00001.tif

PDF

Download

Open document

Transcript (if available)

Content WRITING THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS: FICTION AND
SCOTTISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
by
Sally Anne Hitchmough
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Engli sh)
August 1993
Copyright 1993 Sally A. Hitchmough
UMI Num ber: D P23180
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL U SERS
The quality of this reproduction is d ep en d en t upon th e quality of the copy subm itted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not se n d a com plete m anuscript
and th ere are m issing pages, th e se will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved,
a note will indicate th e deletion.
Dissertation PVtslishirig
UMI D P23180
Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the D issertation held by the Author.
Microform Edition © P roQ uest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta te s C ode
P roQ uest LLC.
789 E a st E isenhow er Parkw ay
P.O . Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007
3SI4C
This dissertation, w ritten by
SALLY ANNE HITCHMOUGH
under the direction of / i . . D i s s e r t a t i o n
Com m ittee, and approved b y all its m embers,
has been presented to and accepted b y The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents fo r the degree of
D O C T O R OF PH ILO SO PH Y
of Graduate Studies
D a te taHSfc..l7.,..3393....
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
;&MJAjk&yc.
r lo ■ V -
£
For my parents,
Geoffrey and Rosemary Hitchmough.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to thank all the people who have
helped in various ways with this dissertation. I am
very grateful to my committee members for all their
assistance: Elinor Accampo, Leo Braudy, Peter Manning,
Sally Pratt and Hilary Schor. I am especially grateful
to Jim Kincaid for all his help and for his enthusiasm,
which sustained me through the project.
To my family in England and friends both here
and there I am grateful for encouragement and support;
in particular I should like to thank Connie Anderson,
Jane Gould, Monika Iskersky and my sister Wendy for
their practical help. I am grateful to Joanne
Johnson-Nagel for providing excellent day-care for
a year, and to Jim and Dorothy Chalmers, Liz and David
Merrill and John and Jean Butcher for lending me parts
of their homes in which to write.
I should like to thank USC's Town and Gown
Committee for awarding me the Marta Feuchtwanger
fellowship, without which I could never have completed
this project.
My thanks go to my children, Amy and Ben, for
being such wonderful companions to my studies, and
last but never least to my husband Alan Chalmers for all
his assistance and support, and for being such a good
listener.
iii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
The Construction of Scottish National Emblems in the
Nineteenth Century.
_i. Re-writing Scotland's Sorrows ............... p.1
ii. Scotland’s Historical Relationship with
England. ...p. 5
iii. Early Travellers and the "Othering" of
Scotland. ............................................p.12
iv. The Reconstruction Begins .p. 32
v. Scott: Magician and Politician ........p.41
CHAPTER TWO
Reading Irresolution in Scott's Resolutions.
_i. Change and Progress............................... p.48
ii. Resisting the Happy Ending of Waverley p.54
iii. "The Lady of the Lake" and the Subversion of
Narrative. ...... .......p.68
iv. The Lady in "The Lady of the Lake"..............p.82
v. Conclusion.............. ................p.106
CHAPTER THREE
Guy Mannering: The Centrality of Margins
d^. Marginality as Subversive......... p.112
ii. The Subversion of Plot .p.116
iii. Paternalism, Paternity and the Marginal
Female........... ....... ............................ p. 1 22
iv
CHAPTER FOUR
Jeanie Deans; The Tidy Nice Scotch Body
i. Defining the Margins. ......... .p. 1 43
ii . Language, Gender and Subversion................. p. 159
iii. Re-addressing the Issue of "Otherness"... p.168
CHAPTER FIVE
John Galt and the Contemporary Influence of Scott.
i^. Galt and "internal Colonialism p. 179
ii. The Wily Scot........ .....p. 185
iii. Entailing the Future and the Past............ p.200
iv. Conclusion: Some Differences Between Galt and Scott
and an Important Similarity.......................p.211
CHAPTER SIX
Margaret Oliphant: The Tidy Nice Scotch Body Sixty
Years On.
i. The Decline of Scottish Literature from
1832... .............................. ................ p.219
ii. Margaret Oliphant and the Anxiety of the
Influenced . * .......... ..p. 22 9
iii. Kirsteen and Claustrophobia.................... p.24 3
iv. The Feminine Trajectory................. ....... .p. 257
v. The Library Window and the Entrapped Writer p.264
vi . Conclusion. ........................... ....p.272
v
CHAPTER ONE
The Construction of Scottish National Emblems in the
Nineteenth Century.
i_. Re-writing Scotland's Sorrows.
The emblems of Scotland are well-established and
well-known. The kilt, the tartan and the bagpipes speak
for a certain national identity in British Columbia
just as they do in Edinburgh. People with celtic
ancestry all over the world take pride in the customs
and badges of Scottish national heritage, seeking out
the tartan which, they believe, connects them by name
to a "clan": a club which is as bonding, as undeniable
and as nostalgic as a family, and as ancient as the
hills themselves. Yet far from being ancient emblems
for the whole nation of Scotland, the tartan and kilt
are comparatively modern inventions, and the Highlander
himself would have been considered by many of his
countrymen even two hundred years ago to be a member
1
of an anomalous minority— a bandit, in fact. The kilted
Highlander, playing his mournful pipes and with a long
history of valiant defeats behind him, was a conscious
construction of an early nineteenth century agency
whose function was to create in the eyes of the world
(and of Scotland itself) a unified national identity
for a nation which had historically been held together
not by a sense of itself so much as by a sense of its
otherness. England had been the agent of cultural
definition as well as political definition of Scotland:
Scotland was the "other," with all the self-limiting
restrictions that that term implies. The later
eighteenth century and early nineteenth century saw
a re-writing of those definitions.
Ernest Gellner in his discussion of emergent
nationalisms points out that "cultural/linguistic
difference and capacity to differentiate themselves
from others, which is such a handicap for individuals,
can be and often is eventually a positive advantage
for entire collectivities." Out of this handicap of
difference Scotland made for itself a new and
affirmative code of emblems by which it could be
defined. And while its economic future depended on
achieving a profitable relationship with Europe which
would not dissolve into subordination to England,
Scotland's cultural independence was based upon an
identity formed in part by political subordinations
I in the past.
Crucial to this process are the novels of Sir
Walter Scott where, I shall argue, the gendered
relationship between England and Scotland is re-figured.
The consistently less powerful of two countries is
apt to be characterized in feminine terms and these
terms are given inferior connotations— as, for example,
John Arbuthnot's figuring of England as the swaggering
elder brother to Scotland's impecunious sister in the
John Bull pamphlets (1712). Thus Scott's portrayal
of the virile but doomed Highlanders in works such
as "The Lady of the Lake" has a significance for
national identity. Scott is able to make his Scottish
figures almost too virile: dying because of their
masculine virtues of loyalty and bravery. He then
invests the feminine with virtues: virtues which can
seem nationally apt so that they can gracefully replace
the languishing masculine virtues as national emblems.
Jeanie Deans of Heart of Midlothian epitomizes a brisk
and affirmative femininity which is Scott's answer
to the debilitating trope of femininity used by history
and politics. If Scotland is female, then it is just
such a "tidy, nice Scotch body" as she, winning friends
through honesty and industriousness and finally
overcoming the corruption and bullying represented
by the men in the novel. By figuring Scotland in such
3
terms Scott answers the historical denigration of the
feminine position as weak, and also answers the
traditional English characterization of Scotland as
dirty or— as one early diarist puts it— "sluttish."
At the same time, Scotland is made to seem virile in
the idealized figure of the clansman. Scott paves the
way for a positive (feminine) future without losing
an idealised (masculine) past or the battle of the
sexes on either side.
Scott's conscious myth-making with regard to the
Highlands and the ill-fated rebellions of the
eighteenth-century had great and wide European appeal.
Not only was Scott responsible for this literary fabric,
but to a certain extent he was also responsible for
the more tangible trappings of Scottishness by the
1820s. In a practical sense he assisted the invention
of clan tartans in preparation for King George IV's
visit to Edinburgh (in his capacity as master of
ceremonies for the event) just as he constructed the
noble characteristics attributable to their wearers
in his fictions. The Scottish identity that was built
by Scott and during his lifetime, then, forms the basis
from which many later writers of the nineteenth century
perceived and modified their subject matter. This
literary and textual construction of Scottish national
identity is the subject of this dissertation.
ii. Scotland's Historical Relationship with England.
Scotland became an independent sovereign state
in the fourteenth century. Its relationship with England
for the next three centuries was often antagonistic,
and almost always England was the victor. England had
a stronger army than Scotland, but it also had more
luck. Perhaps the point at which Scotland's fortunes
seemed brightest was at the marriage of Mary Queen
of Scots and James Darnley, a young English nobleman
of very high birth. Favored in Europe and highly popular
at home, the young couple seemed to present a threat
not only to England's Queen Elizabeth but to the English
church also, since Mary was Roman Catholic. Queen Mary's
moment of potential was brief, however. The
circumstances surrounding Darnley's death, several
intrigues, the forces opposed to Catholicism and the
rival interests of various Scottish nobles as well
as the perpetual threat she presented to the English
throne eventually combined to remove her from the
Scottish throne. She spent eighteen years as her cousin
Elizabeth's prisoner in England before her execution
in 1587. Her son did, in fact, accede to the English
throne in 1603, becoming both King James VI of Scotland
and King James I of England. His accession accomplished
bloodlessly what might have been greatly feared in
another time, but in fact James I's accession to the
\
English throne had little impact on the government
of either country. It certainly did not subordinate
England in any way.
Although the nations were symbolically united
under one crown, they continued to be separately
governed until the Act of Union in 1707. Even after
the Union Scotland retained a separate university
system, banking system and legal system, and the strong
institution of the Presbyterian church ensured that
social issues such as poor relief, education, sexual
mores and worship were controlled separately as well.
The financial and trade advantages that the Act
of Union in 1707 brought with it were manifold, although
it is true that many of these were advantages primarily
to England. England became the largest free trade area
in the world and was thus at an advantage over France.
On the Scottish side the economy received a great boost
from the compensation of £40,000 received by the
shareholders of the Company of Scotland. By the 1720s
Glasgow was the chief port of the realm and a thriving
and rapidly growing city, thanks to the opening of
the colonial and plantation trade, particularly the
tobacco trade. In 1707 the Board of Trustees for
6
Fisheries and Manufacturers was established, thus
encouraging particularly the Scottish linen industry.
There was an increase in English investment in Scotland
and the Scottish trade in corn and cattle to England
thrived.
But on the whole the economic effects of the Union
were disappointing for the Scots. Only a minority of
businessmen enjoyed the benefits that came with
increased access to the colonial market, yet the
imposition of malt tax and excise duties hit everybody.
The malt tax outraged the Scots because the Treaty
of Union exempted Scotland from contributing to the
cost of England's war with Spain, yet the malt tax
was expressly for that purpose. The Act of Union
specified that taxes would be levied equally between
Scotland and England, but Scotland's barley crop yielded
a tiny fraction of that yielded by England's and
therefore an equal taxation was clearly most unfair.
After the Treaty of Utrecht the new Malt Tax Act was
not implemented in Scotland, but when in 1725 Walpole
proposed to introduce it there at half the English
rate there was a riot in Glasgow.
Due to the English Customs and Excise system
Scotland suffered additionally. This system effectively
prevented Scotland from exchanging agricultural and
7
fisheries products for continental manufactures. The
wool trade was curtailed in Scotland just as it had
been in Ireland to deny raw material to England's
rivals. There was a consequent decline in Scottish
wool prices, while Scotland suffered by a policy that
was designed to assist England's economy alone.
Meanwhile with regard to imports, Scotland had to engage
in contraband or buy English manufactures at a cost
3
higher than that on the continent. There were frequent
clashes between Scottish smugglers and government
officials, and the smugglers came to be regarded as
national heroes. The Porteous riots in Edinburgh which
form the background for Scott's Heart of Midlothian
were the culmination of these struggles.
Many Scots felt that the Act of Union deprived
Scotland of its distinctive national identity, and
many of the disaffected joined the Jacobite movement.
Scotland had manifestly become subordinate to England
economically and the link between the state of economic
subordination and a sense of cultural subordination
is strong.
In Internal Colonialism Michael Hechter defines
the relationship of a subordinate power to a
superordinate one and discusses the effects such a
I
relationship has on the psychology of the subordinate
i
nation.^ The term "internal colonialism" refers to
the way in which the subordinate nation comes to see
itself as inferior because it has been told that it
is, and comes to adopt towards itself the same
restrictive techniques that the superordinate power
adopted in order to maintain power over it. This
psychological circle of inferiority applies in many
respects to the relationship between Scotland and
England after the Union, and Hechter shows that the
relationship between Scotland and England fits his
model of colonialism.
According to Hechter the superordinate group will
ensure that only its own members have access to high
prestige positions and positions of power, and the
subordinated group— marked out by visible signs as
5
different— will be relegated to lesser positions.
Although this was not formally so in the case of
Scotland and England (compared to the colonies of the
British empire, for example) still there was an informal
divide which was keenly felt by the Scots of the
eighteenth century, and indeed the nineteenth and even
twentieth. The most significant signs of Scottishness
were of course audible rather than visible, but
nevertheless the Scottish accent was a significant
mark of difference and one which Scots were made to
9 i
feel marked them out as inferior. In the eighteenth
century the word "Scottish" was almost synonymous with
"rude." For some time after the Union there was pressure
on the Scottish nobility to anglicize their speech
and to educate their sons in the south if they were
to aspire to anything. Although Scotland now had its
representation in the British Houses of Parliament,
Sir John Clerk complained that the Scottish
representatives were "despised for their poverty,
ridiculed for their speech, sneered at for their
manners, and ignored." So even as Scotland gained
the right to speak it learned the cost of doing so.
For the Scots, to have a voice in Parliament was also
to have a silencing accent.
It was not until the late eighteenth century and
early nineteenth century that the debilitating effects
of "internal colonialism" began to give way to the
confident sense (for example in the poetry of Robert
Burns) that Scottish "otherness" might be voiced in
liberating ways, that the accent might affirm rather
than betray a difference.
During the nineteenth-century, Scotland became
a more economically integrated part of British
industrial society, producing great engineers and
scientific thinkers as well as material goods. Yet
1 0
the link between Scotland and its politically dominant
neighbour England could not become a simple one tending
to mutual economic advantage. Since 1707 the connection
had been fraught with resentment and regret, and
although by the 1850s railways were bringing the nations
together commercially, they were also the means by
which hordes of tourists came to view the turreted
remnants of the romantic past, stimulated by that very
sense of regret. On the reception of Scott's "The Lady
of the Lake" Scott's biographer J. G. Lockhart writes:
The whole country rang with the
praises of the poet— crowds set
off to view the scenery of Loch
Katrine, till then comparatively
unknown; as the book came out
just before the season for
excursion, every house and inn
in that neighbourhood was crammed
with a constant succession of
visitors. It is a well-ascertained
fact, that from the date of the
publication of "The Lady of the
Lake," the post-horse duty in
Scotland} rose in an extraordinary
degree.
Yet this traffic from England to Scotland in search
of spectacle was not entirely welcomed by the Scots.
Perhaps it emphasized for them the imbalance of power
which allowed the English to choose the way in which
they would regard Scotland: as a spectacle of myth
11
and romance or as a squalid and inferior northern
territory. In the face of a tide of fashionable
anglicisms in Scotland and evidence of English
superciliousness towards Scottishness in England, the
mid-nineteenth century saw the beginning of a sense
of national consciousness which united the peoples
of Scotland.
iii. Early Travellers and the "Othering" of Scotland.
Cultural denigration did not, of course, begin
with the Union. English travellers and journal-writers
had already recorded their impressions of Scotland
in terms that prepared English readers to consider
their northern neighbours as unpleasantly different
from themselves and as culturally inferior. In Henry
Grey Graham's words:
If the tourist entered Scotland by
way of Berwick and the Lothians, he
did not at first meet much to shock
him by ugly contrast. If he entered
by Dumfriesshire and the moors of
Galloway, he was at once filled with
dismay by the dismal change from his
own country— the landscape a bleak
and bare solitude, destitute of trees, ■
abounding in heather and morass and ^
barren hills; soil where cultivation i
was found only in dirty patches of ;
crops, on ground surrounded by heather
and bog; regions where the inhabitants j
I
I
I
1 2 I
spoke un uncouth dialect, were dressed
in rags, lived in hovels, and fed
on grain, with which he fed his horses;
and when night fell, and he reached
a town of dirty thatched huts, and
gained refuge in a miserable abode
that passed for an inn, only to get
a bed he could not sleep in, and fare
he could not e|tf his disgust was
inexpressible.
Much later in the eighteenth century travellers
learned to marvel at the wild scenery that was to be
found in Scotland, but to the earlier travellers craggy
rocks and wild expanses of heather were awful and ugly
to contemplate. Indeed, the Scots themselves seemed
to have little love of the grandeur of their native
habitat, ignoring grand views and preferring to build
their mansions in obscure and ugly places with some
practical advantage. The satisfaction of a degree of
shelter was presumably felt to be a kind of beauty
in itself, but to English eyes which regarded even
the natural splendour as appalling anyway, there was
little to commend about Scotland. A journal written
in 1629 by Lowther, Fallow and Mauson gives an early
account of how foreign Scotland was considered to be,
9
and how little the English felt that they knew xt.
And in 1677 Thomas Kirk records his dissatisfaction
with the country, especially as he experiences it
through the hostelries, which provided such a shocking
contrast to the clean, comfortable inns of England,
1 0
famous for their good food and drink.
Kirk and his party arrive in Turnbery quite late,
and seek lodging. They are dismayed to find that because
of the impromptu nature of their visit the room which
is available to them still has geese in it. Then:
We could neither get eggs, wine,
brandy, milk or spring water, but
only oat bread, and some muddy ale:
this we thought hard, but the good
wife started us yet more, and told
us that her two sons should lie in
the room with us; we shuffled them
off, and^patiently expected the
morning.
This is a sort of exploration through consumption,
which ultimately loses interest in the object of
discovery because of its failure to please. There is
the expectation in Kirk's account that certain foods
and drinks should be available to him because they
would be available in an English inn. He presumably
is not normally expected to eat or sleep in the company
of geese or boys, either. But while his irritation
at these conditions is understandable, it obscures
the picture of Scottish life that he would portray.
i
As usual in descriptions of the marginalized, absurd |
anecdotes come to illustrate central tendencies instead
i
1
*
of bizarre anomalies. The reasons for such poverty
of choice and local attitudes to it fail to appear,
as do other details of Scottish life. This is how
Scotland is being recorded for posterity— by foreign
visitors aghast at the state of their dinners. Scotland
comes to be defined by its lacks, by its differences
from England, and these differences are the negative
ones that strike an uncomfortable and irritable
traveller.
Writing shortly before the Union, Joseph Taylor
gives a fuller account of an Englishman's impressions
of Scotland in his journal, A Journey to Edenborough
[sic] in Scotland in 1705. Taylor comes to his discovery
mission armed with warnings and rumours:
By what I could gather from the
discourse of all persons I convers'd
with, I concluded X was going into
the most barb'rous country in the world;
everyone reckon'd our journey extremely
dangerous, and told us 'twould be
difficult to escape with our lives,
much less without the distemper of
the country.
Not surprisingly, experience begins to bear out
expectation. Taylor passes through small settlements
noting for example "nothing remarkable but only a cross
in the middle of the town, and the nastiness and ill
13
manners of the people." Before they arrive in
Edinburgh the travellers stop at an inn, which seems
to offer no more comfort to Taylor's party than Kirk
found at the inns he encountered. Taylor reports:
We had such sad Entertainment at this
place, and were put into such a dismall
hole of a room, that we began to find
the Country rather exceeded the
Character had heard of it, than
otherwise.
Like Kirk, Taylor finds himself to a large extent
judging through consumption, but he does at least
concede that poverty is the curse of those who inhabit
Scotland, not just those who visit it, and offers a
little sympathy for the Scots in the wake of the
1 5
devastating Darien Scheme failure. Discussing the
incident in which a Captain Greene's ship was
commandeered and its contents confiscated, Taylor
writes:
Tis no wonder why the Scots should
make this, and the Darien business,
the Subject of their Quarrel, for
they have very little trade, and so
were oblig'd by necessity to go a
privateering for [Captain Greene's]
ship, which was a considerable prize
in so poor a country.
Despite this concession to the Scottish side of this
controversy, however, Taylor has little time for the
Scots' own voices on the subject. He does hear their
complaints but does not include them. Rather than record
any interest in these expressions of anger, he
complains: "However this has given their dull Bards
an occasion to vent out some political malice in
barb'rous satyrs."17 Presumably these satires are
directed at the English: as an Englishman Taylor
exercises the power of the record-maker by pronouncing
them "barb'rous" and exempting them from his record.
Taylor s principal complaint about Scotland is
that it is dirty, and his disgust at the filth that
he encounters enters into his account even when it
is at its most scientific. He gives meticulous accounts
distances, comparative measures, prices, and
buildings in Edinburgh, and explains:
I have been thus tedious in my account
of Scotland, because the bad character
it lyes under, discourages most
Gentlemen from travelling thither,
but I can't conclude, without giving
a relation of the causes which makes
this Country so much despis'd by the
English, and here I need not go far
for observation, every street shows
the nastiness of the Inhabitants,
the excrements lye in heaps, and there
is not above one house of Office in
the Town, which might not be call'd
a house of Office itself, in a Morning
the Scent was so offensive, that we
were forc't to hold our Noses as we
past the streets, and take care where
we trod for fear of disobliging our
shoes, and to walk in the midle at
night, for fear of an accident on
our heads. The Lodgings are as nasty
as the streets, and wash't so seldom,
that the dirt is thick eno1 to be
par'd off with a Shovell, Every room
is well scented with a close stoole,
and the Master Mistress and Servants
lye all on a flour, like so many Swine
in a Hogsty; This with the rest of
their Sluttishness, is no doubt the
occasion of the Itch#0which is so
common amongst them.18
Taylor describes in detail his hypotheses regarding
the source of this "itch," and those of a Dr Bonomo
who finds that it is due to the eggs of "a minute litle
1 9
creature, in shape resembling a Tortoise."
