Figure del doppio nei Lais di Marie de France / Doppelgänger figures in the Lais of Marie de France

Maurizio Virdis

2018-01-01

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Abstract

The figure of the double is frequent and repeated in the Lais of Marie de France, although it takes on different meanings and meanings. In fact, the duality of the figures of Mary rules the dialectical pace of an inner psychic life and its being thrown into existence between an evanescent but unavoidable imaginary, and the determined and sensible consolidation of it; in a dimension that is sometimes ‘historical’, sometimes transcendent, sometimes even determined by a need for exemplarity. In Guigemar Marie builds, starting from a love story, lived between an imaginary beloved woman and the (same) real woman, a political utopia and a quiet cultural revolution. In Lanval, the imagined beloved woman becomes the symbol-metaphor-allegory of truth, in op- position to the squalor of a real lascivious coquette, even the queen Guinevere. In Lai du Fresne the two women represent two states and two ways of social existence with their subjective consequences, in an exemplary ideality of pure love.