True Lover/False Lover, franquise/dete: Dichotomies in the Franklin's Tale and Their Analogue in Richard de Fournival's Consaus d'amours

No single aspect of the Franklin's Tale has stirred more controversy than the larger issue of the fundamental nature of the work. Is the Franklin's Tale an ode to a marriage of true minds, a fabliau in romance clothing, or a work revealing how Chaucer, despite the best of intentions, failed to liberate himself from the ambient male chauvinism of the late Middle Ages? Although the first and most positive reading has been defended passionately by some—from George Kittredge a century ago, to Gerald Morgan and Jill Mann more recently—negative interpretations have dominated in the last decades, stoked by the fuel of gender issue analysis; the tale has been deemed an "insupportable fiction of prosperity," and Arveragus accused of "pimping" his wife.¹

Relying on arguments drawn both from the historical context of the tale and from a critical analysis of Chaucer's use and modification of his sources, I affirm in this paper that the Franklin's Tale is indeed an encomium to the loving, "companionate marriage" of Dorigen and Arveragus.² By sources (or analogues), I mean not only the Menedon question in Boccaccio's Filocolo, long recognized as the principal origin of the plot, and the Decameron version of that story, which Chaucer may possibly have known,³ but, in addition, a hitherto unrecognized inspiration, the Consaus d'amours, a thirteenth-century French art d'aimer (art of love) attributed to Richard de Fournival.⁴ An ecclesiastic whose oeuvre included both lyric and didactic works devoted to the love relationship, Richard is best known for his very popular Bestiaire d'amour.⁵ While no contemporary account links Chaucer to Richard, we know that the works of the latter were often preserved in manuscripts that also included the Roman de la Rose, which was well known, well used, and translated by Chaucer.⁶ Thus the manuscript tradition reinforces the hypothesis, based principally on textual evidence, that Chaucer knew the Consaus. It is from this text, I argue, that Chaucer has borrowed the fundamental dichotomies that underlie the tale: the contrast between the true lover (Arveragus) and the false lover (Aurelius), and that between franquise (in marriage) and dete (in adultery). It is through the use of these dichotomies that Chaucer has transformed the story from a casuistic jeu-parti (as in the Menedon question) or a fabliauesque narrative (as in the Decameron) into a veritable ode to married love lived "in blisse and in solas" (V 802), extolling "The joye, the ese, and the prosperitee/That is bitwixe an housbonde and his wyf " (V 804-5),⁷ the very qualities found in the true love relationship described by Richard de Fournival: "soulas, joie, confort, aaise et grant bien" (VI.12).

But let us begin by exploring what the historical context can tell us about Dorigen and Arveragus's marriage agreement, from which all maistrie is excluded.⁸ The historical context is of course two-dimensional, for one must take into consideration not only the late medieval world that Chaucer and his audience knew, but also the pre-Christian "twilight world" in which the characters of the tale evolve.⁹ Distancing the story from the medieval present is indeed Chaucer's innovation, for the Boccaccian tales are set more or less in contemporary Italy. But Chaucer's two worlds are not hermetically sealed off. Although the tale deals with "hethen folk" (V 1293), many of the customs and values presented in it (such as chivalry) were perfectly compatible with the world of the medieval present.¹⁰ The same may be said of the marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen, which has often been deemed "implausible" or an "unattainable ideal,"¹¹ possible only in such an imaginary past, as it was a "revolutionary" step and a relationship of a "radically different type" compared to late medieval marriages.¹² David Aers has emphasized the distance between the "utopian aspirations" of the couple and the "orthodox" Christian emphasis on a strictly hierarchical marriage; the famous Pauline passage...