Grieving American Civil War Dead

Abstract

Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Civil War general and student of hermetic philosophy, included an interpretation of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess in his 1865 study of early British literature. Rejecting the tradition that equated the poem's characters with John of Gaunt, his deceased wife, Blanche, and his liege servant, Chaucer, Hitchcock instead presents the poem as cloaking Chaucer's heretical ideas on the spiritual world. In making this move, Hitchcock demonstrated how his decade-long interest in alchemy allowed him to read literature anew. In many ways, he was participating in a growing trend toward spiritualism in nineteenth-century America, a movement which gained momentum with the devastation brought by the Civil War. His inability to register the Black Knight's grief as a consequence of the death of a human loved one anticipates not only Reconstruction-era America's fascination with the cult of death, but also twentieth-century academic debates about the best way to read Chaucer's dream visions.

Keywords:

• Ethan Allen Hitchcock
• Chaucer
• American Civil War
• alchemy
• death

Notes

In venturing into the world of Civil War America, I have been aided by the knowledge and enthusiasm of Michael Benevento. And as always, I am obliged to Mike Shea for his gracious help with the final product.

Here, Hitchcock quotes lines 751–52 from an unknown edition; he might be silently editing either Moxon or Pickering, editions we know he owned.

The first modernization appears in 1870, in Charles Cowden Clarke's The Riches of Chaucer, in which his impurities have been expunged; his spelling modernized; his rhythm accentuated; and his obsolete terms explained. It reduces the poem from 1,334 lines to 720. According to Hammond, D. Laing Purves also included Book of the Duchess in his 1870 modernization, The Canterbury Tales and the Fairie Queene, with other poems by Chaucer and Spenser (363); however, neither her own entry on the book (231) nor the 1872 edition include the dream poem.