The plot is complicated by Lanval's promise not to reveal the identity of his mistress, which he breaks when Guinevere accuses him of having "no desire for women".
Women are not usually highly regarded in the Arthurian universe, they are side characters who are often not named and if they have any relevance it is only for their beauty.
[2] However, we see the true power of the lai via the character of Lanval's mistress, the lady who chooses him for a lover and ultimately rescues him.
Modern feminist scholarship often focuses on the spaces between these two characters and personas in defining Lanval as a comment on and response to then-contemporary primarily patriarchal values.
Lanval is one of Marie de France's 12-lai collection, and only one explicitly set in Arthur's court with reference to the Round Table and the isle of Avalon (although the lai Chevrefoil too can be classed as Arthurian material).
[9] A lai is a lyrical, narrative written in octosyllabic couplets that often deals with tales of adventure and romance.
Having composed Lanval around 1170–1215, Marie wrote near the time of the Third Lateran Council 1179, which prescribed excommunication for those guilty of sodomy.
This was following a tradition derived from a misreading of the Bible that the innocent in Sodom and Gomorrah were killed as well as those guilty of homosexuality, although it states that God only slew the wicked.
By declaring him a homosexual, Guinevere reflected that charge back on him because everyone was endangered by that sin, according to common belief.
During the crisis of aristocracy, caused by the reconstitution of monarchy and through the rise of the urban middle class, the bacheliers or jeunes found themselves in a position of being without land or in the need to sell that which they did own in order to pay off their debts.
[12] His condition reflects both a class and generation whose dispossession is the result of a matrimonial model that works against the interest of women and younger sons, under which if the eldest son survived to the age of marriage and reproduction, the younger siblings were left to wander far from home, much like depicted within the opening lines of Lanval.
She serves as a foil to reality; while he is exiled, she has left her own country to find him and while he is neglected by Arthur, she holds him above all other knights.
She is the literary incarnation of a fantasized solution to class issues which persisted in actual history during the 12th century for young knights.
Another example is Guinevere's denouncement of Lanval, which is an allusion to the story found in Genesis 39:7, where the wife of the powerful Potiphar falsely accuses Joseph of trying to seduce her against her will.
[16] Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote the short poem "The Fairy Bride" (1853) about a knight named Elvar, another reworking of Marie's tale.