"The name of soveraynetee": The Private and Public Faces of Marriage in The Franklin's Tale

Chaucer's Franklin's Tale opens with a description of a marriage of apparently idyllic happiness. The marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen follows a long courtship where Arveragus served his lady Dorigen through many acts of chivalry and is to be quite different from the model of dominant husband and obedient wife adopted by Walter and Grisilde in the Clerk's Tale. Arveragus swears

That nevere in al his lyf he, day ne nyght,Ne sholde upon hym take no maistrieAgayn hir wyl, ne kithe hire jalousie,But hire obeye, and folwe hir wyl in al,As any lovere to his lady shal.¹

In return, Dorigen swears to be his "humble trewe wyf" (758). The narrator approves this as a "humble, wys accord" (791) and goes on to explain that, paradoxically, Arveragus is

… bothe in lordshipe and servage.Servage? Nay, but in lordshipe above,Sith he hath both his lady and his love;His lady, certes, and his wyf also.

(794–97)

This arrangement has been seen as utopian—most famously by G. L. Kittredge, who argued that "a better has never been devised or imagined" and that it was Chaucer's own ideal.² Indeed, it leads to more than a year of marital bliss.

However, the model contains a contradiction that is more than a mere elegant oxymoron. Although Jill Mann argues that the alternation between "lordshipe" and 'servage" represents a flexible, fluctuating relationship, the fact is that Arveragus's public role is going to show no such flexibility.³ While renouncing "maistrie" in private, he will retain "the name of soveraynetee … for shame of his degree" (751–52). In other words, his concern with reputation will lead him to pay lip service to an ideal of male dominance that he does not espouse in private.⁴ At the poem's crisis, Arveragus's behavior becomes even more contradictory. He tells Dorigen that she should fulfill her adulterous promise to Aurelius, which implies that he respects her as an autonomous human being whose personal word should be honored rather than someone he owns and controls. But he then orders her to tell no one about what she is doing and threatens her with death if she does so. Arveragus has, then, both reneged on his vow to "take no maistrie" and deepened the fissure between the couple's private marital behavior (which now encompasses husband-sanctioned adultery) and the conventional face they present to the public.

How can we account for this? In Alfred David's view, "Arveragus' insistence on keeping up the appearance while willing to suffer the fact diminishes his nobility and raises a serious question about the depth of the Franklin's conception of 'gentilesse.'"⁵ Cynthia A. Gravlee believes that Arveragus's concern for his public image outweighs his love for Dorigen and that his apparent interest in "trouthe," which suits his image of worthy knight, is undermined by his suppression of the truth from the public.⁶ Should we, then, consider Arveragus a hypocrite? Was he never truly committed to an equal marriage? Or was his utopian ideal unworkably flawed from the outset; are we to believe, with Felicity Riddy and Angela Jane Weisl, that the equality he promised was never meant to be anything more than a polite fiction and that male dominance is inevitable in a medieval marriage?⁷

I want to argue in this essay that none of these conclusions is justified. Rather, as Robert R. Edwards has recognized, the Franklin's Tale is a story of a loving marriage struggling to survive in a world of changing social relations, "competing ambitions and mixed practices."⁸ I hope to show that, having established an egalitarian marriage ideal at the beginning of the Tale, Chaucer goes on to explore how such an ideal would be tested by real world circumstances. Notwithstanding the Tale's ostensibly pagan and Breton context, I will present parallels from late medieval letter collections and advice literature to suggest that Dorigen is tested in ways that would have seemed familiar and...