The National Allegory of the Household: "Domus" and "Lingua" in John Gower's "Vox Clamantis" and Geoffrey Chaucer's "House of Fame."

Author/Editor
Smith, D. Vance.

Title
The National Allegory of the Household: "Domus" and "Lingua" in John Gower's "Vox Clamantis" and Geoffrey Chaucer's "House of Fame."

Published
Smith, D. Vance. "The National Allegory of the Household: 'Domus' and 'Lingua' in John Gower's 'Vox Clamantis' and Geoffrey Chaucer's 'House of Fame'." In C. M. Woolgar, ed. The Elite Household in England, 1100-1550: Proceedings of the 2016 Harlaxton Symposium. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2018. 110-28.

Review
Smith's essay is tightly packed, learned, and provocative. His final paragraph summarizes the essentials of his argument: "Gower's and Chaucer's poems both use the household to examine the precarious situation of the cultural past in late fourteenth-century England, and in particular the position that poetry will occupy. For Gower, the household is a space of order and tradition (what he calls 'solitus') that is in danger from within (from the gentry) and without (from the 'rustici'). The threat they pose is general precisely because the household is also an allegory of the rules and expectations that govern Gower's high poetic style in the 'Vox clamantis.' But like all allegories it does not contain the whole story. The noise that troubles it, the murmurings and the 'yhas,' are also a part of the very texture of Gower's poem, and, whether he intends it or not, his poem both records the turmoil around him and forges a way to articulate it, and therefore to find some kind of resolution in it. Yet the 'Vox clamantis' is also a memorial to a kind of poetry that lives only in the past, and that only makes sense when looking toward the past that the present is destroying. Chaucer's poem, on the other hand, imagines the anarchy and the noise of the present as the very sound of the household: the purpose of the Domus Dedaly is simply to reshape, not to control, the noise that comes into it. What resounds as anarchic buzzing returns to earth as a hopeless muddle of truth and lies . . . . For Chaucer, the allegory of the household comprehends the social and political instability of the realm, but reimagines it as the very condition of a poetry that emerges not just in the household that is the realm but in the household of all utterance, even the most banal and quotidian English of the day" (128). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]

Date
2018

Gower Subjects
Vox Clamantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations