Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson: 
A Closer Look at Two Color Line 
Stories “The Wife of His Youth” and 
“Cecily’s Dream” by Charles  
W. Chesnutt
Christopher E. Koy
University of South Bohemia, College of Education, English Department, Jeronýmova 10, 37115 
České Budějovice, Czech Republic 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-198X
koy@pf.jcu.cz
This article explores an African American writer’s revision of a famous English poet 
Tennyson whose versified medieval portrait of the Arthurian legend appears in Idylls of 
the King as well as other poems. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line 
(1899), a story collection by African American author Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), 
addresses parameters contextualized in the aftermath of slavery such as esthetic 
notions of beauty tied to whiteness and intra-racial inequality. The final failure of two 
protagonists, a man and a woman, to fulfill their romantic aspirations of whiteness 
connects the collection’s titular story to “Cecily’s Dream.” In addition to the color-line 
theme, however, Chesnutt is motivated to refer to the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson 
(1809–1892), including moments in which chivalric codes of honor, whiteness and 
flawed courtly love are idealized. Tennyson’s parabolic poems provide Chesnutt’s 
intertextual scheme to engage the implied reader by renewing, transforming and also 
subverting the motif of courtly love in these Arthurian idylls.
Keywords: English poetry / Tennyson, Alfred / African American literature / intertextuality / 
Chesnutt, Charles W. / Arthurian legends / chivalry / courtly love
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Introduction
The constructive, dialectical relationship between literary texts re-
flects a significant and diachronic need to relate to mythical founda-
tions of culture. Rewriting historical and canonical texts has been a 
persistent pattern in Western literary traditions: looking backwards at 
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myth and legends of the distant past has motivated authors since the 
ancient Greeks. Tennyson’s and Chesnutt’s self-reflective impulses re-
veal themselves to be in a dialogue with many other canonical texts. 
In spite of his humble origins, Charles W. Chesnutt was particularly 
aware of cultural trends and literary taste among his American reader-
ship. The extraordinary popularity of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King has 
been explained by John D. Rosenberg: “Arthur underwent a revival in 
the nineteenth century, particularly during the reign of Victoria, be-
cause England had become so quickly and so radically un-Arthurian” 
(Rosenberg 149), and in Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and 
Tennyson 1800–1844, Roger Simpson squarely places the revival on 
the popular impact of Tennyson’s poetic successes. Tennyson’s popu-
larity may be attributed to how he artistically versified courtly love ac-
companied by adventure, danger and violence while toning down acts 
of sexual transgression.1 Furthermore, his popularity has been linked by 
what another critic calls “his excellence in the arts of sumptuous cozi-
ness” (Tucker 703).2 Some contemporaries criticized Tennyson’s idylls 
for being too tame. A. C. Swinburne for instance “condemned what he 
felt was the reduction of Sir Thomas Malory’s virile tales of chivalry to 
a sordid domestic quarrel […] a case for divorce court than for poetry” 
(cited in Gilbert 864). On the other hand, Pelleas and Ettarre seems 
to me anything but tame. Tennyson’s versions underscore the “false 
women” as culprits bringing about the dissipation of Arthur’s Camelot. 
Charles W. Chesnutt sought to propose another perspective when re-
vising Tennyson’s Arthurian legends. Chesnutt took an altogether dif-
ferent angle for his fiction than just writing belles-lettres. Decades earlier 
while still living in the former Confederate state of North Carolina, the 
light-skinned Black author expressed his intentions in a journal entry, 
dated May 29, 1879:
If I do write, I shall write for a purpose, a high, holy purpose, and this will 
inspire me to greater effort. The object of my writings would be not so much 
the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites. […] This 
work is of a twofold character. The negro’s part is to prepare himself for social 
1 This revival in the nineteenth century came well after the popularity of Arthu-
rian courtly romances had declined during the Renaissance authors such as Miguel 
de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) efficaciously lampooned not just epic chivalric 
romances but also their readers in his masterpiece Don Quixote de la Mancha (1615).
2 The moral code particularly attracting Charles W. Chesnutt concerns specifically 
to how men—or rather gentlemen—are to ethically behave towards women rather 
than, for instance, the expectations of courageous behavior of a knight in combat or 
such noble virtues as generosity or obedience to authority.
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recognition and quality; and it is the province of literature to open the way for 
him to get it—to accustom the public mind to the idea: and while amusing 
them to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired 
state of feeling. (Chesnutt, The Journals 139-140)
In other words, this fiction serves as a mirror of self-reflection for 
his implied white readers. In the aftermath of the Civil War and 
Reconstruction, lynching and the reduction of civil rights for blacks 
became commonplace. Chesnutt established his fiction as an agent 
of change to lift up white Americans’ behavior by entertaining white 
addressees while it only adumbrates the idea of racial social justice. 
Chesnutt’s stories do not employ vituperative discourse common to 
protest fiction to expose evil practices nor do they fervidly expound 
the case for equality. Despite setbacks such as the Supreme Court’s 
Plessy vs. Fergusson landmark decision legalizing racioal segregation as 
well as the relapse regarding African American franchise established in 
the Fifteenth Amendment, the pronouncement in Chesnutt’s fiction 
comes out rather elusively. 
Herbert F. Tucker points out that “epic poetry, we are told by a 
firmly consensual line of Romantic theorists from J. C. Herder to 
Northrop Frye, teaches a nation its traditions. Epic tells a culture-
making story, which both embodies in the incidents it narrates, and 
enacts in its narrative practices, values that bind a people in a com-
mon identity” (Tucker 701). Retelling myths reinforces a linear destiny 
that expels supernatural destiny. For the last fifty years, criticism has 
reformulated the notion of literary history as a dynamic interplay of 
texts, as texts which “talk” to each other. J. Hillis Miller characterizes 
literary works as “inhibited […] by a long chain of parasitical pres-
ences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts” (Miller 446). 
This paper aims to show how two stories by Chesnutt are germane 
to and partially derived from plots and figures of Tennyson’s poetry 
by analyzing the intertextual significance of the reworked medieval 
materials in Tennyson which Chesnutt in turn revised in his frequently 
anthologized short story “The Wife of his Youth” as well as his lesser-
known story “Cicely’s Dream.”3 The interpretation attempts a layered, 
3 The number of scholars exploring “The Wife of his Youth,” which names and 
cites Tennyson, is plentiful while no scholar has given any attention to the literary 
reverberations of Tennyson in “Cicely’s Dream.” For example, in his book-length 
study on Chesnutt’s short fiction, Henry Wonham does not analyze “Cicely’s Dream” 
at all, and neither Sollors nor Bone refer to Tennyson’s influence on “Cicely’s Dream” 
in their lengthier examinations of Chesnutt’s prose (see Sollors; Bone).