(Co-incidentally , an English Captain describing the
city of Edinburgh in 1774 compares the shape of
Edinburgh to "a turtle, of which the castle is the
head, the high street the ridge of the back, the wynds
and closes the shelving sides and the palace of
2 0
Holyroodhouse the tail." Edinburgh seems to be its
own disease). Taylor writes:
Another cause of it may be in their way
of washing, They put their cloaths with
a little cows dung into a large tubb of
water, and then plucking their petticoats
up to their bellyes, get into the Tubb,
18
and dance about it to tread the cloaths,
instead of washing them with their hands,
and this the women doe in the open streets,
without any manner of shame or modesty.
In my chapters on Scott I shall examine how Scott
deals with this characterization of the Scots as unclean
and diseased because of their own "sluttishness,"
encapsulated as it is here in the image of an immodest
woman, exposed to her belly, treading cows dung into
her washing in a method which sacrifices decency without
gaining in efficiency. But in these early travellers'
accounts no answering voice is permitted: Scotland
is found to be dirty, therefore Scotland is dirty.
Edinburgh remained famous for its squalid living
conditions until the middle of the eighteenth century,
when at last the town began to spread out rather than
up, and people no longer lived in layers. Indeed,
conditions were still so unhealthy by the time of Walter
Scott's birth in 1771 that the five children his mother
bore before him all died in their infancy, while those
born after the family moved to George Square survived.
For the inhabitants of this city it was a place
of great interest, however. The poet Robert Fergusson
wrote affectionately about "Auld Reekie" and there
was a general feeling that, when the city became more
spread out and wholesome, it lost its character as
1 9
a sort of hotbed of eccentricity and creativity.
Members of the upper classes lived in the same
building— although not on the same storey— as working
class peple, and it was felt that such juxtapositions
gave the city some of its character. Odd juxtapositions
were indeed characterful: one eighteenthcentury judge,
Lord Gardenstone, was famous for sharing his home— bed
and board included— with a fond pig. Another pig was
once captured by the future Duchess of Gordon who rode
it through the streets while her sister beat it with
a stick. Eccentricity was not incompatible with the
erudite life of the city: the great philosopher and
historian Adam Fergusson was obsessed with the
temperature of his house and wore a great fur coat
22
indoors. After the Union, when Edinburgh became a
far duller place, people looked back with nostalgia
to the time when the city periodically hosted the
comparative splendour and dazzle of the finest people
in the country. But these are the voices of Edinburgh
from the inside, and to the earlier English diarists
they are inaudible.
Joseph Taylor's 1705 account of Scotland, while
it provides some factual information on distances,
prices and so on, remains very much an outsider's view;
resolutely an English one. While he is in Edinburgh,
20
Taylor stays at an "ordinary" kept by an Englishman
named Snow, it "being the best house in Town, and the
2 3
usuall Quarters of most Englishmen who resort hither."
This cultural timidity is confirmed by Taylor's
enthusiastic account of Sir Alexander Brand and his
home— a rare enthusiasm in this record of what seems
otherwise to have been a trying trip. Of this encounter
Taylor writes: "We spent this day with greater pleasure,
and satisfaction than any we had done since we arriv'd
in Scotland," and Taylor's account of the gentleman
perhaps suggests the reason for this enthusiasm:
[Sir Alexander gave] very civill and
genteele expressions of his respect
for the English Nation . . . his house
as well as his entertainment seem'd
to us the most like the English fashion
of any we saw in Scotland. The gardens
were very neat, and encompast w^h
a pretty Grove of trees ....
i
Sir Alexander graciously tells the travellers that
they cannot admire his home having seen so many fine
palaces in England, and the day is concluded with a
little singing on the part of the ladies of the house
and some dancing. But Taylor records:
i
I must confesse whilst they entertain'd
us with the Scotch Songs, 'twas very
diverting, but when one of the Ladyes
21
sung an English Song of Purcell's,
with a Scotch Tone and Pronunciation
I had much ado to forbear laughing.
For Joseph Taylor, then, the most admirable aspect
of Scotland is that which is most like England— and
yet it is important that Sir Alexander acknowledge
a difference and that this difference is, on his side,
simply inferiority. To have a home styled after the
English fashion is just good taste and even so the
comparative splendour of the real English thing has
to be understood. Scottish songs are diverting, but
for a Scot to attempt an English song marks out the
difference so starkly that the result is ridiculous.
Acceptable difference between the cultures is perceived
as a question of the degree to which the Scots are
like the English, and ultimately Taylor is so repulsed
by the ways in which he perceives them to be inferior
(in matters of hygiene and so on) that he fails to
observe any other difference.
Even after the Union little happened to dispel
the mutual antagonism and resentment between Scotland
and England. The sixteen representative peers and sixty
members of Parliament made their difficult and expensive
way from Scotland to London, where they found that
their nationality and the English prejudice against
22
it precluded them from any of the dignity or respect
to which they had been accustomed in their own country.
Henry Graham collects together the following
contemporary comments:
"it was one of the melancholyist sights
to any that have any sense of an
antient nobility to see them going
throu for votes and making partys,
and giving their votes to others who
once had their own vote." Wodrow's
Analecta, i.308.
'*In the beginning of this month
[September 1711] I hear a generall
dissatisfaction our nobility that
was at last Parliament have at their
treatment at London. They complean
they are only made use of as tools
among the English, and cast by when
their party designs are over." Ibid.
i.348.
In great dudgeon in 1712 the Scots
members met together and expressed
"high resentment of the uncivil haughty
treatment they met with from the
English." Lockhart's Papers, i.417.
Principal Robertson remarked to Dr
Somerville, 'Our members suffered
immediately after the Union. The want
of the English language and their
uncouth manners were much against
them. None of them were men of parts,
and they never opened their lips but
on Scottish business, and then said
little.' Lord Onslow (formerly speaker)
said to him, 'Dr Robertson, they were
oddlooking dull men. I remember them
well.'" Somerville's Own Life and
Times, p271.
Thus the Scots were represented in England, with
little amity on either side of the cultural divide. !
[
23 !
Clearly, few English people were sufficiently interested
in the problem to break down these national barriers,
and the Scots who found themselves in England were
disabled by them, and powerless to break them down
themselves.
The antipathy between the nations had not
significantly abated by the time Samuel Johnson made
his famous foray into Scotland in 1773. Although
Johnson's quips against the Scots are now famous and
strike the modern reader as outrageous as well as
humorous (and humorous because they are outrageous),
they reflect a common attitude still prevalent in the
later eighteenth century rather than an eccentric one.
Johnson's trip to Scotland dispelled much of his
prejudice since, for example, he found people were
better educated than he expected. But he also found
some justification for his pre-judgement that the Scots
were inferior to the English in matters such as farming
techniques, domestic comforts and of course hygiene.
One of the first observations that Johnson makes
is one that is familiar from earlier diarists— he is
struck by the lack of trees that he sees around him:
The Lowlands of Scotland had once
undoubtedly an equal portion of woods
with other countries. Forests are
every where gradually diminished,
24
as architecture and cultivation prevail
by the increase of people and the
introduction of arts. But I believe
few regions have been denuded like
this, where many centuries must have
passed in waste without the least
thought of future supply. Davies
observes in his account of Ireland,
that no Irishman had ever planted
an orchard. For that negligence some
excuse might be drawn from an unsettled
state of life, and the instability
of property; but in Scotland possession
has long been secure, and inheritance
regular, yet it may be doubted whether
before the Union any Lowlander betwen
Edinburg^ and England had ever set
a tree.
The number of trees was a main difference in
landscape between Scotland and England, but it acquires
a moral aspect in the eyes of an Englishman because
it is held to reflect the inattention of Scots to their
surroundings— to life itself, indeed. There are no
trees because the Scots have neglected to plant any,
and there is no excuse for this neglect. In his
description of Sir Alexander Brand's home, the presence
of trees in the garden pleases Joseph Taylor because
they are an aesthetic addition and because they make
the garden look more English. This conflation of
aestheticism, anglicization and morality is confirmed
in Johnson.
Unlike the earlier diarists I have discussed,
however, Johnson begins to show where the Scots'
25
interests do lie, instead of merely deploring the areas
where they do not. On the whole he is impressed by
the spiritual and intellectual life of Scotland,
observing that there has been a most diligent pursuit
of the liberal arts since the sixteenth century. Yet
for him, these achievements are belittled by the fact
that the Scots have neglected practical arts and
creature comforts:
Yet men thus ingenious and inquisitive
were content to live in total ignorance
of the trades by which human wants are
supplied, and to supply them by the
grossest means. 'Til the Union made them
acquainted with English manners, the
culture of their lands was unskilful,
and their domestick life unformed; their
tables were coarse as the feasts of
Esquimaux, and their houses2filthy as
the cottages of Hottentots.
Johnson is most particularly disturbed by the
fact that the Scots commonly do not wear shoes. He
is told that they did not in fact know how to make
shoes before Cromwell's soldiers showed them how to
do this and to grow kail (a kind of cabbage— the Scots
had known no green vegetable before this). Life without
I
kail he finds unimaginable, and he also remarks I
1
perplexedly that "Tall boys, not otherwise meanly j
!
dressed, run without [shoes] in the streets and in i
26
the islands; the sons of gentlemen pass several of
29
their first years with naked feet." The issue of
barefootedness re-emerges in Scott's Heart of
Midlothian, , where his use of this marker of cultural
difference and his defence of it— presumably in response
to such objectifying perplexities as
Johnson's— illustrates one of the ways in which Scott
answers such othering perspectives.
For Johnson the Union was unequivocally a boon
to the Scots:
Since they have known that their
condition was capable of improvement,
their progress in useful knowledge
has been rapid and uniform. What
remains to be done they will quickly
do, and then wonder, like me, why
that which was so necessary and so
easy was so long delayed. But they
must be for ever content to owe to
the English that elegance and culture
which, if they had been vigilant and
active, perhaps th^gEnglish might
have owed to them.
Like other English travellers before him, Johnson
gives dismayed accounts of sleeping on hay rather than
in the filthy beds offered by the inns, and he
frequently emphasises the dirt that he encounters
everywhere. Johnson is irritated by the dirtiness of
public buildings and the backwardness of farming
techniques as well as the paucity of trees. All of
these of course implicitly are compared with England.
Negative "otherness" is catalogued as characteristic;
positive "otherness" is a surprise.
And Johnson is pleasantly surprised, as he ventures
into the Highlands— and thus deeper into Scotland than
his compatriots— by the people he meets there. At Anoch
he is surprised to find that his host has scholarly
books (indeed, he finds books in more than one language
in all houses in the Hebrides), that his daughter is
a "gentlewoman" and that when these Highlanders speak
English they speak it with "little of the tone by which
31
a Scotchman is distinguished." Here the complacence
of his ethnocentric perspective is challenged by the
host's irritation that Johnson would expect him not
to have books or not to speak with "propriety," and
by the realization that not all Scots can be lumped
together in a generalized judgement: the Highlanders
despise the Lowlanders as "mean and degenerate." The
English perspective is not the only perspective, and
the Lowlanders are not the only Scots.
Johnson's. English naivete regarding the so-called
emptying of the Highlands is also treated brusquely
by his host. When he asks if these miserable emigrants
would stay at home "if they were well-treated," the
28
host replies with irritation that "No man willingly
32
left his native country" — an expression of the sort
of fidelity to land which is echoed in, for instance,
Scott's Guy Mannering (in particular by the gypsies)
but which seems mysterious to English travellers who
cannot imagine a more tolerant way of regarding this
land than their own.
Whilst in the Highlands and islands Johnson
discusses the effects of the rebellion of 1745, and
although he dismisses the Highland clans as brutal
(like all mountain people), his analysis is a mixture
of imperialist dismissal and a sort of romantic regard
which foreshadows the european interest in the "noble
savage" and the intensely romantic reconstruction of
the Highlander in Scott's novels. Of the pre-rebellion
clansmen Johnson writes:
The inhabitants [of the Hebrides]
were for a long time perhaps not
unhappy; but their content was a muddy
mixture of pride and ignorance, an
indifference for pleasures which they
did not know, a blind veneration for
their chiefs, and a strong conviction
of their own importance.
Yet despite this imperialist portrayal of the clansman
as a sort of pre-cognizant herd, there is a certain
nostalgia in Johnson's reflections on the effects of
29
the suppression of these peoples following the
rebellion. The clans have lost their character, their
temper its ferocity; their military ardour is
extinguished, their dignity of independence
depressed— these are Johnson's descriptive terms. Under
the "vindictive conqueror" these people are much
crushed, and Johnson remarks that the change in their
dress (since the kilt, the dirk and other forms of
national attire were banned) is a constant reminder
of their oppression.
A far more subjective response to the history
of the 1745 rebellion is found in Boswell's account
of the trip. This is his response to the stories told
by a soldier staying at their inn, who joined the
Highland army at Fort Augustus and fought with it until
after the battle of Culloden:
As he narrated the particulars of that
ill-advised, but brave attempt, I could
not refrain from tears. There is a certain
association of ideas in my mind upon that
subject, by which I am strongly affected.
The very Highland names, or the sound
of the bagpipe, will stir my blood, and
fill me with a mixture of melancholy and
respect for courage; with pity for an
unfortunate and superstitious regard for
antiquity, and thoughtless inclination
for war; in short, with a crowd of
sensations with whq^h sober rationality
has nothing to do.
30
In these words, Boswell expresses some of the
conflicting responses to the history of the Highlanders
which were, I think, to make Scott's stories so
evocative to his readers half a century later. But
in addition to melancholy, respect and a regard for
antiquity Boswell expresses a sense of shame about
his compatriots' rebellion which is absent— or at least
unrecognizable in that form--in Scott. Later in his
journal he writes that there never should have been
a rebellion, but that he admires "the fervour of
35
loyalty" with which the clans enlisted. At first
Boswell disassociates himself from the Highland
rebellion of 1745 in every way except emotional— that
"crowd of sensations with which sober rationality has
nothing to do"— and at length he is even able to
distance himself from emotion by admiring it rather
than feeling it himself. The Highland names and the
sound of the bagpipes are signifiers for a certain
national identity with which Boswell is unwilling to
acknowledge any affinity. He is not, of course, a
Highlander himself and so this lack of specific affinity
is not surprising, but I would suggest that Boswell's
ambivalence towards this Scottish uprising owes more
to the lack of national confidence the
31
eighteenth-century Scotsman living in England must
inevitably feel.
For Boswell there was not yet a figuring of the
Highland rebellion that could make sympathy with it
in any way respectable, and indeed Scottishness itself
was only barely respectable. The figuring of Scotland
was still in the English domain, and faced with this
enormous history of cultural hegemony (and especially
in the presence of Johnson) it is not surprising that
Boswell's struggling sense of national pride collapses
rather easily. Thus he talks of a "superstitious regard
for antiquity, and thoughtless inclination for war,"
reflecting the English and imperialist perspective
that the motives of these people must be irrational,
thoughtless, rather than grounded in a different set
of creeds. Superstition was held to be the salient
feature of Scottish thought.
iv. The Reconstruction Begins.
In the face of this accumulated evidence against
the Scots, how were they to come to any sense of their
own culture? One of the characteristics of the colonial
situation is that the will and self-esteem of the native
are undermined by the conviction fostered by the ruling
metropolitan elite that native culture is inferior.
In Internal Colonialism Michael Hechter writes of the
native:
If he is defined as barbarian, perhaps
he should try to reform himself by
becoming more cosmopolitan. Failure
to win a high position within the
colonial structure tends to be blamed
on personal inadequacy, rather than
any particular.jghortcomings of the
system itself.
Hechter shows how the circumstances of the Celts
in Britain qualify them to be considered as subalterns
in a colonial situation. I think that before the
beginning of the nineteenth century— indeed, before
Walter Scott— there was little to encourage Scots to
think of themselves as a nation in other than the
negative terms by which they were defined through
English eyes. Indeed there is little evidence to suggest
that they thought of themselves as a nation as such
before the 1850s at all, although the English did.
Such negative "othering" perspectives on Scotland as
those I have been discussing here can be found in the
writings of Scott's contemporaries, and I think this
is as a result of the colonial relationship that Hechter
describes.
33
Again, historical studies show that is a common
occurrence for a colonized nation to create its own
definitive culture contemporaneously in answer to
cultural superciliousness on the part of the dominant
nation:
Hence, if at some point acculturation
did not occur because the advantaged
group would not permit it, at a later
time acculturation may be inhibited
by the desires of the disadvantaged
group for independence from a situation
increasingly regarded as oppressive.
This accounts for the cultural
"rebirths" so characteristic of
societies undergoing nationalistic
ferment. It is not that these groups
actually uncover evidence of their
cultural past as an independent people;
most often such culture is created
contemporaneously to legitimate demands
for the present-day goal of
independence, or tl^ achievement of
economic equality.
As Ernest Gellner says, "Dead languages can be
revived, traditions invented, quite pristine purities
38
restored." Scotland seems to have begun to establish
the route to this national identity early in the
t
eighteenth century. It was to be a nostalgic route,
avoiding the humiliations of the present by recreating
a dignified past. Twelve years after the Union, a j
; literary fragment of 216 lines was published, apparently ;
’ I
part of an ancient celtic poem called "Hardyknute."
34
This was in fact the creation of an aristocratic and
literary lady, Lady Wardlaw, but its true— and
contemporary— authorship remained a secret for over
a generation. This "ancient" fragment was greeted with
great enthusiasm not only in England but on the
continent also. While the new Scottish representatives
in London found themselves despised and ignored for
the way they spoke, the Scottish language was granted
great dignity in its (apparent) antiquity.
James Macpherson followed in the wake of
"Hardyknute" with his poems of "Ossian," a magnificently
popular "discovery" which also captured the hearts
of Scots, English and European readers on their
publication during the 1760s. Macpherson affected an
archaic style in which to write his epic poems and
then presented them to a willing public as translations
of an ancient text that he had found. He was aided
in this forgery by the apparently disinterested Critical
Dissertation on the subject written by one John
Macpherson, the minister of Sleat. In fact the two
worked in collusion. "Ossian" claimed a whole mythic
history for the Scots and a heroic identity. It also
claimed that Earse, the language of the Gaels, and
its contingent oral traditions, had travelled from
Scotland to Ireland rather than from Ireland to Scotland
as had been previously (and correctly) thought. This
gave Scotland the considerable dignity of being the
mother of celtic literature. Hugh Trevor Roper calls
this the first of three stages in "the creation of
an independent Highland tradition, and the imposition
of that new tradition, with its outward badges, on
3 9
the whole Scottish nation." Indeed, the Macphersons
succeeded in making the Scottish Highlands— previously
despised by not only the inhabitants of the Lowlands
of Scotland but also those of Ireland as a sort of
scruffy, lawless relative— celebrated throughout Europe
for its beautiful literary past. Again, the Scottish
tongue might find itself beleagured in Scotland and
the Scottish accent despised in England, but something
could be done for the popularity of an idea of Scotland
by inventing an "ancient" linguistic artefact about
language.
Walter Scott himself knew "Hardyknute" by heart
as a child, and loved the Ossian poems, even though
by his adulthood both had pretty conclusively been
proven to be hoaxes. Scott himself wrote a learned I
essay for publication in the Edinburgh Review in 1805 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I
rejecting the claim that they were genuine. And yet
in this very essay Trevor-ROper locates the second
of the stages in the creation of the Highland tradition, j
i
\
36 I
i
in the assertion that the inhabitant of the Highlanders
in the third century A. D. had worn "a tartan philibeg."
According to Trevor-Roper, this "confident assertion"
of Scott's is surprising because it is the first claim
in history for the tartan philibeg as an ancient item
4 0
of Highland dress, and it is a fallacious one.
The history of the kilt and the tartan is now
41
well-documented: the kilt, or philibeg, was invented
by an Englishman, Thomas Rawlinson, some time shortly
after 1726. Employing teams of Highlanders to work
for his iron-ore plant, Rawlinson became aware of the
inconvenience of their customary dress, which was a
plaid worn over the shoulder and belted, so that it
formed a short skirt reaching half-way down the thigh.
Rawlinson modified this garment for his employees and
by the rebellion of 1745 it had become the customary
dress of the Highlanders— so much so that it was
specifically named in the act of parliament which banned
Highland dress after the rebellion. Trevor-Roper sums
up the ironies of the real history of the kilt compared
to the symbolic value it has acquired internationally
over the years, and indeed acquired very rapidly in
Scotland itself in the eighteenth century:
i
I
We may thus conclude that the kilt is
a purely modern costume, first designed,
37 !
I
: ____________________________________________________ I
and first worn, by an English Quaker
industrialist, and that it was bestowed
by him on the Highlanders in order not
to preserve their traditional way of life
but to ease its transformation: to bring
them out4^f the heather and into the
factory.
