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WOMAN-HATING IN MARIE DE FRANCE'S BISCLAVRET1

Romanic Review, May 2002 by Creamer, Paul

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e noblement se cunteneit.

De sun seignur esteit privez

e de tuz ses veisins amez. (15-20)

(In Brittany there lived a baron whom I have heard marvelously praised. He was a handsome and good knight who comported him-self nobly. He was an intimate of his lord and was loved by all of his neighbors.)

Just as the evil and dangerous qualities of werewolves were offered boldly and unambiguously, so are the virtuous and mild-mannered qualities of the baron. This man is a positive exemplum: goodhearted, worthy, beloved, and a vital part of his community. The description of his wife follows immediately thereafter:

Femme ot espuse mult vaillant

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E ki mult faiseit bel semblant. (21-2)

(He had a wife who had great qualities, and who presented a very lovely appearance.)

We sense immediately that the woman, in comparison to her husband, is being damned by faint praise. While the king and the neighbors adore her husband, she is credited with no such parallel appeal. The words "faiseit bel semblant" (presented a lovely appearance) make this female character dubious from the outset. As Bruckner (258) points out, the lady-whose husband is "beals" (handsome)-is by contrast described as merely possessing the appearance of being beautiful.10 This distinction is essential: we are being offered the obser-vation very early in the text that the baron is genuine while his wife is a traf-ficker in illusions. This is a particularly delicious double irony when we con-sider the revelation he offers her a few dozen verses later, as well as the betrayal she orchestrates immediately after learning his secret.

The description of the wife is one-fifth the length of that of the werewolf and one-third of that of the baron. I argue that the woman's portrait being only two verses in length is significant because, being minimal and minimally flattering, it presents only a slender sketch, a rhetorical straw (wo)man that will be toppled as the sneaky and unfaithful nature of the wife is slowly un-peeled by the narrator. Conversely, the gentlemanly qualities held by the baron at the outset of the text-which will be masked during the year he is held against his will in lupine form-will again be his at its conclusion when, like Job, his material wealth and societal position will be restored and even in-creased (302-4).

The Interplay between Characters: Woman vs. Man, Woman vs. Men, Woman vs. Beast

The two verses that immediately follow the portrait of the wife plunge us directly into the lay's action. These two lines refer to, and then undermine with brilliant subtlety, the putative love that holds the couple together:

Il amot Ii e ele lui;

mes d'une chose ot grant ennui (23-4)

(He loved her and she him, but there was one thing that gave her great worry.)

With this couplet Marie has taken us away from static portraiture and inserted us into an already-rotten scenario. Like a spider web, the slowly-evolving bond between the men and the beast to the exclusion of the woman will emanate from this point, and each new encounter between characters will nourish its expansion. This choppy and awkwardly prosaic description of their love (Rothschild 1974: 94-5) is only eight syllables long in a lay that runs more than 300 verses, and its purported genuineness is immediately crushed by the announcement of the wife's concomitant "grant ennui" (great worry).11 In other words, the narrator informs us by means of this hollow, overly compact "lauding" of the couple's love that any feeling of affection has already been compromised and contaminated by the wife's fear.

WOMAN-HATING IN MARIE DE FRANCE'S BISCLAVRET1

Romanic Review, May 2002 by Creamer, Paul

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