The queen interprets his sexual modesty—his supposed aversion to women—as a mode of social contravention. Though her homosexual accusations defile his manhood, at once suggesting that his reclusiveness engenders a debased masculinity while also opposing patristic dogma, her polemic moreover unveils the induction of his narrative authority—a preeminence defined by his individuated sense of self. As Butler shows: “The alleged psychosis of homosexuality, then, consists in its thorough break with the paternal law and with the grounding of the female ‘ego,’ tenuous though it may be, in the melancholic response to separation from the maternal body” (84 emphasis mine). Marie therefore illustrates Lanval’s “thorough break” with the Symbolic order through the synthesis of his devotion to his lover and the semiotic modalities which derive from her. With this in mind, Lanval’s gallantry can be perceived as an individuation from both social and sexual expectations—one that emphasizes not only the courtly love traditions, but also Marie’s elucidation of desirable manhood:

                       “Lady,” he said, “of that activity

I know nothing,

but I love and I am loved

by the one who should have the prize

over all the women I know.

And I shall tell you one thing;

you might as well know all:

any one of those who serve her,

the poorest of all,

is better than you, my lady queen,

in body, face, and beauty,

in breeding and in goodness.” (ll. 291-302)

Here, Marie juxtaposes the polarity between the queen’s depravity and a tacit image of the Virgin Mary, inexplicitly advocating his romantic sensibility while also subverting the gendered expectations of both courtly ladies and knights. Lanval’s gauche delineation thus seems to correspond with Julia Kristeva’s theorizations concerning Bellini’s paintings of the Madonna in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art: “Those afflicted or affected by psychosis have put up in its place the image of the Mother: for women, a paradise lost but seemingly close at hand, for men, a hidden god but constantly present through occult fantasy” (240 emphasis mine). Lanval’s opprobrium therefore confutes the queen’s impudence vis-à-vis the “fantasy” of his lover—and anyone associated with her—as a saintly figure. Privileging them over the profane body of the queen, Marie inverts their social distinctions, further demonstrating the affiliation between Lanval’s idealized sense of love and fidelity and his innate transcendence as a courtly love hero.

           Given the protean nature of Lanval’s textual agency, his characterization exemplifies the manner by which Marie de France disrupts socio-political constructions of masculinity vis-à-vis her protagonist’s feminized public image. Marginalized by his fellow knights and king, Lanval’s body functions as a subversive figure of manhood, whereby his lover’s semiotic motility pervades and his preeminence derives. To this end, Marie tacitly illustrates that his effeminate nature—emblematic ofhis chivalric devotion to his lover—can indeed transvalue hegemonic tenets governing his body into desirable forms of gendered subjectivity. His individuated sense of reason thus transposes his devalorized position within the kingdom into one that is central to not only the lai but also his importance within the hierarchy of the nobility. While his inadvertent identification with his lover invokes derision and contempt, Marie creates a realm through which the confluence of his estrangement within the Symbolic order and his lover’s semiotic drives engenders his individuality as a lover romanticized by the traditions of courtly love and his own sense of power.

 

 

Notes

 

¹ Lacan asserts: “This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy…the dialectic that will henceforth link theI to socially elaborated situations” (Ricther 1126-7 original italics). Therefore, once Lanval’s Imaginary realm enters and is disrupted by the Symbolic order, his imago is hence introduced to “socially elaborated situations,” which implicitly undermine his idealized sense of self, revealing moreover the extent by which his false autonomy enervates his “masculine” ascendancy. 

Works Cited

 

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:

Routledge, 1999.

----. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Kristeva, Julia.Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York:

           Columbia UP, 1980.

Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France. Trans. Robert Hanning and Joan

           Ferrante. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1978.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Texual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 2002.