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.