Just as the kilt is a modern invention, so is
that other "traditional" feature of Highland dress,
the clan tartan. Trevor-Roper's article gives a full
account of the history of this item. He shows that
far from being the badge by which the Highlander
traditionally showed his clan membership, the
designation of individual tartans to individual clans
was made in a conscious fabrication of "tradition"
during the preparations for King George IV's visit
to Edinburgh in 1822. Prior to this, tartan cloth had
had no clan significance, but it gained significance
as a mark of Highland solidarity and a beleagured
historic artefact to be protected against English
obliteration when it was banned after the 1745
rebellion. It was certainly regarded as such by the
Highland Society founded in London in 1778. Although
by law Highland customs were forbidden in Scotland,
this group of mainly Highland noblemen and soldiers
were able to meet together in London
in that garb so celebrated as having
been the dress of their Celtic
ancestors, and on such occasions at
least to speak the emphatic language,
to listen to the delightful music,
to recite the ancient poetry, and
to observe the^^eculiar customs of
their country.
The Highland Society was in collusion with William
Wilson and Son, a cloth-manufacturing company, when
they drew up a chart of tartans and matched them to
clans during the preliminary arrangements for George
IV*s visit. The Highland Society "certified” these
tartans and created spontaneously an ancient history
for them. As well as being responsible for much
conscious fabrication of Highland traditions
(Trevor-Roper points out the circular nature of their
involvement with Macpherson's Ossian) this group was
largely responsible for the repeal in 1782 of the act
banning Highland dress in Scotland.
From this point on these newly legalized items
became celebrated symbols for all Scots and not just
for Highlanders.
In 1820 the Celtic Society of Edinburgh was formed,
expressly "to promote the general use of the ancient
44
Highland dress in the Highlands." There was apparently
no irony in beginning this promotion by the young
professional members of the society wearing it
39
themselves in the Lowland city of Edinburgh. The
enthusiastic secretary of this organization was Walter
Scott, and when King George IV made his visit to
Edinburgh in 1822 Scott was master of ceremonies for
the entire event. By this time the Waverley novels
were already famous, and in his arrangements for the
royal visit Scott seems to have been bringing to life
and making real the fictions he had made popular in
his novels. Highlanders were to be prominent in the
procedure. Trevor-Roper writes:
Imprisoned by his fanatical Celtic
friends, carried away by his own
romantic Celtic fantasies, Scott was
determined to forget historic Scotland,
his own Lowland Scotland, altogether.
The royal visit, he declared, was
to be "a gathering of the Gael.'* So
he pressed the Highland chiefs to
come with their "tail" of followers
and pay homage to their king. "Do
come and bring half-a-dozen or
half-a-score of clansmen," he wrote
to one such chief, "so as to look
like an island chief, as you are
. . . Highlanders what he will
best like to see."
Whether or not he was "fanatical" Scott must have
gained great satisfaction from seeing Scotland
represented by the mythic version of the Highlander
which he had really shaped and made popular by his
novels. The acceptance of this myth is astonishing.
King George himself donned a kilt and pink tights for
the celebration, and although as J. G. Lockhart
4 6
records there were some people who recognized the
absurdity of this at the time, the popular imagination
was sufficiently conditioned by the cult of the noble
savage to admire the splendid garb of the Highlander
as the cultural representative of romantic Scotland,
And it seems that whereas the Scots of the eighteenth
century would have been perplexed to find the Highlander
represented in this way, by the early nineteenth century
so much had been done to glorify this hitherto humble
inhabitant of the mountains, that if the nation as
a whole should seek a "cultural rebirth" then he was
a suitable symbol and agent of it.
v. Scott: Magician and Politician.
Nostalgia casts in a positive and coherent light
distinctive features which can be constructed as
Scottish emblems. Historically the philibeg and the
pipes had only tangential significance to the
Highlander, and the Highlander himself was only one
among many and varied types inhabiting Scotland. Through
his fictions, his historical writings and his efforts
with the Historical Society Sir Walter Scott illuminated
41
these disparate objects and characters in such a way
that they acquired a voluble coherence of their own,
telling the story of a historic Scotland which, in
turn, came to represent Scotland generally, as a nation.
Thus it was that Scotland achieved the cultural
"rebirth" necessary to its sense of statehood in the
early nineteenth century, when England seemed to be
oppressively asserting its domination economically,
politically and culturally. And Scott was essential
to this rebirth.
By 1826 Scott was ready to write overtly on the
issue of Anglo— Scottish relations in "The Letters
of Malachi Malagrowther. In these papers he made
the point that England had ignored Scotland when
Scotland was poor, but started to intervene politically
as soon as Scotland began to show signs of wealth.
"A spirit of proselytism has of late shown itself in
England for extending the benefits of their system,
in all its strengths and weakness, to a country, which
has been hitherto flourishing and contented under its
4 8
own." In "Malachi Malagrowther" Scott finds a voice
for his injured sense of national pride. The liberty
to express these feelings comes largely as a result
of building that sense of national pride earlier in
his career. From the nostalgic remnants of myth and
42
history Scott effected Scotland's cultural rebirth,
and thus strengthened Scotland in real political
49
terms.
Scott's historic role is therefore complex- When
he compiled his "Border Minstrelsy," collecting examples
of the ancient oral ballads of Scotland before literacy
and time destroyed them, Scott seems perhaps not to
have considered that his duties as a historian included
collecting the artefacts as he heard them. He made
his own additions and amendations apparently without
demarcation, preferring aesthetics to historic validity,
and rather following in the footsteps of Lady Wardlaw
and James Macpherson than breaking new ground as a
conservationist and historian. Again, it is the
sentiment of the past that matters here, rather than
the veracity of the record of it. Scott was concerned
with a strong and coherent image of Scotland, and to
effect this contemporaneous cultural re-birth he turned
to myth, history and imagination, rather than the
definitions of Scotland made by the English.
43
NOTES
1. See Hugh Trevor Roper, "The Invention of Tradition:
The Highland of Scotland," in The Invention of
Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Range
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
2. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 62.
3. Frank McLynn, The Jacobites (London: Routledge Kegan
Paul, 1985), p. 75.
4. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic
Fringe in British National Development 1536-1966
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
5. Ibid., p. 9.
6. Sir John Clerk, quoted by Neil McCallum, in A Small
Country: Scotland 1700-1830 (Edinburgh: James Thin,
1983). I have also found exactly these words in the
text of Henry Grey Graham, The Social Life of Scotland
in the Eighteenth Century Vol. I (London: Adam and
Charles Black, 1899), but without reference to Clerk.
7. j. G. Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (London:
Dent, 1969), p. 211.
8. Graham (see note 6), p. 2.
9. C. Lowther, Mr R. Fallow, Peter Manson, Our Journall
into Scotland A. D. 1629 (Edinburgh: David Douglas,
1894).
10. Thomas Kirk, in Tours in Scotland in 1677 & 1681
by T.Kirk and Ralph Thoresby, ed. P. Hume Brown
(Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1892).
11. Kirk, p. 47.
12. Joseph Taylor, A Journey into Edenborough in
Scotland in 1705 (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1903).
13. Ibid., p. 96.
14. Ibid., p. 98.
15. The Darien Scheme was an attempt by Scots to form
a colony in Darien, Panama, in order to establish a
foreign market for their own exports. The scheme was
a disaster, and after it had claimed many lives and
44
fortunes it finally failed in 1704. The failure was
due to many factors (climate being an important one)
but was popularly attributed to English mis-management
or treachery.
16. Taylor, p. 125.
17. Ibid., p. 126.
18. Ibid., p. 133.
19. Ibid., p. 135.
20. Edward Topham, quoted by David Daiches, in Sir
Walter Scott and his World (New York: Viking Press,
1971) p. 12.
21. Taylor, p. 136.
22. For these and other amusing anecdotes about
Edinburgh's most eccentric inhabitants, see Mary
Cullinan, Susan Ferrier (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1984) pp. 4-7.
23. Taylor, p. 101.
24. Ibid., p. 130.
25. Ibid., p. 132.
26. Graham, p31N. The idiosyncratic pagination is Henry
Graham's.
27. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands
of Scotland and James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour
to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., ed. Allan
Wendt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965).
28. Johnson, p. 20.
29. Ibid., p. 20.
30. Ibid., p. 21.
31. Ibid., p. 26.
32. Ibid., p. 28.
33. Ibid., p. 67.
34. Boswell, p202.
35. Ibid., p. 246. 45
36. Hechter, p. 39, apparently paraphrasing Philip
Mason, Prospero's Magic (1962) and Albert Memni
Colonizer and Colonized (1967).
37. Ibid., p. 39, paraphrasing David C. Gordon, History
and Self-determination in the Third World (1971).
38. Gellner, p. 56.
39. Trevor-Roper, p. 16.
40. Ibid., p. 18.
41. Trevor-Roper mentions J. Telfer Dunbar, History
of the Highland Dress (1962).
42. Trevor-Roper, p. 25.
43. From Sir John Sinclair, An Account of the Highland
Society of London (1813) quoted in Trevor-Roper, p.
26.
44. Colonel David Stewart, founder of the Society,
quoted in Trevor-Roper, p. 29.
45. Trevor-Roper, p. 30.
46. John G. Lockhart, Scott's biographer and son-in-law,
was himself amongst those who found the proceedings
incongruous, particularly the spectacle of the king
of the realm in pink tights and the clothes of a
"bandit."
47. Walter Scott, The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther
ed. Paul H. Scott (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh
Press, 1981).
48. Ibid., p.9.
49. About a barbarian finding himself in modern society
Scott asks:
"Will the simple and unsophisticated
being, we ask ourselves, be more
inclined to reverence us who direct
the thunder and lightning by our command
of electricity— control the wind by
our steam engines . . . or take us
as individuals and despise the
effeminate child of social policy whom
46
the community have deprived of half
his rights— who dare not avenge a blow
without having recourse to the
constable— who like a pampered jade
cannot go 30 miles a day without a
halt (my italics)." Scott, Miscellaneous
Prose Works Vol. 18, p. 356.
In this question, which is ostensibly about the
individual and the community, some of Scott's underlying
suppositions about the past, the nation and gender
emerge. It is interesting to me that even here the
notion of a female who cannot sustain a long walk is
introduced here as weak, clearly pre-figuring her
antithesis, Jeanie Deans, who comes to solve so many
of the anxieties inherent in this passage.
47
CHAPTER TWO
Reading Irresolution in Scott's Resolutions.
_i. Change and Progress.
Ambivalence in Scott is usually, figured as a split
between a pragmatic approval of Scotland's union with
England and a romantic regret for Scotland's lost
past— in particular its lost causes. Scott wrote to
his friend Lady Clephane in 1813:
Seriously, I am very glad I did not
live in 1745 for though as a lawyer
I could not have pleaded Charles's
right and as a clergyman I could
not have prayed for him yet as a
soldier I would I am sure against
the convictions of my better reason
have fought for^him even to the bottom
of the gallows.
The ambivalence expressed here is more than
political, clearly. It is the divide between the present
and the past, between reason and passion. Moreover,
the split is between the word (the plea of the lawyer,
the prayer of the clergyman) and action: the very split,
in short, between the author and his material. To
me, these are irreconcileable schisms and they
48
are what motivate the novels— but so do the anxieties
inherent in them. To Alexander Welsh, however,
reconciliation is possible: "The emotional values of
the Highland world intrigued Scott: in'his romance
he constructed a fable by which these values could
be enjoyed in the very act of reaffirming the claims
of society." For Welsh, the endings of Scott's novels
always consist of a compromise which is, in effect,
a conciliatory attitude towards the Union: Scott's
final resolution is always conservative and explanatory,
supportive of the way things have turned out to be.
For many critics, the endings of Scott's novels
represent compromise and political conservatism. My
argument is with this idea of the ending as somehow
speaking louder than the content of a narrative. As
D. A. Miller writes:
Once the ending is enshrined as an
all-embracing cause in which the
elements of a narrative find their
ultimate justification, it is
difficult for analysis to assert
anything short of total coherence.
One is barred even from suspecting
possible discontinuities between
closure and the narrative movement
preceding it, not to mention possible
contradictions ^nd ambiguities within
closure itself.
As the readings in this chapter will show, by
questioning the very resolution of Scott's endings
49
a sense of the anxiety of nostalgia emerges which might
otherwise be obscured.
Instead of a conciliatory attitude to the status
quo, I think Scott expresses reservations about it.
Time and again, he gives voice to the subordinated,
shows interest in the overlooked. These characters
Scott finds "narratable" to use D. A. Miller's term:
what they do not or cannot narrate becomes the narrative
itself, working at apparent odds with an ending which
might seem to obscure them. But it is in these
characters and issues that the kernels of Scottish
cultural identity are to be found, and this I think
is Scott's chief concern. He did not merely wish to
preserve a style of life swiftly passing or make a
record of types of people. I think these certainly
are among his purposes, but also I think Scott created
for Scotland a fictive national character which could
withstand political subjugation with dignity.
Here is an often-quoted passage from Scott's
introduction to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
(1802), the collection of traditional ballads and songs
which testify to Scott's enduring scholarly interest
in historiography;
In the Notes and occasional
Dissertations, it has been my object
50
to throw together, perhaps without
sufficient attention to method, a
variety of remarks, regarding popular
superstitions, and legendary history,
which, if not now collected, must
soon have been totally forgotten.
By such efforts, feeble as they are,
I may contribute somewhat to the
history of my native country; the
peculiar features of whose manners
and character are daily melting and
dissolving into those of her sister
and ally. And, trivial as may appear
such an offering, to the manes of
a kingdom, once proud and independent,
I hang it upon her altar with a
mixture of feelings, whi^h I shall
not attempt to describe.
This is an eloquent expression of Scott's
intentions, but also a revealing one. The appalling
thing, for Scott, is that Scottish cultural
individuality could "melt" or "dissolve": the choice
of these words indicates a sense of powerlessness in
the face of something occurring without struggle.
Scott's refusal to describe his "mixture of feelings"
is suggestive of a great self-consuming energy of
emotion. This is a sort of undercurrent or controlled
threat of subversion that I want to show is often
present in Scott. Scotland's pride and independence
in the past is contrasted with this melting and
dissolving in the present, and the gendered relation
between the two countries (sisters) seems almost forced,
in order to allow that they might be allies. Melting
51
into sisterhood is a far less alarming collusion than
melting into marriage, or brother-sisterhood. Yet even
the choice of sisterhood over the alternative metaphors
indicates some sublimated anxiety on Scott's part,
and this is the anxiety I wish to examine.
Because the Union with England in 1707 had occurred
without a battle, without bloodshed, and on grounds
of (apparent) mutual interest, and because subsequent
to that union Scotland had found itself subordinated
in various ways, there is the fear in Scott that the
union has feminized Scotland. Scott cannot change
political history, but he can affect cultural perception
(and indeed clearly did so in other more overt ways).
But if Scotland is to be feminine, then Scott will
present a femininity quite different from the uneducated
and indecently attired Edinburgh housewife described,
5
for example, by Joseph Taylor. And through his
portrayal of the Highlanders, such as Roderick Dhu
of "The Lady of the Lake" for whom passion is action,
or the silent and faithful clansmen in Waverley and
even the gentler Rob Roy, Scott is able to figure
Scotland's virility dramatically. If they must be
overcome, it is their own very masculinity that finally
dooms the Highlanders: their brave loyalty to their
chief and their fierce adherence to their warrior code.
Scott achieved much with this depiction of the Highland
52-
noble savage, and not least of these achievements is
the portrayal of Scotland as a potent, masculine force
which, if it finally must concede to a somewhat
feminized political position, is nevertheless preserved
with dignity in a nostalgic, untouchable past.
Whether this preservation is dignified or not,
however, depends upon how the hero is read, and how
the ending of the novel is read. This is how James
Kerr reads the ending of Waverley:
For Scott, the closing chapters of the
narrative are no more real than Waverley's
picturesque interpretation of the Scottish
landscape in the early chapters. The
only truth of the ending rests in Scott's
elaboration of a social, political, and
moral order in which he believed, a
beneficent order in which the progress
of the present is maintained while the
virtues oj: the past are preserved and
nurtured.
For Kerr, Scott performs a "balancing act" between
this sense of the "progress of the present" and "the
virtues of the past." Waverley's awakening from the
dream of Jacobitism into reality is a way for Scott
"of describing and justifying the changes he perceived
to have occurred in England since the mid-eighteenth
century.
I should like to challenge this view which imagines
Scott balancing past and present while his own political
53
mind is resolved in favor of the present. By paying
attention to what is left out of Scott's novels as
well as what is included but covered up (by, for
example, a smooth conclusion) I think a more tumultuous
past and present can be uncovered in Scott's thinking.
ii. Resisting the happy ending of Waverley.
In his "Postscript, which should have been a
Preface" to Waverley, Scott writes:
There is no European nation which,
within the course of half a century
or little more, has undergone so
complete a change as this kingdom
of Scotland. The effects of the
insurrection of 1745,— the destruction
of the patriarchal power of the
Highland chiefs,— the abolition of
the heritable jurisdictions of the
Lowland nobility and barons,— the
total eradication of the Jacobite
party, which, averse to intermingle
with the English, or adopt their
customs, long continued to pride
themselves upon maintaining ancient
Scottish manners and customs, commenced
this innovation. The gradual influx
of wealth, and extension of commerce,
have since united to render the present
people of Scotland a class of beings
as different from their grandfathers,
as the existing English are from those
of Queen Elizabeth's time ....
But the changer though steadily and
rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless,
been gradual; and, like those who
drift down the stream of a deep and
smooth river, we are not aware of
54
the progress we have made until we fix
our eye on the no^-distant point from
which we set out.
Scott seems to be concluding, here, that the changes
in Scotland have been "steadily and rapidly
progressive," yet behind the list of changes to Scottish
life are the political impositions which England made
upon it. Scott's resentment and regret are almost
perceptible beneath the attempt to write in a
controlled— even encouraging— tone. Thus English
domination is the implied cause of Scotland's inability
to maintain "ancient Scottish manners and customs"
and although Scott speaks of "progress" he nevertheless
seems to be lamenting the loss of these manners and
customs. The passage implies grief at change even as
it ostensibly approves it, and even as it gives that
change the impersonal face of progress, it names the
political causes and implies blame of their agents.
Again in this passage as in the earlier one about
the manners and character of Scotland "melting and
dissolving" there is an expression of powerlessness
in the face of change, in the image of drifting
downstream. But the sense of drifting away from a time
of cultural separateness is in fact an illusion: the
severance is far more dramatic than that, including
in its acts of violence the suppression of the 1745
55
uprising and what amounts to the cultural suppression
of Highland Scotland afterwards.
Waverley is all about suppression. Many critics
have seen in the eponymous hero and in the cheery
resolution of Waverley a complacence in Scott which
favors the hero. To read the novel through its ending
in this manner, however, is to ignore the powerful
voice within the novel which speaks against English
cultural domination of Scotland and which points out
the violence and loss which lie behind the "melting
and dissolving" of the happy ending of this romance.
I want to show the ending in a way that will restore
it to a place of mixed significance.
Close to the end of the novel, when Waverley
returns to Tully-Veolan after the rebellion is over,
he is shocked at the scene of devastation which meets
him:
Upon entering the court-yard, Edward saw
[his fears realized]. The place had been
sacked by the King's troops, who, in wanton
mischief, had even attempted to burn it;
and though the thickness of the walls
had resisted the fire, unless to a partial
extent, the stables and out-houses were
totally consumed. The towers and pinnacles
of the main building were scorched and
blackened; the pavement of the court broken
and shattered; the doors torn down
entirely, or hanging by a single hinge;
the windows dashed in and demolished,
and the court strewed with articles of
furniture broken into fragments. The
56
accessaries of ancient distinction,
to which the Baron, in the pride of
his heart, had attached so much
importance and veneratio|f were treated
with peculiar contumely.
The nature of all this destruction is "wanton" and
even "lazy": it is destruction without purpose. The
fate of the two ancient horse-chestnut trees emphasizes
the casualness with which objects of age, dignity and
veneration have been treated:
Too lazy, perhaps, to cut them down,
the spoilers, with malevolent
ingenuity, had mined them, and placed
a quantity of gunpowder in the cavity.
One had been shivered to pieces by
the explosion, and the wreck lay
scattered around, encumbering the
ground it had so long shadowed. The
other mine had been more partial in
its effect. About one-third of the
trunk of the tree was torn from the
mass, which, mutilated and defaced
on one side, still spread on the other
its ample and undiminished boughs
(p. 297).
The Baron magnanimously allows that all this is in
the course of war— even in what the soldiers "think"
their duty (p. 303). But the quantity of detail suggests
otherwise, especially as the objects destroyed are
almost all those which have been introduced earlier
in the novel as symbolic of the ancient family of the
Bradwardines. These wanton explosions of English
vindictiveness after the 1745 rebellion blasted the
last from the old patriarchal system of the clans in
the Highlands so that now, like the ancient tree, it
1 0
"encumber[ed] the ground it had so long shadowed."
It is not only the system that was blasted, but
also the individuals involved in the rebellion. Scott
details a vindictiveness towards ancient property and
personal effects, where he has earlier avoided a
description of similar effects against the Highland
army. Scott allows Waverley to hide out at the Jopson's
farm and at Ned Williams’s for the duration of the
final defeats of the Highlanders, but the cruelty of
the Duke of Cumberland's treatment of the exhausted
Highlanders at Culloden is such a well-known piece
of history that its absence from the text ironically
ensures its constant presence for the reader. The
aftermath of Culloden included the slaying of women
and children, and many of the subsequently imprisoned
3000 men, women and children did not survive
imprisonment or were unwillingly transported. The waste
of the estate stands for this greater human and cultural
waste, and the easy way in which Tully-Veolan is patched
up with Waverley's money thus stands starkly at odds
with the history of Scotland. The memory of this waste
makes the already indigestible ending even bitter.
