Reviewed by Briana @ Pages Unbound on
However, there is a catch to these tales. Excluding the aforementioned available princess and the lady in Marie’s version of “Lanval,” most of these beautiful women are married, and the knights who come to lift their spirits are technically adulterers. Marie condemns none of them, however. The only characters who are punished suffer pain or death not because of their extra-marital affairs, but because their secret love prompted them to other actions, such as murder. Indeed, Marie seems to approve of adultery that is composed of a “pure” love. When one of the dashing knights is killed by his lover’s jealous husband, his death is proclaimed profoundly “unjust,” and the son he helped conceive is destined to avenge the deed. Clearly Marie’s stories function on their own morality, where women trapped in unhappy marriages have the right to find true love somewhere else, which is quite different from the Church’s. Her writing was popular, so clearly there was something common and resonating enough about this scenario that allowed it to appeal to a wide audience.
Marie’s acceptance of these affairs will probably be slightly disconcerting to modern readers, but her treatment makes the situations seem natural enough that the tales cannot be ruined by it. Many of the husbands are all but absent from the story, making it easy to forget them. A couple are so cruel that the reader wants to side with the woman. And often the adultery is relatively pure—gazing from a window, sending love notes from afar. It is still wrong, of course, but it is easier to palate when it is not lewd. Despite the circumstances, there will always be something at least a little beautiful about sending a woman you cannot have a note hidden beneath the feathers of a swan.
This review was also posted at Pages Unbound Book Reviews.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 24 January, 2012: Finished reading
- 24 January, 2012: Reviewed