American Chaucers (review)

Candace Barrington's stated purpose in American Chaucers is to examine "the intersections between the 'father of English letters' and American popular culture" (1). She casts her net wide, dealing with such disparate genres as grand opera, memoir, college pageant, spiritualist performance, and contemporary film. Her goal is to demonstrate "how Chaucer's difficult alterity and canonical cachet combine to create a chameleon text suitable for adaptation to various American concerns and values" (1). This goal may seem a bit vague, but it is actually an extension of the title of the book—an acknowledgment that when talking about Chaucer and American popular culture one must always keep in mind the plurality of the father of English letters.

Barrington begins her work on "American Chaucers" with a useful treatment of how the poet was anthologized in the United States. In this chapter, she differentiates the British from the American anthology by noting that where the British anthology emphasized an Arnoldian aesthetic and developed a "historical continuum culminating in contemporary poets," American anthologies "tended to arrange the poems thematically . . . decontextualiz[ing] the medieval setting" (21). British editors focused on how poetry could "promote higher virtues," while American editors promoted the extent to which the anthology was a marker of "good breeding" (35). British poems thus become cultural capital available to be mined "and cashed in for social and economic improvement" (35).

Chapter 2, comprising almost a third of the book, deals with Percy MacKaye and his work The Canterbury Pilgrims. Narrating the fascinating story of how MacKaye's dramatic piece moved from play to pageant to comic opera between 1902 and 1917, Barrington demonstrates his desire to embody in Chaucer a "serious vernacular poet urgently needed to unify the increasingly diverse American culture" (92). Chaucer's "ideal" relationship to his audience provides a model for MacKaye's desideratum, an American "civic theater." His failure to realize his dream is the result of bad luck, the increasingly commercial drive of theater (with which MacKaye was complicit) and the emergence of a counter-tradition in the person of Eugene O'Neill.

In chapter 3, Barrington treats Flying with Chaucer, a fifty-six-page memoir written by James Hall some eleven years after World War I. In it Hall narrates how he found a volume of the Canterbury Tales while interred in a makeshift detention facility in Landshut, Germany. The volume, pocketed as he escapes from the prison, is in Barrington's words, "not only a reliquary for preserving . . . aristocratic sensibility, but also becomes a talisman for transporting Hall to the past and for transmitting that otherwise lost sensibility to the future" (114). Indeed, Hall claims that he wrote the start of Flying with Chaucer in the blank back pages of the book he was carrying. His ambition was to pass the book (and thus his words) on to his children. Barrington writes feelingly of how Hall's ambivalence about war and his sense of loss are communicated through half a dozen Chaucerian passages in his memoir. But the larger implications of Hall's work remain elusive as Barrington at once claims that his work is a "vox clamantis in deserto" and an expression of the larger cultural forces of the interwar period.

Barrington's focus seems to narrow even more as she turns to the issue of gender and twentieth-century American attitudes toward Chaucer. In a chapter entitled "Geoffrey and the American Flapper," Barrington expresses her desire to discover "women's role in disseminating Chaucer" (118). Her exemplary moments are the production of a Chaucerian pageant at a women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts and the spiritualist Chaucerian performances of Katherine Gordon Sanger Brinley, "a writer of little note who took her ability to recite Chaucer on the road" (126). The stories of the pageant and Brinley are fascinating, but they tend to overwhelm any sustained analysis about why they are important. The result is that statements such as "The exchange of Chaucer from woman to woman . . . occurred outside institutionalized venues, an indication of women's marginalization in...