The medieval romances Richard Coer de Lyon and The Roman de Melusine or L'histoire de Lusignan present women who are simultaneously mothers and monsters. These contradictory figures embody a crucial tension found in depictions of maternity in medieval literature.

Both Melusine and Cassodorien (a legendary version of Eleanor of Aquitaine)’s strangeness is explicitly shown in their behavior; they both fly away after their respective husbands violate the taboo that they had imposed upon them. In addition, these figures appear and disappear from the lives of their offspring while leaving undeniable marks upon them, making it possible to analyze not only their demonization as mothers but also the extent of the contamination that this implies for their descendants. In this study, I aim to analyze these figures using an archetypal and feminist approach in order to compare both the impact that each figure has on its descendants and to compare them to each other. While a traditional Jungian archetypal approach would be restrictive as these figures could only be classified as mothers in what would be a one-dimensional analysis, I propose to apply a feminist revisionist reading to this approach, as proposed by Sarah Appleton Aguiar in The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature and by Demaris Wehr in Jung & Feminism.