This site was designed with the
.com
website builder. Create your website today.
Start Now

PROFESSOR of ENGLISH and MEDIEVAL STUDIES

UNIVERSITY of NEW MEXICO

Anita Obermeier

  • Home

  • My Courses

    • ENGL 449/549 Middle English Dialects
    • ENGL 306- Arthurian Legend & Romance
    • ENGL 451/551- Uppity Medieval Women
    • ENGL 451/551 - Medieval Lyrics
    • ENGL 581- Chaucer & Gender
    • ENGL 680- English Arthur and Empire
    • ENGL 450/550- Heroes, Saints, & Lovers
    • ENGL 551- Arthurian Legends
  • Professional Profile

    • Articles
    • Book Reviews
    • Books
  • More

    Use tab to navigate through the menu items.
    To see this working, head to your live site.
    • Categories
    • All Posts
    • My Posts
    monica.c.wolfe
    Dec 16, 2018

    Marie de France's Bisclavret

    in Heroes, Saints, & Lovers

    I’m still a bit torn on how to interpret Marie de France’s lai “Bisclavret.” It follows the expected form of the lai, depicting love as suffering for all parties involved, but it is also a very gendered tale in which male and female suffer due to gendered punishments. Are the punishments fair? Are they equal? What commentary on marriage and gender is being made in this text? Basically, the husband’s punishment (being turned semi-permanently into a werewolf) is inflicted upon him by his wife (and his wife’s new love interest) because he kept a secret from her. The secret—of his turning into a werewolf once a month, of course—was kept, however, in relatively good conscience; he was afraid of revealing this personal flaw to his wife and did not want to upset her. The wife’s punishment, later in the tale, is losing her nose (and bearing children with no noses), inflicted by the werewolf as punishment for keeping him from turning back into a human and abandoning him for another man. Both punishments affect physical appearance. Bisclavret’s unappealing appearance as a wolf, however, doesn’t do him much disservice; the king and knights still take him in and he enters into the homosocial bond that gives no value to appearance. He is valued and cared for just as much when he is a wolf as when he is a man. The wife’s change in appearance is different, though. Women’s appearances contribute greatly to their domestic lives (acceptance by the husband) and public lives (acceptance by female social circle), and the fact that her children were born without noses (and all of them female!) seems a far more serious punishment than that inflicted on Bisclavret. On one hand, I’d like to lay blame on the wife for such a harsh punishment toward her husband for keeping a rather harmless secret. On the other hand, the tale can be read as the wife’s inability to make choices regarding her love life without outside judgement and subsequent punishment. Is this a tale of warning for women who choose to leave their husbands more than it is a tale of warning for husbands not to keep secrets from their wives? Rather than being merely an amusing commentary on marriage, I feel like “Bisclavret” leans toward commentary on the acceptable and unacceptable behaviors of the wife in relation to her husband.

    0 comments
    0
    0 comments

    If you have any questions about the resources available on this page, please contact Anita Obermeier.

    © 2016 by Anita Obermeier. Design by Abigail Robertson