Chaucer's 'House of Fame'

Published: Chapter 11 in Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N. Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 307-39.

Description: Familiar with the "visual and verbal labyrinth traditions" and their metaphorical significances, Chaucer incorporates in HF a controlling labyrinthine uncertainty, chaos, and obscurity in its "disoriented turnings back and forth, its paradoxical incorporation of order and disorder, its emphasis on process rather than product, on path rather than pattern."; This uncertainty permits a wide range of valid interpretations, all controlled through the labyrinth pattern. Chaucer's sources--Dante, Virgil, and Boethius--all provide labyrinthine models.; HF perverts and parodies the sources in a "bright comic approach to grave matters," which focuses on a "superficially unthreatening labyrinthine microcosm" but implies serious epistemological problems for the poet/reader, crafter/interpreter of the "labyrinth of words." Doob compares sources and gives a reading of HF.

Alternative Title: The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages.

Chaucer Subjects: House of Fame.; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.