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textured approach to the two stories to make new connections and a 
more vibrant discussion between white Victorian culture represented 
by Tennyson and the African American culture during Reconstruction 
represented by Chesnutt. The power of shared referencing embedded in 
Chesnutt’s story “The Wife of his Youth” resonated with the American 
readership very successfully. Published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1898, 
the remarkable reception of “The Wife of his Youth” (also published in 
French as “L’épouse de sa Jeunesse”) largely aided in accommodating 
the publication of Chesnutt’s story collection entitled The Wife of His 
Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899).
Tennyson’s twelve idylls were published over four decades of the 
nineteenth century and primarily based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The 
History of the Kings of Britain written in Latin, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le 
Morte Darthur written in Middle English and the Mabinogion, originally 
composed in Middle Welsh, the last of which Tennyson had read in mod-
ern English translation. Tennyson’s commitment to rendering Arthurian 
romance into poetic form spanned nearly his entire adult life. In highly 
accessible poetic form, Tennyson records courtly love as a paradox under-
lying the system of the chivalric code. The Arthurian Cycle was nostal-
gically sought after in Victorian England and the United States where 
readers found Malory’s Middle English “with its archaic language and 
style of narration too daunting” (Lambdin 13). Fiction writers charted 
the esteem for the Arthurian revival and responded with many versions4 
just as the myth of King Arthur has been perpetually recycled in many 
languages throughout Europe during the last millennium.
“The Wife of His Youth”—a Revision of Courtly Love
Using direct evocations of Tennyson’s poetry, the protagonist in 
Chesnutt’s story, an upper-class African American named Mr. Ryder, 
revels in the ideals of chivalric virtue: stability, chastity and loyalty. 
In “The Wife of His Youth,” the social circles of upper crust African 
4 Some American authors wrote popular versions: Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King 
Arthur (1880), the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) by Mark 
Twain (both Southerners), assorted poetry by, for example, Elizabeth Stoddard, 
“Before the Mirror” (1895), Edgar Lee Masters, “Ballad of Launcelot and Elaine” and 
“Death of Launcelot” (both 1916), Edward A. Robinson’s “Merlin” (1917) and Edna 
St. Vincent Millay’s “Elaine” (1921). Modernist African American novelists who later 
made use of parodic mimicry on Arthurian myths include Ralph Ellison, Invisible 
Man (1952), Ishmael Reed, The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) and Paule Marshall, 
The Fisher King (2000).
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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Americans that Mr. Ryder leads emulate the decorum, good-graces and 
high principles of the Victorian Age where love is regarded as omnium 
fons et origo honorum and fully compatible with marriage, the very flow-
ering of civilization, just as it was apprehended in the code of chivalry. 
With little room for liberal progressivism, Mr. Ryder, a member of 
the highest echelon of black people in northern United States, invokes 
an ethos of a distinguished social order for society that his African 
American followers unreservedly trust:
He had observed of late a growing liberality, almost a laxity, in social man-
ners, even among members of his own set, and had several times been forced 
to meet in a social way persons whose complexities and callings in life were 
hardly up to the standard which he considered proper for the society to main-
tain. (Chesnutt, Conjure 106)
Mr. Ryder perceives a dissolution of the social order in his time. Like 
King Arthur, Mr. Ryder aims to put order into the chaotic post-conflict 
society. Significantly, social standing and skin pigmentation were inter-
twined in Ryder’s mind as well as those of “his own set”5 whereby, in 
this American setting, discrimination leads to new social opportunities. 
However, like the knights of the Round Table, Mr. Ryder’s followers 
fall short in resembling the “stainless man” (Tennyson 134), and like 
King Arthur, Mr. Ryder tutors his society to follow strict exclusionary 
principles which hardly any can keep. As Aidan Day affirms, “the ideal 
and idealistic Arthur sometimes offers both a moral perspective and a 
portentously self-righteous way of articulating it” (Day 189), a criticism 
which equally applies to the smug Mr. Ryder. In Arthurian epics the 
development of the proper inner attitude is central to the mastery of 
courtly behavior. In mimicking Southern elite whites who share preten-
sions of chivalry, Chesnutt ultimately has his caricature of this subclass 
of the haute black bourgeoisie, Mr. Ryder, alter this behavior outwardly.
Preparing for his own high-society engagement ball, Mr. Ryder 
hosts light-toned African American guests at his elegant home filled 
with ornate works of art exhibiting his conspicuous consumption and 
status hunting. Mr. Ryder intends to set an example to society about 
how to live and conduct oneself as elite members of civilized society. 
Yet his art has less to do with its intrinsic value or with his fine taste 
than the opulence his art collection exhibits.
5 Akin to Mr. Ryder’s “light mulatto” complexion, King Arthur “is fair / Beyond the 
race of Britons and of men” (Tennyson 22) in “The Coming of Arthur” even though his 
alleged parents Uther and Ygerne are dark-eyed and dark-haired.
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His search for an exquisite poem which might aptly convey his 
love leads him to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, particularly his images of 
Guinevere, King Arthur’s stunning wife, and his record of her pas-
sionate adultery with the darker Lancelot. Mr. Ryder echoes both male 
characters: in his social climb upwards, his behavior reflects Arthur’s 
ascetic ways, though after meeting the near-white and highly treasured 
widow Mrs. Molly Dixon, Ryder may appear transformed into a sensu-
ous Lancelot. Expressly looking for a love poem in a thick “volume of 
Tennyson—his favorite poet—fortifying himself with apt quotations” 
(Chesnutt, Conjure 106) for his wedding proposal, Mr. Ryder recites 
parts of poems focused on beauty defined by Tennyson as pale, fair or 
white. This focus appears rather ironic for an African American yet is 
tellingly appropriate for the “Blue Vein Society” where an “envious 
outsider made the suggestion that no one was eligible for member-
ship who was not white enough to show blue veins” (103). Mr. Ryder 
aspires to the problematic ethos of courtly love, the idolatry of white-
ness and accordingly the condescension of people of darker hues.
