In her 12th century Lai, “Bisclavret,” French poet Marie de France tells the story of a Baron who lives a double life as a Bisclavret, a being similar to a werewolf. In defiance of the common literary treatment of werewolves, de France portrays Bisclavret in a mostly sympathetic light, while vilifying the Baron’s wife, who betrays her husband when she learns of his other identity. De France’s work has been criticized by some scholars for its negative portrayal of women, who are often conniving villains in her stories. But while at surface read the Baron’s wife is certainly the villain of “Bisclavret,” which may well have been Marie de France’s intention, “Bisclavret” can alternatively be read as a feminist criticism of society’s condemnation of female sexuality, and the trials faced by women who seek independence from dangerous and dishonest men. 

Citing writings by Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the entry on wolves from the Medieval Bestiary website states, “If a wolf sees a man before the man sees the wolf, the man will lose his voice. If the man sees the wolf first, the wolf can no longer be fierce. If a man loses his voice because the wolf saw him first, he should take off all his clothes and bang two rocks together, which will keep the wolf from attacking” (The Medieval Bestiary). Nakedness and the removal of one’s clothing are prominent themes in de France’s Bisclavret. It is Bisclavret’s lack of clothing when he is in his wolf form that causes the baron’s wife “pure fear,”(de France98) leading her to conclude that “she could not lie with him again”(de France 102). 

In Bisclavret, clothing seems to separate the human from the animal or monster. Bisclavret can only return to his human form by donning his human clothes; his wife takes advantage of this, stealing his clothes from their hiding spot so that he is stuck in wolf form. Yet de France’s depiction of this human-animal clothing barrier is sometimes ambiguous: while without his clothing, Bisclavret cannot return to human form, he seems to retain his human sensibilities and reason. Despite Bisclavret being naked in his wolf form for most of the story, he refuses to dress and return to his human form until he is given privacy. This strange detail suggests that his transition between human and wolf is not merely physical– in preparing himself to turn back into a human, Bisclavret displays the human qualities of modesty and shame of the naked body. 

What, then, does it mean that man is said to be able to pacify a werewolf by taking off his own clothes? If clothes represent the barrier, albeit malleable, between humans and animals, it seems that the removal of clothing transforms man into an animal. In order to pacify a werewolf, then, man must transform himself into the werewolf’s kind. This is an apt metaphor for the wife’s ultimate betrayal of Bisclavret: in order to save herself, she too must become an animal, and embody the cruelty and deceitfulness of the werewolf.

The Baron’s wife betrays her husband and traps him in his animal form after finding out that he has been hiding his true identity from her. Unbeknownst to her, he has been spending nearly half his time as a werewolf, or Bisclavret. Furthermore, because the boundary between the Baron’s human and wolf form is so ambiguous and fluid, the Baron’s wife can not trust the Baron to transition predictably between his forms. Bisclavret’s experience of human shame of his naked body even when in his animal form suggests that his two forms are present at all times: from this perspective, the wife’s fear to sleep next to her husband is understandable. In “The Naked Beast: Clothing and Humanity in Bisclavret,” Edith Joyce Benkov notes that information on how Bisclavret spends his days as a beast is notably absent from the Lai. She writes, “the absences which so distressed his wife parallel the absence of development of the “aventure”; what happens during those three days remains the unspoken story of the beast among beasts and has no human voice. It is little wonder, then, that the “merveille” uncovered by Bisclavret’s confession, the particularity of his “aventure” frightens his wife”(Benkov 31). Without details of Bisclavret’s aventure, the wife must rely on legends of the Garwaf, a “savage beast”(de France 9) full of “blood rage”(de France 10), to fill in the gaps of her husband’s story.  

 Benkov also notes that the wife, through her questioning of Bisclavret and her transmission of his secret to the Chevalier, assumes the role of narrator, thus identifying her with de France. More-so than any other character in the Lai, Bisclavret’s wife holds the truth and controls others’s access to it. While de France seems to come out on the side of Bisclavret considering the violent punishment she imposes on the wife and her female offspring, Benkov writes, “the violence of Marie’s rejection of the wife does not negate the mingling of her voice with the wife’s, a mingling which does not occur between Marie’s voice and Bisclavret’s”(Benkov 37). Just as the stripping off of clothing reveals one’s true form in the Lai, Benkov’s reading suggests that we must strip back the layers of the text to gain a more nuanced understanding of what on the surface reads as a hero-villain dynamic between Bisclavret and his wife.