58
Standing by his cave hide-out, Baron Bradwardine
tells Waverley that the destruction of Tully-Veolan
is "the end of an auld sang" (p. 303). "Now there's
ane end of ane auld sang" were the words with which
Chancellor Seafield concluded the last meeting of the
last Scottish parliament on April 28th, 1707, apparently
closing for ever Scottish independent history in the
face of the Union with England. Attention is certainly
not drawn to this echo in the novel; on the face of
it the Baron's words are the expression of grace in
defeat and of resignation. But by echoing Chancellor
Seafield's words at this point, describing events
thirty-eight years after the Union, Scott shows how
wrong Seafield was in thinking the Union would end
controversy. He also shows the error in thinking that
the Union could be a bloodless one— the sort of melting
and dissolving it promised to be. The waste of
Tully-Veolan shows how much destruction is really behind
"the end of an auld sang." The symbolic fragments,
the "accessaries of ancient distinction," all signify
a culture which must be smashed because it "cannot
"intermingle with the English," as the Postscript says.
So even though the Baron's conversation with
Waverley would seem to indicate that he accepts the
destruction of Tully-Veolan as just one of the customary
forfeits of war, the vividness of the description of
59
English wanton violence fills the gap in the novel
where Culloden might be expected to be described, and
contradicts him. Scott repeatedly indicates that the
Scots would be more merciful than the English: Prince
Charles allows Colonel Talbot to ride home freely to
be with his grievously ill wife because, as he says,
"I come here to war with men, not to endanger
women" (p. 261). A contrast with Cumberland's brutality
towards the women at Culloden is implicit here. Thus
Scott reinforces his myth of a Scotland honourable
in its codes of chivalry, and at the same time implies
a bitterness against England which belies the easy
resolution of the novel that critics are willing to
find.
I find particularly ironic the structure of the
ending of Waverley, with Fergus's gruesome death so
close to the conclusion and sandwiched between
Waverley's own plans for a perfect future. Fergus is
to suffer the horrible fate of being hanged, drawn
and quartered, his head to be impaled on the battlements
of the walls of Carlisle. This is, of course, a
particularly vindictive form of execution, and Fergus
faces it heroically. But his words to Waverley, spoken
with "astonishing firmness and composure," express
this same theme of the contrast between national
behaviours:
60
This same law of high treason . . .
is one of the blessings, Edward, with
which your free country has accomodated
poor old Scotland— her own
jurisprudence, as I have heard, was
much milder. But I suppose one day
or other— when there are no longer
any Highlanders to benefit from its
tender mercies— they will blot it from
their records, as levelling them with
a nation of cannibals (p. 326).
In Fergus's words, the English are like cannibals,
the Scots are of a milder— though vague and
forgotten— nature. Fergus surely speaks for Scott,
here, both in his haunting suggestion that the lost
(and already unrecallable) culture was a preferable
one, and more tangibly in his concern that the
conquering culture is able to choose the terms of
recorded history. Yet critics on the whole overlook
this glimpse of Scott's anger in the words of Fergus
(and thus much of the Complexity of Scott's sympathy
with the Jacobites) because the ending of this chapter
is in a different vein. The last words in the chapter
belong to Waverley's pragmatic guide Alick, who laments
the death of Evan Dhu alongside his chieftain:
"It's a great pity of Evan Dhu, who
was a very weel-meaning good-natured
man, to be a Hielandman; and indeed
so was the Laird o' Glennaquoich too,
for that matter, when he was na in
ane o' his tirrivies" (p. 329).
61
Thus Scott disguises the politically loaded speech
of one character with another's dismissive personal
observation, but Alick's verdict closes the chapter,
and I think this is why his opinion is often quoted
by critics and Fergus's is not. Waverley has gained
its happier reputation, I would argue, because we read
the ending of a chapter (or a novel) as speaking more
loudly— and more truly— than whatever has preceded
it. This forces us to accept that Scott has built up
passionate political beliefs in a character only to
deflate them with a word like "tirrivies." Other
possibilities emerge if we become suspicious of the
finality of the ending.
J. Hillis Miller likens the ending of a novel
to the ending of a concerto:
While the concerto or the novel
continues the circle of form is kept
open in a continually renewed,
continually unsuccessful attempt of
time to become space. The last moment
in a novel, like the last note or
chord in a piece of music, is
privileged, but privileged not because
the circle is now at last brought
round and full. The last moment fails
to do this any more than any of the
other moments, fails, for example,
in the still remaining incongruity
between what the narrator knows and
what the protagonist knows, or in
the openness toward the future of
the remaining characters after the
death of the protagonist, or in the
inability of the reader to hold all
62
___
the parts of the novel in his mind
at once, or in the sense the reader
has that all the implications of the
story have^ijiot after all been
exhausted.
Fergus's cruel death and the elimination of the
Jacobites remain aspects of the story which are not
exhausted by the end of the novel. In my view the
implications of these unfinished stories must press
on the reader's consciousness in a way that actively
subverts any attempt to find harmony in that final
chord.
The grisly chapter that disposes of Fergus is
the third from the end of the novel (if we exclude
the post-script) and the final chapter contains the
fairy-tale conclusion of Waverley's marriage and his
restitution of Tully-Veolan. As I have already said,
I think this happy ending is subverted by the death
of Fergus so shortly before, but in the final chapter
itself I find the presence of the portrait of Waverley
and Fergus ironic:
It was a large and spirited painting,
representing Fergus Maclvor and
Waverley in their Highland dress,
the scene a wild, rocky, and
mountainous pass, down which the clan
were descending in the background.
It was taken from a spirited sketch,
drawn while they were still in
Edinburgh by a young man of high
genius, and had been painted on a
full length scale by an eminent London
artist. Raeburn himself (whose Highland
chiefs do all but walk out of the
canvas) could not have done more
justice to the subject; and the ardent,
fiery and impetuous character of the
unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich
was finely contrasted with the
contemplative, fanciful, and
enthusiastic expression of his happier
friend. Beside this painting hung
the arms which Waverley had borne
in the unfortunate civil war. The
whole piece was generally admired
(p. 338).
Critics have discussed this portrait as one of
the ways in which Waverley (and Waverley) re-works
history in order to make it palatable. The portrait
is highly artificial— sketched by one person and painted
by another— and represents both Fergus and Waverley
1 2
in a generalized and anaesthetized way.
The only evidently new addition to the restored
dining parlour, the portrait is also a representation
of power. Edward— despite all his equivocation— was
finally on the winning side after the war. His is the
right to choose the terms of interpreting history,
and this portrait is an assertion of this right. In
it, Waverley wears Highland dress, and the arms he
bore "in the unfortunate civil war" hang beside the
picture. But despite the repeated use of the adjective
"spirited" the picture does not merely represent a
64
vigorous past; it also surely suggests a terrible one.
The Highland dress that Waverley sports in the painting
has in reality been forbidden to those with more of
a right to wear it than he. Likewise the arms which
are so decoratively arranged are forbidden. And we
cannot forget (or can we?) that the "fiery, ardent"
Fergus is now a gruesomely dismembered corpse,
dismembered by order of the very government for whom
his "happier friend" forsook Highland dress and arms.
As the party, after having "generally admired" the
portrait, tucks in to a magnificent dinner, these real
forfeits are again gently hinted at by the absence
of a couple of the Baron's former servants "who had
not been heard of since the affair of Culloden" (p.
338) .
The picture presents a fascinating irony. It
is a pictorial representation both of Waverley's
cultural confusion and of his cultural presumption.
By making it so conspicuous an addition to the Baron's
renewed old home, Waverley is stating his claim to
the Baron's place and making his mark on history. The
Baron may be effectively reinstated by Waverley's
magnanimity but the picture on the wall is a constant
reminder of what has been lost and who has won. For
all Waverley's secret machinations to present the estate
65
to the Baron as a grand surprise, the gift is not a
subtle one at all.
The description of the ravaged Tully-Veolan, its
qualified reinstatement to the Baron, the omission
of the battles, the horrifying death of Fergus— all
of these subvert, I think, the reading of the ending
as a conciliatory happy one.
Waverley's marriage to Rose could be a happy ending
in a conventional love story or it could be seen as
the flowering of Waverley’s growth in maturity if this
novel is to be read as a novel of individual
development. But to read the marriage as representing
Scott's own ideal as a conciliation between Scotland's
romantic but untenable past and its progressive but
compromised present is to ignore these ironic pointers
to the politics of power. We need not take Scott
entirely at face value when he calls his hero "a
1 3
sneaking piece of imbecility" but we need to be alert
to the danger of taking its central character as the
traditional hero of a traditional novel.
D. A. Miller uses Scott in his discussion of how
the means of the motivation of a plot might be at odds
with the means of its resolution:
The historical novel— at least as
practiced by Scott— exists to deprive
the course of history, as well as
the course of narrative thus motivated,
of its necessity. In a novel like Old
Mortality, the narratable typically
coincides with civil discord, which
Scott not only deplores, but sees as
ideally uncalled for. His reasonable
narrator and his reasonable hero, Henry
Morton, together offer a perspective
in which, if sufficiently stressed,
the entire conflict that has generated
the novel must be seen as senseless
waste . . . * The balanced compromise
that obtains at the end of the novel
does not . . . emerge from a dialectical
process as the result of a conflict
of social forces. Rather it is postulated
a prori as a principle that allows us
to see the narrative as at least
theoretically dispensable. People make
history in Scott only because people
make mistakes: both can and should be
avoided .... Narrative remains a
"developmeiji^ of every thing most
unwelcome.
Certainly the narrative of Waverley, like Old
Mortality, depends upon errors and discord for its
movement, but Waverley is a far less engaging
protagonist than Henry Morton. His errors generate
plot, but so do those of Fergus Mclvor, and if a
"balanced compromise" obtains at the end of this novel
then it seems to me to do so very precariously. Civil
discord may have been deplorable to Scott, but this
does not prevent it from being powerfully desired also,
at some other level. A balanced compromise that places
Edward Waverley on top may still be insistently
suggesting that other (perhaps desired) ending in which
67
he is toppled. Miller asserts that "traditional
novelists typically desire worlds of greater stability
and wholeness than [a "narratable" logic of
insufficiency, disequilibrium, and deferral] can
1 5
provide." The traditional view of Scott sees him
as just such a traditional writer, but I would argue
that desire in Waverley {and in other novels and poems)
is not simply focussed upon balance and compromise
but rather works against these in its angry suppression.
Perhaps in Waverley Scott is showing up the
qualities that ensure an enduring political success:
chameleon-like equivocation; the ability to disappear
at a crisis; an aptitude for winning the hearts of
influential individuals; and above all, being on the
winning side in the first place— -and making sure you
are still (or again) there in the end. Although these
qualities may effect resolution and paranthetically
some sort of balance, they are not noble attributes.
This is, it seems to me, exactly Scott's point.
iii. "The Lady of the Lake" and the Subversion of
Narrative.
Although one is a narrative poem and the other
a novel, "The Lady of the Lake" and Waverley have much
in common in terms of the stories they tell. Both
68
feature Highland life as seen through the eyes of a
Lowland visitor, travelling for amusement but caught
up in the confusing politics of the region. In both
narratives there is a superficial reconciliation between
the Highlanders and the Lowlanders, and in both a
Highland girl figures as a prize for the successful
male.
There are differences betweeen Ellen Douglas and
Rose Bradwardine, and I will discuss later the way
I think Ellen anticipates Jeanie Deans to some extent,
and Scott's use of the woman as a positive emblem for
Scottish national identity. But first I want to discuss
some ways in which the ending of this poem can be read.
In "Symbolic Characterization in 'The Lady of
the Lake'" Jill Rubenstein argues that the events of
the poem constitute an educative experience for King
James, so that by the end of the poem he has imbibed
the finer aspects of Highland morality: "the supreme
1 6
value of fidelity and the ties of loyalty." For
Rubenstein, the king is the central figure of the poem,
and Ellen is the mediator between James and Roderick,
the old and the new worlds which they represent. The
hunting motif which she traces through the poem
represents James's "growth in sensitivity" and the
ending of the poem is satisfactory since the previously
"over-civilized" James has been tempered by his
experiences with Ellen, Roderick, Douglas and
Allan-Bane, and is therefore better able to rule a
country with them in it. "The representative of the
present has assimilated the values of the past and
17
will presumably henceforth reign accordingly."
Nancy M. Goslee views the poem with equal optimism.
Goslee analyzes the symbols and imagery of the poem
in the tradition of the romance, seeing the hunt
imagery, the symbol of the sword and the lady herself
as elements of a tradition which is either confirmed
or deflected according to Scott's purpose. Like
Rubenstein, she places the emphasis of the narrative
on James, and sees his rivalry with Roderick for Ellen,
and his final gift of her to Malcolm as the essential
storyline. The story is resolved thus:
Characteristically, the king arranges
Malcolm's freedom and marriage to
Ellen— a boon she is too shy to
demand— by teasing disguise of his own
intentions. Promising "fetters and
warders for the Graeme," James throws
his own chain of gold around Malcolm's
neck,then "gently drew the glittering
band,/ And laid the clasp on Ellen's
hand." His gesture reflects no narrow
restraint, however, but a larger order:
as final image of the narrative, the
"glittering band" of the king's chain
unites the blond hunter in the highlands
who has been a lowland prisoner with
the dark lowlander who has been a
highland exile. Their union promises
in turn a society unified through love
70
into a "glittering ring" rejecting
the king's new sovereignty.
For Goslee, Scott's purpose in writing the poem
is essentially to exorcise personal misgivings about
a political problem (what Edgar Johnson calls "the
1 9 *
struggle between clan and crown")
Through this intelligent joy in acting
out the gestures and style of medieval
romance, Ellen and the king establish
together a sort of mental
romance-geography in order both to escape
and to explore in safety the less
manageable terrain of Scottish pg^itics
and their personal consequences.
Both Goslee and Rubensteih see Scott working out
his own interior battle between conflicting values;
the old values represented at their crudest by Roderick
Dhu, with his unrelenting code of clan-honor, loyalty
and vendetta, and the new ones represented by the king,
with his rationalism, his cosmopolitan education and
his acquisitiveness. For both Goslee and Rubenstein
the compromise of these two codes, represented at the
end of the poem, is a desirable resolution for all
concerned: the characters in the poem (with the
exception of course, of Roderick himself who is dead),
Scott and his reader.
The poem has quite a different aspect, however,
if instead of King James, James Douglas is read as
71
its central figure. In both Goslee's and Rubenstein's
readings, James is given a generous analysis because
of his position as king, just as Waverley is given
a generous analysis by his critics because he is the
protagonist of the eponymous novel. It is true that
the end of "The Lady of the Lake" reasserts King James's
regal supremacy, but to see the story itself as an
assertion of this supremacy is to read it through its
ending, to see it backwards. It is to recognize no
authority in the poem except the king's, and that merely
because he Ls king.
It seems to me that the poem offers some analysis
of the notion of authority itself. The king is not
the only ruler in the poem: Douglas, Roderick and
Malcolm are all chieftains of their clans and thus
the only rulers those clans will acknowledge. But the
personal qualifications for rulership are also examined
in the poem, qualifications which include a certain
personal stature which is recognized by the populace
as majestic.
Douglas, indeed, is the only one of the three
main male characters— Douglas, James and Roderick— -whose
physical stature sets him apart from others. James
conceals his identity not only from the reader but
also from the other characters throughout the poem.
72
Although his courage surprises Roderick Dhu and his
charm impresses Ellen, they do not immediately
recognize him as a superior presence. There is nothing
inherently regal about him, it seems. Roderick also
conceals his identity for some of the poem and is
assumed to be simply a "mountaineer” by James. Like
James's, Roderick's revelation comes as a surprise
both to the reader and within the poem, and it is
self-revealed.
Unlike either of them, Douglas seems incapable
of disguise. His body and manner are recognized as
somehow superior to others before his identity is
confirmed. While riding into Sterling, the king sees
a figure "of stature tall and poor array.” He asks
De Vaux whether he recognizes the man and his "firm,
yet active stride." De Vaux's response is revealing
if unpleasing to James:
De Vaux: 'No, by my word; a burly groom
He seems, who in the field or chase
A baron's train would nobly grace.'
James: 'Out, out, De Vaux! Can fear supply,
And jealousy, no sharper eye?
Afar, ere to that hill he drew,
That stately form and step I knew;
Like form in Scotland is not seen,
Treads not such step on Scottish green. ^
'Tis James of Douglas, by Saint Serlei'
The king himself acknowledges the incomparable physical
grandeur of his enemy— or rival. And when they do get
73
to Stirling, it is the crowd's recognition of Douglas
and their immediate acclaim of him which angers the
king, who is, after all, renowned for being able to
move freely among his subjects when "disguised" in
common clothing.
Douglas is the central figure both to the
characters and to the action of the poem. To see the
ending of the poem as resolving problems is to miss
this, since he is marginalized by that ending. Douglas's
exile by James is the catalyst of the entire story
and the cause of great anguish. Yet the cause of this
exile is briefly and inadequately accounted for in
the last stanzas of the poem. James explains:
Wrong hath he had from slanderous tongue,
I, from his rebel kinsmen, wrong.
We would not, to the vulgar crowd,
Yield what they craved with clamour loud;
Calmly we heard and judged his cause,
Our council added, and our laws
(VI st. xxvii).
Douglas's years of grief and hiding, then, are
the result of mere slander— an injustice that James
has permitted. Yet James makes no concession to his
own part in this— Douglas has been wronged by slander,
James has been wronged by Douglas's clansmen— and
identifies himself with the law in the regal first
person plural to make his authority in the matter
74
complete and unquestionable. It is unquestionable,
that is, to those who see this regal authority as the
only authority. However, it is not necessary to place
the emphasis in the poem entirely on this power of
position. Resisting such a placement immediately prompts
questions about the resolution of the poem and about
the authority which the surface of the poem can lay
claim to.
For both Goslee and Rubenstein King James is
essentially a civilizing force. Rubenstein sees James
as representing law and order and thus issues close
to Scott's heart:
Roderick severely misjudges James,
whom he calls "this tyrant of the
Scottish throne" (II st. xxviii),
and Scott corrects this distorted
view in Note XXIV to the poem, in
which he praises James' civilizing
efforts .... Law for Scott is one
of the finest fruits of progress,
and the King's devotion to it^g cause
stands clearly in his favor.
Rubenstein is assuming here that the Scott of
the notes is in some important sense the true Scott
whereas the Scott of the poem-narration takes a
fictional stance. This assumption fails to recognize
the subtleties and ironies made possible by playing
two authorial roles against each other.
75
King James does indeed learn many things on his
travels, and these experiences may well give him some
sort of an education. But if James is not read as the
central figure of the narrative, these events come
to have significance not merely for the education and
improvement that.they offer James, but for their own
sakes as justifiable pleas against his political
domination. Critics have commented on the stag-hunt
through which James makes his appearance in the poem,
a hunt which not only has strong narrative interest
but also foreshadows James's eager interest in the
elusive Ellen. It is worth noting, however, that the
hunt is described with the greatest sympathy for the
stag:
For jaded now and spent with toil,
Embossed with foam, and dark with soil,
While every gasp with sobs he drew,
The laboring stag strained full in view.
Two dogs of black St Hubert's breed,
Unmatched for courage, breath and speed,
Fast on his flying traces came,
And all but won that desperate game
{I st. vii).
The labor of the stag is described in detail, while
the dogs are described as "vindictive." The huntsman,
while this desperate struggle is waged, "Already
glorying in the prize,/ Measured his antlers with his
eyes"(I st. viii), showing the acquisitiveness which
76
is characteristic of James throughout. The exiled
Douglas is later identified with "a hunted stag" (II
st. xxxvii) and "a stricken deer" (II st. xii), and
this early sympathy for the stag prepares the reader
for sympathy with Douglas rather than the king.
The king loses the stag because, in his fervor
to pursue the object of his desire, he has ignored
the exhaustion of his "gallant grey" and the horse
expires. This detail is in itself an indictment of
James's single-minded acquisitiveness and his failure
to reward loyalty— the underlying theme, I would argue,
behind his relationship with Douglas.
There follows a grand description of the
magnificent scenery through which the footbound hunter
wanders, which I think is contrasted with James's own
response. Although he is "raptured and amazed" his
amazement finds its voice thus:
"What a scene were here," he cried,
"For princely pomp, or churchman's
pride!
On this bold brow, a lordly tower;
In that soft vale, a lady's bower;
On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey;
How blithely might the bugle-horn
Chide, on the lake, the lingering
morn I
How sweet, at eve, the lover's lute
Chime, when the groves were still
and mute!" (I. st. xv)
77
James's sophisticated education here limits his response
23
to nature with almost comic effect, but it is also
an imperialist response. James would impose his own
values on the scene without question, and with a
terrible ignorance of what they obscure or destroy
24
— indeed with the certainty that they improve.
Indicative of his imperialism is his view of the
inhabitants of these wilds: he regrets that his horse
will be prey to "that Highland eagle" and also fears
that he himself will fall prey to the "Highland
plunderers" who may inhabit the mountains. All other
creatures are legitimate prey to him, the hunter; he
can conceive of no life-form living harmoniously
independently of him in the scene which he surveys.
Yet there have been people living in this place, and
it is on behalf of these people and in perceptive
response to James's acquisitiveness that Roderick Dhu
later makes a long speech to his incognito companion:
Saxon, from yonder mountain high,
I marked thee send delighted eye,
Far to the south and east where lay,
Extended in succession gay,
Deepwaving fields and pastures green,
With gentle slopes and groves between:
These fertile plains, that softened
vale,
Were once the birthright of the Gael;
The stranger came with iron hand,
And from our fathers reft the land
(V st. vii).
