My first exposure to Chaucer was in a modern English excerpt from “The General Prologue” in twelfth grade honors English. Not inspiring.

My second exposure was as an undergraduate English major at the University of Cincinnati. The professor was Elizabeth Armstrong. She taught me Shakespeare and after that I wanted to take every one of her classes because of her dynamism, excitement, and straight talking. We read Chaucer in Middle English. She had to teach us how, of course. How to pronounce the words, the different vowel sounds, the rolling of the Rs, the different grammatical forms. Reading Middle English was like reading in a dream. The words and sounds were familiar yet exotic. Intoxicating even in their strangeness. I wrote some naive paper about the lovers of “The Knight’s Tale” and tried to argue that one had a worthier love than the other.

Thereafter my next leap came when I took Derek Pearsall’s graduate seminar on Chaucer at Harvard. He was and is the foremost Chaucerian…even greater than Larry Benson who edited the Riverside Chaucer. I remember with some shame the paper I wrote for him that made some ridiculous argument about oral formulaic theory and Chaucer. What was I thinking?

Then I taught Chaucer in college. Pearsall’s irony had not penetrated so I taught the tales with a romantic orientation. And some appreciation of the possible feminism of a few of the tales. But I always saw “The Franklin’s Tale” as the resolution to the marriage and mastery debate.

Now I am returning to Chaucer after quite a hiatus and rereading the tales with a more objective eye. Having just quickly reread this tale, I am bemused by the tale’s emphasis on appearance. Arveragus leaves Dorigen to seek fame in England. Aurelius wants the rocks covered up so he can force Dorigen to keep her promise. Dorigen may be the only character who is not concerned with surfaces. When she looks at the dangerous rocks, she truly wants them gone so ships may safely put into port. She wants them “sonken into helle for his sake!” Now come to think of it, the third person singular possessive pronoun is rather interesting. I know as reader that she means Arveragus, but nowhere else in her speech of 28 lines does she mention him by name. I know from the narrator’s description of her that she is only thinking of him. Dorigen seems totally devoted to him. She does not seem to have the concern of the men with outward behavior and inward truth.

The other thing I noticed is that when Dorigen prays to “Eterne God,” she seems to be addressing a deity with rather Christian characteristics: the world is a fair creation, mankind is the fairest part, and the winds are governed by him.  She does accuse the God of sowing confusion in the fair world with the black rocks. But then she backs away from such an overt criticism by saying she will leave this ontological problem is why evil is in God’s world to the clerks. She disciplines her thoughts and instead asks God to sink the rocks into hell. 

When Aurelius prays in his lovelorn distress, he prays to Apollo, refers to Lucina and Neptune and Pluto. Is anything to be made of this? If I remember correctly Arveragus does not refer to any pagan gods. He seems to evoke the same God as Dorigen. I wonder if anything can be made of the different evocations? Maybe Franklin is proposing a new model for love to replace that of courtly love? But again, no. Chaucer could do that without the evocations. That is losing one’s self in minuscule details which really don’t matter.

What does matter coming back to the “Franklin’s Tale” is the question of how much my understanding of the tale has shifted over the intervening years. Chaucer was my age or older why he wrote it and he had had his share of life experience. His vision of love and humans is more multilayered than my younger or even older self might see.