LeFresne's Model for Twinning in the Lais of Marie de France

LeFresne's Model for Twinning in the Lais of Marie de France

Within the general pattern of multiples that map out a potential for intertextual play in the Lais, Marie de France introduces a more specific design, the twins who appear in Le Fresne both literally and figuratively. Their presence in the collection invites us to consider how different models of twinning may shape and give new meaning to the larger pattern of multiplication. To illustrate, I offer here a two-staged reading of Le Fresne's twins, each part twinned with another lay in the collection, in the first case, Lanval, in the second, Chievrefoil.¹ The division in two parts corresponds to differing views of twins in the human imagination, seen as duality (a competition of opposites) on the one hand, and dualism (or complementarity to form a whole), on the other.² These two views suggest the mind at work making sense of twins as a puzzle or contradiction: they are two and yet a unit, the same and its other.

The multiple twins that appear in Le Fresne begin to suggest how stories and common materials migrate between characters, cross over and create twins, both in Marie's collection and beyond its borders.³ Le Fresne's initial situation resembles that in a number of lays: characters in close proximity to each other appear identical until some event in the plot allows them to achieve distinction through difference. In this case, two knights, rich, valiant, and married, were neighbors from the same country ("prochein furent, d'une cuntree"; 7).⁴ The birth of twin boys appears to disrupt the synchrony and receives a heavily negative connotation when the other wife claims that only two fathers could produce such a result. The irony immediately becomes apparent, however, when the twinning of the couples continues: a second set of twins are born to the slanderer, and she finds herself in a trap of her own making. How will she avoid the self-incriminating charge of adultery?

Since she has already initiated a pattern of difference—albeit involuntarily by giving birth to twin girls—she will follow through by eliminating one of the two babies to protect her own reputation and the purity of the family line. Identity and inheritance threatened—that, in a nutshell, is the plot of the first part of Le Fresne, the mother's story, as it is of the second part, the next generation, Fresne's story, when Gurun's knights will persuade him to put aside his concubine in favor of a suitably noble marriage partner with whom he can produce children to ensure the stability of his domain. Twin plots, whose resolution seems to require, in each case, elimination of the eponymous heroine. The duplication leads paradoxically to a final reversal and common solution based on the restoration of Fresne's identity. An elaborately symmetrical and imbricated narrative structure thus reinforces the role of twins at the level of character development and deepens the inquiry into the profoundly disorienting phenomenon of a twoness that is simultaneously a oneness.⁵

Luckily, the second time the same solution is applied—eliminate one of the twins—it leads to a happier ending: Fresne's recognition by the bad mother who had wanted to kill her but then agreed instead to send her away with some identifying tags, ring and cloth, that would bespeak her noble birth despite her loss of identity. They have remained hidden (like Fresne herself), unable to testify until the moment when Fresne's selflessness leads her to place the beautiful cloth on Gurun's wedding bed and thus trigger the moment of revelation.⁶ The family's integrity restored, a second substitution of one twin for the other can then reunite the lovers in a new framework of matrimony, doubled by La Coudre's suitably rich marriage arranged by the parents "en lur cuntree" ("in their...