The Knight And The She's Daughter Analysis

There is a strange connection between the supernatural, nature, and women present in medieval ballads and Breton lais. These features can be found to cause a different look at women and the power that they harness. The women of “The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter,” “James Harris, (The Daemon Lover),” and “Sir Orfeo” all exist within two separate worlds which allows them to hold more power than they would in just one. All of them possess a quality that enabled them to cross from one world to the next in order to make men give them what they deserve. Through further exploration of the supernatural and natural influence these women posses, we can identify the way that they hold a unique power over men. “The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter”
The emphasis on her beauty is an essential part of her power because it is what enables her to become a superior being in both her world and the fairy world. She begins this transformation by gathering up her army of maidens and exploring the orchard. When encased within a man-made version of nature, she quickly fell asleep under a “fair ympe-tre” (“Sir Orfeo” 70). This tree is essential to her transformation and abduction because it, like the orchard they are in, is man’s way of intervening with nature. The process of combining man and nature has caused a rift where Heurodis’s beauty is recognized and taken. She has the same amount of power in her own world as she does in the fairy world. Tara Williams suggests, “Heurodis’s primary value is aesthetic in both worlds and that her defining characteristic may be the status of her body as a signifying spectacle” (556). Her power as an aesthetic figure is still extremely powerful because as a silent figure, she is able to force the will of the men who surround her. Both men compete with each other to keep their prized beauty as more of a symbol of their status than anything else. They are only content when they have taken her and proven their worth to everyone else more than to her. This depiction of a supernatural entity differs from the others because she holds no real power of
They prove themselves to be capable of feats that no ordinary woman could and through that veil of suspended belief exists a commentary on the way that women work to achieve power. These women are all transgressive in nature but they fail to evolve any further at the end of the story. The shepherd’s daughter wins a man and inherits her land but gives up all her authority in doing so. Jane Reynolds gets to live two great lives but upon leaving one, she creates chaos and misery in the other. Heurodis displays her power in a passive way as she is the drive behind a good ruler but all is forgotten when he returns to the court and trades her importance in to preserve the homosocial bond. These endings, however, are the ways that society keeps women in check. They caution men about the tremendous power that women have over them but then reassure them that all will be well as long as they are secure. Women rule in these tales but men cannot let that be the end of