78
Through Roderick, Scott describes the plight of
the Highlander, who cannot hope for ’ ’fattened steer
and household bread" from the "savage hill" which is
all the Saxon has left him, and is therefore forced
to steal back what once was stolen from him, to live.
Through Roderick Scott gives a sympathetic account
of "blackmail" (the cattle-stealing lifestyle of the
Highlanders). Roderick is one of the "mountain chiefs
who hold/ That plundering lowland field and fold/ Is
[njaught but retribution true" (V st. vii) and his
argument is supported by a note on these lines in which
Scott the "editor" gives a nonfictional account of
such an affair.
The text thus offers some vindication of Roderick
Dhu1s "villanies," as it does for his courtship of
Ellen. Although it is quite decidedly unrequited,
Roderick's ardour for Ellen is surely more passionate
than that of the insipid Malcolm, but it is
also— importantly— rivalled by James. Here again is
an instance of the king's casual assumption of
superiority over Roderick. I shall discuss the terms
of Roderick's courtship later, but however unwelcome
it is and violent in its expression, it takes on a
certain integrity when weighed against the playful
seductiveness of James. Roderick Dhu's intention is
what he says it is, and I think that it is important
to weigh these two against each other {to the detriment
of James) rather than Roderick against Malcolm (to
the detriment of Roderick).
"Fitz-James knew every wily train/ A lady's fickle
heart to gain" (IV st. xviii) we are told, and James's
regard for Ellen is another example of his
acquisitiveness and his assumption of the right to
be so. James's pretty speech to Ellen is no more than
courtly seduction in doggerel:
I'll place thee in a lovely bower
I'll guard thee like a tender flower
(IV st. xvii).
Yet even with these lame lines James wins more of
Ellen's heart than Roderick has. It is because of
Malcolm that Ellen refuses James, and because of her
father's exiled status; if it were not for these
obstacles she would consider herself free. Ellen seems
to assume that James's intention would be to "wed",
although actually James's words and worldliness would
suggest otherwise, but the implication is that she
would accept him if it were not for Malcolm and her
father. Roderick Dhu's offer of marriage— procured
with great difficulty from the Pope (since the two
are technically cousins)— counts for nothing.
80
Just as I have argued that Edward Waverley's faults
of character can finally be seen as an indictment of
political power itself, and that the "happy" ending
of Waverley is thus ironic, I think that "The Lady
of the Lake" questions the personality behind the power
of James and compares him to other leaders unfavorably.
The faults of his character raise similar ironic
shadings to the poem's ending. Like Waverley, James
brings to the Highlands inappropriate preconceptions
and yet through his experiences the reader gains a
fuller and more sympathetic picture of the Highlanders
than he himself seems able to grasp.
My reading of the ending of the poem shows the
heroic Douglas finally and completely usurped. His
most faithful clansman, Roderick Dhu, has been rejected
by his daughter and finally killed by his rival, dying
to a song from the past which they both shared. Malcolm
Graeme has been granted the hand of Ellen, a felicitous
union certainly and one which Douglas himself approves.
But Douglas's power and authority in this most personal
matter of giving his daughter's hand in marriage has
been usurped in this as in all matters by James.
Permission is not even sought, since its denial is
impossible. The end of the poem, then, sees no clash
of powers, no dramatic antagonisms or reconciliations:
the way in which Douglas is finally displaced is as
81
undramatic as James's "forgiveness" of Douglas's
"wrongs": in short, this is a melting and dissolving
once again. Yet behind this melting unity is the
devaluation of Highland values and the silencing of
its pleas against injustice and domination.
This reading of the poem makes it a sort of lament
for Scotland's lost masculinity. The Douglas figures
nostalgically for an heroic Scotland tragically
obscured. However, there is also a place for a reading
that will give strength to the feminine.
iv. The Lady in "The Lady of the Lake."
The role of the feminine contains, I believe, far
greater complexities and problems for Scott than critics
have usually allowed, and I see equal complexity in
Scott's feelings about Scotland and its usurpation
by the dominating culture and imperialism in England.
Indeed, I think that Scott's feelings about sex roles
are closely related to his nationalist feelings. Grieved
by the passivity, perhaps the "feminine" passivity,
with which Scotland was accepting England's imperialism
by his time, Scott makes his Highlanders the very
reverse of what he sees in his Scottish contemporaries.
He makes them "masculine" in the extreme, enthusiastic
to defend their intensely patriarchal community and
82
unflinchingly resistant to compromise. In Scott's
fantasy, the Highlanders put up a strong fight for
their society, and although the politiclaly expedient
solution is the one that finally succeeds, the
Highlanders are treated by him with such sympathy that
they are dignified even in their necessary demise.
This compromise seems to have a feminine face.
Not only is Roderick Dhu, the most masculine of the
Highlanders, unable to live if it is to be effected,
and Douglas, the leader of the noblest clan, rendered
impotent by it, but also Ellen, the lady of the lake,
is the most significant agent in bringing it about.
Initially Ellen seems to be little more than a male
construction of obedience and beauty, the virginal
25
virtues of daughterliness. But she does take on some
power herself through the repercussions of a momentary
expression of desire. This desire opens up the character
to possibilities: she begins to be able to support
something of the reader's identification which will,
I will argue, lead to the nationalist ideology contained
in some of Scott's later female characters.
At the beginning of the story, Ellen is merely
a signifier for the strength and virtue of her father
and an unobtainable object of desire for Roderick Dhu,
Malcolm Graeme and King James. Her transition from
mere signifier (always important for what she signifies
83
_______________________________________________________________________________ I
rather than for herself) to an active agent able to
manipulate symbols rather than merely be one, brings
the war between the men, and the poem, to their
conclusions. The transition is effected by a tiny
gesture of desire on Ellen's part, a gesture which
she immediately tries herself to obscure, but which
remains an important gesture of rebellion against the
child-like feminine role which her patriarchal community
defines for her. This transition is also an important
one for Scott: we can see the germ in Ellen Douglas
of a strong feminine representative for Scottish
nationality who can carry it intact beyond the demise
of its over-masculine men, and replace the
passive/feminine cultural identity with an active/
feminine one. This trope will triumph in the later
invention of Jeanie Deans, but I think it begins as
2 6
early in Scott as "The Lady of the lake."
Ellen first appears in the poem in response to
a man's call, and is seen through the eyes of that
man. Lost in the Highlands (and disguised as a huntsman)
King James blows on his bugle to find out if he really
is alone, and is amazed to see the beautiful Ellen
glide across the water in response to his call.
Obscuring his body from her view to better see her,
and his identity as king in huntsman's clothes (and
later under the pseudonym of Sir James Fitzjames) the
84
king dubs Ellen Lady of the Lake. His view of her is
the disjointed (even dismembered) itemization that
creates the object of male desire:
With head upraised, and look intent,
And eye and ear attentive bent,
And locks flung back, and lips apart,
Like monument of Grecian art,
In listening mood she seem'd to stand,
The guardian Naiad of the Strand.
« » •
And ne'er did Grecian chisel trace
A nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace,
Of finer form, or lovelier face:
What though the sun, with ardent frown,
Had slightly tinged her cheek with brown—
The sportive toil, which, short and light
Had dyed her glowing hue so bright,
Served too in hastier swell to show
Short glimpses of a breast of snow:
. . . A foot more light, a step more true,
Ne'er from the heath-flower dash'd the dew
(I st. 18).
Throughout this description Ellen is a collection of
female body parts and a work of art— a construction.
Although it is through the king that Ellen is
first presented, she already belongs to a world of
men who construct her. Her first words in the poem
are, significantly, "Father" and "Malcolm." These are
the names of the two men who have the greatest claim
to Ellen not only as an object of affection but also
as possession. Until she is in a position to marry
Malcolm— that is when he has asked her father whether
he can marry her-— Ellen is always her father's daughter.
85
She is seen absolutely in these terms, stressing them
herself also, and is most frequently seen as a signifier
for him.
To James, Ellen is the unknowable woman, the object
of desire. Just as he obscures his person and then
his identity, she covers first her body:
The maid, alarm'd, with hasty oar
Push'd her light shallop from the shore,
And when a space was gain'd between,
Closer she drew her bosom's screen
(I st. xx).
And she consistently obscures her identity, as Highland
custom permits and her father's exiled status
necessitates. Having constructed the object of desire
from her physical parts, then, the king is unable to
know the object of his desire because she has no name
or voice of her own.
Ellen seems happy with this state. When James
arrives at the hidden home which she and her aunt
(Roderick Dhu's mother) inhabit, she tells his "gayly"
that he will need to call "on heaven and on thy lady"
before entering the "enchanted Hall" (I st. xxvi).
This is the female space: womb-shaped, inhabited by
women and requiring invocation to "thy lady" before
entering. When James does enter there is "a clang
of steel" as Ellen's father's sword falls from its
86
sheath, where it had been "careless flung/ Upon a stag's
huge antlers" (I st. xxvii). Clearly James is being
reminded of his Oedipal position here; although he
27
has exiled his former father figure Douglas, he does
not have the right to claim Douglas's woman (Ellen's
saint-like mother died long ago and Ellen is the only
apple of her father's eye) until he has rendered Douglas
powerless. Startled by the clatter of this awe-inspiring
weapon, James gazes around the walls of the hall and
discovers that they are covered with boars' tusks,
elks' horns, the heads of wolves and the pelts of
wild-cats and deer— in short, the "trophies of the
fight or chase." The feminine metamorphoses into the
masculine before his very eyes, and James picks up
the sword in awe as if to acknowledge the supremacy
of such pervasive masculinity:
"I never knew but one," he said,
"Whose stalwart arm might brook to wield
A blade like this in battle-field."
She sigh'd, then smiled and took the word:
"You see the guardian champion's sword:
As light it trembles in my hand
As in my grasp a hazel wand;
My sire's tall form might grace the part
Of Ferragus or Ascabart:
But in the absent giant's hold
Are women now, and menials old"
(I st. xxviii).
This is a remarkably Freudian conversation. While James
holds the father's sword in his hand and confronts
87
the symbolic strength of the man whom he must overcome
to possess the woman, Ellen herself seems happily
located in the "Oedipus stage" as Freud calls it, of
2 8
her development. With the overwhelming evidence of
her father's phallic power before her, Ellen reasserts
her attachment to and affection for her father, and
submissively positions herself amongst the powerless
"menials old" as subservient to him. Ellen is content,
at this stage, to see herself as "lacking"— she is
content to remain a signifier for her father's power.
Ellen is also content to remain insubstantial
to James by repeatedly refusing to gratify his attempts
to discover her father's name. Guessing by her outward
appearance that she is noble, James is frustrated by
Ellen's elusiveness in his conversations with her and
her aunt:
Each hint the knight of Snowdon gave
Dame Margaret heard with silence grave;
Or Ellen, innocently gay.
Turn'd all inquiry light away:-
"Weird women we! By dale and down
We dwell, afar from tower and town.
We stem the flood, we ride the blast,
On wandering knights our spells we cast" |
(I st. xxx).
i
Not only does she refuse to answer his questions, but j
she even parodies them with a claim to be a witch, j
1
I
88 |
the always unknowable female most feared by men and
most mutable.
Ellen sings James a song, "Soldier, rest!
. . . Huntsman rest!" intended to soothe the wanderer
to sleep. Her song is filled with the adventures of
masculinity— images of the battlefield and the hunt— and
although her plea is that he should forget these things
in his dreams, there are no pleasanter images with
which to replace them. Just as Ellen's presence is
enigmatic and finally less tangible than her father's
sword, the images of masculinity which have been
forbidden linger on after the words of the song have
gone and James is alone sleeping. In his dream, James
walks with Ellen in a grove, expressing the desire
for her which he has conceived during his waking hours,
and this time apparently gaining a resonse. Just as
his entry into the apparently receptive and feminine
hall had been abruptly interrupted by her father's
sword, however, the image of Ellen metamorphoses
distressingly into a masculine one:
At length, with Ellen in a grove
He seem'd to walk, and talk of love;
She listened with a blush and sigh,
His suit was warm, his hopes were high,
He sought her yielded hand to clasp
And a cold gauntlet met his grasp:
The phantom's sex was changed and gone.
Upon its head a helmet shone;
89
Slowly enlarged to giant size,
With darken'd cheek and threatening
eyes,
The grisly visage, stern and hoar,
To Ellen still a likeness bore
(I st, xxxiv).
Again, Ellen's unknowability is emphasized, and the
extent to which she is a signifier for her father.
Every attempt to touch or to "know" the female is met
with an abrupt reminder of the masculine, the puissant
father, the warrior.
After his interrupted night's sl^ep, James must
take his leave of Ellen, Margaret and Allan-Bane the
minstrel. In the farewell song that the minstrel sings,
woman seems comfortably restored to the last of a list
of possessions appropriate to the noble stranger.
Allan-Bane wishes him:
Good hawk and hound for sylvan sport,
Where beauty sees the brave resort,
The honor'd meed be thine!
True be thy sword, thy friend sincere,
Thy lady constant, kind, and dear
(II st. ii).
Just when she is expected to be the most passive
and unobtrusive, however, the "lady" for the first
time refuses this role and expresses her own desire:
I
I
90
While yet he linger'd on the spot,
It seem'd as Ellen mark'd him not;
But when he turn'd him to the glad,
One courteous parting sign she made
(II st. iv).
This "simple mute farewell" means more to James
than "when prize on festal day/ Was dealt to him the
brightest fair," and it is sufficient encouragement
for him to return two days later to ask Ellen to come
with him to the court, thus setting in motion the rest
of the poem. Ellen is herself aware that her tiny
gesture is important, recognizing immediately the
construction that James can place on it, but also how
far it transgresses the rules that she as a woman
in this society must follow: she must not willingly
indicate her own desire. Significantly, the voice of
her own conscience, which rebukes her immediately after
she has made the gesture is a masculine voice:
When his stately form was hid,
The guardian in her bosom chid—
"Thy Malcolmi vain and selfish maid!"
'Twas thus upbraiding conscience said,—
"Not so had Malcolm idly hung
On the smoothe phrase of Southern tongue:
Not so had Malcolm strain'd his eye,
Another step than thine to spy"
(II st. vi).
Ellen's conscience, then, takes the form of her father
(her guardian) reminding her of her duty to Malcolm
(her lover) and rebuking her not only with inconstancy
to him/ but to their (patriarchal) society— that of
the northern tongue— to which she belongs.
The extent to which Ellen immediately accepts
the guilt for this inter-action is indicative of the
extent to which she submits to her place in this
society. She is only, after all, responding to James's
gaze. However, her gesture is one certain expression
of rebellion against her society and has lasting
effects.
After her own conscience, Allan-Bane acts as a
restrictive reminder of her status as woman and as
the daughter of Douglas. In response to her request
for something to cheer her (and to obscure her guilty
feelings) the minstrel insists instead on a lugubrious
re-iteration of historical griefs and Ellen's misfortune
in losing all the rank to which her birth should entitle
her. As well as a depressing history of his "master's
house" (the patriarchal world which Ellen must not
betray by flirtatious gestures to Southern strangers)
this serves to remind Ellen of her place within it,
and of her lack. And Ellen herself seems to accept |
this definition. She describes her father as like j
"yonder oak" and herself as "this little flower" (II j
I
st. ix), a diminutive plant hiding beneath the great j
\
one. i
i
92 I
Placing a flower in her hair, she coquettishly
exclaims:
And when I place it in my hair,
Allan, a bard is bound to swear
He ne'er saw coronet so fair
(II st. ix).
What Ellen does by drawing attention to herself
as feminine and beautiful is to re-emphasize her own
body as an object of exchange, perhaps as a reaction
against her own momentary slip into an order of things
whereby she might make the terms of exchange herself.
Indeed, she attempts to joke with Allan-Bane about
the sway her eye holds over "grim Sir Roderick
foreshadowing the unhappy scene to come in which
Roderick does bid for Ellen's hand, and her status
as object of exchange is made very clear.
Roderick Dhu is described by Ellen in dire terms
as a figure of rash strength and a warrior whose
masculine virtues are made vices by the exaggerated
zest with which he exhibits them.
I grant him brave,
But wild as Bracklinn's thundering wave;
And generous— save vindictive mood,
Or jealous transport chafe his blood;
I grant him true to friendly band,
As his claymore is to his hand;
But O1 that very blade of steel
More mercy for a foe would feeli
I grant him liberal to fling
Among his clan the wealth they bring,
When back by glen and lake they wind,
And in the lowland leave behind
Where once some pleasant hamlet stood,
A mass of ashes slaked with blood.
The hand that for my father fought,
I honor, as his daughter ought;
But can I clasp it reeking red
From peasants slaughter'd in their shed?
No I wildly while his virtues gleam,
They make his passion darker seem
(II st. xiv).
What Ellen describes here is a monster of
masculinity, a figure who parodies what this machistic
society considers to be "virtue" (loyalty to clan and
chief, effective skills in warfare) and is thus a
terrifying figure. Ellen does not, however, cast an
objective eye upon Roderick Dhu; loyalty to her father
demands that she respect him-— and she does— and it
is only at the prospect of having him as a husband
that she balks. Even this fear, however, is not enough
to prevent her from playfully reminding Allan-Bane
of Roderick's love for her. The minstrel's tetchy
warning that her "hand is on a lion's mane" and his
reiteration of her debts of duty to that lion, remind
her of her place in this society: she belongs to her
father and however much he loves her she is a valuable
object of exchange. In return for Ellen's hand in
marriage, Douglas can have the forceful protection
of Roderick Dhu and the MacAlpine clan.
The return of Douglas, Roderick Dhu and Malcolm
Graeme to the lakeside forms the patriarchal context
for Ellen. Rowing over the lake, the troops of warriors
sing a "Boat song" as tribute to their chief and
proclamation of their bellicose intentions in which
women do, indeed, have their place:
Widow and Saxon maid
Long shall lament our raid
(II st. xx).
Deftly avoiding the greeting of Roderick Dhu Ellen
greets her father with all the affection that a "duteous
daughter" will give to a "pious father," showing that
the claims of one man can only be avoided in this
society by being possessed by another*
Surrounded by the dominating male figures of her
community, Ellen expresses her thoughts and feelings,
if she expresses them at all, in the involuntary signs
of hysteria. Faced with the news of the impending attack
on the chieftains (and Douglas in particular) Roderick
makes the startling declaration that he will protect
Douglas with his name and clan (a considerable force)
in return for Ellen's hand in marriage. His proposal
is characteristically gritty:
When the loud pipes my bridal tell,
The Links of Forth shall hear the knell, 95
The guards shall start in Sterling's porch;
And, when I light the nuptual torch,
A thousand villages in flames
Shall scare the slumbers of King James i
— Nay Ellen, blench not thus away,
And, mother, cease these signs I pray
(II st. xxx).
We can only guess at what Lady Margaret's "signs"
may be but Ellen's response to this proposal is to
faint. It is made to Douglas and not to Ellen anyway,
and indeed the extent of her involvement in the whole
arrangement is indicated by the one-sidedness and
one-sexedness of the phrase "my bridal." Fortunately
for Ellen, not only is Malcolm able to read the silent
message of fear "in Ellen's quivering lip and eye"
but Douglas also "mark'd the hectic strife/ Where death
seem'd combatting with life." These men at least are
able to read the silent, feminine language of signs.
Douglas saves his daughter from her extreme
discomfiture by transferring the focus away from her
and onto himself. At first he declares that his loyalty
remains, despite his exile and unjust treatment, too
strong to allow him to fight "the princely boy" King
James, whom he regards as a son. This declaration of
manly fidelity to man is not enough, however, to appease
the wrath of Roderick, whose jealousy of Malcolm is
now unleashed. After a moment where his eyes "that
mock'd at tears before,/ With bitter drops were running
96
o'er" (II st. xxxiii), Roderick suppresses this
momentary concession to feminine behaviour and
re-asserts the masculinity of the interaction by
violently assailing Malcolm. The two begin a fierce
brawl over Ellen's hand, but again Douglas transfers
the focus of the situation from Ellen onto himself:
Chieftains, forego!
I hold the first who strikes, my foe—
Madmen, forbear your frantic jar!
What! is the Douglas fall'n so far,
His daughter's hand is deem'd the spoil
Of such dishonorable broil!
(II st. xxxiii)
Ellen is explicitly, here, a signifier for Douglas,
and implicit in his rebuke is the insult inferred by
treating her as more than this or as dependent from
him. This point in the poem is most starkly illustrative
of Eve K. Sedgwick's observation that "Men's
hetereosexual relationships . . . have as their raison
d'etre an ultimate bonding between men; and [that]
this bonding, if successfully achieved, is not
29
detrimental to "masculinity" but definitive of it."
Indeed, Roderick Dhu's very machistic, warrior-like
proposal is so full of the imagery of death and revenge
that it is hard to imagine how it can relate to Ellen
at all. The phallic images of burning torches on "his"
wedding night are not celebrating the viriltiy of a
bridegroom but that of a warrior.3^ It is significant
that even in his marriage proposal Roderick Dhu's
imagery is all of destruction.
Ellen's closest relationship is with her father,
yet she is really only a signifier for his position.
An almost comic illustration of this comes later in
the poem when Douglas is at Stirling, engaged in
sporting combat (incognito) with the king. After several
shows of his undeniably superior strength, Douglas
is gathering dangerous interest from the crowd, when
the king's groom angrily strikes Douglas's dog, Lufra.
This proves to be the greatest of all the indignities
I
that Douglas has suffered and the only insufferable
one:
The Douglas had endured, that morn
The king's cold look, the noble's scorn,
And last, and worst to spirit proud,
Had borne the pity of the crowd;
But Lufra had been fondly bred,
To share his board, to watch his bed,
And oft would Ellen Lufra's neck
In maiden glee with garlands deck
(V st. xxv).
