Hierarchy Of Needs In Marie De France's Lanval

Marie de France’s Lanval outlines not a joyous, beautiful tale, filled with love and last second heroics, but a story fraught with fey consequence, predatory behavior, unhealthy reliance, and psychological enthrallment with Lanval the knight himself as the shallow damsel in distress. The main female character, entitled only as The Fairy Queen, already is obviously not to be trifled with, considering her ethereal origins, but she takes an uncharacteristic saunter far past both her female and fey limitations and expectations with her actions towards Lanval. Indeed, she could be said to flirt with godly territory in her machinations of Lanval’s personage, disregarding her more easily detectable entrapment of Lanval’s mind via her control of Lanval’s

The Fairy Queen’s dedication is not as fawning and positive as one might first think, but instead it leads to Lanval’s complete reliance on her to fulfil his psychological and physical needs; Maslow’s Hierarchy easily illustrates how the Fairy Queen accounts for every level of Lanval’s needs and forces his personhood to revolve around her. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a psychologic model designed by humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow to explain the reasoning behind humans’ desires and needs and their ability to fulfil those wants and needs( ). The

Each level in the hierarchy must be met and fulfilled before one can move on to the next level. An unsatisfied need can hold a person back from passing the level and dealing with larger, more complex issues, and force the person to remain focused only on addressing the needs on the level relevant to them. While Lanval assumedly has addressed the first two levels of the hierarchy, at the very least, before he meets the Fairy Queen, the lines “He was of the king’s household/ but had spent all his wealth,/ for the king gave him nothing” (29-31) show that he was approaching destitute and his base needs might soon be in jeopardy. Upon his meeting with the Fairy Queen, she immediately satisfies the first level with a feast “…they brought him food./ He took supper with his love”(181-182), her luscious tent, and a nap. Her agreement with him assures him that he will always have his base needs attended to if he should continue to follow her orders. Lanval