Not only is the Baron’s wife’s betrayal more sympathetic when we consider the erraticness of the human-werewolf boundary, the Medieval Bestiary’s entry on werewolves suggests that it is even a necessary act of self-defense. Man must see the werewolf before he is seen, or he must either lose his voice or descend himself to the animal level (by removing his clothing). In “Bisclavret,” neither the Baron nor his wife are truly honest characters, yet it is the Baron who commits the first duplicitous act, by hiding an entire side of his identity from his wife. The Baron’s wife, feeling that something is amiss in the marriage, seeks the truth of her husband’s periodic absences. In doing so, she only protects her own life and independence by “seeing” the werewolf before it is able to silence her. The wife, sensing that her own life and independence are in danger, must strike when she has the chance. Being physically weaker than the husband, she achieves her aim through cunning. The Baron’s wife’s dishonesty can equally be seen as a victory of intellect: the physical threat of the Bisclavret-husband is neutralized by the intellectual threat of the wife. 

The werewolf or Bisclavret here functions as a metaphor for the abusive husband. Even before Bisclavret reveals his double life, his wife expresses a significant amount of fear of him. She tells him, “if I just dared, I’d ask of you a think I dearly wish to know, except that I’m so full of fear of your great anger, husband dear”(de France, 33-36). Perhaps, the Bisclavret’s double life exists both within and without of the household: to his wife, he is alternatively a “dear husband”(de France 49) and a violent abuser. In the context of the wife’s previous declaration of fear of Bisclavret, her roundabout questions aimed at uncovering Bisclavret’s secret read less as a tactic of manipulation, and more as a method of avoiding sparking the rage that she so fears. That the wife feels she is in danger is also clear in her decision to enlist help from her male suitor to enact her plan. The Baron’s wife uses her sexuality to procure the protection of physical strength and size. The Chevalier’s role in the wife’s plot is unclear: he appears to be superfluous to the plan’s success aside from the male protection that he provides. 

At the end of the Lai, Bisclavret avenges himself by biting off the nose of his wife when she visits the King’s court. Soon after, Bisclavret returns to his human form, and his wife is chased out of the country with the Chevalier. A curse of noselessness is passed down to all of the wife’s female descendants. Several elements of this conclusion to the Lai emphasize the unfairness of the wife’s treatment, and the way in which her punishment is inherently tied to her womanhood.

While Bisclavret’s attack on his wife is the most prominent and most written about act of violence in the Lai, it is crucial to note that the human characters commit similarly grievous acts of physical and emotional violence towards the wife. When Bisclavret attacks his wife, the King concludes that she must be guilty and evil. Citing Bisclavret’s typically peaceful behavior, he becomes suspicious of the wife and orders her to be tortured for information. This treatment of the wife is startlingly similar to how female victims of rape, sexual harrassment, and domestic violence are treated in the modern day. Based on a limited view of Bisclavret’s past behavior, the King decides that the attack must be the wife’s fault. The King’s decision and statements on the wife’s guilt are reminiscent of the modern day rhetoric surrounding instances of rape and other forms of abuse. Like Bisclavret’s wife, many women are blamed for the sexual or physical abuses that they endure. Victoria Blud writes, “Bisclavret imposes his violent will on his unfaithful wife, and the results of his action deny her any recourse to or defense from the law”(333). This denial of a trial or defense for the wife contrasts markedly with the King’s immediate inclination to trust Bisclavret’s character and innocence.

 In “Wolves’ Heads and Wolves’ Tales: Women and Exile in Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer,” Victory Blud argues that the “wolf’s head” is transferred from Bisclavret to his wife at the end of the Lai, as her disfigurement transforms her into an exiled outcast. Blud reads the wife’s punishment through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject maternal body, which suggests that the maternal body, “the first abjection,”  is “intimately linked” with all things that represent “the in-between, the ambiguous, [or] the composite”(Blud 329). Thus, the figure of the werewolf or Bisclavret can be seen as a metaphor for the abject maternal body. That the wife’s punishment is tied to her gender is abundantly clear in her passing of her curse to her female descendants. As Blud writes, “the mark of her exile becomes bound up with the evidence of her maternity”(Blud 336).

