Leaving Carthage in Chaucer’s House of Fame

ABSTRACT Although critics often read Chaucer’s House of Fame as a mock pedagogical journey, this article aims to redeem the poem’s didactic progression. The article argues that, through his adaptations of Virgil’s Aeneid, Chaucer constructs an educational allegory. The act of viewing the murals in the Temple of Venus threatens to transform Geffrey into a protagonist in the Carthaginian story, but he learns in the House of Fame to interpret the Aeneid as a metatextual commentary on the constructedness and mutability of literary fictions. In turning to Virgil as his pedagogical guide, Chaucer echoes Dante, yet he ultimately reads the Aeneid as confirming the fickleness of human fame rather than the permanence of heavenly glory. By locating in the Aeneid a precursor to the House of Fame’s own meditation on the contingencies of reception, Chaucer writes himself into to the European canon and retrospectively fashions Virgil into his literary predecessor.