Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1997

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Laura Howes

Committee Members

Nancy Goslee, Joseph Trahern

Abstract

In this study, I am beginning an examination of Maid Marian, exploring when she first actually appears in written literature in some form up until the present (1997), with some speculation about how she may have functioned in early oral tradition. Although this inquiry is by no means complete, I have studied numerous primary texts from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries, as well as several twentieth-century films and television programs devoted to the Matter of the Greenwood. In addition, I have read a variety of secondary texts, many on the Robin Hood legend, others on ballads, history, heroes, literature, feminism, film, and popular culture.

Surprisingly, Maid Marian does not appear in written records until rather late, mentioned in only two ballads before 1600, although she had been paired-or at least connected-with Robin Hood in the May Games since the fourteenth century, when the English appear to have borrowed her name partly from the shepherdess-heroine of Adam de la Halle's late thirteenth-century pastoral play Robin et Marion. Thereafter, she moves in and out of the legend, emerging in various plays, ballads, novels, and light operas, until the advent of cinema in the twentieth century makes her a permanent part of the Greenwood Legend, whether in print or on film. As a character of legend. Maid Marian both reflects and critiques the culture in which she appears: aloof and chaste one moment, troublesomely sensual the next; now an aristocratic lady, now an English freewoman; a chaste May Queen or a lusty Morris dancer; sometimes a loyal but passive onlooker, while at others a maker of her own destiny. While always recognizable as a very human character, Marian also represents an ideal-an ideal of Woman at a particular instance in time.

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