Literary Satire in the House of Fame

Abstract

The House of Fame is the most curiously constructed of Chaucer's works. Although the poem has all the trappings of a typical love-vision, it deals with a heterogeneous body of subject matter that often seems only remotely connected with love. Love is the dominant theme of the first book, which retells the story of Dido and Æneas, and the purpose of Chaucer's trip to the house of Fame is presumably to hear love tidings. Yet the second book is taken up with the scientific lessons of the eagle, while the third is concerned with Fame viewed first as the maker of reputations and secondly in her role as the disseminator of rumor. How is one to reconcile these themes and make sense out of the haphazard way in which Chaucer has strung them together? Of course, one can dismiss the problem as a case of poor artistry, and that is precisely what many critics have done. Dorothy Everett, for instance, writes of the poem, “As a whole it is not a success, and was perhaps left unfinished for that reason.” However, the poem is so very successful in part and so very nearly complete (the ending, for that matter, may have been suppressed) that it is at least worth speculating whether the failure to make sense out of the whole is our own instead of Chaucer's.