The Lais Of Marie De France

Among the most pervasive themes in the Lais of Marie de France is that of dishonesty and deception, with almost every character in the Lais deceiving others to some extent for personal gain. Much like in her translations of Aesop’s fables, de France uses her Lais as a means of conveying a moral message onto the reader, drawing a clear line between moral and immoral deception, somewhat at odds with the established moral code of her era.

By far the most deceitful of all the stock characters in the Lais are the husbands of de France’s mal mariées, who lock their wives away (Guigemar, Yonec), or place them under constant surveillance (Aüstic), and continuously deceive their wives as to the true nature of their situations as a means of ensuring their fidelity and asserting their dominance. While such behaviour would have likely been considered normal to a mediaeval audience, by whom

women were seen as property, de France presents the plight of her mal mariées from a more sympathetic angle, shifting the blame for the eventual breakdown of the marital union (Guigemar) or the wife’s infidelity (Yonec, Aüstic, Chievrefueil) onto the husband’s actions. In Guigemar, for example, the unnamed female protagonist is led to believe that her husband is holding her in an inescapable prison, both before and after the discovery of her affair with Guigemar and his expulsion from the kingdom; her condition before the affair makes her adulterous behaviour a morally acceptable form of resistance to her husband’s cruelty, and her more extreme confinement after the affair likewise renders her abandoning of her husband morally defensible. This does not, however, shield her from her husband’s trickery: though she is imprisoned for ‘dous anz […] e plus’ , upon her escape, she ‘n’i trueve clef ne serreüre’ (Guigemar, l. 675) and ‘unques nuls ne la desturba’ (Guigemar, l. 677), having been deceived by her husband as to the true nature of her condition all along.
Likewise, in Yonec, the female protagonist, who is described as a ‘pucele’ (defined by the DMF : Dictionnaire du moyen français as a ‘jeune fille’ or ‘vierge’ ), ‘al riche hume fu donee’; her far older husband (Yonec, l. 12) keeps her locked in a dungeon for ‘plus de set anz’ (Yonec, l. 41). However, following Muldumarec’s death at the hands of her husband, she ‘par une fenestre s’en ist’ and escapes from the tower in which she is imprisoned by jumping from ‘vint piez de halt’ (Yonec, l. 343).
The repetition of this plot device time and time again in the Lais can be said to function more broadly as a metaphor for the condition of women in mediaeval society, representing the extent to which a woman’s life was governed by the wishes of her husband and of the church. Though it is unlikely that de France would have been calling for women to reject the authority of their husbands and the church – seeing as she would likely have learnt to read and write in a convent as, at the time, formal education was off-limits to women – it is clear that her sense of morality condemned husbands whose behaviour towards their wives was unnecessarily cruel and repressive.

