Three Faces Of Aeneas

18 Pages 4606 Words

assistance or an epiphany. Moreover, it releases the author of the burden of direct responsibility for the claims that he makes throughout the narrative, placing the responsibility on the reader who now becomes both interpreter and judge of the dream and its truths. Consequently, this device enables Chaucer to experiment liberally with the traditional material, to combine the countless answers provided by divergent literary traditions and juxtapose contradicting truths in order to achieve his purposes.
Yet what is Chaucer’s purpose in the House of Fame, and how does the combat between the Virgilian and Ovidian tradition that creates the three-faced Aeneas of Book I fit into the unity of the poem? Critical views about Chaucer’s purpose and the plausible theme of the House of Fame range from the exploration of limits of human understanding produced by the mind’s confrontation with the sources of its knowledge, through simply a presentation of the dilemma faced by the medieval writer when attempting to justify his fiction by a reference to a prestigious authoritative text, to Chaucer’s daring attempt to challenge his famous predecessors, generated by his own ambition toward authority. Interestingly, the form of a dream-vision excuses any daring attempts on Chaucer’s part to manipulate and revise the characters and themes of authoritative texts and to comment on the unreliability and lack of credibility of the traditional sources. Furthermore, the form may permit Chaucer to fulfil his own dream: to elevate himself from the position of the mere ‘makere’ to the one of the ‘poete’. Accordingly, the revision of the story of Aeneas enables Chaucer to create his own story, his own poetical truth, while yet not entirely removing the writer from the strong medieval habit of dependence on ancient authority.
In the House of Fame Chaucer uniquely employs the qualities of both Virgil’s heroic and Ovid’s treacherous ...