Who the monster was, anyway?

For a society based in oaths and rites, Marie appears extremely liberal when it is time to talk about love. Nothing can stop it. Bisclavert appears as an exception: Bisclavert’s wife simply stops loving him when she is aware that he is a werewolf… but she is not a Noble woman, or at least not noble enough. She is practical and cares about small details, like where her husband hides his clothes during his werewolf phase… small things; an occupation for small persons? Other characters are noble, tragic. Love in aristocratic hearts is always pure, their strategies and subterfuges appear always justified. Bisclavert´s wife is just a cheater who brings condemnation not only to her, but to her children and for several generations. Meanwhile, Yonec’s mother remains without sin, even thou she carries the baby of her affair to her marriage, and the adult son becomes the killer of his stepfather; the legitimate husband of her mother. They have different rights because they are different people, and their passions are made of a different matter. The mysterious knight who is the father of Yorec has the even the right to become a hawk using of course some kind of (always heretic) magic, and Bisclavert is the victim of a “condition”. This “condition” does not change or even touch the nobility of his inner nature. Ultimately he is beyond of this kind of “small things” and becomes the poodle version of the werewolf: the king’s personal “poodle”.

Marie de France is liberal with love, but only if the lovers are aristocratic, pretty and young. Is this only an ornament to please the listeners of the lais? It reveals some exclusive and excluding point of view of a group that nowadays we should call a class? Who is really the other? The guy affected by his werewolf “condition”? Or is the woman that cannot sustain her love because her lack of sensibility to the noble qualities of her husband? Is the monster the knight who is capable of taking the hawk’s shape? Or is the old and jealous old husband?

Personally, I think the monster is always the other; in this case, the most opposite character to the one that the reader or the listener can identify him or herself with...