So closely is Lufra associated with Ellen in Douglas's
mind, in fact, "that with name of Lufra, Ellen's image
came" (V st. xxv), and in his anger Douglas retaliates
[
with violence ("such blow no other hand could deal")
knocking the groom senseless.
98
Ellen's image, then, is so powerfully evoked by
the presence of his dog that Douglas is as enraged
by the abuse of Lufra as he would be by the abuse of
Ellen. This perhaps unflattering substitution indicates
the extent to which Ellen is a signifier for Douglas.
He suppresses his anger against James consciously,
but his pride and noble status, for which Ellen is
the signifier, revolt quickly when Lufra, another
signifier, is abused. It is not paternal affection
that James expresses so violently but injured masculine
pride. Lufra, like Ellen, is a signifier for this:
the girl and the dog are interchangeable.
The only position really possible for Ellen in
this community of men is to remain as a child. As
Douglas's child she avoids the problems that result
inevitably from expressing her own desires and dreads,
and in the Oedipal drama she chooses the simplest role
to play by remaining in the time before the supremacy
of the father's phallus is threatened. Both Douglas
and Ellen frequently refer to Ellen as a "child," even
when she is being spoken of in the apparently adult
31
role of "bride" at the same time. As a child, her
mirroring of Douglas is taken for granted: the child
is expected to represent its parents with little
autonomy or alteration.
99
Again and again, Ellen represents herself in the
terms of her phallocentric culture. After the men have
again disappeared (to prepare for war) Ellen mournfully
declares to Allan-Bane:
My soul, though feminine and weak,
Can image his; e'en as the lake,
Itself disturb'd by slightest stroke,
Reflects the invulnerable rock
(IV st. x).
Ellen places herself in a long tradition of women
who mirror men to the men's advantage. Ellen portrays
herself as insubstantial, an illusory replica which
is treacherously inconsistent and changeable. The lake
32
has earlier been described in feminine terms and
is often linked with Ellen. Far from being
insubstantial, however, the lake is actually an
important element in the plot since, like Ellen, it
is a place of convergence. It is the place to which
the men return, the place at which the king appears— in
fact Loch Katrine is the defining landmark of the clan
territory. It is also, however, substantial in itself:
the king rows skilfully over its surface, as does Ellen
herself; Roderick Dhu advances pugnaciously over it
and Malcolm Dhu dives into it. It is more than a merely
reflective surface imperfectly imaging the mountain;
like Ellen herself it has an important role to play. - j q q j
j
-------- : ---- _ --.J
As the poem proceeds, women feature in it in
increasingly active ways. After the lakeside scene
where Ellen and Margaret merely sigh and sign their
responses to the men's words, Allan Bane sings to Ellen
"The Ballad of Alice Brand," a tale in which a young
woman braves superstition and transforms an elf back
to his original form (her brother, murdered by her
lover) by her boldness. Another brave woman is the
madwoman, Blanche of Devan, whom James encounters on
his second trip to the Highlands. She warns him in
strange and enigmatic language of dangers on the trail
and particularly of the untrustworthiness of his guide,
Murdoch. Her warning saves James's life, although
Murdoch kills her for her outspokenness.
Ellen's own importance as an active agent in the
story began with that signal to James which seemed
so portentous to her at the time. After the men have
left, Ellen is shocked by the sudden reappearance of
James in the glade in which she and Allan-Bane are
sitting. James begins to woo her in his courtly way,
but is stopped by Ellen's frank dismay. Despite James's
well-practiced amorousness, Ellen takes immediate (and
imaginative) responsibility for his dangerous return:
01 hush, Sir Knight! 'twere female art
To say I do not read thy heart;
1 01
Too much, before, my selfish ear
Was idly soothed my praise to hear.
That fatal bait hath lured thee back
In deathful hour, o'er dangerous track;
And how, oh how, can I atone
The wreck my vanity brought on I
(IV st. xvii)
Ellen entirely accepts (indeed precipitates) the
masculine construction of herself as temptress. Yet
with his cliches and courtly phrases it would seem
that James is far more in control of this situation
than she is. Nevertheless, to "atone" for her crime
she tells James her "secrets"— that her father is an
exile and that there is already a young man "exposed"
for her sake. Convinced by Ellen's body rather than
her speech that she is telling the truth, Fitz-James
takes her at her word:
There shot no glance from Ellen's eye
To give her steadfast speech the lie
In maiden confidence she stood
Though mantled in her cheek the blood
(IV st. xviii).
Before he leaves, however, he passes on to Ellen a
ring which, he tells her, the king gave to him in return
for saving his life. He urges Ellen to go the king
immediately and "claim [her suit], whate'er it be/
As ransom of his pledge to [James Fitz-James]."
1 02
The story of the poem after this follows King
James's return to Stirling and his fatal encounter
with Roderick Dhu (fatal to Roderick, that is) on the
way, and once he arrives in Stirling his combattive
encounters with Douglas on the sportsfield. These are,
in miniature, the combats that have threatened the
plot throughout so far, but in effect they are rendered
unnecessary by the encounter James has had with
Ellen— because of the exchange of that ring. Although
she does not know it, Ellen has met the king and has
already exchanged the token with him which will ensure
the release of her father. The exchange at Stirling
is essential, however, because there it is Ellen who
takes the active role. When she seeks James out at
court and asks him to redeem the pledge, Ellen is for
the first time engaging in a transaction with a man
of her own volition, and— most importantly— without
her body as the object of exchange. Ellen has
transcended her father's and Roderick's system which
treats her as an object (however acquiescent) of
exchange, and has accepted the terms of a system which
can deal in symbols and tokens instead.
Gayle Rubin describes a primitive society in which,
actually, Douglas, Roderick Dhu and Malcolm seem to
f it:
1 03
If it is women who are being transacted,
then it is the men who give and take
them who are linked, the woman being
a conduit of a relationship rather than
a partner to it. The exchange of women
does not necessarily imply that women
are objectified, in the modern sense,
since objects in the primitive world
are imbued with highly personal qualities.
But it does imply a distinction between
gift and giver. If women are the gifts,
then it is men who are the exchange
partners. And it is the partners, not
the presents, upon whom reciprocal
exchange confers its quasi-mystical power
of social linkage. The relations of such
a system are such that women are in no
position to realize the benefits of their
own circulation. As long as the relations
specify that men exchange women, it is
men who are the beneficiaries of the
product of su^ exchanges— social
organization.
Before meeting the disguised king Ellen is so
entirely a part of the masculine culture of the
Highlanders that she does not recognize that she is
first and foremost an object of exchange— or at least
she entirely accepts this. Expected to exhibit
unquestioning filial affection and duty she exhibits
just those qualities and represents herself as a
negative— a lacking replica of her father— and impotent.
She continues to be this absence in certain ways
when she meets the king. However, the gesture which
she makes to him as he leaves is an important reversal
of this. An expression of her sexual self, the adult
woman rather rather than the child created by dominating
1 04
males, this gesture not only precipitates events which
result in the resolution of the conflicts in the plot,
but it also results in Ellen's discovering that symbols
and tokens, rather than her own body, can be effective
objects of exchange.
At Stirling, the exchange of the ring between
Ellen and the king solves all the conflicts between
the men. Douglas is pardoned on her account and so
would Roderick Dhu have been had he not died of his
wounds in a cell. As the most extreme representative
of the uncompromising, masculine order, Roderick must
die before Ellen can make her exchange. And Roderick
Dhu dies while Allan-Bane sings to him an account of
the recent battle in which a female successfully plays
the role of the warrior:
I mark'd Duncraggan's widow dame,
Behind an oak I saw her stand,
A naked dirk gleam'd in her hand:
It darken'd,— but amid the moan
Of waves, I heard a dying groan.
Another flash!--the spearman floats
A weltering corse beside the boats,
And the stern matron o'er him stood
Her hand and dagger streaming blood
(V st. xx).
Where the woman shows herself capable of the male
role of warrior, and where the woman shows herself
capable of entering into the system of symbolic exchange
1 05
without herself being the object of exchange, Roderick
can no longer exist.
v. Conclusion.
By reading against the apparent happy endings
of Waverley and of "The Lady of the Lake" it becomes
possible to see their cultural conciliations as acts
of silencing and domination rather than as a melting
and dissolving of difference. Both texts deal with
Highland society and in both texts that society is
finally undercut. By the time that Scott wrote his
poems and his novels the Scottish Highlands were
virtually emptied of inhabitants other than sheep.
Highland society was already quite lost except to the
nostalgic reconstructions of literature and tourism.
Scott was concerned that his own reconstruction should
be a virile one despite the possibly feminized status
that Scotland as a whole now held as a subordinate
culture. His Highlanders are therefore so far paragons
of masculinity that they consume themselves because
of it: they are too loyal, too strong, too noble to
continue to exist in a world which rewards malleability
and political slipperiness. Scott allows those masculine
characters to occupy a place of nostalgia while he
twists the representation of the feminine so that it
1 06
occupies a place of strength rather than a place of
obscurity. A glimmer of this can be seen in Ellen
Douglas's transition from silent/silenced female to
an active agent of the plot.
This marginalized character, figured always in
terms of her relation to other characters, offers Scott
more potential as a locus for ideology than, for
example, Waverley1s Flora Mclvor. Flora is already
an eloquent character and is already endowed with
political significance. Although she is strong, Scottish
and female, she is too simply translated in terms of
ideology (a Jacobite) to fulfil the more subtle function
that Scott is developing. Her beauty, her nobility,
her function as love interest interfere with any
possibility of her becoming a Scottish emblem because
she is recognizable to the reader as something else,
some more familiar type. The character who initially
occupies a marginal position, who seems to draw identity
from an over-masculine culture and yet is outside of
it and need not suffer its doom: this character offers
more potential to Scott and to the reader who seeks
to identify with a character on nationalist terms.
In the next chapter I shall discuss two more of
Scott's women, Meg Murdockson and Jeanie Deans, to
see how Scott develops this idea of a strong feminine
representative of culture.
107
NOTES
1. Walter Scott, Letters Vol. 3, ed. H. J. C. Grierson
(London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1932), pp. 302-3.
2. Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 110.
3. D. A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. xiii.
4. Walter Scott, in the Introduction to The Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Borders (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1802).
5. Joseph Taylor, A Journey to Edenborough in Scotland
in 1705 (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1903).
6. James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as
Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press,
1989), p. 38.
7. Ibid., p. 39.
8. Walter Scott, Waverley ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 341. All subsequent page
references to Waverley in the body of the text are
to this edition.
9. Waverley, p. 29 6. Compare this description with
Waverley's ^depressing" first impressions of
Tully-Veolan in chapter 8, to which Scott refers as
a "chapter of still life" (p. 36). This interesting
description plays with authorial position, noting the
delapidation of the Scottish estate but noting it all
through Waverley's would-be romantic eyes, and
explicitly recording the disappointments a "mere
Englishman, in search of the comfortable, a word
peculiar to his native tongue*' (p. 33) might find.
Scott seems deliberately to be playing with cultural
perception and judgement.
10. After the 1745 rebellion the situation of the
Highlands deteriorated rapidly. Many of the Lairds
had escaped to France, where they lived supported by
rent paid by loyal clan members. But these clanspeople
were also paying rent to the government which had
confiscated the land, and never having been wealthy
were rendered destitute.
The lands also came increasingly to be given
over to sheepfarming and the tenants to find themselves
1 08
forced to emigrate. In reality this was probably a
result of the spread to the Highlands of capitalism
and the railroads and so on, but the collective memory
of it does not attribute it to such impersonal forces
as economics.
11. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction
(Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1968),
p. 47.
12. See particularly Douglas Gifford, "Scott's Fiction
and the Search for Mythic Regeneration" in Scott and
his Influence, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt
(Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies,
1983) , p. 180.
13. In a letter to John Morritt in July 1814 Scott
writes: "The heroe is a sneaking piece of imbecility
. . . I am a bad hand at depicting a heroe properly
so call'd and have an
unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of
Border Buccaneers, highland robbers and all others
of a Robin Hood description . . . I suppose the blood
of the old cattle-drivers of Teviotdale continues to
stir in my veins." Letters Vol. IV, p. 478.
14. D. A. Miller, p. 269.
15. Ibid., p. 265.
16. Jill Rubenstein, "Symbolic Characterization in
'The Lady of the Lake,'" in Dalhousie Review, Vol.
51, Autumn 1971, p. 370.
17. Ibid., p. 373.
18. Nancy M Goslee, "Romance as Theme and Structure
of 'The Lady of the Lake'" in Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, Vol. 17, 1976, p. 749.
19. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown
(London: Macmillan, 1979), quoted by Goslee.
20. Goslee, p. 739.
21. Walter Scott, "The Lady of the Lake" (Edinburgh:
Blackwood's, 1814) Canto V, line 519. All subsequent
references to "The Lady of the Lake" in the body of
the text are recorded by reference to canto and stanza
because of the multiplicity of editions.
109
22. Rubenstein, p. 369.
23. Jill Rubenstein comments that "James can enjoy
the scene only by transforming it into a version of
eighteenth-century pituresque complete with hermits
and bowers, articulated in a highly stylized diction
wholly inappropriate to the actualities of Highland
scenery" (Rubenstein, p. 370).
24. Lennard Davis discusses the phenomenon of early
explorers describing countries in terms of what they
offer materially in his chapter "'Known unknown’
locations: the ideology of place" in Resisting Novels
(New York: Methuen, 1987).
25. Rubenstein writes:
"The minor characters also function,
to a certain extent, as representatives
of historical forces. Ellen contributes
simplicity to high birth, and Scott
admires his heroine’s ability to make
herself at home on a Highland Isle or
in court; she is thus a mediating figure
between Roderick and James. Like Malory's
Lady of the Lake, who offers Excalibur
to Arthur not as an outright gift but
as an opportunity to be pursued, she
teaches the sovereign a lesson in
kingship; or more accurately she provides
him with an opportunity to teach himself.
His infatuation with Ellen prompts James
to return to the Highlands, where he
learns his crucial lesson, that he must
not allow natural affection and civil
loyalty to become mutually exclusive
in his kingdom" (Rubenstein, p. 373).
26. Although the publishing date of Waverley is much
later than "The Lady of the Lake" the two were begun
at around the same time. Perhaps this accounts for
Ellen's slight advantage over her more passive but
apparently later counterpart.
27. Douglas: Against his sovereign Douglas ne'er
Will level a rebellious spear.
'Twas I that taught his youthful hand
To reign a steed and wield a brand;
I see him yet, the princely boy I
Not Ellen more my pride and joy
(II st. xxxii).
1 1 0
28. Sigmund Freud, "Femininity," in New Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1965), pp. 99-119.
29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 50.
30. Nancy Huston discusses the contiguity of imagery
used to describe the virility of love-making and that
used for making war. Nancy Huston, "The Matrix of War:
Mothers and Heroes" in The Female Body in Western
Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1986).
31. Douglas: The abbess hath her promise given
My child shall be the bride of heaven
(V st. xx).
32. Mildly and soft the western breeze
Just kiss’d the lake, just stirr'd the trees,
And the pleas'd lake, like maiden coy,
Trembled but dimpled not for joy;
The mountain shadows on her breast
Were neither broken nor at rest
(III st. ii).
33. Gayle Rubin, "The traffic in women: Notes on the
'Political Economy' of Sex" in Toward a New Anthropology
of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) pp.
157-210.
1 1 1
CHAPTER THREE
Guy Mannering; The Centrality of Margins.
i_. Marginality as Subversive.
In my readings of Waverley and "The Lady of the
Lake" I have given weight to the subversive
possibilities of Scott's endings. I have also shown
how the female figure can begin to give voice to some
of the issues pertinent to the subaltern culture. As
the woman in an emphatically masculine culture, Ellen
Douglas is primarily a piece of property, described
in relation to the men who possess or wish to possess
her. This figure of familial subjection offers potential
to Scott as a means of figuring political subjection.
Scott then twists that subjection to a position of
power. Meg Merrilies, the gypsy in Guy Mannering,
represents a significant development of this idea.
Meg is an even more marginal figure than Ellen: she
is not only a woman in a story about a man, but she
is also an old and ugly one. Neither romantic heroine
nor respectable mother, Meg lingers on the outside
of the family circle which is, in miniature, the
patriarchal system that the novel apparently supports.
1 1 2
And in a novel in which the law plays an essential
role Meg is an outlaw: a vagrant, a gypsy. But by
emphasizing the Scottishness of the gypsies, Scott
aligns Meg with Scottish nationality and thus addresses
through her some of the issues of subalternship. She
is shown both as assisting the dominant culture and
being oppressed, displaced and ignored by it. And while
those at the center of the novel notice her for her
"otherness" and revile her for it, they ignore the
ways in which she parallels or assists them. In these
ways Meg resembles the subaltern nation.
Yet Meg can be read as the unsung heroine of the
novel, the most important agent of the happy resolution
of its plot. Within the novel itself, credit goes to
the eponymous Guy Mannering for effecting the neat
resolution of the novel: the restitution of Harry
Bertram to his rightful social place. But as I will
show, Meg Merrilies is a sort of witchy shadow of
Mannering, and is more effective than he is in all
the ways in which she parallels him. Mannering*s writing
forms the talisman which the law recognizes as proof
of Bertram's status; meanwhile Meg's words protect
the talisman and Bertram himself from perishing
entirely. Meg saves Bertram from death as a young child,
whereas Mannering almost kills him in a duel when
Bertram is twenty-one.
1 1 3
By making his gypsy woman the assistant of the
law in reinstating Bertram, Scott makes central his
most marginal figure and privileges the subversive
voice. Even though she is ignored by most of the
characters at the center of the novel, Meg is important
both to the plot and as a representative of Scottishness
or subalternship generally. Indeed, as I will argue,
the subversive voice is strong in the fabric of this
novel— in its tone, its incidental characters and
events— and works surreptitiously against the main
plot.
The critical reviews of Guy Mannering at its
publication show an uneasiness with this "fabric."
The "Critical Review", for example, "must lament that
'Guy Mannering' is too often written in language
unintelligible to all except the Scotch." The same
exception to the novel is made more forcefully by the
"Quarterly Review" which held that "The work would
be, on the whole, improved by being translated into
2
English." These reviewers are objecting to the fact
that by using so much of the vernacular, Scott is
forcing is reader to understand what is marginal in
terms of language in order to understand the plot.
The "Quarterly Review" also, in fact, objects to the
use of the marginal in the substance of the novel:
1 1 4
The language of Guy Mannering, though
characteristic, is mean; the state
of society, though peculiar, is vulgar.
Meg Merrilies is swelled into a very
unnatural importance.
Like the dominant culture justifying its
superiority over a colony, the reviewer assumes the
cultural position from which all others can be judged
as inferior. The use of the word "unnatural" to describe
Meg Merrilies' role is very telling. What might a
"natural importance" be? Presumably it would be the
usual role of the gypsy in fiction: adding a little
local color; offering a temporary threat; representing
the menace of otherness from which the major characters
can escape in alarm to a comforting normality. Such
comfortable fiction is "natural." But Scott foregrounds
the marginal in Guy Mannering: not only in terms of
language and character but also of nationality. Despite
its conventional plot, the fabric of the novel is
unconventional, and this gives the novel the subversive
edge which the reviewer for the "Quarterly Review"
seems to have perceived and found threatening.
The novel has a masculine emphasis, with its male
characters, its preoccupation with matters of law,
of patrimony and patrilineage. Even the plot can be
described as following the pattern of masculine desire
in the way it depends upon a series of revelations
culminating in a final splendid exegesis. But the ^
subversive use of tone, minor details and minor events,
I will argue, questions the strength of that central
masculinity. It is appropriate that the minor character
made central, the banished subversive who will not
go away, is female.
ii. The Subversion of Plot.
The plot of Guy Mannering is that of a traditional
romance. Harry Bertram is stolen away at five years
old from his aristocratic parents by outlaws and is
believed dead. His mother dies in the premature labor
brought on by grief, and his father remains distracted.
But the child survives, and after many adventures makes
his way (in pursuit of his lover) to his rightful home,
where he is recognized through various means, reinstated
and assured of his posterity.
This is also a very "literary" plot: Guy Mannering's
4
indebtedness to Shakespeare is explicit. Although
Scott's storytelling skills spur the narrative on with
urgency, there never really can be a doubt that all
will be resolved in the usual manner for such
romances— in the convention, in fact, of the literature
to which Scott specifically alludes, and also in the
manner which Alexander Welsh establishes as Scott's
own convention— the correct alignment of proper hero
and property and his assurance of posterity:
The romance of Harry Bertram is that
of the missing heir, no longer a prince
in rags but a gentleman divided from
his estate. Rank and property together
govern the main action of the plot,
but the mere question of the hero's
identity as a gentleman controls^all
the smaller crises of the story.
For Welsh, Guy Mannering "is in so many ways a treatise
on real and pretended gentlemen" and the happy ending
of the conventional romance is conferred on a hero
who is both real gentleman and rightful property owner.
But does Guy Mannering have a happy ending? Jana
Davis points to the difficulty of accepting the "happy
ending" of revelations and truths in Guy Mannering,
since much of what she calls the "fabric" of the novel
(its obscured landscapes and its mysterious events)
"workfs] against the certainty that 'the truth will
out'"— and, indeed, against the notion of truth at
all. "Ultimately we are left with the sense that
knowledge is only, as Scott puts it, the 'best of
luxuries.'" Certainly much of the "fabric" of the
novel works against Welsh's happy ending of legitimacy
and property justly aligned. If knowledge is thwarted
in the manner that Davis describes, so too is the idea
of legitimacy, of the law as the representative of
117
truth. The law is made both central and problematic,
solid and shadowy. Figures of the law abound, including
the villainous usurper Glossin who inveigles his way
into ownership of Ellangowan despite his bourgeois
origins--as a lawyer. They also include the
quasi-detective figure Pleydell, a lawyer and a foil
to Glossin in honesty and philanthrophy, but capable
of sitting drunk on a tabletop in an odd burlesque
of monarchy.
