Gender and Gentility in Medieval England

The subject of gentility is approached in a wide spectrum in Marie de France's Lanval and Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale.   Both pieces illustrate the surface of gentility to be something almost perfect, described in detail that portrays unsurpassed beauty, wit, and morality.   However, both pieces also hint at grave descrepancies of the higher class perhaps alluding to a social issue often raised in societies where class is so distinctly separated.   Lanval brings to life the world of Avalon with a broken promise to a fairy queen while The Wife of Bath's Tale begins with the description of a perfect knight who is also a heinous criminal.   Both tales approach gentility with different lights but perhaps come to the same conclusion:   On the surface, the high class is not all that it seems.   Marie de France and Chaucer make it clear in different perspectives through the view of women, the roles of the gentility themselves, and the moral point of the tale that things are not all that they seem in the upper class.
Through history, we see the typical role of a woman as submissive to her husband, a homemaker, and cast in the part of 'seen but not heard.'   Early literature is lacking a significant number of female writers, politics sees few female leaders until modern times, and the workforce consisted mostly of men until after the second World War.   Those women that did 'make it in a man's world' stick out in our minds as anomolies.   Marie de France, as one of the only documented female writers of the medieval period, is one of those women.   In her lais, Lanval she describes in lines 143-145 the control of a fairy queen over the knight that loves her: "'Love,' she said, 'I admonish you now, I command and beg you, do not let any man know about this...'" (Marie de France 206).   This illustrates a unique concept in which the female character of the story exhibits control over the man.   Knights often fought for 'courtly love,' and their ladies.   This extends beyond that...