Geoffrey Chaucer, House of Fame

House of Fame:

House of Fame seems to be the Chaucerian text that is most interested in writing and the role of narrative. The poem opens as another dream vision, the narrator first awaking in a temple of glass. On this temple is, roughly, the Aeneid which the narrator recounts. After this long recounting, the narrator is taken in a large eagle's claws, sent from Jupiter, to reward the narrator for his poetic labor for Cupid and Venus. After wondering at the experience of flying and passing on an astrology lesson, the narrator is dropped off in the House of Fame, where all sound, and thus all poetry and song, eventually arrives. The narrator witness Fame herself having court, and is finally taken to a new house by the eagle, where truth and lies leave by window and are intertwined, and the unfinished text ends with the entrance of a new undefined figure. Primarily my interests in this text lie with the digression about Dido and other classical women, the role of Fame as a Fortuna like figure, and the physicality of sounds/words/poetry. 

In the initial dream vision, the narrator recounts Virgil's Aeneid, but digresses to expand for a few hundred lines on Dido, which itself transitions into a discussion of untrue men. On one hand this is part of a text that is heavily embedded in the classical tradition, perhaps as much or more than many other of Chaucer's texts. Yet, in a section that very quickly runs through the events of Virgil's lengthy text, this is a substantial amount of attention to pay to Dido, especially in lamenting her poor treatment. As with the Legend of Goode Women and The Canterbury Tales, this is another text that demonstrates Chaucer's larger interest in women, and in many cases defends their plights.

Once in the House of Fame, the lady of the house is a somewhat frightening figure, who easily grants either fame or banishment/death to her petitioners without any consistency. Some who have toiled justly are dismissed, and others who have produced no labor are granted great amounts of fame. Fame, then, functions like the Fortuna in Boethius, a flippant figure who is marked by her inconsistency (it is also worth noting that Chaucer specifically invokes Boethius earlier in the text). When given the chance to present himself to Fame, the narrator declines out of apparent fear, something that I could not blame him for. 

In an interesting initial discussion between the narrator and the eagle, sound is treated as a physical substance that can be marred by pipes but, eventually, finds its way to the House of Fame. Once there, however, the sound itself seems to have a physical aspect as the eagle tells the narrator that each sound becomes a representation of the one who produced it, as if that person were himself presented to Fame. Thus, when Fame pronounces a petitioner either lauded or banished to obscurity, she is advancing or destroying a physical copy of the person who produced the sound. Even some of the language used to describe banishment is that of death, making an interesting point about how sound, words, and poetry are treated. Does good poetry rise to its proper place and bad poetry fall to the depths?