Beginning with the obvious

Perhaps I'm being a little simplistic, but I would like to better understand the terms we will be throwing around throughout the course. For my own benefit, I wanted to write out my basic understanding of the terms used to structure our course. Please comment if you feel my knowledge or understanding is lacking.

To define a person, a place, or a culture as Other, one must first assign a culture, an idea, or a place as Self. The basic notion of Self is, of course, comprised of a number of shared cultural experiences and familiar daily rituals. How, then, do we define the Self in a time period, a geographical environment, and a catalog of shared experience that we do not recognize? Are we defining the Self in terms of our modern sensibilities or the sensibilities of our medieval authors?

We have, as modern readers, a fairly comprehensive idea of the Self, just by virtue of being part of the culture at large. However, no matter how well thoroughly we research the Middle Ages, its cultures and customs, we will never know how the collective culture defined the Self. Reading medieval literature with the shared and recent history, with the nationalism, and with the culture of a man or woman of 12th century Norman England or 11th century France is impossible. Is our class utterly hopeless because we cannot hope to understand the depth or the body of collective culture in the Middle Ages?

I think not. In the act of reading, we are writing. And regardless of context, certain values of the Self stand as constants. Occupying an outcast position in society, possessing a vengeful or malicious nature, and devaluing human life are all generally understood to be acts against decent human nature/our self. While it is important to note critical historical events and paradigms that inform the text, reading the text as modern readers is the most useful way to study a culture so far removed from our own. I wanted to clarify my critical intentions before attempting to grapple with the text and to differentiate the Other from the Self, which is to say nothing of the Monstrous.

In “Bisclavret,” Marie de France offers what can be interpreted as a sort of cautionary tale, warning against the malicious nature of her own sex. I tend to view the wife as a malicious character because of her immediate question after the revelation that her husband is a werewolf. She does not ask how he became a werewolf; she asks a practical question that leads him to reveal how he returns human form. Setting aside the vague question of what did the husband do to deserve such a betrayal, the wife nonetheless betrays him. From the rest of her lays, Marie de France seems to believe that female betrayal is inevitable whether the husband trusts the wife with his deep dark secrets or locks her in a tower.

All of which makes me question why would Marie de France vilify (or if not vilify, portray as flighty and untrustworthy) her female characters? Shouldn’t she be working as an agent of her, and consequently her gender’s, interests? Perhaps that’s where I’m mistaken in my thinking. Marie de France is a writer who happens to be a woman, not necessarily a woman writer in the modern sense. She wrote as her male counterparts did, which is to say she echoed the prevailing ideas about women based on the theology and the social climate of the Middle Ages. Although she is the other, the woman, she wrote in the context of Anglo-Norman culture, which is to say, the culture of men.