By Preeve which that is Demonstratif (4)
Nevertheless there are many objections to Kittredge's theory. Some of these
were articulated as early as 1917 by H.B. Kinckley in an article in P.M.L.A.
One must review some of the objections.
Many things besides marriage are discussed in the four tales. It is perhaps
arbitrary to isolate marriage as a theme uniting them. Neither The Clerk's
Tale nor The Franklin's Tale are really 'about' marriage, though the
relationships of married couples are important to both stories.
Furthermore, other tales also discuss the trials of married life. One could
enlarge the "Discussion of Marriage" to include most of the tales, in which
case the idea would serve little critical purpose. Marriage is, after all,
one of the most common of human activities, and it is not remarkable that
many of Chaucer's tales mention it.
Kittredge's theory depends on the belief that "The Franklin's Tale" offers
an "ideal" view of marriage. In fact, it tells of a knight who neglects his
wife for a couple of years in order to pursue his hobby of jousting, and on
his return forces her to keep a foolish promise to commit adultery with a
young squire. This is a curious ideal; and one feels it could have been
seen as an ideal only in a community of men where it was the custom for
knights to neglect their wives regularly in order to participate in the
intellectual jousting of an S.C.R., or even to abandon them for longer
periods while shattering their lances in the lists of Kalamazoo.
Chaucer never seems to have made a final decision as to the order in which
his stories should appear in The Canterbury Tales. The four tales in
question do not occur in the same order in all the manuscripts of the work,
and this greatly weakens Kittredge's argument. Even if we were to accept as
definitive the order in which the four tales occur in the major printed
editions, they do not form a continuous sequence. The tales of the Friar
and Summoner intervene between those of the Wife of Bath and the Clerk, and
that of the Squire comes between those of the Merchant and Franklin. So if
there is a "Discussion of Marriage" it suffers much interruption.
Kittredge's theory may cause us to negelect the links between the Squire's
and Franklin's Tales, and, more important for my present purpose, the close
relationship between the tales of the Wife, the Friar and the Summoner;
that is to say, the D-Group.
Oriens.
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