An early Tennyson poem, “A Dream of Fair Women” (1842) is read 
aloud by Mr. Ryder along with the poem “Margaret,” which among 
other features links whiteness to the uppermost ideals of beauty. “A 
Dream of Fair Women” features the Ptolemaic Queen of African Egypt, 
Cleopatra. As a devious Egyptian leader with a decidedly Greek edu-
cation and possessing Greek family roots,6 the unmarried Cleopatra’s 
political intrigues and intimate relations with Julius Caesar, bearing 
him a son, and then with the servile Mark Antony, with whom she had 
three children, appeared too lascivious for Mr. Ryder’s engagement ball. 
The poems he had just read “would not do” (Chesnutt, Conjure 107). 
Werner Sollors makes note of the volume that Mr. Ryder likely reads 
from when reciting out loud the opening lines of “A Dream of Fair 
Women,” that “it was exactly of that page that Cleopatra’s image was 
reproduced, above the poem’s title” and that “Tennyson complained 
about [the pre-Raphaelite illustrator John Everett] Millais’ choice to 
make Cleopatra a Mulatto” (Sollors 230), further underscoring how 
this aesthetic preference for whiteness is imbricated in Tennyson’s mul-
tifaceted ideology. As a representation in Ryder’s fantasy of the perfect 
embodiment of virtuous love, Mrs. Dixon was “of lively disposition 
and buxom build. So he ran over the leaves until his eye rested on 
the description of Queen Guinevere” (Chesnutt, Conjure 107). Like 
King Arthur, he presumes that her exterior beauty indicates virtuous 
6 For more details regarding the American reception of Cleopatra’s color, see Maier.
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
161
exquisiteness; given his views on assimilation into the white race, Molly 
Dixon may be but a means and not an end to Mr. Ryder. Nevertheless, 
Ryder recognizes that in both cases, Cleopatra and Guinevere fall short 
on desirable virtues like loyalty or chastity.
Up to that point, the conservative and well-mattered gentleman was 
said to have been avoiding marriage for decades, echoing Lancelot’s 
sentiments on lifelong bachelorhood. Yet like the charming and beauti-
ful Guinevere for young Arthur, the wealthy Molly Dixon
had won Mr. Ryder’s heart. She possessed many attractive qualities. She was 
much younger than he; in fact, he was old enough to have been her father 
[…]. She was whiter than he, and better educated. She had moved in the best 
colored society of the country, at Washington. (Chesnutt, Conjure 105)
Since Mrs. Dixon’s husband had died and left the twenty-five-year 
old socialite wealthy, nothing blocks Ryder from rising significantly 
higher in society, as marriage with her would greatly increase his purse. 
As a man “moving white,” Mr. Ryder confirms racial conventions of 
the “Blue Vein Society” as well as the ideology, as Ryder understood 
them, versified by the esteemed British Poet Laureate. “The Wife of His 
Youth” traces how Mr. Ryder adroitly manages “the complexities of at-
tempting to balance love, marriage, racial responsibility, social mobility 
and the burden of history” (Duncan xxi). Ryder conveys his haughty 
racial ideologies clearly enough: “we people of mixed blood are ground 
between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between ab-
sorption by the white race and extinction in the black.” (Chesnutt, 
Conjure 104) Like a utilitarian opportunist, he argues for the abandon-
ment of darker blacks while accentuating his vanity with a poetry read-
ing explicitly preferring “light” women, obviously derogatory and irre-
sponsible behavior. Moreover, in advocating the Blue Veins to consent 
to a limiting identity imposed on them, Ryder’s ethics requires some 
African Americans to accept the delusion that they are other than they 
really are, to adopt haughty aristocratic behavior that was anathema to 
characteristics of African Americans, most of whom were only recent-
ly emancipated. At the same time, Ryder invokes President Abraham 
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: “With malice towards none, with 
charity for all, we must do the best we can for ourselves and those who 
are to follow us. Self-preservation is the first law of nature.” (Chesnutt, 
Conjure 106) Ryder’s second sentence hardly arouses the Christian be-
neficence Lincoln had intended to inspire. Indeed, his prediction of 
the extermination of the black race echoes Arthurian eschatology, the 
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ultimate defeat of the ideals of Camelot. Mr. Ryder finds verse con-
veying his longings for ladylike beauty and the explicit color idyllic in 
Tennyson’s poem “Margaret” (1833) which Ryder recites:
O sweet pale Margaret,
O rare pale Margaret,
What lit your eyes with tearful power,
Like moonlight on a falling shower?
Who lent you, love, your mortal dower
Of pensive thought and aspect pale,
Your melancholy sweet and frail
As perfume of the cuckoo-flower? (Chesnutt, Conjure 107)
As he searches onward in the poetry of Tennyson, Ryder rummages 
from the royal African Cleopatra to Arthur’s wife Queen Guinevere 
to the pale Margaret. Chesnutt’s implied white readers might wonder 
if this poetry reading is really being seriously considered as appropri-
ate among African Americans, or if Chesnutt is just mockingly “pull-
ing their leg.” However, Ryder’s stimulating reading of Tennyson’s 
seductively enchanting Margaret gets interrupted by the visit of a 
dark black elderly woman who stops by Mr. Ryder’s front porch. He 
lowers his thick Tennyson volume to assist the poorly-attired black 
elderly lady.
Born as a slave in Missouri, Eliza Jane Taylor tells Mr. Ryder that she 
is in great need of assistance. She then narrates back in time to earlier 
events of love, self-sacrifice and abiding loyalty. Many years earlier, she 
had alerted her free-born mulatto husband to escape from enslavement 
when she learned her owner planned to illegally sell him to a trader: 
“W’en Sam come home f’m de fiel’ dat night, I tole him ‘bout ole 
marse gwine steal ‘im an’ Sam run away […]. Ole marse had heerd dat 
I warned Sam, so he had me whip’ an’ sol’ down de ribber.” (Chesnutt, 
Conjure 109) Her husband escaped safely to the free north, while she, 
in forced exile, was victimized by slaveholders in the deep South, their 
fates differing in the starkest contrast conceivable. Consequently, Eliza 
Jane has not seen her husband for some twenty-five years. While her 
displacement is central to the slave experience, it continues well after 
the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865.
Nevertheless, her ascetic patience facilitates her quest to locate her 
husband long after the war. After this analepsis, Eliza Jane’s narrative 
becomes even more astounding: “I’s be’n lookin’ for ‘im eber sence […]. 
