Hi All,

I'm sorry about the stuttering start of the quarter! I wanted to ask what you thought about the readings for the first partial week. Lanval and The Wife of Bath's Tale are both traditional medieval fairy tales (tales including the Fay). As the stories are told by women, I thought they worked fairly well with the critical text from Karen Rowe. I particularly liked the way that the empowered fairy women of the two tales are like the figure of Philomela in the Ovidian tradition. Each of these women use aspects of the marginalized female world to voice their opinions: Philomela names her rapist, the fairy woman in Lanval uses her wealth and beauty to keep her knight true and to win his freedom at the end of the poem, and the two main female figures in The Wife of Bath's Tale (Gwenevere and the fairy bride) control the fate of the rapist knight and King Arthur. 

These tales could work together in other configurations as well. What do the texts (including the Yeats and the Keats) have to say about women who leave or disappear? (Also, and this is just an aside, rings of mushrooms are often said to be the sites of fairy gatherings.) I know that this seems like a strange characteristic by which to unify the readings, but it happens so often that there's something powerful and transgressive in the action worth describing. It is at once alluring and alarming. What do you think?