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CHAPTER ONE. Married Friendship: An Ideology for the Franklin
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CHAPTER ONE Married Friendship An Ideology for the Franklin As with the other Canterbury Tales, criticism of the Franklin’s Tale has been preoccupied with identifying the ways in which the tale reflects the social status of the teller. Early critics have seen in Chaucer’s Franklin’s hopes for his son and in his opulent hospitality evidence of social climbing.1 On the other hand, Henrik Specht has argued that the Franklin is not a social climber because he may already be considered gentle, and thus an appropriate voice for gentle values.2 More recently, Nigel Saul and Paul Strohm have identi- fied the Franklin as a member of the middle strata, a wealthy freeholding landowner, a category of person who had not yet achieved gentility at the time The Canterbury Tales was written.3 The figure of the Franklin was an effective representative of the new social mobility of late medieval society, because, as several historians have suggested, the forces for economic change at the end of the Middle Ages were to be found not so much in the urban as in the rural populations.4 Franklins shared the freeborn status of gentlemen but were not themselves noble; however, as successful small landowners, 21 Lipton 01 6/8/07 12:42 PM Page 21 they sometimes lived in a manner that resembled that of the lower ranks of gentle society. Thus, the Franklin was a crucial example of the members of the middle strata of society who did not fit comfortably into the conventional three estates model. In this tale, the Franklin formulates an ideology for his own emergent class through his portrait of marriage which becomes the basis for an egalitarian political vision at the end of the tale. To derive a portrait of marriage that expresses the social values of the Franklin, the tale adopts and revises the conventions of romance and fin amor, mainstays of aristocratic literary ideology, by drawing on sacramental marriage. Although the Franklin’s Tale is a romance, the tale critiques and transforms that genre’s frequent association of marriage with knightly prowess and public display, replacing them with an emphasis on individual choice and mutual love characteristic of the sacramental marriage model. The tale not only draws on the broad ideas of sacramental marriage, but it also specifically invokes the classical friendship tradition, often used by medieval theologians and sermon writers to describe the mutuality of conjugal love. This language of marital friendship becomes a means of elaborating an ideal of marriage based in free will, private value, and choice, virtues, as we will see, that are particularly appropriate to the Franklin’s social status in contrast to the aristocratic ideology commonly expressed by romance. As Kathryn Jacobs has observed, although most of the tale focuses on the domestic relationship between husband and wife, Arveragus and Dorigen , by the end of the tale marriage has become the rubric for expressing a vision of an ideal society.5 This is not a universal ideal, however, but one specifically suited to the Franklin’s social politics. The values of mutuality , generosity, and free choice, initially used to depict the marital relationship , are associated at the end of the tale with the homosocial bonds of friendship forged among the three men—the Knight, the Squire, and the Clerk—in their negotiations about the marriage. This friendship, with its bonds of mutuality ranging across the estates, constructs a horizontal political model and a vision of society in which virtue is defined by personal merit rather than social status. Thus, the values of marital friendship, crucial to sacramental marriage, become the basis for an idealized middle strata political vision. For many readers of the tale, the shift away from the domestic relationship at the end is surprising, and indeed Dorigen’s absence from the end of 22 Affections of the Mind Lipton 01 6/8/07 12:42 PM Page 22 [54.198.146.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:49 GMT) the tale has been a conundrum for many critics. Her absence can be explained , however, if we see it as an indication that marriage has become a vocabulary for social politics. Although the shift to politics at the end is somewhat abrupt, the tale’s appropriation of the aristocratic discourse of love to create a political model of marriage has a context in contemporary court poetry. As critics such as Lynn Staley, Lee Patterson, and others have demonstrated, love...