Carol Eshleman is an avid Potter scholar and Doctor Who enthusiast. She has spoken at conferences at UNC, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and at Potter conferences in Orlando. She teaches Law Studies, Speech, and is the theatre director at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metairie, Louisiana. She spoke at Leaky Con this summer in Orlando on alchemy and Dr Who. Enjoy!

The Doctor and the Rose: Doctor Who and Alchemy in the Russell T. Davies Era

Doctor Who fans are familiar with the concept of time travel.  We often see how actions from the past influence and color the future.  Images from the past reappear in new but clearly recognizable ways.  Let me share with you my observations of alchemical imagery that is present throughout the Russell T. Davies era of the Doctor’s journey.

Many of us are familiar with alchemy as the pseudo-science that gave rise to modern chemistry, and it is true that there were medieval alchemists who were literally trying to turn base metals into gold.  Eventually, alchemy evolved to carry more philosophical and spiritual meaning, and the physical process gave way to an allegorical pilgrimage of the soul towards eternal life.  This allegory made its way into medieval literature and continues to be used by diligent authors to enhance their narratives with spiritual depth.  Potter scholar John Granger has done tremendous work in uncovering alchemical imagery in J. K. Rowling’s series.  Allow me now to take a similar path along the time stream of our favorite Gallifreyan.

That the Doctor should be a figure associated with a body of imagery concerned with resurrection and eternal life is no revelation.  The Doctor’s ability to regenerate and begin again with a new face and personality makes any section of his personal narrative open to this sort of interpretation.  However, the Doctor as we see him at the beginning of the 2005 reboot is more than ever in need of a transformation.  Reeling after his actions in the Time War, he is now the last of the Time Lords and is struggling to find direction and meaning.  Who does he encounter first but a girl named Rose, and this is very significant (so significant that Russell Davies titles the first episode of the reboot “Rose,” a character that the audience has never encountered instead of something about the character that the audience has waited nearly a decade to see).  The rose is a symbol of the completed alchemical work, the Philosopher’s Stone, which has the power to transform base metals into gold and create the elixir of eternal life, but let’s not jump too far ahead just yet.  There are several stages that the material must go through before it is fully transformed.  As we study the alchemical journey that the Doctor takes through the Davies era, we’ll see that the Time Lord’s narrative aligns with the events and stages of the alchemical work to eventually coalesce into a portrait of resurrection and redemption. [Read more…]

Carol Eshleman sent me these notes before her paper on ‘Literary Alchemy in the Canterbury Tales‘ that I posted last week. This short essay, though it includes some of the same material, speaks to the Potter-Chaucer parallels more explicitly Enjoy!

The Potter and the Pilgrim: Alchemical Parallelism by Chaucer and Rowling

Since becoming a resident of the Potterverse and engrossing myself in John’s books on the series, I’ve become a ridiculous fan of literary alchemy. Therefore, when my Medieval Literature professor told us we could do our term paper on any aspect of Middle English writings, I immediately yelled, “Alchemy!” in a fashion that would’ve made either of my favorite Grangers proud. In an equally unsurprising manner, the research that I was doing on Chaucer seemed to resonate with my own thoughts on Harry Potter. When uncovering the alchemical parallels that are used in the Canterbury Tales, I discovered literary devices strikingly similar to the ones that Rowling uses in the Hogwarts Saga.

In analyzing Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous work, it is important to keep in mind that although the pilgrims are telling separate tales, these stories are not told in isolation. Chaucer’s characters tell stories that comment on, extend, and often mock other tales that have been told previously in the larger narrative. The Miller’s Tale is extremely funny to read on its own, but it becomes more meaningful when seen as a mockery of the Reeve and of the Knyght’s Tale. A lifetime could be spent deciphering parallels between the various tales. The complexity of this endeavor is heightened by the state of the work as a whole. Chaucer never finished writing the Canterbury Tales, and the tales that are completed exist in fragments containing only several stories apiece. Luckily, this can be used to our advantage. Tales within the same fragment tend to have the greatest amount of connections. [Read more…]

A Guest Post from Carol Eshleman!

The Canterbury Alchemist: A Pilgrim’s Allegory

A canon and his yeoman race up to Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims, begging to be allowed into their party. What follows is a tale of failed transformation and the subject of scholarly speculation spanning centuries. Analysts have argued about purposes of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale along extremes from Chaucer merely imitating the alchemical literature of his time to Chaucer himself being an alchemist. What is more intriguing is why an author would have an outsider intrude upon a set cast of characters after taking such pains to describe them in detail. Mark J. Bruhn points out Chaucer’s self-reflectiveness in this scene: “Chaucer-the-narrator poses from within the dramatic moment the inevitable and crucial question it provokes: who are these unexpected interlopers?” (289). Because the premise of Canterbury Tales is that a group of people on a pilgrimage to Canterbury each tell story, the solution to Chaucer’s purpose must lie within the tale this intruding character tells. The Canon’s Yeoman’s tale of alchemy thrust upon the greater cast of pilgrims points to a larger alchemical allegory that Chaucer wishes to impart upon his readers.

An argument can be made for Chaucer’s use of alchemy as an imitation of other literature during his time period. Indeed, the general format of Canterbury Tales is an amalgamation of medieval literary genres, which fits with alchemical symbolism in general since alchemy “was not confined within the boundaries of few genres” (Linden 4). Because there were a plentitude of writings concerning the processes of alchemy, it’s highly possible that the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale was merely representative of this content as its own category of literature. The accuracy with which Chaucer portrays the alchemical process, however, is an extensive subject for debate. [Read more…]