The narrative impetus of the novel is also
subverted. The novel seems to be about Harry Bertram's
legal status as heir to Ellangowan. The way in which
Bertram's identity is obscured and then veiled and
then confirmed in tantalizing stages both to the reader
and to the various characters, heightens the dynamic
of desire in the novel. The narrative seems to surge
on towards a particular desired ending: the revelation
of and proof of Harry Bertram's real identity, his
reinstatement in the place of his fathers and the
subsequent rewards of land, status and love object.
Yet this very notion of a romantic reinstatement
of the legitimate heir is undermined. Even while the
true identity of the hero— upon whose legitimate status
all expectation of the narrative hangs— is being
revealed, the novel questions an emphasis placed on
the very idea of linear heredity.
118 j
1
On the day that Dominie Sampson conveys Meg
Merrilies' catalytic message to Guy Mannering— the
message which both predicts and ensures that "Bertram's
right" shall be restored— Charles Hazlewood is
unwillingly detained by the friends he is visiting
and unable to be at Woodbourne, the scene of the
8
flurry. The cause of his detention is easily
overlooked; it is presented in the novel as the most
trivial of issues; yet in the context of the novel
it has the effect of subverting both the premise of
the novel and its tone:
[Charles's] friend also insisted on
showing him a litter of puppies, which
his favourite pointer bitch had
produced that morning. The colours
had occasioned some doubts about the
paternity,— a weighty question of
legitimacy, to the decision of which
Hazlewood's opinion was called in
as arbiter between his friend and
his groom, and which inferred in its
consequences which of the litter should
be drowned, which saved (p. 412).
Since the eventual reinstatement of Bertram depends
on the way he looks— how far he resembles his father
in fact— the parallel between this story of puppies
and the main romance about aristocrats is clear, and
it is disturbing. Here "weighty question of legitimacy"
is an ironic phrase, and the matter itself is dealt
with in a way which is arbitrary yet final (some will
119
be deemed to be pedigrees, the others will be drowned).
It is discussed in a light-hearted, even mocking tone,
and it seems to be a trivial interruption to the main
interest of the story.
This incident has resonances close to the end
of the novel during the trial of Hatteraick the smuggler
and Glossin for attempting to procure the Bertram
inheritance by foul means. Glossin's trump card is
the claim that Bertram is the bastard son of his father
and a local girl. Glossin can prove that Bertram was
entered as a boy on an excise yacht, as his name is
recorded there. To the surprise of the reader such
a natural son does exist, but Glossin is foiled by
the lawyer Pleydell's anticipation of him:
"Ay?" said Pleydell,— "that is a very
likely story I— but, not to pause upon
some difference of eyes, complexion,
and so forth— be pleased to step
forward, sir." A young seafaring man
came forward. "Here," proceeded the
counsellor, "is the real Simon
Pure— here's Godfrey Bertram Hewit"(p.
497) .
This is the first and only mention in the novel
of Godfrey Bertram Hewit. He is introduced, produced
and dispensed with in the space of two paragraphs.
Yet he is Bertram's father's son, and unlike Bertram
he has always known that he is: he carries the name
1 20
of his natural father, Godfrey Bertram, as well as
his legal father, Hewit. Harry Bertram on the other
hand has always carried the name of Vanbeest Brown,
an amalgam of the Dutch trading company which
financially supported him, and the smuggler who stole
him to Holland.
Of course, this is a romance in which the murky
name of Brown is to be clarified and fame and fortune
restored, but the "weighty question of legitimacy"
which forms the ostensible narrative is undermined
here as in the puppy incident. Everybody knows Harry
Bertram is the legitimate heir because he looks like
his father, Godfrey. Like the puppies, it is a question
of color that separates the two half-brothers: "some
question of eyes, complexion and so forth." Of course
this is not sufficient in itself to reinstate Harry
Bertram: the law requires that "strongest and most
satisfactory evidence" (p. 500) of the written word— in
this case the scheme of nativity which Harry has carried
around his neck since infancy— to prove his legitimacy.
And unlike the puppies, which may have different
fathers, the young men have different mothers, which
puts the question of whom to drown and whom to save
on a comfortable legal footing. But the introduction
of the half-brother incident, similar in detail and
narrative tone to the earlier puppy incident, remains
1 21
unsettling. If the arbitrariness of paternity is not
in itself a threat to the weightiness of that weighty
question of legitimacy, then the playful way in which
Scott deals with it is.
In this way, then, Scott makes problematic both
his conventional "happy ending" and the linear narrative
which urges toward that end. If we do not really take
the reinstatement of Harry Bertram very seriously,
what should we take seriously? What is it that we
desire? On the face of it the novel seems to have as
a central theme the search for a father. And on the
face of it the search is rewarded: Harry Bertram is
reinstated as head of a patriarchal estate. He finds
multiple fathers: a whole lineage of fathers. Fathers
abound at the end of the novel. However, here too the
fabric of the novel seems to work against its ostensibly
happy ending. Fathers abound in the body of the novel
too, and not in happy ways.
iii. Paternalism, Paternity and the Marginal Female.
The most important form of paternity is the
patriarchal order under which land in the novel is
organized. When Guy Mannering first encounters the
Bertram family— at the time of Harry's birth— there
is a happy unity about the estate of Ellangowan.
1 22
Although it is exercised without particular principle
but rather a profound sloppiness, Bertram's lairdship
is a benign paternalism. His one ambition, however,
is to become a Justice of the Peace, a commission which
is due his social position but not his weak intellect.
Trouble begins when he is given this commission. He
sends the local beggars to the workhouse, the simpleton
to Bridewell where he dies miserably, and a merry old
sailor is banned "for no better reason than that he
was supposed to speak with an Irish accent." The
suffering of these individuals is in itself a bad thing,
but the consequent effect on the community is worse.
Scott catalogues suffering to show that these hitherto
objects of charity were hot merely a drain on the
community but actively contributed to it:
We are not made of wood or stone, and
the things which connect themselves
with our hearts and habits cannot, like
bark or lichen, be rent away without
our missing them. The farmer's dame
lacked her usual share of intelligence,
—-perhaps also the self-applause, which
she had felt while distributing the
awmous (alms) in shape of a gowpen
(handful) of oatmeal, to the mendicant
who brought the news. The cottage felt
inconvenience from interruption of the
petty trade carried on by the itinerant
dealers. The children lacked their supply
of sugar-plums and toys; the young women
wanted pins, ribbons, combs, and ballads;
and the old could no longer barter their
eggs for salt, snuff, and tobacco (p.77).
1 23
There is a way of life being destroyed by
Ellangowan's dismissals, and as Scott's use of dialect
words in this interjection indicates, it is a peculiarly
Scottish way of life. Ellangowan's estate before he
becomes a Justice of the Peace at least approximates
a kind of patriarchy of which Scott approved, and which
9
is behind so much of his fiction.
In the case of the gypsies, Bertram's violation
of his paternal role as laird almost amounts to a kind
of anti-patriotism also. Scott locates a specific
Scottishness in the gypsies. The beginning of chapter
VII is given over to a history of the gypsy race in
Scotland, including the tribe's geneology and its
evolution away from Egyptian origins. There is a long
extract from Fletcher of Saltoun describing the habits
of the Scottish gypsies of the last century, which
adds to the historical dimension of the gypsies within
Scott's novel. Scott's own description of them as the
"Pariahs of Scotland," living a wild life amongst the
civilized community and awesome in their wildness and
their "indomitable pride" even aligns them perhaps
with the historic Highlanders. Like the Highlanders
the gypsies inhabit terrain which can offer "a ready
escape into a waste country or into another jurisdiction
(p. 79). Like the Highlanders, then, they are a race
aside from that controllable by law, and like them
1 24
also the gypsies afford Scott a fertile alternative
Scotland with which to color his cultural and national
reconstruction.
The gypsies are part of an ancient economic system
at Ellangowan:
They had been such long occupants that
they were considered in some degree
as proprietors of the wretched shealings
which they inhabited. This protection
they were said anciently to have repaid
to the laird in war, or, more frequently,
by infesting or plundering the lands
of those neighbouring barons with whom
he chanced to be at feud" (p. 80).
By evicting the gypsies, Bertram is attempting to deny
a connection which goes far deeper than economics.
The gypsies certainly are connected to Bertram as common
members of a mutually beneficial social and economic
system, but they also share with him a common bond
of nationality. Bertram attempts to confirm his own
centrality by making the gypsies "other." His eviction
of them is a denial of his own "otherness"— his
Scottishness. But severance cannot foe so simple, as
Meg's continued significance in the family fortunes
shows.
Meg Merrilies is, in fact, one of the chief reasons
for Bertram's eviction of her tribe. While she has
come to despise Bertram personally for his persecutions,
1 25
she continues to adore little Harry as the latest member
of a family to whom she and her people have always
been loyal. Meg seems to have a strong maternal passion
for the child. Despite being forbidden all contact
with him, she contrives to "waylay him in his walks,
sing him a gypsy song, give him a ride upon her jackass"
(p. 85). When he is ill she risks her own safety to
lie beneath his window chanting a febrifuge rhyme.
This quasi-maternal affection is fully reciprocated.
The child "more than once made a stolen excursion as
far as the gypsy hamlet" to the terror of his
attendants. In fact it is the strength of this illicit
bond that decides Godfrey Bertram to evict the gypsies:
his wife becomes suspicious of Meg Merrilies and Bertram
decides "to make root-and-branch work" with the gypsies
I
of Durncleugh.
The gypsies are the most significant victims of
Ellangowan's new policy. By evicting them, Bertram
commits crimes against the individuals (and Scott makes
clear how much they suffer), crimes against the
community of which he is the protector, and crimes
against the larger community of Scotland. The gypsies i
are not mere local color; they are representatives,
just as the Highlanders are in other of Scott's works,
of a culture that is peculiarly Scottish. They are
part of Scotland's cultural identity. Because of the
1 26 i
eviction, and because of Godfrey Bertram's persecution
of the smugglers, Frank Kennedy is murdered, Harry
Bertram stolen away, and the main narrative is begun.
Thus the main action is initiated by a violation of
a paternal role and then by a specific violence against
a paternal figure.
That specific act of violence might properly be
seen as an oedipal crisis. Harry Bertram is stolen
away at the age of five, when he is able to speak
"a broken language." It is because he is able to speak
that he cannot be returned to his parents: he would
be able to tell them the story of Kennedy's murder.
The oedipal crisis, the event which sets the narrative
1 0
rolling, occurs just as the child is able to speak.
Frank Kennedy's murder is an oedipal crisis because
Kennedy is a kind of father figure to Harry: he is
a "particular favourite" when Harry is a child, and
indeed Harry grows up believing that the man killed
in the skirmish was his father. In this fatal oedipal
drama, the father is a composite of the man who makes
the law (Godfrey Bertram) and the man who carries it
out (Frank Kennedy). The paternal crisis initiates
the plot and provides the narrative with a desired
ending toward which it moves— the regaining of name
and estate if not the regaining of a father. But there
are problems with this.
1 27
From this scene on, Harry has multiple fathers.
There is Lieutenant Brown the smuggler whose name he
carries; there is Dirk Hatteraick the devil-father,
murderer of Kennedy and tyrant of Harry's childhood;
there is Glossin the usurper of the father's estate;
the old Dutch merchant who is Harry's guardian; Dandie
Dinmont the ideal father; Guy Mannering the future
father-in-law and surrogate father in several ways.
Even Pleydell tells Harry: "Thou art a fine young fellow
. . . and since you have wanted a father so long, I
wish from my heart I could claim the paternity" (p.
447). The novel abounds in fathers indeed, but they
are all inadequate, all lacking. And even as Pleydell
joyfully places Bertram amongst a plethora of
forefathers there remains a lack:
"Goodnight . . . to the newfound
representative of the Bertrams, and the
MacDingawaies, the Knarths, the Arths,
the Godfreys, the Dennises, and the
Rolands, and, last and dearest title,
heir of tailzie and provision of the
lands and barony of Ellangowan, under
the settlement of Lewis Bertram, Esq.,
whose representative you are" (p. 450).
Lewis Bertram is Harry's grandfather, not his
father. As Pleydell earlier muses to himself: "we must
pass over his father, and serve his heir to his
grandfather, Lewis, the entailer, the only wise man
1 28
of his family that I ever heard of" (p. 448). Harry's
father is omitted because of his foolishness— his
inadequacy. He is lacking because he is lacking. So
even as Harry discovers his origin, his father, he
finds a space, and even as the narrative moves on to
its resolution it makes a lack.
Harry's real father eliminates himself at the
very moment that he performs the interdiction that,
according to Lacan, enables the narrative. He bans
the gypsies, evicts Harry's surrogate mother, denies
his role as paternalist. His is an act of
self-castration: he destroys the community of which
he is the "father" and by causing the events which
lead up to Harry's abduction he destroys not the boy
himself but his relationship to him— that is, that
which makes him a father.
It is Harry Bertram's task to reinstate a wise
paternalism at Ellangowan— the paternalism which Scott
11
most admires. But he has no paternal guide in this:
his own weak father is replaced by villains who will
spar with Harry for his rights. Even Guy Mannering,
while he presents to the world of the novel the
demeanour of a wise and a good man, is not a good father
figure for Harry. One of the haunting follies of his
life has been yielding to the persuasion that there
was intrigue between his wife and Harry (known to him
1 29
of course as Brown) in India, and in shooting Harry
in a duel Mannering repeats the oedipal crisis that
began the narrative, and aligns himself with Godfrey
Bertram in relation to Harry.
Amongst all this social decay and these vacillating
fathers, the hero requires someone to whom he can turn
for guidance; the responsibility of directing our
narrative towards its desired conclusion will ultimately
rest on the same person's shoulders.
I think that the clue to this dilemma of power
and plot lies in the little bag which Harry Bertram
can produce at the trial and which contains the scheme
of nativity worked out for him at his birth by the
young astrologer visiting Ellangowan, Guy Mannering.
Nobody but the real Harry Bertram, heir to Ellangowan,
can possess this token. Here is the signifier of legal
status, of legitimate birth, of heredity. Pleydell
perfunctorily establishes this and dispenses with the
case. But the law sees only one signifier: the written
word, written in Mannering's hand, signifying that
Mannering has been here before and made his' legitimizing
mark on Harry Bertram. The law, in effect, recognizes
the fathering of Harry Bertram through the word of
Guy Mannering, so that Bertram finds at once some of
the fathers (and forefathers) the lack of whom Pleydell
earler pitied. But the law does not see that this little
1 30
bag of tricks is a multiple signifier. Not only does
it signify Mannering, the man who has taken the
responsibility for the law unto himself, but it also
signifies one who is dead and beyond any law, Harry's
mother, and more importantly, one who is outside the
law, Meg Merrilies.
What Pleydell siezes upon is a "paper," but what
Bertram carries around his neck is "a small velvet
bag, which . . . being opened, was found to contain
a blue silk case, from which was drawn a scheme of
nativity" (p. 500). The layers of revelation here are
significant, because they draw attention to a hidden
presence in the novel, one which remains hidden and
lacking even at the end. This is the person who made
the bag— Bertram's mother. Drawing the "paper" out
of its blue silk bag vividly recalls the scene in which
it was put there, also described particulary:
[Mrs Bertram's] fingers itched to
break the seal, but credulity proved
stronger than curiosity: and she had
the firmness to enclose it, in all
its integrity, within two slips of
parchment, which she sewed round it,
to prevent its being chafed. The whole
was then put into the velvet bag
aforesaid, and hung as a charm around
the neck of the infant, where his
mother resolved it should remain
(p. 73).
1 31
In this protection of the paper, Bertram's mother
is joined by another figure more significant to the
plot, in my view, than she. This is Meg Merrilies,
Harry's surrogate mother, who can protect the paper
with her words: not by a spell, but by the implication
of a spell. At the trial Meg's nephew, the gypsy
Gabriel, testifies that:
His aunt had always said that Harry
Bertram carried that round his neck
which would ascertain his birth. It
was a spell, she said, that an Oxford
scholar had made for him, and she
possessed the smugglers with an
opinion, that to deprive him of it
would occasion the loss of the vessel
(p. 500).
The scheme of nativity has been around Bertram's
neck throughout the novel, holding the key to his
identity undeciphered. The law recognizes it as the
signifier of legitimacy, but sees only the paper, the
mark of Guy Mannering the surrogate father— indeed,
in two senses the father-in-law. However, the paper
owes its continued existence and therefore its
effectiveness to the mother who sewed a protective
bag around it, and to the gypsy-mother who wrought
about it a protective layer of words and superstition.
It is the signifier for desire fulfilled in the
narrative— wealth and status etc— but also for desire
1 32
unfulfilled, for lack. Meg, like Mrs Bertram, is dead
and forgotten by the time of Harry's reinstatement,
but like the paper she is linked by signifiers both
to Harry's father-figures and to his mother. She is
herself a signifier for a lost culture. Her absence
and the absence of what she represents prevents the
novel from having the happy ending that the narrative
1 2
closure would suggest.
I have indicated already that Meg is a
self-appointed mother to Harry Bertram, and that the
narrative is motivated by the incident which sublimates
Harry's forbidden love for her. The scheme of nativity,
or sign of legitimacy, is as much a signifier for Meg
Merrilies as it is for Guy Mannering, with whom she
is linked in interesting ways.
Soon after Mannering has made his astrological
prediction at the beginning of the story, he comes
across Meg making her own predictions for the child.
She is spinning (an activity which in itself echoes
Mrs Bertram's sewing) and making a charm for the
well-being of the infant. Although this song is printed |
in the text, the version available to the reader is |
a "paraphrase" which Mannering, "after in vain
attempting to make himself master of the exact words j
. . . concluded to be [the song's] purport" (p. 63). j
Meg's words remain elusive to the reader, and we are j
1 33
left with an approximation by "our translator, or rather
our free imitator," who is, significantly, an
Englishman. In so many ways, Meg is interpreted, written
over and lost.
After she has finished her spinning, Meg looks
at the wool and tells a story similar to Mannering*s
prediction: "A hank, but not a haill ane . . . the
full years o' three score and ten, but thrice broken,
and thrice to oop, (i.e. to unite); he'll be a lucky
lad an he win through wi' it" (p. 64).
Meg's prediction, then, is accompanied by a charm
for the child: arcane words which are nevertheless
performative. Mannering is also capable of arcane speech
(his erudition in astrology has been exhibited with
ridiculous ostentation the previous night) but his
is a sterile sort of language. And whereas Mannering
writes down his prediction and then all but forgets
about the baby Harry, Meg continues to speak words
which will directly effect the fate predicted. In word
and action Meg protects Harry. Not only does she defend
the all-important bag with her words, but it is her
complicated machinations that bring together all the
threads of Harry's broken story. Mannering, on the
other hand, is ironically the very agent of the hazard
that he predicts for Bertram's twenty-first year, when
he shoots him in India. In this way, Mannering fulfils
1 34
(negatively) the prediction he made at the birth; Meg
fulfils (positively) the prediction that she made.
Mannering and Meg are clearly closely linked in
all this, but a comparison shows Meg to be more
effective. It is by her skills, efforts and finally
self-sacrifice that Bertram is first saved from murder
at five years old and then brought to recognition.
For all his concern and his resource to the law,
Mannering is unable to effect the desired happy ending
for Bertram, and even though his "mark" is the legally
recognized final element that reinstates Bertram, the
mark is Meg's also. Mannering is merely one of a series
of lacking father figures: Meg is the unsung heroine
of the novel.
When Mannering sees Meg spinning in that early
scene, Ellangowan's estate is still in its harmonious
state. Alarming though they seem to the young Englishman
as he spies upon them from his hidden place, Meg and
Dirk Hatteraick the smuggler are part of a complex
and thriving community. This is a Scottish community:
the gypsies are specifically Scottish, and so is
smuggling— a trade brought to life by the imposition
of English trading laws at odds with and insensitive
to Scottish culture. Meg's appearance and activity
; represent a particular harmony:
1 35
Equipt in a habit which mingled the
national dress of the Scottish common
people with something of an eastern
costume, she spun a thread, drawn
from wool of three different
colours— black, white, and grey— -by
assistance of those ancient implements
of housewifery, now almost banished
from the land, the distaff and spindle.
As she spun, she sung what seemed
to be a charm {p. 63).
Meg personifies certain aspects of Scottish
national culture. Here is the superstition or belief
in the supernatural; here is the Scottish national
dress. There is even, in the description of the distaff
and spindle, a nostalgia for something lost which united
disparate elements— "banished from the land" is Scott's
telling phrase. And as a representative of Scottish
culture it is significant that Meg's words are written
over by the Englishman. Meg is dressed in the Scottish
national costume with a little Eastern influence, and
indeed this is an apt description of the novel itself.
Here, if nowhere else, Meg jls^ Guy Mannering. And she
is peacefully creative here, in contrast to her somewhat
frenzied activity later in the novel. She represents,
in short, some sort of harmonious ideal in the novel.
At this time, as the gypsy woman in her Scottish
dress spins a supernatural tale of life beginning,
baby Harry is safe with both parents, and the estate
of Ellangowan embraces all its disparate elements.
1 36
1
Meg represents that sense of harmony which is sublimated
into desire at the point of the oedipal crisis. The
absence of Meg at the end of the novel represents an
unfulfilled desire which prevents a happy ending to
the novel.
