How Does Natalie Davis Characterize Martin Guerre's Wife?

The two interpretations – Natalie Davis’ and Robert Finlay’s - diverge most profoundly when characterizing Martin Guerre’s wife, Bertrande de Rols. While Davis guesses about Betrande’s emotional state and her longings to have a different husband, the author does not cite any passage in Coras’ account or in any other sources to support this claim: “Beyond a marriage in which her husband understood her little, may have feared her, and surely abandoned her, Betrande dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back, and be different.” In her exploration of Betrande’s emotions and feelings, Davis is committing the historian’s fallacy, Finlay argues. He writes that Davis is applying her own twentieth-century understanding and expectations of love,

sexuality and marriage to Bertrande’s situation. Stressing the morality and piety of Betrande, Finlay writes that the tale of a “self-fashioning,” confident, and strategically acting peasant wife is not en par with the piety and Christian morality of the time. In fact, as Finlay concludes, Davis entirely omits the discussions of devoutness and Betrande’s moral conflict when covering the fact that she is loving and living with a stranger. Finlay also accuses Davis of selectively picking those details of Cora’ account that fit – in retrospective – with her interpretation of what happened. Even though the sources are ambivalent at best, Davis chooses to portray Bertrande as a heroine and women who knows how to secure her place in society.
While I disagree with Davis’ use of exaggeration of the source material and the way in which she uses narrative elements to trying to lead the reader to believe her literary-psychological story, I understand why she is using this method. The creative psychological portrait writing, the imaginative arranging of her source material, and the storytelling that centers on Bertrande’s position as a modern feminist woman in a rural medieval society, resonates well with modern readers. Her story, then, is not so much a historical piece but an ethnographic study or an enriched folk tale. I do, however, agree with Davis’ thesis that Betrande de Rols must have known that the “new” Martin Guerre was not her husband. Perhaps Betrande de Rols was not so cunning, self-fashioning and conspiratory as Davis imagined it, but she must have gone along with the impostor – and might have even fallen in love with him – in order to re-establish her honor and place in the community of her town and her religious virtue. While Davis might have overestimated Bertrande’s confidence, she made sense of the French woman’s sensibility.
Finally, I disagree with Finlay’s assumption that the treacherous Pansette tricked Betrande and that she was just another victim. In fact, this claim shows Finlay’s own limitedness and his ignorance in understanding the psychological-and emotional aspects of Bertrande’s behavior. While in terms of sourcing, methodology, the use of data and presentation of the material, Robert Finlay represents a traditional historical approach that is might be more objective and gives consideration to stories in their context, his critique of Davis’ work is only partially justified.