A Fox is not always a Fox! or How not to be a Renart in Marie de France's Fables

A Fox is not always a Fox! or How not to be a Renart in Marie de France's Fables Sahar Amer University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill Animal literature in the Middle Ages is essentially typological in that each animal is matched with a specific virtue or vice. This type of literature must be understood in the context of the period's fascination with universal symbolism on the one hand, and the tendency to associate literature with lies on the other. In fact, in order to justify its recourse to animals, any literature which claimed to be didactic and sought to be endorsed by the medieval ecclesiastical discourse of authority had to subordinate the animal to a deeper conventional significance, usually of a theological nature. In the medieval typological discourse, perhaps best exemplified by the Bestiaries, the lion is the symbol of God or the King; the lamb that ofJesus Christ or the victim; the fox that of the Devil or evil preachers . Animal symbolism, however, was in certain cases double-edged since some animals could, through a process of doubling and inversion , also represent their opposites. Such is the case, for example, with the Bestiaries, as Louis Réau judiciously noted: "the difference between the Bestiaire de Dieu and the Bestiaire de Satan is not always clearly marked" (78, translation mine). In this vein, the lion could represent both courage and savagery. Yet the polysemy of the medieval typological discourse is nonetheless restricted since it is manifest only through contradictory, that is, categorically opposite, meanings: even if a given animal possesses two different meanings, he only ever incarnates one or the other, not both at once. Medieval polysemy is thus ultimately reduced to univocity. Indeed animals in the Middle Ages constituted a truly semiotic system, what Augustine called the signum (II.ii.5-7) and Saussure a system of "fixed signs" in which each signifier (animal) always possessed the same meaning. Established by Adam, these systematic associations were fixed, conventional, and faithfully reproduced by any religious or didactic literature using animals.1 Animals were not seen as imaginary characters nor were they used for pure entertainment; rather they were instruments primarily of social and moral edification , the engaging surface or sugarcoating of the bitter pill of moral teaching. 10Rocky Mountain Review At a time when such was the prevailing discourse, Marie de France dared to speak otherwise. In her fable collection known as the Esope, the first French female poet departs from the typological literature of her contemporaries and rejects the univocal and fixed animal symbolism of her period in order to create something new.2 1 have chosen to focus on the representation of the fox since he, perhaps more than any other animal in the twelfth century, had a well established and well known symbolism, both in the vernacular and in the more didactic literatures. A study of the portrayal of the fox in Marie de France's Fables will thereby allow us to understand more fully the poet's innovation and her daring subversion of available models. However, the example of the fox is but one among many in Marie's recueil, and my conclusions apply to other animals and other aspects of the Esope* In other words, the example of the fox serves only as a prolegomenon to a more extended study of the representation of characters in Marie's Fables, as well as of the symbolism in her text, and of Marie's poetic craft in general. Before examining the depiction of the fox in Marie de France's recueil , it is important to reconstruct briefly the medieval reader's "horizon of expectations" concerning this particular animal," for animals in fables do not constitute a zoological species, but rather a literary one. Thus, the meaning of an animal in a work of literature must be read in relation to other texts using the same character. Therefore, it is by comparing Marie de France's representation of the fox with other literary depictions of the same animal that one can better appreciate Marie's innovative stance in relation to the typological discourse of her time. At the end of the twelfth century when Marie...