Character Analysis
The Reason For The Season
Of the three magical ladies who visit Christine de Pizan, Lady Reason is the first to speak. She immediately takes Christine under her wing and comforts her with speeches about how great women can be. But she also has specific tasks that she needs Christine to fulfill, and she's willing to be commanding when she needs to be.
As she says in the book,
"[If] you wish to follow my commands, you have in me an administrator so that you may do your work flawlessly. I am called Lady Reason; you see that you are in good hands. For the time being then, I will say no more." (1.4.3)
Lady Reason needs to speak with authority to Christine because she needs to replace the authority that Christine has placed in all the male authors who say that women are horrible. Think of Lady Reason as a Dumbledore-like figure: stern but benevolent.
All in all, Lady Reason really lives up to her name. We might want to see her as a compassionate and loving figure, but the truth is that she's only concerned with pure reason. At one point, she even laughs at Christine for being taken in by men's silly arguments against women, saying,
"You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in women's clothes while he slept; because those who were making fun of him repeatedly told him he was a woman, he believed their false testimony more readily than the certainty of his own identity." (1.2.2)
Her objection to men isn't that they're mean, but only that they're arguments don't stand up to reasonable questioning. This is extremely important in the context of The Book of the City of Ladies: one of the major beefs that misogynistic philosophers have traditionally held against women is that they're slaves to their emotions and incapable of rational thought.
Lady Reason, however, has a rational mind like a steel trap. She'd make an awesome judge.