I’s be’n ter Noo Orleens, an’ Atlanty, an’ Charleston, an’ Richmon’; 
an’ w’en I’d be’n all ober de Souf I come ter de Norf.” (Chesnutt, 
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
163
Conjure 109) On the day of his engagement ball, Eliza Jane confidently 
maintains her faith in her husband’s loyalty: “and I knows he’s be’n 
lookin’ fer me. Fer he sot a heap er sto’ by me, Sam did.” (Chesnutt, 
Conjure 109) In her quest, reclamation and restoration are her ultimate 
objectives much like grail seekers of Tennyson’s Idylls. She humbly asks 
the benevolent Mr. Ryder if he happened to be acquainted with her 
husband, Sam Taylor. Mr. Ryder refers her to the fact that the mar-
riages during slavery were not legally recognized and freed slaves were 
required by law to re-marry before a court. Since she had not remarried 
him, Sam might have married another woman. Eliza Jane vehemently 
protests: “‘No, indeed, suh,’ she replied, ‘Sam ain’ dat kin’ er man. 
He wuz good ter me, Sam wuz.’” (Chesnutt, Conjure 110) Replicating 
mystical visions of supernatural events in Tennyson’s Idylls, Eliza Jane 
Taylor perseveres in seeking her husband because of voodoo prophesy 
and dreams, both of which she discloses to Mr. Ryder: “He ain’ dead. 
De signs an’ de tokens tells me. I dremp three nights runnin’ on’y dis 
las’ week dat I foun’ him.” (Chesnutt, Conjure 110) She is predestined 
to find him. Mr. Ryder asks the kind, unpretentious woman for her 
address and would soon contact her after looking into the matter. In 
spite of the injustice of her enslavement, whipping and her terrible 
treatment after being sold down the river, the impecunious Eliza Jane 
shows no indication of bitterness. To sum up, Chesnutt sentimentally 
paints Eliza Jane as a saint.
Mr. Ryder’s struggle in modifying his racial and social principles is 
not described in the story, but it must have been distressful. He reflects 
upon his own status and acquires a new self-awareness and knowledge 
of his “sins,” including neglect of his vows of marriage. The abiding 
loyalty of Eliza Jane has transformed Ryder inwardly. Clearly, his long-
acquired decrepit principles were not attuned with the characteristics of 
Eliza Jane’s heroic deeds. Reminded that his freedom is ultimately not 
of his own making, he recognizes that his wife’s brave and well-timed 
warning decades ago enabled his escape north as well as his impressive 
social ascent. What is more, Mr. Ryder has been deceitful about his 
own origins and identity7—not merely regarding his fortuitous escape 
from enslavement but additionally his antebellum marriage. Like 
Arthur, Ryder’s origins were never clear to the public.8 The plot skips 
7 Mr. Ryder’s acquired full name while living in the North is never revealed; only 
his full original name is referred to by Eliza Jane Taylor: Sam Taylor.
8 In The Coming of Arthur Guinevere’s father King Leonogran is deeply troubled 
by doubts about Arthur’s legitimacy to be king. It remains unclear who Arthur’s father 
really was.
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from Eliza Jane’s departure to the scene quite a few hours later at the 
formal ball, a large gap of unaccounted time.
At his assembled engagement ball, Mr. Ryder is expected to ask the 
charming Mrs. Dixon for her hand in marriage to escape his lonely bach-
elorhood, though Mr. Ryder does not recite Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 
poems as originally planned. Instead, he decides to come clean: after 
retelling Eliza Jane’s slave narrative and her multiple-decade-long pur-
suit of her husband, Mr. Ryder eloquently narrates the life of Eliza 
Jane’s husband, whose marriage to a slave was legally invalid and whose 
ascent in society kept him safe from recognition. Ryder presciently asks 
guests at the ball this question: “What would he do, or rather, what 
ought he to do, in such a crisis of a lifetime?” (Chesnutt, Conjure 113) 
Compelling his guests to take active accountability by deciding an hon-
orable choice with a public answer, the ultimately transient nature of 
medieval ideals of the Blue Veins are democratically corrected, replac-
ing Tennyson with a slave narrative plus the fêted lines of Polonius to 
his son Laertes from Hamlet:
This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. (Shakespeare 22)
Mr. Ryder abandons his ideologies as Eliza Jane thwarts his ardent 
desire for whiteness by waking him up to the true meaning of a vir-
tuous woman. Under the catalytic effect of a deus ex machina, her 
sudden appearance triggers the anagnorisis that he is of ordinary folk, 
moreover that he is already married to a devoted, virtuous wife. His 
epiphany regarding her steadfast integrity dramatizes the ending of 
his racism as well as his appreciation of true virtue. The intensity of 
Mr. Ryder’s sensitive reorientation is exacerbated by the timing: he 
encounters Eliza Jane just as he is about to become engaged to an-
other woman. Rejecting that an African American would imitate the 
disgraceful and pernicious influence of racism by discarding one’s true 
mate for whiteness or fleeting youth and beauty, Chesnutt’s protago-
nist abruptly deserts fashionable Tennyson in favor of Shakespeare, 
thereby overcoming what Henry Wonham postulates most Blue Vein 
members engage in, namely the consciously unsympathetic repression 
of the history of slavery (Wonham 57). Mr. Ryder has precipitously 
fled to the North but with Eliza Jane’s resurfacing, his mind has come 
full circle and returned to his original self and to true love, even speak-
ing in African American Vernacular English at the ball. Mr. Ryder 
fittingly orchestrates his fellow Blue Veins to favor a righteous reso-
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
165
lution in his “crisis of a lifetime,” in the court of public opinion. By 
means of an almost homiletic nature, Ryder quotes Polonius’s “ad-
vice” expressed in an imperative, “to thine own self be true,” thereby 
urging the Blue Veins to decide for social and racial solidarity and 
genuine honor.
