Chivalry

The concept of chivalry developed in France and Spain during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Derived from the French word chevalier, meaning “horseman,” chivalry refers to the code of ethics that governed the behavior of mounted soldiers (knights) in feudal states. Motivated by a profound sense of duty, the ideal knight was to demonstrate grace, courtesy, gallantry, piety, chastity, valor, and loyalty at all times, and especially in relations with women. In American culture, the idea of a gallant man who rules and protects his home and lover authoritatively, though benevolently, has shaped constructions of masculinity from colonial times into the modern era.

In colonial America, ideals of chivalry were most clearly evident among the southern gentry, who by the early eighteenth century began aspiring to the lifestyle of England's landed aristocracy. Their notions of chivalric guardianship were grounded in their property (land and slaves) and in the racial and gender hierarchies that defined the southern social structure. The ideal southern gentleman and his sons were to protect the honor of their family; the virtue of their mothers, wives, and daughters; and the welfare of their slaves. Sometimes this required the ritualized violent confrontation of the duel.

Yet chivalric notions of manliness were by no means an entirely southern phenomenon. Throughout the colonies, this [Page 88]ideal underlay the rhetoric of Revolutionary protest against British imperial policy. Many patriots, gendering liberty and republican virtue as female, identified themselves as heroic “sons” and protectors of liberty against the encroaching and corrupt “male” power of King George III. This cultural association among chivalry, manhood, militarism, and patriotism has persisted into the twenty-first century.

As the nation expanded westward during the nineteenth century, writers such as James Fenimore Cooper—influenced by the popular romantic fiction of Sir Walter Scott—infused their archetypal western heroes with chivalric traits of gallantry and principled dedication to the protection of women. Similarly, chivalry informed the ideologies and assumptions underlying the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, and U.S. imperialism. In all of these, white Americans justified national expansion, global interventionism, and resistance to European colonization in the Western hemisphere as being part of their perceived obligation to protect republican liberty among (or bring it to) the nonwhite and “feminized” peoples of the Americas and the world.

In the nineteenth century, chivalry remained a marker not only of masculinity and whiteness, but also of class status. The Victorian middle- and upper-class idea that men were to represent their families in the public sphere (called the “cult of domesticity” by historians) was solidified by social mores that dictated that upper-class women remain in the home, guarded from the toil and ugliness of public life by their male patrons. Such imperatives were, however, not extended to lower-class and African-American women, whose partners and families relied upon their income to ensure family survival. Unable to approach the chivalric ideal of womanhood, these women could be used by a gentleman for labor and sex without endangering his respectability.

In the South, Victorian domesticity accentuated aristocratic notions of gallant masculinity, though chivalric manhood took on increasingly political overtones amid the growing sectional crisis that preceded and then sparked the Civil War. During the 1840s and 1850s, defenders of slavery criticized the northern free-labor system on the grounds that male industrialists had immorally abandoned their traditional obligation to protect the weak. The rhetoric leading to secession and war—and the ideology and violent practices of such Reconstruction-era white supremacist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan—relied heavily upon the notion that southern men must heroically guard the virtue of white women against northern carpetbaggers and the threat of sexual predation by black men. The wide currency of this image of chivalric, white, southern manhood in the early twentieth century was evident in the popularity of the film Birth of a Nation (1915), which features scenes of heroic white Klansmen on horseback.

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