‘I am You’: Fear and Self-Preservation in Marie de France’s Le Fresne
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Le Fresne is one of the twelve Breton lais that an Anglo-Norman author Marie de France is claimed to have composed in the second half of the twelfth century. This poem begins with an unnamed young noble lady who accuses the wife of her husband’s friend of having committed adultery as soon as the news is broken that the latter has just given birth to healthy twin sons. In this paper, I will concentrate on the implication of this major crisis of the romance. Neither the narrator’s initial identification of the lady as a deceitful and envious woman nor modern critics’ readings of her that are in essence reinforcing the narrator’s judgment seem to fully explain what may drive her to throw such a lethal attack on the innocent woman. This is because she has presented herself as a nurturing, self-reflective, and sympathetic individual in other occasions. I will try to account for the impulsive and violent demeanors of the lady by relying on the concepts revolving around fear, self-preservation, and projection that T. H. Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborate in Dialect of Enlightenment. I will argue that the lady is none less than a fearful subject whose self-preservation system is automated against the danger signs, which are embodied in the new mother and her twin sons and then the lady’s own twin daughters, all of which evoke the primeval fear over which she has no control.
Abstract
Le Fresne is one of the twelve Breton lais that an Anglo-Norman author Marie de France is claimed to have composed in the second half of the twelfth century. This poem begins with an unnamed young noble lady who accuses the wife of her husband’s friend of having committed adultery as soon as the news is broken that the latter has just given birth to healthy twin sons. In this paper, I will concentrate on the implication of this major crisis of the romance. Neither the narrator’s initial identification of the lady as a deceitful and envious woman nor modern critics’ readings of her that are in essence reinforcing the narrator’s judgment seem to fully explain what may drive her to throw such a lethal attack on the innocent woman. This is because she has presented herself as a nurturing, self-reflective, and sympathetic individual in other occasions. I will try to account for the impulsive and violent demeanors of the lady by relying on the concepts revolving around fear, self-preservation, and projection that T. H. Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborate in Dialect of Enlightenment. I will argue that the lady is none less than a fearful subject whose self-preservation system is automated against the danger signs, which are embodied in the new mother and her twin sons and then the lady’s own twin daughters, all of which evoke the primeval fear over which she has no control.
참고문헌 (11)
- Adorno, Theodor W., "Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming" (1997), Verso
- Adorno, Theodor W., "Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments" (2002), Stanford University Press
- Archibald, Elizabeth, "The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance", pp.39~55 (2000), Pearson Education Limited
- Burgess, Glyn S., "Introduction. The Lais of Marie de France", pp.7~36 (1999), Penguin Books
- Freeman, Michelle, "Women and Power in the Middle Ages", pp.250~264 (1988), The University of Georgia Press
- Hanning, Robert, "The Lais of Marie de France" (1978), Baker Academic
- Krueger, Robert L., "The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing", pp.172~183 (2003), Cambridge University Press
- Laskaya, Anne, "The Middle English Breton Lays", pp.61~64 (1995), Western Michigan University
- Marie de France., "Le Fresne", Hanning and Ferrante, 73~91
- Marie de France, "Guidemar", Hanning and Ferrante, 30~59
- Marie de France, "General Prologue", Hanning and Ferrante, 29~29