Re-Sounding Echo

When Aurelius first appears in the Franklin's Tale, we know he has for several years secretly loved Dorigen, wife of absent Arveragus, although he reveals his love only "somwhat" by "a general compleynyng" in songs (V 944–45).¹ For the most part, he "dorste nat his sorwe telle" (V 949), and the Franklin emphasizes the squire's lack of speech with "nevere dorste he tellen hire his grevaunce" (V 941) and "no thyng dorste he seye" (V 943). This constraint is especially underlined when we learn Aurelius compares himself to Echo, most famously known from the account in Ovid's Metamorphoses:

And dye he moste, he seyde, as dide Ekko For Narcisus, that dorste nat telle hir wo.

(V 951–52)

An allusion to a nonspeaker provides a moment of comedy in the tale because it follows both a reference to Aurelius speaking (V 946) and a long list of the many forms of speech he uses: "layes, / Songes, compleintes, roundels, virelayes" (V 947–48). It also catches our attention because Aurelius's casting his dilemma in mythic terms reveals his own sense of himself and his predicament.

But Ovid's story of Narcissus and Echo resonates in the Franklin's Tale in more significant ways, as do other medieval uses of that story. Aurelius, for instance, is surprisingly like Echo, and Dorigen can be fruitfully compared to Narcissus. At least as important as suggesting similarities in character, the allusion directs our attention to the topics of speaking and interpreting, both central to a tale in which the plot turns on Dorigen's garden speech to Aurelius.² Indeed, close study of the allusion makes evident Chaucer's great interest in speech in this tale. The prominence he gives to Echo and her reflected speaking, rather than to Narcissus, for instance, is striking when compared to other references to the mythic narrative found elsewhere in medieval poetry. The allusion appears to originate with Chaucer because it is found in neither of the tale's probable major sources, the "novella" Menedon tells in the fourth book of Boccaccio's Filocolo (82) or Emilia's "novelletta" told on the tenth day of his Decameron (657).³ Moreover, Chaucer uses speech more strategically than does the Italian author and thus makes it an important topic in his narrative. By setting the Franklin's Tale in relation both to Ovid's story of Echo and Narcissus and to the Boccaccian sources, I hope to indicate that the multiple ways Chaucer's allusion re-sounds the Metamorphoses story make it a more significant influence, particularly as it highlights issues of speaking and interpreting, than has been previously noticed.

Let us first consider the Metamorphoses account of Echo and Narcissus, which begins with the birth of Narcissus for whom Tiresias predicts a long life only if he does not know himself. By his sixteenth year the youth's excessive pride has left him untouched by love, no matter how greatly others desire him. When re-sounding ("resonabilis," III.358)⁴ Echo one day sees him hunting, the narrator pauses to tell us of the restrictions Juno has placed earlier upon the nymph's ability to speak. Because she often held Juno with "prolonged speech" ("longo . . . sermone," III.364) in order to distract the goddess from discovering Jove's dalliance with other nymphs, Echo has been cursed and can now only echo the last part of any speech she hears. Echo of course falls in love with Narcissus and secretly follows him, until the youth's calling to companions from whom he has been separated gives her the opportunity to re-sound his words. While doing so, she at one point emerges from hiding and attempts to embrace the youth, but he so thoroughly rejects her by action and word that she returns to hiding and, wasting away from grief, is reduced to a voice without a body. All of this we are told in sixty-one lines (III.341–401). Although, as

A. D. Nuttall suggests, we now expect Echo to curse Narcissus and thestory to move forward from this curse,⁵ its movement is...