That it is the wife’s nose that is torn off by Bisclavret is also not without significance. In more senses than one, the loss of the nose affirms the wife’s status as the abject and outcast, which is already inherent in her womanhood and fertility. Blud points out that the lack of a nose was often a sign of advanced leprosy, a condition which during de France’s period carried significant stigma and led its sufferers to become social pariahs. A woman’s nose was also bound up in sexual implications: Blud writes that “the nose was often associated with its owner’s illicit or unorthodox sexual practices”(335). The removal of the nose might be served as punishment for a woman’s adultery, in part because this deformation was thought to be the ultimate sexual turn-off to men(Blud 335). It thus seems to be no coincidence that Bisclavret’s wife, who leaves him for another man, loses her nose at the end of the Lai. That this curse is passed down to the wife’s female descendents implies a view of women and their sexuality as inherently untrustworthy.

Yet while Bisclavret’s wife is punished for an adulterous affair that is assumed to occur beyond the page, she is simultaneously punished for her failure to meet her husband’s sexual needs. It is her decision that “she could not lie with him again”(de France 102) that precipitates her betrayal of Bisclavret and her unhappy end. The sexual obligation of a wife to her husband is implied in Bisclavret’s wife’s decision. She seems to care deeply about Bisclavret at the beginning of the Lai, professing to him that in his absences her “heart is full of pain”(de France 45). Yet after deciding that she can no longer have sex with him, she decides that the only alternative is to trap him in his animal form. This decision speaks to Medieval society’s view of how much control a woman should have over her sexuality (not much). Ultimately, Bisclavret’s wife chooses to trick her husband into living full-time the life which he has already lived three days out of seven, because her alternative is to become trapped in a non-consensual sexual relationship.

While some scholars of Marie de France’s writing read Bisclavret as a misogynist Lai despite its female authorship, others may read the wife’s extreme punishment as a critique rather than a suggestion for how women should be treated. In “Bisclavret to Bisclarel Via Melion and Bisclaret: The Development of a Misogynous Lai,” Amanda Hopkins suggests that while de France’s original Bisclavret “allows for doubt” as to the wife’s guilt in the narrative, its Old Norse and Old French translations, Biscalrét and Bisclarel, as well as the anonymous adaptation Melion, “fill the spaces left by Marie’s lack of judgmental comment with misogyny, providing explicit morals and making the poems function to a greater or lesser extent as exempla of the treacherous nature of women”(Hopkins 321). In the Old Norse Bisclaret, which of the translations and adaptations sticks most closely to the original Lai, Bisclavret tears his wife’s clothes off at the end, instead of her nose. This change makes the wife’s wolfification and the link between her punishment and her sexuality more obvious, and associates the werewolf, which does not wear clothing, with the female body. 

Marie de France’s Bisclavret offers an ambiguous depiction of female nature and medieval gender dynamics. While many may read the wife’s portrayal and punishment as a misogynistic portrait of the deceitfulness and sexual deviancy of women, it can alternatively be read as a critique of these very stereotypes. The titular Bisclavret is a primarily sympathetic character, excluded from human society by seemingly no fault of his own. Because the “wolf’s head,” the mark of abjection, is passed from Bisclavret to his wife at the end of the Lai, we can perhaps infer that de France intended for readers to similarly sympathize with the wife at end of the Lai. The wife’s betrayal of Bisclavret is ultimately an act of sexual agency and self-defense from the threat of a husband whose violent and unpredictable wolfishness perforates the boundaries of his humanity.

Works Cited

Benkov, Edith Joyce. “The Naked Beast: Clothing and Humanity in Bisclavret.” Chimères, vol. 19, no. 2, 1988, p. 27., doi:10.17161/chimeres.v19i2.6436.

Blud, Victoria. “Wolves’ Heads and Wolves’ Tales: Women and Exile In Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer.” Exemplaria, vol. 26, no. 4, 2014, pp. 328–346., doi:10.1179/1041257314z.00000000057.

De France, Marie. “Bisclavret.” Marie De France Poetry, edited by Dorothy Gilbert, W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Hopkins, Amanda. “Bisclavret to Bisclarel via Melion and Bisclaret: The Development of a Misogynous Lai.” He Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literature Across the Disciplines, edited by Barbara K Altmann and Carleton W Carroll, Boydell & Brewer, D. S. Brewer, 2003, pp. 317–323.

“Wolf.” Medieval Bestiary : Wolf, The Medieval Bestiary, bestiary.ca/beasts/beast180.htm.