The House Behind the Cedars

Chivalry’s origins lie in the Middle Ages when it was developed as a code of conduct for feudal knights. In texts, chivalry is presented as an elaborate system of manners with special regard for the delicate treatment of women. Instead of fighting for personal glory or gain, knights fight on behalf of the woman they love and must show unshakeable bravery. 19th-century chivalric romances were popular in the antebellum South; Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Edward Bulwer’s The Last of the Barons are both mentioned in the novel. The white elite of the South, who presided over a steeply hierarchical, agricultural society, viewed themselves as analogous to medieval nobility and mimicked the idealized social conventions depicted in chivalric novels.

The consideration and respect which chivalry demands is limited, however, to one’s peers. There is no expectation that one’s inferiors be treated respectfully. This contradiction between the highly regimented manners expected between elites and the indifference to their brutality towards their subordinates demonstrates the essential hypocrisy of chivalry. Chivalry was originally intended to moderate the predations of medieval knights but only succeeded in dressing up the cruel nature of feudal society. Likewise, in Southern society, courtly manners between members of the white economic elite served only to paper over the brutality of slavery and later post-Civil War racism.

The House Behind the Cedars is set in the aftermath of the American Civil War during the period known as Reconstruction. The effects of the war are mentioned throughout the story. The town of Patesville, based on the author’s hometown of Fayetteville, North Carolina, is pockmarked with burned ruins, a reference to General Sherman’s sacking of Fayetteville. There are repeated references to families whose estates have been burned or that are burdened with debt and unable to make full use of their plantations.

The upending of the antebellum racial order is the most radical result of the war. In Patesville, where a bell had once warned all non-white people to be home before dark, there is now a black police officer. Before the war, it had been illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write, but emancipation sees the establishment of schools to teach the formerly enslaved, a social development which plays a major role in the plot.

This period of Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877, involved the occupation of the former Confederacy by federal troops to make the South’s defeat complete and to provide protection for black people as they exercised their new rights. During this period, poor whites, the formerly enslaved, and mixed-race Southerners combined political forces. This cross-racial alliance resulted the election of black and mixed-race people to state and federal office, a situation referenced by Jeff Wain’s claim to have sat in the state legislature.

Federal troops were withdrawn after the Compromise of 1877 in which a contested Presidential election was awarded to Hayes, a Republican, in exchange for the withdrawal. The planter-class which had dominated antebellum Southern society reasserted its power, and a wave of racial violence swept the South. Within a few years of the withdrawal, all non-white representation in state and federal government had been suppressed under a post-Reconstruction racial caste system which became known as Jim Crow.