Because Eliza Jane Taylor lived as the embodiment of intractable 
virtue over the course of decades, Mr. Ryder is compelled to remarry 
her. While his original principles privileged Mrs. Molly Dixon’s white-
ness as the essence of society’s shared ideals of virtuous love and beauty 
(Tennyson), Ryder’s trothplight is remedied by Eliza Jane’s unceasing 
loyalty and commitment (Shakespeare).9 To be sure, Eliza Jane is no 
Guinevere. While she originates from the lowest station possible and 
has hardly risen in society after emancipation, her behavior—abiding 
loyalty, transparency and traditional sense of morality—shows the true 
meaning of the code of honor, in spite of the depravity of slavery she 
had endured. Unlike the nominal English medieval l’amour Courtois, 
by definition immoral and adulterous, Eliza Jane’s natural loyalty is 
revealed using the subtlest of phrasings but which was actually devoid 
of characteristic attainment.
Like Arthur’s relationship to Guinevere in Tennyson’s The Coming 
of Arthur, Mr. Ryder may not care for Molly Dixon beyond her 
incomparable beauty and social status. At the ball—analogous to King 
Arthur’s court—Chesnutt juxtaposes the two women, the living devout 
slave narrator Eliza Jane, akin in appearance to the “Loathly Lady” in 
Arthurian myth, but in fact a real phenomenon in American history, 
and then the wealthy and almost white Mrs. Dixon, suggestively per-
sonating the fictional Queen Guinevere in social standing. When Mr. 
Ryder asks the Blue Veins what he should do, to demonstrate her righ-
teousness, Mrs. Molly Dixon proves that she is no Guinevere either: 
while shedding tears, she tells Mr. Ryder, as the first to speak up at the 
ball, that he should acknowledge Eliza Jane as his wife in a masterful 
public performance.10 Guinevere on the other hand, is depicted as jeal-
ous of other women appearing near her lover Lancelot such as Elaine, a 
9 Mr. Ryder is described as old enough to be Mrs. Molly’s father, yet younger than 
his wife Eliza Jane. His swift change in ideology may be referenced by Merlin’s com-
ment on Arthur in The Coming of Arthur: “An old man’s wit may wander ere he die” 
(Tennyson 24), which I suggest applies to old Mr. Ryder as well.
10 Molly Dixon’s approval of Mr. Ryder’s remarriage to Eliza Jane also gives Mr. 
Ryder an out from her expectation of matrimony which the engagement ball was to 
publicly cement. Mr. Ryder had courted the widow, yet Mrs. Dixon’s gracious conduct 
in acknowledging Eliza Jane also preserves Ryder’s good reputation.
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character flaw unbecoming of a queen. Mrs. Molly Dixon accordingly 
admits Eliza Jane into the “courtly” world of their society, suggesting a 
kinship to a “sistah” who suffered a lowly fate through no fault of her 
own. In Ryder’s court, his followers’ nobility is ultimately secured by 
means of Socratic tutelage rather than Arthurian leadership.11
Robert Bone writes that the story’s “theme has to do with the black 
man’s sense of history. The wife of Mr. Ryder’s youth is a symbol of 
his obligation of the past. The heritage of slavery is a painful one, and 
yet the old and ugly wife must be embraced” (Bone 99). Without an 
understanding of the underlying code of honor implicit in this story, 
Bone expresses reluctance to embrace the honorable choice with this 
remark. The unifying motif of Tennyson’s disloyal Guinevere longing 
for Lancelot is a textual oeuvre readers of Chesnutt’s time were familiar 
with, serving as the opposing foundation by which the conclusion of 
“The Wife of His Youth” becomes morally potent. The mutual cir-
cumstance the women share is their sterility: Guinevere provides no 
heir to Arthur, and Eliza Jane ironically usurps Mr. Ryder’s earlier 
contention that “we must do the best we can for ourselves and those 
who follow us. Self-preservation is the first law of nature” (Chesnutt, 
Conjure 106) since no children would be forthcoming from the barren 
Eliza Jane. Nevertheless, to white readers who wish to put all negative 
consequences of slavery and the Civil War in the past, Mr. Ryder’s 
remarriage in the end becomes an eloquent metaphor of national rec-
onciliation by the mere fact that his reunification with Eliza Jane, the 
embodiment of African American post-war diasporic identity, provides 
a happy conclusion to the tragically common national phenomenon of 
African American separation caused by slavery and war.
11 According to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, “the harmony between natural 
impulses and the moral dimension of individual existence remains the fundamental 
good” of mankind (Vránková 92).
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
167
“Cicely’s Dream”—Revision of the Forsaken Nurse
As pointed out earlier, scholars have not placed Chesnutt’s Civil War 
story under Tennyson’s sphere of influence, though “Cicely’s Dream” 
is deeply indebted to Idylls of the King and offers a layering of signifi-
cation. The enslaved female protagonist, Cicely Green, registers as a 
figure of Arthurian romance. As I intend to illustrate, in Chesnutt’s 
motivated revision of Tennyson, “Cicely’s Dream” echoes the motif of 
a damsel’s rescue of an injured combatant, her implicit expectation of 
matrimony after nursing him back to health, and the transformation 
of identity of the soldier which appear in Tennyson’s idylls Enid and 
Geraint, Elaine and Lancelot and finally Gareth and Lynette.
Tennyson borrowed the plot of Enid and Geraint from the Mabinogion 
as well as Chrétien de Troyes’ Eric et Eníde. Like Enid, Chesnutt’s pro-
tagonist Cicely originates from humbler circumstances than the warrior 
she nurses back to health: she is a North Carolina plantation slave born 
around 1850. Tennyson’s Enid’s nurses her husband, the impervious 
Prince Geraint, shortly after combat with the followers of Limours:
And Enid heard the clashing of his fall,
Suddenly came, and at his side all pale
Dismounting loosed the fastenings of his arms,
Nor let her true hand falter, nor blue eye
Moisten, till she had lighted on his wound, 
And tearing off her veil of faded silk
Had bared her forehead to the blistering sun
And swathed the hurt that drain’d her dear lord’s life.
