Lanval By Sophocles, Marie De France, And Chaucer

Reaching back to the earliest recorded history known to man, human beings have been exploring and creating the boundaries of what it means to be human. Since the ancient times we have had stories passed down from generations to generations to help spread these boundaries to others all around the world. One common boundary that you will see in literature is the power that men and women have over each other and there are three distinct writers who help explore and create this boundary: Sophocles, Marie de France, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Marie de France’s “Lanval” is an entertaining lai that challenged society’s rules for women during the 12th century. At the time, women were viewed as objects to men. They were obedient, doing whatever their man

They both share a common element in a sense that both the men of the stories get punished for not listening to their mistresses. However, while the knight and fairy queen in “Lanval” rode off and lived together happily ever after in the end, Oedipus and his lover are not as fortunate. Oedipus the king ends up becoming fate’s puppet and was doomed for misfortune before he could ever realize it.

Clearly the main theme of the story is the power of fate. From this story, I get a sense that Sophocles is suggesting that we cannot be fully responsible for our actions. Oedipus is helpless in the fact that he has no control over his predestined fate. Oedipus tries his best to change his fate but fails because fate simply does not allow him to do so, which makes it difficult to blame Oedipus for what happens to him.

Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother and lovely wife, tries to use her power over Oedipus to persuade him to give up on finding out the unavoidable truth. She tries to tell him that the truth cannot be possible. She says that not every prophecy comes true, that she and the former king Laius had a son that was prophesized to kill the king and sleep with her, that they had the son sent to be killed, and that her previous husband was murdered by a group of thieves, so there was no way that he can be the killer. However, Oedipus’s stubbornness and determination causes him not to

Both stories have a centralized theme of love and the female characters in both of the stories use love and sexual desires for their own personal gain. However, between the two stories, Alison in “The Wife of Bath” is by far more cynical. Alison of Bath is a strong-willed and dominant woman who uses her power over men to get whatever she wants whenever she wants it. She often challenges the typical roles of gender, much like the Fairy Queen did in Marie de France’s “Lanval”. It is revealed in the story that she was the dominant figure in four out her five marriages and she did not mind it at all. She wanted power and wanted to be in control and if she did not have that power she used sex as her weapon. She was not ashamed of her sexual prowess as she even uses the bible to justify her actions, “That God bade us to wax and