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ILLUSION AND REALITY IN CH AU CER'S FRAN K LIN 'S TALE* KENNETH KEE Victoria College, Toronto !R.eversals of fortune are to be expected in "this wrecched worldes transmutacioun ," as Chaucer describes our unstable worldly estate in his "balade" Fortune. 1 It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in recent years critical opinion concerning the Franklin's Tale has also undergone such a change "in this world ... so variable" that one is sometimes led to wonder if the critics are writing about the same work. Traditionally the Franklin has been regarded with a benign and proprietary air by the critics who have been warm-hearted in their acceptance of his opinions on marriage. Of those celebrated lines in the Franklin's Tale2 concerning the proper relationship between husband and wife in marriage, Kittredge long ago wrote: "We need not hesitate, therefore, to accept the solution [to the marriage debate] which the Franklin offers as that which Geoffrey Chaucer the man accepted for his own part. Certainly it is a solution that does him infinite credit."3 And generations of scholars have followed Kittredge in their critical utterances, so that as recently as i960 an editor of the Franklin's Tale is led to write: "... one cannot help feeling that into this ample-minded and kindly country gentleman, who in fact is said to have held offices that Chaucer himself had occupied ... the poet has projected his own fairness and wisdom, his opinion on matrimony, his own tolerant, halfhumorous appraisal of life."4 But this "blisful lyf" led by "the peples in the former age" has given way to a new and more unpleasant reality. A harsh Augustinian wind has searched out and chilled the hearts of students of Chaucer; their attention is now directed towards the "sentence" of the Canterbury Tales, and no one nowadays dares be frivolous enough to read the tales for their "solaas" alone. This new critical climate is one which grants a cool reception to the Franklin's efforts to knit up the discussion of marriage in the Canterbury Tales into a presentable and seemly whole. Of the Franklin's views on love and marriage D.W. Robertson writes: "The fact that the Franklin wishes to maintain the delights of the God of Love in marriage puts him in the same class with Januarie and the wife of Bath. The statement about the 'freedom' of love is pleasant to the romantic ear, but in the Middle Ages passionate love as inspired by Cupid is traditionally described * A slightly revised version of a paper delivered to the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English in Toronto on 27 May 1974. English Studies in Canada, 1 , 1 (spring 1975) 2 in terms of chains, thralldom, servitude, and so on."5 And that this view of the reality of the Franklin's Tale is Chaucer's own is a position maintained by R.B. Burlin, who lays bare the tawdriness of the Franklin's narrative pretensions in these words: "Thus, Dorigen, Aurelius, and Arveragus are all elegant but artificial puppets pieced together from bits of faded but noble romances, from cliches of character and conventions of courtly behaviour. Behind them lurks a reality which is, however, not their own but that of their narrator. It reveals a sensibility perhaps less refined and idly extravagant in emotion and ideas, but more practical, prejudiced in favour of common morality and the familiar virtues of Holy Church, and above all, more fundamentally human."6 To these diametrically opposed interpretations of what Chaucer really thought on the subject of love and marriage could be added other views,7 but the procedure would be tedious and neither pleasurable nor profitable. R.M. Jordan draws our attention to the fact that "The task facing students of Chaucerian narrative is to render a just account of an art whose aesthetic bases are not readily accessible in the vocabulary of modem criticism." He then goes on to speak of the desirability of arriving "at a just appreciation of the aesthetic possibilities of a high manipulative art."8 Our attention is rightly drawn to the manipulative qualities of Chaucer's art. This manipulation of audience...
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