Then, after all was done that hand could do,
She rested, and her desolation came
Upon her, and she wept beside the way. (Tennyson 91)
Set in the spring of 1865 and the first years of the Reconstruction pe-
riod, Chesnutt’s story opens with a barefoot, attractive-looking, ra-
cially-mixed “maiden” whose worthy conduct resembles the behavior 
of Enid. While in the process of collecting vegetables and fruit in an 
Eden-like garden, Cicely hears a groan and discovers a wounded Union 
soldier unconscious with severe head injuries in the nearby pinewoods:
Upon the ground, under the shadow of the towering pines, a man lay at full 
length,—a young man, several years under thirty […] she saw the man was 
wounded and bleeding, and the nurse latent in all womankind awoke in her to 
the requirements of the situation […] she took off her apron, dipped one end 
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of it into the spring, and ran back to the wounded man. The apron was clean, 
and she squeezed a little stream of water from it into the man’s mouth. He 
swallowed it with avidity […] she bound the apron around his head as well as 
she could, and then sat down a moment on a fallen tree trunk, to think what 
she should do next. (Chesnutt, Conjure 172–173)
Parallels of aiding the wounded warrior by employing clothing and 
contemplating the process also include the women showing pity for the 
suffering soldiers. Finding the Union soldier just outside of the slave 
plantation property, the boundary of the plantation and the woods 
where slaves might escape, Cicely trespasses to the forbidden zone, 
probably risking punishment as she climbs over the fence to assist the 
stranger. Believing the soldier’s color to be that of a lighter mulatto, 
Cicely surmises that the “negro” Union soldier fights to rescue his own 
people “to end the long night of their captivity” as slaves (King 102). 
However, this oblique figure is hard to place exactly. The ambivalence 
of the soldier’s color is significant: he is not only aesthetically attractive, 
but seductively sensual. Consequently, he is assimilated into the slave 
community on the plantation. Chesnutt evocatively places the soldier’s 
mental and physical recovery under Cicely’s complete control, and his 
racialized otherness ironically transforms into Cicely’s mode of perceiv-
ing her world so that his racial construct becomes black.
Both Enid and Cicely are keenly perceptive of the threats of ene-
mies nearby and undertake measures to prevent adversaries from killing 
their warriors suffering from similar injuries. With the assistance of her 
grandmother Dinah, Cicely furtively conceals the unconscious “John,” 
as they decide to call him, from the Confederates searching for the 
Union soldier: Cicely lays him on her bed in a shed for slaves. She offers 
him her natural untutored care, “the nurse latent in all womankind 
awoke in her to the requirement of the situation” (Chesnutt, Conjure 
172). After deliberating, mother and daughter decide against inform-
ing their masters of his presence.12 In Enid and Geraint the same scene 
of defiance is played out. Enid hears threats and sees dangers that the 
helmet-wearing Geraint does not notice, so she cleverly disregards her 
12 Like Tennyson’s poetry, Chesnutt’s story moves to a picturesque setting. Cicely 
lives in the contraposition of the two worlds: her home is what appears like a paradise 
after the warrior’s experiences on the battlefield: she brings him to her refuge and offers 
him peaceful shelter away from the chaos of combat. The depicted contrast in natural 
scenery is stark: With Dinah’s assistance Cicely brings him out of a nearby dark pine 
forest, over the dividing fence, to a safely isolated clearing, consisting of a vegetable 
and fruit garden.
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
169
vow of silence by warning him to the danger of the “brawny spearman” 
Earl Doorm. After falling from his horse and appearing dead, Geraint 
is “waken’d from his swoon” (Tennyson 93) much like the Union sol-
dier who “opened his eyes and stared blankly […]. Suddenly he essayed 
to put his hand to his head, gave a deep groan, and fell back again 
unconscious” (Chesnutt, Conjure 175). Both warriors require scrupu-
lous care from their respective nurses, though Enid helps her husband 
while Cicely treats a complete stranger, acting out of a deep sense of 
moral obligation.
Prince Geraint had become obsessively jealous of attention she 
received from men so Enid had been commanded to be silent; he 
was made weary because of various rumors regarding Guinevere and 
Lancelot, aggressively making Enid suffer for another woman’s trans-
gressions. Hence his oath to service as a knight of chivalry has gone 
awry. In Chesnutt’s story, the role-playing of silence is inverted: Union 
soldier “John” is dumb, his severe brain injury renders him speechless 
and he suffers from total amnesia. Over the course of a year, Cicely not 
only nurses him back to health, but teaches him to speak her vernacu-
lar. She reviews school lessons from various subjects she mastered every 
evening with him after attending the freedman school set up for for-
mer slaves. “John” loves Cicely: “His love for Cicely appeared the only 
thing for which he needed no suggestion.” (Chesnutt, Conjure 181) 
Due to his head injury, he appears utterly innocent and completely 
guileless, unusual given his status as a combat soldier.
The unidentified warrior motif in “Cicely’s Dream” also echoes the 
portrait of Gareth in Gareth and Lynette. The man charged by King 
Arthur to rescue the imprisoned maiden is identified as a kitchen worker. 
Lynette insists instead that the most celebrated knight, Lancelot, rescue 
her mistress, with the implicit understanding that Lady Lyonors would 
marry her champion. Instead of a knight of high lineage, Lynette dole-
fully gets escorted by a belle inconnu, a fair unknown “kitchen-knave” as 
King Arthur’s choice to defeat the four outlaws holding Lady Lyonors 
imprisoned in her own castle.
The silent Unionist “John” is not so fair-skinned and otherwise 
unidentifiable. Reasoning that he is a light-skinned mulatto soldier, 
Cicely senses that she has found her dream-man. Once again, Chesnutt 
reverses Tennyson: while “dishwasher” and “kitchen-knave” Gareth 
(son of King Lot and Queen Morgause, King Arthur’s half-sister) 
marries Lady Lyonors once he removes his “mask” and his true noble 
bloodlines are revealed, John’s identity is only transformed after regain-
ing his memory. Like the newly revealed high-born knight, the res-
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cued Union soldier is revealed to be a white man from Massachusetts 
named “Arthur” who had narrowly escaped a Confederate Prison at 
Salisbury.13 The virile characteristics of courage and how he overcame 
life-threatening dangers are evident only near the end of Chesnutt’s 
plot. Arthur Carey is identified by name at the graduation cere-
mony by his betrothed, Martha Chandler, the schoolmistress from 
Massachusetts teaching Cicely and other former black slave children. 
Arthur Carey’s amnesia functions as Chesnutt’s literary contrivance for 
the kitchen-worker “mask” of the blue-blooded Gareth. Both charac-
ters are belle inconnu to their respective ladies, but in Chesnutt’s rever-
sal, the unhappy ending for Cicely keeps the color line “intact” while 
in the Arthurian rescue ending in marriage, the nominal high lineage is 
maintained for both families. Neglect of a woman’s expectations is also 
evident in Arthur Carey (alias “John”) after he forsakes Cicely Green: 
Arthur never thanks her for her bravery, her long-term nursing nor for 
mentoring him to speak and read. While she undertakes more effort 
in the recovery of her warrior’s health than Enid, Cicely is forgotten 
immediately after Arthur recognizes Mayflower descendant14 Martha 
Chandler at the graduation exercises.
