• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1103-1122
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• 2009

In this essay, I compare the ways in which the mid-thirteenth century English romance, Floris and Blancheflour, represents relationships of the Spanish pagan queen to her adoptive Christian daughter who becomes her daughter-in-law, with the ways in which Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and other so-called Constance romances delineate relationships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. What draws me into these romances is the fact that they both convey the intergenerational relationships of women. However, the texts become distinct from each other in the way in which each depicts women characters and their relationships with one another. In this paper, I argue that the level of intimacy that the mother-in-law figure has with the daughter-in-law figure plays a defining role in making the former perform her agency for or against the latter. In the Man of Law's Tale and other Constance romances, the daughter-in-law figure is in every sense an alien or 'outsider' to the mother-in-law figure. To the contrary, Blancheflour in Floris is a sort of 'insider' to the queen because they lived in the same household for fourteen years-ever since the girl's birth. The queen, therefore, should have a high degree of intimacy with Blancheflour. I argue that the pagan queen's intimacy to the daughter of a Christian-European captive has enabled the queen to protect the girl as her adoptive daughter first and as a daughter-in-law second, namely contributing to her unreserved endorsement of the inter-racial-religious-class union between her only son, Floris, and Blancheflour. This is one major factor that distinguishes the relationship of the queen and Blancheflour in Floris from the dysfunctional relationships of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law in the late medieval Constance romances, where women of different generations are strangers to each other, and no way is imagined for women of different races and religions to get along with each other.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.65-75
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• 2012

Throughout the agraian society, industrial society, information society, and the knowledge-based society, the word father has become the representation of the law, oder, control, protection, and discipline. This study, with traditional fairy tale "Le petit chaperon rouge", aim to analyze the child readers a notion familly around 'me' and conceiving the father as the unit of the institution; also, in the Korean film , cinema audiences feeling keenly the necessity of the conventional family values and looking for the poster of principal agent of law and order. Generally the father is protector of 'me' and simutaneously, is incorporal being; even if he is inessential, he has, only by the name, great influence with people(law, order, control, discipline, are operating only with the name as the father God does). Our study will show how the signifier father operates and what similarity is between the film and the traditional fairy tale. A father is recognized as a tyrant or criminal, but a man is always realized to undertake a duty of resisting unjust powers and protecting nonperson. Those opposing structures was well represented in epic works such as"Le petit chaperon rouge" and . The father described in children's tale appeared as a symbol of desire and oppression, therefore youngster readers realized around 'Me' the concept of family through the absence of a father and received the father as a unit in the system. A father in a film has been described as a protector of nonperson, and a main part in the institution and order of traditional family. In both genre, the psychological signifiant of father still has been shown based on the symbol of father as a social institution.