“I Do, I Do”: Medieval Models of Marriage and Choice of Partners in Marie de France’s “Le Fraisne”

That Marie de France would choose to write a story about love and marriage with a happy ending is rather a surprise to readers mindful of the historical reality of the Middle Ages. The prospect of a woman having a happy, loving marriage in twelfth-century Renaissance France is bleak indeed. Georges Duby comments on how little historians do know about love between spouses: "... que savons-nous, en France, au XIIe siecle, de l'amour entre epoux ? Nous n'en savons rien, et nous n'en saurons, je pense, jamais rien pour l'immense majorite des menages...." ("Que sait-on de l'amour en France au XI[I.sup.e] siecle?" 5). Notwithstanding, the celebrated historian does mention Marie de France and how her depiction of love in the Lais seeks marriage as its ultimate goal: "In the poems attributed to Marie de France, ideal love is that which leads to marriage" (The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest 224). Marie's notion of love as a constant presence creates among the poems a reciprocal harmony of lovers in love that makes for a unified collection. Jean Flori's insightful article on Marie's Lais points toward a commonality based on unconventional love: "... tous racontent une histoire d'amour contrarie et, dans tous les cas, les sympathies de l'auteur vont aux amants tant qu'ils vivent cet amour sans se soucier des convenances sociales" (19). Cynthia Ho in her stimulating essay from Crossing the Bridge, assigns monogamy in Marie's Lais a somewhat curious meaning, "defined as exclusive, committed love in disregard of marriage vows" (142). Robert Hanning in his reflective chapter from The Olde Daunce recognizes the various qualities of Marie's love "... in its many guises: married and adulterous, young and mature, successful and unsuccessful, idealized and degraded, comic and tragic" (95). Philippe Menard in his essay "Marie de France et nous" insists upon the nature of love as shared: "Un aspect touchant de ces peintures tient au fait que l'amour vecu est reciproque" (12). Moreover, as evidence that Marie does not value the superficiality of courtly love games, Menard judiciously comments upon Marie's penchant for authenticity in love: "En outre, loin d'accepter aveuglement les rites elegants, mais un peu artificiels de l'amour courtois ... Marie prefere la spontaneite et les elans d'un coeur sincere" (14). Love in Marie demands equality between the sexes and thus defies the domination/submission precept of courtly love: "L'idee qu'il ne saurait y avoir de domination en amour, qu'aucun des partenaires ne doit commander a l'autre est eminemment etrangere a la doctrine courtoise" (15). For Donald Maddox in his provocative book Fictions of Identity in Medieval France, the tender and loving words of Tristan in "Chievrefoil" link the Lais together: "Bele amie, si est de nus:/Ne vus sanz mei, ne jeo sanz vus" (77-78). Maddox maintains that "this unadorned utterance is arguably the umbilicus, the key locus of the entire collection" (77). Yves Badel comments on how the brevity of the lays as a genre invites one lay to complement another: "... un texte court reussi appelle un supplement, demande a etre repris, relance en quelque maniere ... ainsi de recit en recit, narrateur et lecteur sont solidement contraints, par loi dure de la brievete et d'une histoire a chaque fois nouvelle, a un face a face avec le reel de l'existence" (39). Thus, we can see how Marie's collection as a literary genre has been assessed by scholars as succinct yet compatible texts that like separate streams find their common source in Marie's abiding wellspring of true love. While true love is everywhere present in Marie, are we able to generalize about love in the Lais? According to Burgess and Busby, generalization may be overly simplistic: "Love in medieval literature, as in any other period (indeed, in life itself), is too complex to be reduced to a single model which will not admit of variation" (Introduction 27-28). However, woven into the fabric of the Lais, we discover the fine thread of true love that embroiders one lay to another in a seamless tapestry where couples freely choose each other and enter into what we moderns would loosely designate as a "relationship". …