In a similar way, Lancelot and Elaine is noticeably reclaimed by 
Chesnutt as well. Unmarried and less than half the age of Lancelot, 
Elaine (along with her father Bernard, the Lord of Astolat) assist 
Lancelot before and after a jousting tournament. Elaine stood “rapt 
on his face as if it were god’s” while Lancelot “had not dream’d she 
was so beautiful” (Tennyson 146). In spite of wearing her pearl and 
scarlet on his sleeve meant to help disguise himself, Lancelot believes 
that he has not provided the lovesick girl with an expectation of mar-
ital guarantee. On the contrary, Lancelot is merely fond of Elaine 
and certainly appreciates how she nurses his wounds. Unsurprisingly 
in courtly provisos, Lancelot was indeed fighting for the Maid of 
Astolat’s honor in the unmistakably public forum of a tournament 
when he wore her pearls. Elaine nursed his multiple injuries (which 
Lancelot received in her honor), bringing him back to full vigor and 
potency. Yet after her perception of Lancelot’s courtly behavior indi-
cates a fulfillment of her marital expectations, Lancelot shatters all of 
her hopes.
13 Historically, the notorious Salisbury Confederate Prison in North Carolina, 
classified as a kind of “miniature Andersonville,” held thousands of captured Union 
soldiers who died of illness or starved to death.
14 Like First Families of Virginia (FFV) for Southerners, among Northerners a 
Mayflower descendant remains to this day an American version of an aristocrat.
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
171
Appearing as an unspoiled child of nature, Cicely Green likewise 
presumes “John” will marry her and fulfill her titular dream: they were 
already engaged and their wedding had been arranged to take place one 
week after her graduation. Like “the lily maid” Elaine, Cicely feels an 
idolatrous passion for “her” courageous warrior, with Cicely concealing 
her lover not only initially from Confederate soldiers, but later, after 
the war, from other women:
For a time Cicely kept him away, as much as possible, from others, because 
she did not wish them to see that there was anything wrong with him. This 
was her motive at first, but after a while she kept him to herself simply because 
she was happier so. He was hers—hers alone. She had found him, as Pharaoh’s 
daughter had found Moses in the bulrushes: she had taught him to speak, to 
think, to love. (Chesnutt, Conjure 178)
While the crucial healing of the inflicted injuries takes place, both plots 
present a pastoral isolation of the nurse and warrior. Unlike the maid-
ens in Tennyson’s Idylls, Cicely dominates over her warrior in his sur-
roundings, showing less than purely humane but also selfish motives. 
However, the dreams of Elaine and Cicely are disappointed due to the 
perceived social duty of their seductively handsome patients. The reac-
tion to this disappointment by Elaine is transformed: Chesnutt’s Cicely 
is disappointed but emerges more mature. Tennyson’s Elaine responds 
to her unfulfilled expectations with excessive emotional trauma: “but 
this night I dream’d / That I was all alone upon the flood, / And then I 
said, ‘Now shall I have my will [marriage with Lancelot];’ / And there 
I woke, but still the wish remain’d.” (Tennyson 162)
While the virgin Elaine rejects as intolerable Lancelot’s offer of 
half of his realm overseas in lieu of an unwanted marriage, he likewise 
rejects her odd compromise for much less than marriage: to become 
his squire. Tennyson changes Malory’s text where the sexually more 
forward Elaine offers to become Lancelot’s paramour. As Aaron 
Heisler points out, “Tennyson’s emendation is almost comically pro-
phylactic, utterly impoverishing Elaine of sexual will” (Heisler 161). 
With unfulfilled expectations of romantic bliss, the moribund Elaine 
dies of an emotional fever, reinforcing the convention of female mal-
aise. After bravely confronting head on the ordeal of Lancelot’s nearly 
fatal injury with her successful nursing work,15 Elaine becomes utterly 
15 Elaine’s and Cicely’s desire for the permanence of a family following the nursing 
of a warrior not only thematically corresponds to medieval Arthurian mythology but 
also to fiction by modernist authors such as Hemingway in Farewell to Arms (1929) 
and to a lesser extent Ondaatje in The English Patient (1992).
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incapable of comprehending that matrimonial aspirations with 
Lancelot is unattainable.
As the title indicates, Chesnutt accentuates the dream motif: 
“[Cicely] had dreamed a beautiful dream […] that in her dream she 
had found something, and that her happiness had been bound up with 
the thing she had found […] she had tasted some great and novel hap-
piness.” (Chesnutt, Conjure 171) Yet by radically downplaying Elaine’s 
melodramatic demise (with her farewell letter on parchment held in 
her dead hand while floating down a river), Chesnutt’s more mature 
African American schoolgirl accepts with resignation that “her” Union 
soldier was a white man. While Elaine has a consoling father at her 
side, Cicely, given her bright color in contrast to the dark complex-
ion of her mother Dinah, likely has an absent Southern white father. 
Moreover, crossing the color line in wedlock was legally unfeasible in 
North Carolina. Subjugated to the law of the color line which Cicely 
dare not cross, Chesnutt’s story transforms Arthurian motifs into racial 
signifiers. Like Lancelot, Arthur Carey may be understood to behave 
justifiably but ignobly; neither of the spotless women were recognized 
as a marital prize to their respective knights.
Intertextually in this prose revision of the idyll Lancelot and Elaine, 
the narrator unpretentiously designates Cicely “the other woman,” and 
like Elaine, an ineligible lover of what ends up becoming a short-lived 
relationship. Chesnutt’s version of the forsaken nurse motif laconically 
concludes that “her beautiful dream had been one of the kind that go 
by contraries” (Chesnutt, Conjure 187). Chesnutt’s witty allusion to 
“contraries” is recognizably targeted to Tennyson’s well-documented 
predilection to poetically convey the contradictory dualistic nature of 
the universe, as Allan Danzig meticulously demonstrates in his article, 
“The Contraries: A Central Concept in Tennyson’s Poetry.” Included 
in Danzig’s study of contraries are the early versions of the idylls pub-
lished in 1859 subtitled “The True and the False” in which Enid, Elaine, 
Vivien and Guinevere are portrayed. Yet in revising via parody the 
courtly ideals of Arthurian myth in Tennyson, Chesnutt’s story not only 
echoes Tennyson’s “contraries” but succeeds in establishing likeness in 
unlikeness by vividly distinguishing Elaine’s initial exasperation and fatal 
despair with Cicely’s uncomplaining endurance which resonates consis-
tently with Eliza Jane Taylor’s astonishing perseverance, thereby under-
mining the validity of the traditional concept of honor through intertex-
tual correlations of Tennyson’s two true women, Enid and Elaine.
