The Franklin's Tale
The Franklin's Tale is part of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
Summary
Dorigen and Arveragus marry with promises about how they will treat one another. While he is away, she fears the coastal rocks that could endanger his return. To discourage Aurelius, who seeks her love, she sets an apparently impossible condition: remove the rocks.
Aurelius obtains a learned clerk's help to make them appear to disappear. Dorigen is distressed by the obligation she has created. Arveragus tells her to keep her promise, but Aurelius releases her when he learns this. The clerk then cancels Aurelius's debt.
The tale asks which person has acted most generously. Its sequence contrasts a condition intended to prevent action with a promise later treated as binding.
Source
Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website: synopsis, context and link to the text.
Reading the condition and the ending
For the wording of the tale, use Harvard's Middle English text with interlinear translation. The closing question, lines 1621–1624, invites the audience to judge generosity. It leaves a question for comparison rather than supplying a single named winner.
In a reading record, distinguish three stages: Dorigen's apparently impossible condition, the rocks' apparent disappearance, and the decisions to release others from obligations. A change in what seems possible and a change in what somebody demands are different narrative moves.
- Obstructions provides vocabulary for the feared rocks and the route home.
- The Shipman's Tale offers another movement of debt and obligation, with a different outcome. Track who owes what to whom in each story.
- The Ethics of Metaphor helps keep the language of honour, freedom and obligation open to examination rather than assuming those labels settle the characters' choices.