FRANKLIN’S TALE, THE

byGeoffrey Chaucer

(ca. 1395)

The Franklin’s Taleis one of the most admired and discussed of CHAUCER’sCANTERBURY TALES. The tale is based chiefly on the folklore motif of the “rash promise,” though there is no specific source or close analogue to Chaucer’s story. The Franklin narrator says it comes from a BretonLAI, and certainly it has elements of medieval ROMANCE narrative. However, the trials of the female protagonist, Dorigen, also suggest elements of some of Chaucer’s tales of pathos in which the heroine, like Constance inThe MAN OF LAW’S TALEor Griselde inThe CLERK’S TALE, finds happiness after a series of tribulations. The tale concerns the Breton knight Arveragus, who wins the love of the beautiful Dorigen.When the two marry, they agree that neither shall have complete sovereignty in the marriage—that Dorigen shall be subject to Arveragus as his wife, but he shall be subject to her as her lover.When Arveragus goes over the sea to enhance his knightly reputation, Dorigen spends each day fretting over the rocks that line the shore, fearful that they will wreck her husband’s ship when he returns.When a young squire, Aurelius, expresses his love for her, Dorigen rejects him by swearing to grant him her love only if the rocks along the shore disappear. Following the conventions of COURTLY LOVE, Aurelius takes to his bed and seems about to die of love, when his brother proposes a possible solution to him. They visit a learned clerk who, by means of magic, promises to make the rocks vanish in exchange for a huge fee, which Aurelius agrees to pay. When the rocks disappear, Aurelius finds Dorigen and asks her to keep her promise: The rocks being gone, she must give him her love. The horrified Dorigen, after considering a number of women who had committed suicide rather than commit adultery, goes to Arveragus (now safely returned) to reveal her dilemma.Arveragus insists that “Trouthe is the hyeste thing that man may kepe” (Benson 1987, 187, l. 1479) and sends her to Aurelius to keep her word. Aurelius, impressed by Arveragus’s noble gesture, emulates the knight by performing a generous action of his own: He releases Dorigen from her pledge. The clerk, in his turn, demonstrates his own generosity by forgiving Aurelius his debt. In the end the Franklin poses ademande d’amour—that is, a question for the audience to consider. He asks,Which character was the most “fre”—that is, most generous? A good deal of criticism has considered the crucial place ofThe Franklin’s Talein what George Lyman Kittredge called Chaucer’s “Marriage Debate”— a debate begun by the WIFE OF BATH and continued inThe CLERK’S TALEandThe MERCHANT’S TALE, concerning sovereignty in marriage. The Franklin’s depiction of a marriage of mutual sovereignty seems to be the solution to the question.Another aspect of the tale explored by many scholars is the focus on “gentilesse,” or true nobility, displayed by the knight, the squire, and the clerk in the tale. In this view the Franklin, a rich landowner but not a member of the noble class, wants to make a case for his own innate gentility to be recognized. More recent criticism has seen both of these views as oversimplified. Few contemporary scholars accept the concept of the “marriage debate” quite as Kittredge presented it, though clearly Chaucer is concerned in many of his tales with marriage and male/female relations. But the marriage in the Franklin’s tale is far from ideal, and Arveragus’s assertion of his sovereignty by compelling his wife to “keep her word,” which was never intended seriously, seems a profoundly flawed notion of “trouthe.” Nor is the Franklin’s enumeration of the three men’s “generosity” ultimately convincing: None of the three men gives away anything that he was entitled to to begin with, all having been gained through deceit and subterfuge. It has seemed clear to most recent critics that Chaucer has created a far more complex tale than previously thought.

■ Benson, Larry, et al.The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

■ Collette, Carolyn. “Seeing and Believing in theFranklin’s Tale,”Chaucer Review26 (1992): 395–410.

■ Crane, Susan.“The Franklin as Dorigen,”Chaucer Review24 (1990): 236–252.

■ Kittredge, George Lyman. “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,”Modern Philology9 (1911–1912): 435–467.

■ Mann, Jill. “Chaucerian Themes and Style in the Franklin’s Tale,” inNew Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. 1, Part 1.Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition, edited by Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982–1988, 133–153.

■ Raybin, David. “ ‘Women, of kynde, desiren libertee’: Rereading Dorigen, Rereading Marriage,”Chaucer Review27 (1992): 65–86.