers.1 If the male-authored romances represent idealized courtly behavior from a masculine point of view, then Marie’s translations and adaptations can be seen as a subversion of this patriarchal point of view situated within familiar critical and poetic structures. The structure and content of the prologue to the lais is modeled after the prologues to prose texts written in the Latin commentary tradition, which heavily influenced the medieval educational system. Scriptural texts were valued above all others, while classical Latin texts also enjoyed elevated esteem among medieval scholars. The Latin tradition demanded that texts be heavily analyzed, or glossed, by scholars who 1 This idea will be explored in depth later. For a full discussion of how romance literature functioned in Anglo-Norman feudal society, see Georges Duby’s chapter, “On Courtly Love” in his text Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages. 4 sought to uncover deeper spiritual truths in them. In order to be valued within this tradition, texts had to have an identifiable author (or auctor) and conform to Christian values.2 In addition to the classical and scriptural manuscripts that were preserved and circulated throughout the medieval period, vernacular folk tales and romances circulated orally and were preserved in manuscripts. These texts were vastly different than the ones that were valued by the clerks and scholars engaged in the Latin tradition; they still mostly conformed to Christian values, but their main functions were to affirm sociopolitical values and instruct citizens connected to the court about appropriate roles and behavior. Like the scholarly texts, the vernacular texts were produced and circulated in a patriarchal system that mainly served the interests and concerns of medieval men. Marie’s lais are a hybrid of these two traditions; she uses her prologue to position herself as a literary critic in the Latin tradition and then applies that scholarly, critical stance to her translations of the non-scholarly Breton lais to subvert the tropes and motifs of the vernacular texts and speak for the interests and concerns of Anglo-Norman women. The lai “Le Fresne” presents the common motif of the fair unknown, in which a child, typically male, is born to a noble father but must be secretly raised apart from his family, with both father and son unaware of his noble origins. These stories typically end with the revelation of the main character’s identity, usually as the result of a series of coincidences. Fair unknown stories commonly address issues of masculine identity formation