Christopher E. Koy:     Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson
173
Conclusion
I have situated Chesnutt’s two stories in the Arthurian tradition in-
spired specifically by Tennyson’s popular poetry in a sometimes-sar-
castic tone against ideals of exclusiveness, discrimination and racial op-
pression. During Reconstruction, Southern whites particularly enjoyed 
reading the forsaken ideals and decline of King Arthur’s court expressed 
in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, as many identified them with the “Lost 
Cause” myth of the Confederacy. Ideals such as the superiority of the 
white race, of the Arthurian ethos manifested in the medieval code of 
honor reframed against black people, were frequently misread into a 
Tennysonian support during and after Reconstruction for oppressive 
racist efforts of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance in lines such as these:
For when the Romans left us, and their law,
Relax’s its hold upon us, and the way:
Were filled with rapine, here and there a deed
Of prowess done redress’d a random wrong. (Tennyson 235)
In his journals, Chesnutt examined writers of influence among white 
Southerners and later employed similar tropes used by these authors in 
order to convey a different vision of the common weal. In the absorb-
ing plot of “The Wife of His Youth,” Mr. Ryder ultimately does not 
break his troth, in contrast to the broken faith presented in the Idylls 
of the King where desire tops duty. While Lancelot ignored his moral 
obligations by his affair with the king’s wife, Mr. Ryder protects the 
rights of his wife Eliza Jane. In Chesnutt’s contrasting of characters, 
Eliza Jane suffers for her husband much more than Enid or Elaine did 
for their knights. In Chesnutt’s second story, Cicely avidly hopes to 
marry an unidentified wounded warrior she heals, coddles, loves, and 
even educates, so that she may fulfill her dream, but much like Elaine’s 
desire for Lancelot, a previous relationship interferes, so she is likewise 
forsaken. After the recovering veteran recognizes his old sweet heart 
Martha Chandler, Arthur’s response is reminiscent of Lancelot’s rejec-
tion. Accordingly, white Northerners leave the South and return to the 
North, replicating the Union forces of occupation abandoning blacks 
of the South at the end of Reconstruction.
In his fiction Chesnutt thematically undermines patriarchal dimen-
sions which Tennyson’s “true women” motif underscores: neither 
Eliza Jane nor Cicely follow any passive stance but pursue their own 
righteous aspirations, though men ultimately determine matrimonial 
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PKn, letnik 44, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2021
outcomes. Employing an elaborately intertextual strategy, Chesnutt 
repeats and then subverts the inefficacious chivalric tradition, loosely 
linking courtship in “Cicely’s Dream” with the historical social uplift 
movement of blacks through Freedman School education during 
Reconstruction. Indeed, just as Chesnutt wrote in the aforementioned 
journal entry, an African American woman has educated and elevated 
a white man.
The concluding failure to fulfill the African American protagonists’ 
sought-after love of white beauty closely binds “The Wife of His Youth” 
and “Cecily’s Dream” intertextually to Tennyson’s poetry. With a 
consistent ideology of white beauty in his idylls and other poetry in 
mind, Tennyson chose to exclude from among his Arthurian sources 
the plot of the Middle High German epic Parzival by Wolfram von 
Eschenbach where the hero’s older African half-brother Feirefiz might 
have played a constructive, even universalizing, role in the plot of the 
idyll The Holy Grail;16 instead, Tennyson merely engages Percival’s 
white sister, a nun, in his version.
In his two daring reenactments of Tennyson, Charles W. Chesnutt 
implies that African Americans, whether living in the North or 
South, in a metropolis or in the province, whether old or young, 
dark or light, highly educated or simply an ambitious former slave, 
suffer, overcome hardships, love and moreover are as honorable, per-
chance at a higher level, than the legendary heroes of the Idylls of the 
King. Moreover, Chesnutt exposes the senselessness of the Arthurian 
Code and the time-honored racialized values. By highlighting the 
tenacity of Eliza Jane and the numerous skills in nursing and peda-
gogy of Cicely, it is especially Chesnutt’s African American women 
who come off with a sense of agency showing that, in contrast to 
Tennyson’s heroes, men may actually not be more enduringly virtuous 
than women.
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Novo branje Lorda Alfreda Tennysona: Pogled 
od blizu na zgodbi »Žena njegove mladosti« in 
»Cecilijine sanje« Charlesa W. Chesnutta
Ključne besede: angleška poezija / Tennyson, Alfred / afroameriška literatura / 
medbesedilnost / Chesnutt, Charles W. / legende o kralju Arthurju / viteštvo / dvorna 
ljubezen
Članek preučuje, kako se je revizije del znanega angleškega pesnika Lorda 
Alfreda Tennysona (1809–1892), ki je v verzih upesnil srednjeveško Artur-
jevo legendo (Idila kralja in druge pesmi), lotil afroameriški pisatelj Char-
les W. Chesnutt (1858–1932). Chesnuttova pripovedna zbirka Žena njegove 
mladosti in druge zgodbe iz barvne serije (1899) obravnava različne parametre 
v kon tekstu posledic, ki jih je povzročilo suženjstvo, denimo estetske pojme 
lepote, vezane na kvaliteto belega in znotrajrasne neenakosti. Končni poraz 
protagonistov, moškega in ženske, pri uresničevanju njunih romantičnih pri-
zadevanj, povezuje naslovno zgodbo zbirke z zgodbo »Cecilijine sanje«. Poleg 
tematike obarvanosti Chesnutta za sklicevanje na Tennysonovo poezijo moti-
virajo tudi trenutki, v katerih so idealizirani viteški kodeks časti, belost in 
nepopolna dvorska ljubezen. Tennysonove parabole nudijo Chesnuttu med-
besedilno shemo, s pomočjo katere vključuje implicitnega bralca tako, da 
prenavlja, preoblikuje in tudi podreja motiv dvorske ljubezni v teh idiličnih 
arturskih legendah.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 82.091
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v44.i3.09