Abstract
The Franklin’s Tale recounts the efforts of Arveragus and Dorigen to conduct their marriage according to the ideals of courtly love, which lead the husband to renounce his mastery over his wife. In this, the tale takes up at the point where the Wife of Bath’s tale left off, with the affirmation of masculine submission as the condition for marital harmony. However, a threat to their relationship soon appears in the form of Aurelius, a squire who insistently holds Dorigen to her rash promise of love. In some ways, this tale seems designed to challenge the Wife of Bath’s claim that the drive to mastery and sexual satisfaction defines the subject of desire. In the end, after all, Dorigen seems uncomfortable with the role of master. Indeed, in the world conjured up by the Franklin, the main parties to the conf lict appear to hold their desires in check, the key moments of crisis turning on gestures of renunciation and ambivalence.
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Notes
On the concept of the “subject-supposed-to-know,” see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 230–43.
E. T. Donaldson writes of the idealism supporting Arveragus’s demand: “an ideal has no relevance unless we are willing to sacrifice our whole world to it—and trouthe is ‘the highest contract that man may keep.’ Of course, Arveragus is right” (925). See E. Talbot Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), pp. 924–27. Derek Brewer concurs in similar terms. He suggests that it is no argument against the legitimacy of heroic idealism that the high cost makes us flinch: “The exquisite delicacy of the sacrifice cannot be appreciated if we forget or deny the other elements of honour, bravery and chastity, the shame of cuckoldry and of pandarism (for does not Arveragus send his wife to Aurelius?), the shame of sex for women, the pain of loss of social reputation.” See Derek Brewer, “Honour in Chaucer,” Essays and Studies (1973): 17.
Other examples of this tradition of thought include Gerald Morgan, “Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Moral Argument of the Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 20 (1986): 287–306;
Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 145–60;
Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Feminist Readings Series) (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991), pp. 111–20;
Carol Pulham, “Promises, Promises: Dorigen’s Dilemma Revisited,” Chaucer Review 31 (1996): 76–86.
An earlier, and influential, argument that the text systematically undermines the intentions of its teller to promote an ideal of reciprocity in marriage comes from Alan Gaylord, who writes: “Chaucer, expecting his audience to recognize the ludicrous ethical acrobatics the Franklin makes his characters perform, has honed upon that expectation a cutting edge of irony, on which lays open the affectedly gentil values of the teller of the tale” (“The Promises in The Franklin’s Tale,” English Literary History 31 (1964): 365. Signficant critical traditions locate a pervasive irony directed toward either the Franklin or the masculine bias of the tale’s celebration of honor. For the former, see J. L. Hodge, “The Marriage Group: Precarious Equilibrium,” English Studies 46 (1965): 289–300;
Wolfgang Rudat, “Gentillesse and the Marriage Debate in the Franklin’s Tale: Chaucer’s Squires and the Question of Nobility,” Neophilologus 68 (1984): 451–70; for the latter, feminist readings, see
Susan Crane, “The Franklin as Dorigen,” Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 236–52;
Elaine Tuttle Hanson, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 267–83;
Effie Jean Matthewson, “Morality in the Franklin’s Tale,” Medium Aevum 52 (1983): 27–37;
David Aers, Chaucer (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 85–921;
Angela Jane Weisl, Gender and Genre in Chaucer’s Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 104–17;
Anne Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 160–62.
In the wake of Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, for instance, Dorigen’s status as an object of exchange has received considerable attention. See Mary R. Bowman, “‘Half As She Were Mad’: Dorigen in the Male World of The Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 27.3 (1993): 241;
Felicity Riddy, “Engendering Pity in The Franklin’s Tale,” in Feminist Reading in Middle English Literature (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 62;
Sandra J. McEntire, “Illusions and Interpretation in The Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 31.2 (1996): 155.
For a reading attuned to the importance of rhetoric to the gender politics of the tale, see Bonnie Wheeler, “Trouthe without Consequences: Rhetoric and Gender in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” in Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Dallas: Academia, 1993), pp. 91–116. Exploring the consequences of the tale’s “textual fissures,” Wheeler writes: “The tale’s rhetorical movements destabilize its narrative goal and subvert univocal readings…” (94).
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 152.
Slavoj Zizek, “Courtly Love, Or, Woman as Thing,” The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1995), p. 95.
For a similar approach, see Ellie Ragland, “Psychoanalysis and Courtly Love,” Arthuriana 5.1 (1995): 1–20.
Jacques Lacan, “Excommunication,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 13.
For a reading strategy attentive to the performative dimension of the text, see Jacques Derrida, “To Speculate—On ‘Freud,’” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). For the notion of a staging of desire in fantasy, see
Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 49 (1968): 1–18; and
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Unconscious as Mis-en-Scène,” in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Wolfgang Rudat, “Gentillesse and the Marriage Debate in the Franklin’s Tale: Chaucer’s Squires and the Question of Nobility,” Neophilologus 68 (1984): 455.
For this structuralist revision of the Oedipus complex, see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Routledge, 1993).
For a lucid commentary on this aspect of Lacan’s work, see Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, trans. Devra Beck Simiu (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 45–51.
See Linda Charnes, “‘This Werk Unresonable’: Narrative Frustration and Generic Redistribution in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 300–15. Charnes takes this as a sign that Dorigen is having trouble accepting her husband’s absence and regards the promise as an expression of her anger towards him. Reading the promise as an instance of “imaginative displacement,” she writes: “The rocks become at once the objects which threaten Dorigen’s wish to see her husband’s safe return and the instruments with which she can punish him in her imagination” (309).
Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 65.
Lacan illustrates the linguistic immanence of desire in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 154–55.
See Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 12–59.
For a summary of these views, see David M. Seaman, “‘As thynketh yow”: Conflicting Evidence and the Interpretation of The Franklin’s Tale,” Medievalia et Humanistica 17 (1991): 48–49. See also, Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, pp. 145–60.
See Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Standard Edition 7 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 1–122.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale, ed. A. C. Spearing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 32.
This is an obsessional structure. See Freud’s analysis of the Ratman’s obligation to Lieutenant A in his “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition 10 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961): 151–249.
Barrie Ruth Straus, “‘Truth’ and ‘Woman’ in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” Exemplaria 4 (1992): 157.
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© 2012 John A. Pitcher
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Pitcher, J.A. (2012). The Rhetoric of Desire in The Franklin’s Tale. In: Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137089724_3
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