Disabusing Women In The Old French Fabliaux Natalie Muoz by Natalie Muñoz instant download after payment.

The French medieval fabliaux provide a variety of portrayals of female characters that, until recently, have unfortunately been considered simply misogynistic. The most interesting thing, the polyvalence of categories, is most often ignored. Fabliaux women cannot be taken as a unified and univocal group. My discussion of the various types of women in the Old French Fabliaux and the methods they use to subvert male authority shows that the fabliaux are not as misogynistic as originally thought.
Fabliaux women admirably serve as critics of medieval institutions, such as courtly love and knighthood. Rather than describing them in terms of their common characteristics, I will show that it is more productive to study this group in terms of their agency. The fabliaux women are not “flat” characters. They perform a number of different roles that define their agency and their ability to act as subjects. Traditional fabliaux criticism readily notes that women are reduced to sexual objects, the evidence for this being the frequent portrayal of female sexual anatomy. Conversely, I maintain that women find the male body a source of pleasure or a means to assert their authority, while the men find the female body to be confusing and frustrating. These seemingly powerless women adeptly manipulate those around them through the use of language. Their most common weapons are metaphors, double-entendres, and linguistic ingenuity, which allow them to express their desires and to control the situation with their male counterparts.
The depiction of these women as working within medieval literary and cultural conventions to assert their subjectivity often appears to distort the normal relations between the sexes and to put into question the very gender framework within which the fabliaux operate. The closing morals frequently serve as a means of reasserting traditional male dominance, thereby reducing any uneasiness the audience may have felt. I recast fabliaux women as powerful, diverse, and multifaceted, all the while recognizing the limits of their subversion.