Three Deaths and a Castration. What Could be Better...?

Even though the lai of Chaitivel is primarily a story of noble knights and battles I actually focused on the ideals that the lady within the story was supposed to live up to.

Medieval romance stories, more commonly than not, put the women on a very high pedestal. Women are supposed to conform to a very idealistic pattern of sweet, charming, kind, peaceful, loving, and every other positive adjective you can come up with. In Chaitivel, Marie de France makes the lady all very positive things, as well as the most beautiful maiden there ever was, but the lady takes the characteristics to the extreme and it ends up with a disatrous ending. The way she avoids being cruel or unkind is to lie to each knight in turn and tell them she is their's. If this was a story of one knight and one lady it would be a perfect story. The fact that she ended up betraying and lying to each one, in the disguise of being kind, is the lady's downfall.

Marie de France is trying to make a point by saying that people wish and wish for all women to act like a true lady, but when she actually does and goes through with all the true characteristics it ends with three men dead and one castrated. The ideal is so extreme that Marie de France is trying to call the ridiculousness of it to attention. Marie does not necessarily like to follow popular conventions of writing, and likes to include irony into her works, but this lai takes the cake on Marie de France criticizing the unrealistic ways of medieval romance.