Who Could Tell the Joy That Is Between a Husband and His Wife? Feeling with the Good Wife in the Franklin's Tale

Abstract

Abstract By focusing on the problems that Dorigen faces in maintaining her status as a good wife after Arveragus departs for England, the Franklin's Tale reorients the romance conventions of the Breton lai to follow the logic of contemporary conduct texts for good wives. Chaucer thereby explores how masculine sympathy for the good wife appropriates the structures of feeling at work in conduct texts in order to forge new associations between men as disparate as Arveragus, Aurelius, and the clerk of Orléans. But Chaucer also encourages us to linger and continue to feel alongside Dorigen, and as a result to feel the emotional costs women must bear to make such feminine virtue and masculine sympathy possible.