The Return Of Martin Guerre Sparknotes

The movie The Return of Martin Guerre provides many insights into the life of people during the sixteenth century. The movie is about a man who steals the identity of another peasant. The story discuses themes of self-identity, a new idea at the time the movie takes place. The people in the movie are portrayed as stereotypical medieval peasants, who seem to know nothing. Sixteenth century France is depicted as a stereotypical medial world that is experiencing the new ideas of that time period. The characters in the movie are portrayed as ignorant, and moronic. They people believed everything that they saw at face value, they did not look deeper into the aspects of the imposter. The people acted clueless and could not see the difference between an imposter and the real person. The people are also heavily reliant on religion. The peasants based all of their opinions and ideas from religion The priest blessed the bed to safeguard it from the devil,

People at the time began to self identify and develop their own thoughts and ideas. Rather than always following the ideas presented to them they began thinking for themselves. This new idea is seen in Bertrande and in Martin. Bertrande did realize that the fake Martin was fake and embraced him anyway. She challenged the ideas of marriage to be with the fake martin, whom cared for her and whom she truly loved, challenging the ideas of the society and think for herself. Martin left his family, and farm to pursue his own goals and find himself. Martin began to stop thinking with the common ideas of the time, get married and stay put to raise the land and family, and began to think for himself, developing his own ideas. The renaissance time period brought about many radical changes one major idea being self-identification and self-though, both characters defied the rules of the society to develop their own