WOMAN-HATING IN MARIE DE FRANCE'S BISCLAVRET1

Romanic Review, May 2002 by Creamer, Paul

But the originator and chief agent of the misogyny found in this lay is Marie herself, author of the work. It is she who brings us a truly loathsome female protagonist whose every act is despicable, whose thoughts and speech are always motivated by self-interest and executed with dishonest stealth, and who utters the truth only when under torture and arrested by fear (265-6).22 While some of the female villains in the other Lais suffer grimly comical comeuppances (such as the mother in Le Fraisne, who-after claiming her neighbor's giving birth to twins could only have been caused by adultery-later herself gives birth to a pair) or are not punished at all (the queen in Lanval, for example, slanders the fine knight but is not harmed), this is not the case in Bisclavret. The baron's wife receives the most grievous non-fatal injury of any female character in the Lais, and hers is the only wound to a member of either gender that subsequently impacts future generations. In Marie's elaborate menagerie of evildoers harbored within the Lais, male or female, only the baron's wife combines a progressive chain of betrayals, an interrogative method worthy of a star trial lawyer, and a singularly graphic and durable punishment.

The author's treatment of Bisclavrefs sole female character must simultaneously be contrasted with her treatment of the male characters in the lay. As architect of Bisclavrefs plot, she depicts and animates men and women differently across the spectrum. Marie meticulously crafts a panorama of mutual obligations and responsibilities, which are honored by all of the men and rejected by the only woman. And men are always treated better: the werewolf bites the woman's nose off, but does not ever actually harm the knight from the country (197-204); the king banishes the woman but not the knight (305-8); and many of this couple's female descendants are born noseless (312-4), but none of the males (Bambeck 136). As previous critics have pointed out, the faithless (and now nearly faceless) woman will survive her attack, thereby able to see other females of her clan suffer as a result of her own evil deeds. The summa of the anti-woman tone woven into the fabric of this lay is the woman's initial suspicion of her first husband. The wife's concern with his three-day absences has, importantly, nothing to do with a fear of werewolves. She pointedly admits that she dreads that her husband has a mistress (51). We have therefore an actual traitorous female character referring to a hypothetical traitorous female. There are no virtuous women in this text, present or "offstage." And so it comes to pass that one treacherous woman's distrust of a non-existent treacherous woman leads to a confrontation between husband and wife, and this clash eventuates a good man being forced to live in lupine form for a year, until he is taken under protection and eventually rescued by the efforts of another good man, the king.

We recall the three beings that Marie showcased at the beginning of the lay: werewolf, man, and woman. Incrementally, over the run of the lay, the author topples all three initial portraits-vacating the first, tarnishing but then resuscitating the second, and damning the third. The feared and fearsome generic werewolf never surfaces in the text. The man, namely the baron-initially a splendid vassal and later a humane werewolf pushed to rage only when betrayed-exits the lay literally in the embrace of his lord and covered with kisses (300-1), flush with recovered recognition and material goods. That his lycanthropy is never resolved (it is neither cured nor its origin explained) seems not to bother the baron, the king, his men, or Marie herself. We come to the lay's treatment of the third type: the woman, as represented by the wife. As many critics have pointed out, it is the female who by lay's end has become the sole vicious beast present in the text.