As the eponymous hero of Marie de France’s lai, Lanval retains the idyllic power of the narrative. However, his textual authority is also governed by the preeminence of his lover, Queen Semiramis, which at once aggrandizes and debases his masculine identity and influence. Utilizing the traditions of courtly love lyric poetry, Marie de France demonstrates the manner by which Lanval experiences the torments of unrequited love and desire, thereby asserting a patriarchal authority, relegated by her affections and presence: “‘I shall obey your command;/ for you, I shall abandon everyone./ I want never to leave you./ That is what I most desire’” (ll. 126-30). Lanval’s amorous sentimentality, exacerbated by his peripheral stature within King Arthur’s kingdom, conflates his individuality with her semiotic influences through which his masculine ascendancy is attenuated. Therefore, as the lai intimates, his lover’s maternal and feminine drives enfeeble Lanval’s existence, which, in turn, privilege the woman within the male/female binary. While critics argue that his marginal position and Arthur’s jealousy enervates Lanval’s power, his fierce attachment and identification with his lover, as exemplified in lines 253-302, also illustrates the ways in which his effete masculinity destabilizes the image of his public self, which further typifies the protean nature of his narrative authority.
As Toril Moi suggests in Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, “Femininity and the semiotic do…have one thing in common: their marginality. As the feminine is defined as marginal under patriarchy, so the semiotic is marginal to language” (164-5). Though she is absent throughout most of the lai, Lanval’s lover circulates and emanates semiotically through Lanval’s wistful pensiveness. Within this context, the intermission of their love affair tacitly elucidates and incites his feminized position within the confines of the patriarchal domain. His estrangement in King Arthur's court deepens as a result of his dutiful affection, and his patriarchal vigor is moreover subdued by the perpetuation of his cloistered space, both existentially and psychically: “Lanval went off to one side,/ far from the others; he was impatient/ to hold his love,/…he thought little of other joys if he could not have his pleasure” (ll. 253-8). Here, Marie discloses the scope of his lover’s sovereignty, hence illuminating the ways in which the amalgamation of his public and private selves propagates an emasculated identity. For Lanval, this moment instigates his false sense of autonomy in which his intimacy with his lover establishes at once the influence of her semiotic drives and his individuated masculinity. As indicated by Jacques Lacan in “Mirror Stage as the Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” “[w]e have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification…the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image,” using the analytic term, the imago (Richter 1124 original italics). By wallowing in his misery, Lanval further alienates himself from his fellow knights. His sovereignty as a lover and nobleman is thus impeded by his Ideal-I of the Imaginary order, whereby his lover’s semiotic influences thrive, though his misrecognition of himself generates his dismay and perpetuates his seclusion.
Accordingly, Lanval’s rejection of the queen’s amatory pronouncements reveals the seemingly perilous borders of his imago as exemplified through his body. Though she pledges her affections to Lanval—“You may have all my love;/ just tell me your desire” (ll. 265-6)—he fervidly proscribes her attachment, implicating himself as an anomalous figure of masculinity: “‘My lady,’” he said, “‘let me be!/ I have no desire to love you./ I have served the king a long time;/ I don’t want to betray my faith to him’” (ll. 269-72).1 Because the queen’s advances substantiate the social expectations, which govern perceptions of manhood, his sexual indifference presents a transgressive antithesis to inscribed sexual practices. Given these ideological assumptions, his sensual facility and cerebral well-being are thus unified within the confines of his presumably insidious body. For Judith Butler,
what the body gives and receives is not a touch, but the psychic
contours of a bodily exchange, a psychic contour that engages the
body that it represents. Without this moment of exposure, a moment
in which one displays something more than one intends, there is no
transference. (UG 173)
Therefore, through Lanval’s repudiation of the queen’s fondness, Marie implicitly articulates the semioticpressure manifest within his feminized characterization. It is this marginal and effeminate circumstance through which the conventions of courtly love thrive and paradoxically restore his textual authority. Lanval's body hence alludes to a flux between his exteriority and interiority—the private and public boundaries of the body through which his private “otherness,” illustrated and aroused by his lover’s semiotic drives, transvalues into his feminized masculinity.
The queen’s vengeful tirade thus calls attention to his inherent beneficence,which, in turn, ameliorates his alienated position within the patriarchal order:
“Lanval,” she said, I am sure
you don’t care for such
pleasure;
people have often told me
that you have no interest in women.
You
have fine-looking boys
with whom you enjoy yourself.
Base coward, lousy
cripple,
my lord made a bad mistake
when he let you stay with him.
For
all I know, he’ll lose God because of it.” (ll. 279-86).