The setting is generally a mythical Brittany. LaisThe "Lais of Marie de France" are a collection of twelve narrative poems, primarily concerned with the theme of love and courtliness, and as such the heroes are usually knights or aristocratic ladies. She is considered by scholars to be the first woman known to write francophone verse. Virtually nothing is known of her life, but one written description of her work and popularity from her own era still exists. My introductory lecture typically included a brief illustration of sociohistorical context6 and some sense of critical reception before we proceeded to studentled discussion, which was grounded on textual analysis and designed to address some thematic element with which students could engage.Marie de France was a poet and fabulist who lived in England during the late 12th century. In the early segment of the British Literature survey, I paired the poetic translation of “Lanval” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature along with the excerpt from Malory's Morte Darthur as an introduction to the genre of medieval romance. Approaching Marie as a foundation for our modern tropes of sexual love is one way to make the Middle Ages accessible to students, and at the same time defamiliarize our own cultural assumptions about sex, love, desire, and power. Kathryn Gradval identifies the medieval romances of Chrétien de Troyes as the source of these “ideological couplings that will become key in Western literature and culture,” but Marie's Breton Lais share the same tendency “to obscure, rationalize, or sentimentalize sexual violence against women.” While key moves like privileging heteronormative desire, celebrating the devotion between lovers, and describing the conquering, indeed overpowering, nature of love all strike familiar chords with modern readers of the Lais, a discussion of these narrative moves ought also to observe the frequent commodification of the female body, the patriarchal regulation of sexuality, and the erotics of suffering, all of which demonstrate the many ways in which rape culture in socalled courtly literature coheres with presentday constructions on sex and gender.
Even the tales with ostensibly happy endings demonstrate how firmly Western conventions of romantic love link desire and suffering, passion and violence, masculinity and aggression, femininity and threat.
Lovers pursue affairs that imperil their lives and often end in their violent deaths together knights or their gobetweens are frequently dismembered by jealous husbands and overwhelming passion compels all manner of secret plotting and betrayal.
While the Lais of Marie de France contain no explicit instances of rape, these twelve short AngloNorman poems dating to the later twelfth century abound with episodes of infidelity, indiscretion, sexual compulsion, and sexual violence.
0 kommentar(er)