Deception within marital unions in the Lais is, however, more often than not reciprocal. In an article entitled Women in medieval society, Alixe Bovey explains that a mediaeval woman’s role in society ‘was often dictated by biblical texts. The writings of the apostle Paul, in particular, emphasised men’s authority over women, […] instructing them to remain silent.’ De France’s portrayal of women in the Lais, especially that of her mal mariées, contrasts greatly with the everyday life of a woman of her era, and even with the established tropes of courtly love as depicted in the literature of de France’s peers. As Nora Cottille-Foley explains in The Structuring of Feminine Empowerment: Gender and Triangular Relationships in Marie de France, ‘love triangles depicted in courtly literature represent a husband, his wife and her lover’ and that ‘by exhibiting his [the lord of the house’s] largesse to the point of letting his lady flirt with his retainers, he was able to gain a stronger hold over the young men of the household’ ; rather than being used by their husbands as a means to further their control over the chevaliers of their kingdoms, de France’s women act as agents of their own sexuality, seeking extramarital affairs as a means of finding both the physical and emotional satisfaction their husbands are unable, or unwilling, to bring them. Such behaviour undoubtedly entails deception, and de France’s women demonstrate a level of cunning and intellect few in the 11th century would have expected from them. As opposed to admitting to her affair with the knight in the neighbouring castle, for example, the female protagonist of Aüstic chooses to tell her husband that ‘“il nen a joie en icest mund, / ki nen ot l’aüstic chanter ; / pur ceo me vois ici ester”’ . Later, in response to her husband killing the nightingale as a means of symbolically putting an end to her affair, she embroiders her story ‘en une piece de samit, / a or brusdé’ (Aüstic, ll. 135–136) and commands a servant to deliver it to her lover. Through this act of cunning she circumvents her husband’s attempt to silence her, re-establishing contact with her lover, however limited that contact may turn out to be.
As with the men in the Lais, de France also provides examples of women whose trickery and dishonesty violates her moral code, most notably in Equitan. Together with her lover, the female protagonist of Equitan plots to murder her husband by tricking him into taking a bath in boiling water while Equitan bathes alongside him, allowing her to claim that he ‘“est morz el bain sudeinement’” . Unlike the mal mariées, however, whose intentions de France justifies in her work, the plot of Equitan would without a doubt have been considered morally reprehensible by both the more liberal de France and her conservative audience. As Alixe Bovey writes, ‘Once widowed, […] women had legal independence and, in many instances, autonomy over considerable financial resources’ ; it can, therefore, be assumed that Equitan’s lover sought far more than just freedom from the constraints of her marriage, and as such, Equitan and his lover ultimately fail in their attempt on the seneschal’s life, due to their less than noble intentions. Their gruesome deaths (Equitan, ll. 293–312) serve to highlight the gross immorality of their actions; immediately following the deaths of the two lovers, de France reasserts the moral message of the Lai, as follows:
Ki bien voldreit raisun entendre,
ici purreit ensample prendre :
tels purchace le mal d’altrui,
dunt tuz li mals revert sur lui. (Equitan, ll. 313–316)

Somewhat less surprising, however, are the actions of de France’s chevaliers. As quoted in The Structuring of Feminine Empowerment: Gender and Triangular Relationships in Marie de France, Diane Bornstein summarises the life of young, mediaeval knights as such: ‘The real aim of a juven [bachelor, lit. youth] was to obtain a wife, by honest or dishonest means’ . The deceitful behaviour of de France’s chevaliers would, therefore, have been accepted by both the author and her audience; in fact, the knights of the Lais represent a rather idealised view of the mediaeval chevaliers who, in the words of Sarah Douglas, were often ‘guilty of terrible atrocities, generating a tension that was often acknowledged but never really solved’ , the ‘tension’ to which she refers being the contrast between the chivalrous image of how a knight should be, as promoted by the church in the hope of combatting the endemic violence of the time, and their actual behaviour; she gives the example of the peasantry being ‘slaughtered unremittingly whenever they were deemed in the way’ .
In the Lais, de France’s chevaliers exhibit cunning and deceitfulness in a multitude of ways: Guigemar, for example, upon discovering that his lover is alive and being held captive by Meriadu, offers him his services in return for possession of his lover. When said offer is refused, however, he slyly chooses to ally himself with Meriadu’s rival and, following an arduous battle, defeats him, regaining possession of his lover (Guigemar, ll. 837–882). Equally cunning is Muldumarec’s plan to exact revenge on his lover’s husband post-mortem, entrusting his sword to his pregnant lover and instructing that she ‘bien la guart a oés sun fiz’, constructing a plan to have his lover, her husband, and his son, who will grow into a ‘chevaliers pruz e vaillanz’ invited to his home kingdom, where his lover shall reveal to her son ‘cum il fu nez, ki l’engendra’, bestow upon him his father’s sword, and allow her son to avenge his father’s killing (Yonec, ll. 429–440).

The themes of deception and trickery are omnipresent in the Lais, used by de France as a means of simultaneously conveying a sense of morality and immorality; those who willingly deceive others to advance their own interests, such as the husbands of her mal mariées, are often deceived in return, with this counter-deception being morally justified by the original act of deception.

Though it is true that almost all characters in the Lais deceive others to some extent in order to further their own interests, de France draws a clear line between purely selfish deception, e.g. the behaviour of the husbands towards the mal mariées, or the scheming of Equitan and his lover, and retaliatory deception, i.e. that which is necessary to avenge the cruelty a character, especially a woman, has endured at the hands of another, thereby challenging the established moral code of both her audience and the society in which she lived and moving away from the literary tradition she inherited which, in the words of Nora Cottille-Foley, ‘forced female characters into the roles of scheming women or obedient wives’

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