Timeless tales about family tensions – simple theme, infinite variations.’ Discuss with reference to two or three lais by Marie de France

Many traditional stories in our culture are based on growing up, the point between childhood and adulthood when young people leave their parents and find a mate. There is a pattern to this movement which is often called the rites of passage pattern: a separation from society, a liminal stage during which there is often a lesson to be learned, and then the stage of reintegration, either back into the original society or into a new one. These stories are of interest because they capture the feelings of their readers, and in the twelfth century some of the greatest of these stories were the lais of Marie de France: “These short poems, as well as the long Latin-based romances, draw much of their power from their treatment of sexual love, fortunate or tragic in outcome. They mark the beginnings in narrative of the supreme topic of personal and emotional concern in so much western literature.”
Derek Brewer calls stories of this sort ‘family dramas’, and suggests that there is one b...