Chivalric Masculinity as the Main Characteristic of Courtly Love Literature
In the twelfth century, a woman only known by the name of Marie wrote the Lais of Marie de France. It is a collection of courtly love poems that belong to the greater genre of courtly romance, and each of the tales illustrates a rather similar story of tragic and forbidden romance. The concept of chivalric masculinity was a defining characteristic of the courtly love genre and is present in both the tale of Guigemar and Bisclavret, which are the two primary tales of focus in this paper.
Chivalric masculinity is a set of abstract qualities idealized by the Medieval knights, such as bravery, courtesy, honor, loyalty, nobility, military prowess, spiritual faith, and gallantry toward women. Both Guigemar and Bisclavret embraces and enacts some, if not all, of these traits. Furthermore, chivalric masculinity is directly linked to the male character, or knight, conforming to heterosexual norms, which seems to be endorsed in the first lai, Guigemar. In contrast, in regards to chivalric masculinity in the lai of Bisclavret, the hero seems to move away from heterosexuality and towards homosociality. Homosociality differs from heterosexuality because the primary bonds or relationships are between men, as opposed to between a man and a woman, and these relationships are not defined by sexual love. In regards to Marie’s view of chivalric masculinity, chivalric masculinity is directly linked to transformativity. Both knights are represented or misrepresented as in flux: between balanced and imbalanced in Guigemar and between animal and human in Bisclavret.
Bisclavret is a model of bodily conversion, but through his transformation Marie highlights the notion that what makes a knight, and a man, both involves physical identity and extends beyond it. Bisclavret is a werewolf and a minister of merciless violence. Traditionally, the figure of a werewolf is male, which is purposeful in the Lais, and is a symbol of male violence. The character of Bisclavret raises the question of whether maleness and humanness form two mutually exclusive types of identities, but in order to answer this question it is necessary to focus on the possible capacity of violence and its link to verbal language. Throughout the Lais, there are indications that his masculinity is exaggerated, as illustrated in these scenes, “... a ferocious beast which, when possessed by this madness, devours men, causes great damage… ,” “Bisclavret caught sight of the knight and sped towards him, sinking his teeth into him and dragging him down towards him,” “He dashed towards her like a madman,” and “He tore the nose right off of her face”. It is through Marie’s use of excessive violence that Bisclavret is able to prove his competence for reason in werewolf form when he is unable to speak or write. This “devouring,” for example, develops into a model of poetic language, particularly as Bisclavret, in a symbolically meaningful act of violence, bites off his wife’s nose in revenge.
In conclusion, despite the fact that Guigemar and Bisclavret seem defined by change or the misrepresentation of change by other characters, they are also incredibly market by stability and the adherence to the ideal of the chivalric knight, but as the Lais progress it is revealed that the knights’ masculine identities may in fact be unchanged. Therefore, masculine identity cannot be assumed as simply transformative because the abstract traits of chivalry eclipse conversion, nor can it be understood as solely as the balanced symbol of chivalric virtue because it is outlined by the possibility of transformation. Both Guigemar and Bisclavret represent physical and social change and the lasting ideal of chivalry in courtly love literature, and in order to understand each knight, it requires the attention to both aspects. Thus, for Marie, the concept of chivalric masculinity in these Lais should be understood as dual, a hybrid of two contesting visions.