Although the narrative will be resolved in a
conventionally happy manner, Meg Merrilies is already
dead. And although her death is described in long and
painful detail, she is uncelebrated by the characters.
Immediately after she announces her own death ("Pass
1 3
breath, Come death!") young Hazlewood turns to
"compliment Bertram on the near prospect of his being
restored to his name and rank in society" (p. 489).
Although she has been the means to that end, Bertram's
words entirely negate her. And she remains ignored,
or absent, from here on. Yet Meg's absence paradoxically
emphasizes her importance as object of desire.
Throughout the novel Meg is subject to dismissal
as the "harlot, thief, witch and gypsy" (p. 410) that
Sampson calls her. "'For God's sake,'" says Julia when
Meg appears before them to complete her triumphant
plot on Harry's behalf, "'give that dreadful woman
something, and bid her go away'" (p. 4 69). To those
in the central social positions of the novel's world,
Meg is dreadful in her marginality: she looks half
manly, half mad, wholly criminal; she speaks an only
1 37
half-intelligible language. Yet Meg occupies a central
position in the plot. Not only is she the vital
perpetrator of narrative, but she is also vital to
the sub-text of the novel, and for this role her strange
garb and her strange tongue are essential. She
represents an aspect of Scottish culture already
perceived by Scott as lost at the time that he writes;
indeed, I would argue, she actually represents Scottish
culture in that very perceived lostness, lost beneath
a persistent over-writing, written by those who can
only perceive her as "other."
How far is Scott implicated in this loss? In the
very last chapter, "the close of all" as the epigram
calls it, and the conventional happy-ever-after of
the romance, everybody is accounted for in terms of
social status. I have already indicated the extent
to which I think Scott makes this "happy ending"
problematic in the fabric of the novel, yet in this
last chapter there is no mention of the outlawed woman
who makes the hero a legal man. It is as though Scott
allows Guy Mannering after all to assume authority,
as he authors the ending of the eponymous text (in
the literary equivalent of Meg's dying words) with
"Here ends the Astrologer."
Yet there persists a tiny trace of Meg. The young
people, Mannering tells Pleydell, have "gone to plan J
1 38 j
out a cottage at Derncleugh"— the ancient spot on which
stood Meg's hut before her eviction, and the place
to which she demanded to be taken to die. There is
no indication of why a cottage is planned, or who shall
live in it. Presumably it is to accomodate the
descendants of Meg's kin, in the reconstruction of
Ellangowan's most peaceful patriarchy under Harry
Bertram, but this is significantly left unsaid.
Meg is the variously marginal character— outlaw,
vagrant, unlovley and old woman— upon whom the plot
depends. She is both mother and father to the hero
and she is the elusive thing which motivates desire
in the narrative. Already lost, missing, always
interpreted, she represents a sense of national identity
for Scotland which Scott cannot let entirely slip away
at the end of Guy Mannering. Yet the reinstatement
of what was called "friendly tenants" such as gypsies
is really as implausible as the happy ending of the
romance of Harry Bertram, and if the figure of Meg
Merrilies is a perfect trope for Scottish national
I
identity in some ways, it is also a doomed one. The
powerful gypsy woman, however central I find her to
the narrative must remain a marginal, even empty figure j
otherwise, just as the Highlanders must always carry I
i
a little of the shame of their status, no matter how i
I
central Scott can make them in his fictions.
1 39
That little cottage at Durncleugh, however,
contains the germ of Scott's solution to this problem
of national representation. Maintaining the strong
idea of a marginal character who nevertheless makes
a vital plea on behalf of heritage, culture, the
overlooked and the overwritten, Scott takes his peasant
woman and transforms her. Scrubbed clean, neatly
attired, respectably Christian and virginal, yet ready
to speak her mind and to defend an imperilled culture
with her body, out of the cottage door will step Scott's
masterpiece of the vernacular: Jeanie Deans.
1 40
NOTES
1. Critical Review/ February 1815, quoted in
introduction to Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (London;
Macmillan, 1924) p. xxii.
2. Quarterly Review, quoted as above, p. xxiii,
3. Ibid., p. xxiii.
4. See Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: the Making of
the Novelist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1984) pp. 77-84.
5. Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963) p. 200.
6. Ibid., p. 212.
7. Jana Davis, "Landscape Images and Epistemology
in Guy Mannering" in Scott and his Influence, eds.
J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association
for Scottish Literary Studies, 1983) p. 128.
8. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (London: MacMillan,
1924), p. 432. All further references to the novel
in the body of the text are to this edition.
9. For a detailed analysis of Scott's philosophy of
economics and the way in which this affects his works,
see Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1981). McMaster argues
that Scott increasingly yearned for and despaired of
the possibility of a society which was just, tolerant
and comfortable. More and more he came to believe that
human vices inevitably prevail and work loose the
bonds which hold communities together. McMaster's
theory seems well-illustrated in Guy Mannering.
10. Lacan notes that the oedipal crisis, the moment
at which the child fantasizes the death of his father,
occurs at the age at which speech begins.
11. See McMaster pp. 156-63.
12. In Character and the Novel (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1965) W. J. Harvey calls this sort
of division of character function in a novel "psychic
decomposition," explaining:
1 41
The causes and nature of psychic
decomposition are very complex. It
may be the result of some emotional
nexus outside the book which is too
painful to be brought into the novel
in a pure state . . . [or it] may result
from the novelist's attempt
to render passional states of unusual
depth and intensity, when one's identity
is merged in another's .... At the
deepest level, decomposition may be
part of the novelist's vision of the
world" (pp. 127-8).
In Scott's case I would argue that the "psychic
decomposition" in Guy Mannering has the ostensible
function of adding to the magical element of the story,
but at a deeper level may expose some of the anxieties
of national power and gender that I am discussing.
13. Ruskin apparently thought Meg's death
"self-devoted, heroic in the highest, and happy." Quoted
in introduction to Guy Mannering (London: MacMillan,
1924) p. xxiv.
1 42
CHAPTER FOUR
Jeanie Deans: The Tidy Nice Scotch Body.
_i. Defining the Margins.
Although it is set at an earlier date, Heart of
Midlothian {1818) takes up many threads from Guy
Mannering. Smuggling is foregrounded in this novel,
with the hanging of Wilson and the subsequent Porteous
riots beginning the action. I have argued that Meg
Merrilies is at least implicitly central to Guy
Mannering, and in Heart of Midlothian the main action
is quite explicitly given to female characters. The
theme of Scottishness is foregroundeded here, where
it was only background in Guy Mannering. In Heart of
Midlothian the location shifts between Scotland and
England in a way that offsets difference, and
marginality as a product of difference is an essential
sub-text of the novel. The function of the marginalized
Meg Merrilies is divided between Madge Wildfire, the
crazed gypsy (manly-looking, like Meg, and fantastically
attired) doomed to be miscomprehended by those in
authority, and the peasant Jeanie Deans. Like Meg,
Jeanie shows that the just cause can be located outside
1 43
of the parameters of law, "justice" and power. These
women speak for the importance of understanding what
is regional and complicated.
Like Meg, Jeanie is distinctly Scottish, and like
Meg she is marginal in terms of beauty and class. Her
function is thus established beyond the usual function
of the heroine in Scott's novels. On first reading
Heart of Midlothian Scott's friend Lady Louisa Stuart
wrote to him:
Had this story been conducted by a
common hand, Effie would have attracted
all our concern and sympathy, Jeanie
only cold approbation. Whereas Jeanie,
without youth, beauty, genius, warm
passions, or any other
novel-perfection, is h^re our object
from beginning to end.
In Jeanie Deans, Scott finds an empowering emblem for
the rebirth of Scottish national and cultural identity.
If Scotland is to be figured as female in its political
subordination to England, then Scott can choose the
terms on which that femininity will be encoded, just
as he chose how to encode its defeated masculinity.
Jeanie Deans is a "tidy, nice Scotch body," a woman
of irreproachable moral fibre whose nationality and
femininity are inseparably fused in her virtues.
Lennard Davis's discussion of the way in which
character works in the novel provides insight into
1 44
the power of Jeanie Deans as a national emblem. Davis
describes the reader's identification with character
in the novel in Freudian terms as a process which
"requires rivalry and admiration, defeat, and
internalization of the object." Davis's thesis is
that the desire for such identification precedes our
reading of the novel; readers are pre-disposed to "fall
in love" with characters, and "by the connection through
identification, ideologies can ebb and flow through
a populace" as readers identify with the values
(especially beauty, moderate rebellion and morality)
that characters represent. The novel, according to
Davis, "promises on a personal level the overcoming
of alienation and loneliness" ' “'since it offers a
comforting version of the fantasy of familial alienation
to overcome the loss and bewilderment of Oedipal exile.
Davis extends this theory to explain how the novel
can be ideologically relevant to a larger community:
From a larger perspective, alienation,
through a series of overdeterminations,
can be perceived as a variation on this
Oedipal exile .... The novel as a
social form provides a collective defense.
Here the public ideology of community
achieved through such concepts as
nationalism is confirmed by the defense
of identification which works on both
the personal as well as the collective
level. In this sense, the novel provides
one of the powerful mechanisms that
support this perception since the subject
1 45
of alienation in the novel must always
be treated through the personal,
biographical history of a character.
The domestic explanation in the novel
is always the strongest and most available
one.
The Heart of Midlothian is a novel which seems
to have allowed this sort of national identification
through personal identification from the outset. The
story is primarily the story of a family— a domestic
story— yet its earliest reception shows that Jeanie
Deans was felt to be a national character: the reader's
desire for identification embraces the national through
the personal story. J. G. Lockhart records of Heart
of Midlothian:
The reception of this tale in Edinburgh
was a scene of all-engrossing
enthusiasm, such as I never witnessed
there on the appearance of any other
literary novelty. But the admiration
and delight were the same all over
Scotland. Never before had [Scott]
seized such really noble features
of the national character as were
canonize^ in the person of this homely
heroine.
Scott's contemporaries recognized his achievement
in creating a new nationally emblematic character,
but the gender of that character seems equally
significant to me. In this novel power lies on the
whole with men, and with the English. There is much
1 46
at stake, then, in the role Scott chooses for a female,
Scottish protagonist. By making his heroine's femininity
inseparable from her Scottishness, Scott shows how
similar national, cultural chauvinism is to sexual
chauvinism in its oppression of the subordinated.
Jane Mi ligate contests that "it would be easy
to turn this novel into a kind of feminist tract" by
showing the central place women have in it, but that
"this would be to politicize sexually a text concerned
with human values in a wider sense.Millgate concludes
that the novel should not be read as feminist because
Jeanie believes fundamentally in the patriarchal system,
which is why her plea against this individual travesty
of it carries weight. While I agree with Miligate's
excellent analysis of Scott generally, I do believe
that an application of feminist theory to this novel
is both justified and important. Far from being a
"tract" I think that the novel which emerges under
such analysis is a discussion and exploration. It
discusses politics in gender terms and it explores
the voice of the over-written, the denied and the
culturally obliterated. Jeanie's own sense of the
rightness of the status quo is in any case much shaken
by the end of the novel— but reading Scott only in
terms of endings presents problems, as I have argued.
A feminist analysis finds a strong subversive voice
147
in this novel, no matter what the novel might finally
seem to endorse.
Just as in Guy Mannering, one of the forms of
political discourse and of the patriarchy at work in
this novel is the law. Scott was deeply interested
in the processes of the law, but in this novel he
chooses to make it a problem and to make some of those
problems political. Although Scotland retained its
own legal system after the union of 1707, it was subject
to English parliamentary dictates. In Heart of
Midlothian the law is effectively English and it is
masculine: these are the problems.
That the law is English is made clear from the
beginning of the novel, when it is seen operating
against the smuggling activities of Wilson. Public
affection for Wilson is attributable in the novel to
his personality; but historically Wilson would have
been a folk hero by very dint of his smuggling. Since
England had imposed a heavy tax on malt in 1725 (and
thus on whisky and beer, the Scottish national drinks)
smuggling had been considered a heroic act of
7
nationalistic defiance. Indeed, Judith Wilt sees
smuggling as redefining a lost national space: "On
Scottish sea and soil particularly this world of pirates
and smugglers is a kind of mythic national homeland,
given that in 'Britain' the nationhood of Scotland
1 48
~ r i """1 3 ' ' " " " " 1 " r r "
is a crime." Captain Porteous, then, by his cruelty
to Wilson before the latter's death, and then by his
order to the troops to fire indiscriminately into the
crowd at the execution, exacerbates the already
considerable injustice of harsh English law exercised
against a Scottish folk-hero.
The pardon of Porteous by the English crown shows
the people a corrupt or vindictive legal system, and
the condemnation of Effie for a crime which she did
not commit emphasizes this. Porteous commits public,
visible murders, for which the crown pardons him. Effie
is deemed to have committed a private murder because
she can produce no public evidence that she did not
— and the crown condemns her. Meanwhile Ratcliffe,
a longstanding outlaw, is made into a respectable
jailer, as if to show the perversity of legal matters.
Indeed, the crown's intransigence over Effie's case
is seen by the people as spite at the Scots for their
audacity in lynching Porteous. As Saddletree puts it
with customary verbosity:
"Do ye think our auld enemies of
England, as Glendook aye ca's them
in his printed Statute-book, care
a boddle whether we didna kill ane
anither, skin and birn, horse and
foot, man, woman, and bairns, all
and sindry, omnes et singulos, as
Mr Grossmyloof says? Na, na, it's
no that hinders them frae pardoning
149
the bit lassie. But here is the pinch
of the plea. The King and Queen are
sae ill pleased wi ' that mistake about
Porteous, that deil a kindly Scot
will they pardon again, either by
reprieve or remission, if the haill
town o* Edinburgh should be hanged
on ae tow."
A speech by Mrs Howden early on not only emphasizes
that the law is English, but also makes the Scots
essentially feminine in their response to it:
"I dinna much ken about the law
. . . but I ken, when we had a king,
and a chancellor, and parliament-men
of our ain, we could aye peeble them
wi ' stanes when they weren1 gude
bairns--But naebody's nails can reach
the length o' Lunnon!" (p. 45)
Mrs Howden1s speech is pragmatic in its termagent terms,
and to the point. Scotland still has its own legal
system, but now that it has lost its own sovereignty
the Scottish people are unable to voice their sense
of injustice. It is important to emphasize the
relationship between the English power and the Scottish
people, since it is very similar to the relationship
between men and women in this novel. By making Jeanie
Deans his protagonist, Scott shows that he is aware
of this.
That the law is masculine is already a commonplace
of feminist criticism. In this novel it is certainly
1 50
so. All the agents of the law— Lords of the Judiciary,
counsels and Judge— are of course all male, and in
addition (and most importantly) the law is being placed
in opposition to a female, Effie. But the supremacy
of the Word, the Law, is here most emphatically
masculine, because it admits of no possibility of
discourse apart from its own. Helene Cixous talks of
the ’ ’decapitation" of woman when she is not allowed
1 0
to speak, a punishment worked out as a quite literal
threat to Effie. She is to die not because she has
committed the crime of which she has been accused (not
even the law— or the agent of it— believes she is a
child-murderer) but because the law prescribes a system
of discourse for her into which she cannot enter. The
law is punishing Effie for the crime of child-murder
because she gave birth to a child whom she can now
not trace, and because she did not confide in any other
woman regarding her pregnancy. Had she acknowledged
her pregnancy, claims the law, this would have proved
that she intended no harm to the child at birth. Because
she did not do this, she must have killed the child.
The law rigidly binds one signifier (disguising
pregnancy) to one signified (the intent to commit
child-murder). In Effie's own perception of her case
disguising the pregnancy signifies shame, fear and
the hope that Robertson can marry her before the birth
1 51
of their child, but her perception has no place in
this discourse. She must die because she can find no
way to make the truth have meaning in the eyes of the
law. Jeanie cannot help her because she is trapped
between this law and the law of God (which forbids
perjury)— two patriarchal systems of law which prevent
11
her from saving her sister with a lie.
As I have already said, political and sexual
chauvinism are close parallels in this novel. Misuse
of the law shows one kind of political chauvinism.
Sexual intimidation is also prevalent in the novel
and always presented from the point of view of the
woman.
George Robertson's seduction of Effie is the first
and most important to the plot of these "misuses."
Sexuality itself is a symptom of unequal power here.
Effie is herself not willing to blame Robertson for
the seduction, but it is his failure to marry her before
the birth of their child that almost costs her her
life, and Jeanie is not afraid to call Robertson "the
wicked cause of my sister's ruin" (p. 157). Effie is
not the only woman Robertson has "ruined," however;
Madge Wildfire, the pathetic lunatic whose half-witted
aid brings Jeanie out of the thieves den and into the
home of the Stauntons later on, is also a former lover
of Robertson's. Like Effie, Madge bore a child which
1 52
came to a tragic end, and Madge lost her mind as a
result. Little seems to be overtly made of this tragedy
and Robertson's part in it in the novel, and until
recently critics too have been content to make little
of it. Susan Morgan seems to concede to an admiration
of Robertson: "Handsome, charming, courageous, he is
nevertheless a heroic figure without a cause, even
1 2
a lost cause, to direct his actions" she wistfully
writes, and she easily dismisses Madge unquestioningly
as a "madwoman."
The way in which Madge is disregarded by critics
eager to see in Robertson the qualities of a Byronic
hero repeats the injustice done to her by Robertson
and duplicates some of Robertson's attitudes. Scott,
I think, shows his sympathies quite differently. When
Robertson meets Jeanie on the moor Scott re-inforces
the characterization of him as a chauvinist egotist
by threatening her with a pistol (ever a symbol of
male power I) claiming that he will kill her unless
she lies in court to save Effie (from the death to
which he has committed her and in his own absence from
court). In addition to his physical bullying, he calls
Jeanie "dull of comprehension" (p. 159) and a "foolish,
hard-hearted girl" (p. 160).
The scene of Jeanie's encounter with Robertson
is the infamous Muschat's Cairn, a mound commemorating
1 53
the scene of a horrible wife-murder. Scott's narrator
explains in a footnote that Nichol Muschat, "a debauched
and profligate wretch," first attempted to defame his
wife with the aid of his accomplice, Campbell, then
to poison her, and finally the two men carried her
to this place where they cut her throat and inflicted
other wounds on her (p. 120). The choice of this spot
for the rendezvous of Robertson and Jeanie is
significant indeed, since it emphasizes the theme of
sexual threat and domination. It is also on this spot
that Jeanie is bound over by the law to the temporary
custody of "Daddy" Ratcliffe (a suitably patriarchal
nickname) the criminal turned jailer, and is subjected
to male threats for the second time in one night.
Forcibly gripping hold of her, Ratcliffe suggests to
Jeanie "Suppose I should strip your cloak off" (p.
183) and it is only by tricking him that Jeanie escapes.
This is one of the instances in the novel where the
masculinity of the law is emphasized in its very misuse.
There are other instances of male cruelty in the
novel, not least, of course, Effie's unjust condemnation
and her father's utter rejection of her. But these
actions on the part of Robertson and Ratcliffe
illustrate an important point. Their behaviour towards
women is intimidating, and Scott shows that the line
between "amorous" and "aggressive" behaviour is a
1 54
difficult one to draw at times— and the difference
s all too easily overlooked by men. When Effie is in
prison and is about to be visited by her lawyer, she
is told that another court official, Langtale, might
accompany him because "he likes to look at a bonny
lass, whether in prison or out o' prison" (p. 213).
The horror of this remark is plain— all aspects of
Effie's life are rendered irrelevant except her value
as a pretty object for a male gazer. The woman is held
captive and victimized by the male gaze.
Imprisoned as she is within the prescriptions
of masculine discourse, Effie resembles the colonized
state, defined according to what it has to offer the
dominant culture which has the power to describe it.
Lennard Davis explores at length the relationship of
description to appropriation in for example the journals
of the East India Company employees during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. He quotes Sir Walter Ralegh,
writing of Guyana in terms that illustrate the easy
way in which a colony might be figured as a woman.
Guyana is a country "that hath yet her maidenhead,
1 3
never sacked, turned, nor wrought." Thus the colony
either offers riches to the explorer or it does not:
as a woman it is either open to penetration or closed:
no other aspect of it (or her) can be interesting enough
to warrant description. Thus Scotland in the seventeenth
1 55
and early eighteenth centuries was described according
to the comfort of its inns and the passability of its
roads and, like Effie, must suffer the indignity of
being surveyed and judged in silence, excluded from
the discourse of the empowered. Effie is of course
imprisoned physically because of her exclusion verbally
from that discourse. And as an emblem of the power
that confounds her, Langtale the court official, agent
of the law, is aptly named, combining the long "tail"
of lechery with the power to describe, narrate and
define— to tell the "tale."
Because she is freckled and plain, Jeanie is not
often subject to the dubious distinction of being
flattered by men. This is contrasted with the way in
which she is regarded by members of her own sex. By
women, Jeanie is frequently noticed as a "neat, clean,
quiet-looking little Scotchwoman" (p. 320), and
references to her cleanliness as a national
characteristic abound. Her femininity and her
cleanliness become Scottish emblems frequently
emphasized together.
The community of women is not something which
Jeanie (or to her cost, Effie) has particularly enjoyed
or even recognized before her journey, but on the road
she instinctively cleaves to her fellow sex because
she understands the disadvantage which the imbalance
1 56
14 '
of power between the sexes gives her. Male travellers
are recognized in the novel to pose a physical threat
to Jeanie of course. When she is waylaid by Frank Levitt
and Tom Tuck they can threaten to take her money by
force, and when she refuses, they can offer to "strip
[her] to the skin" (p. 306)— echoing Ratcliffe's earlier
threat. When she gives them the rogue's latin from
Ratcliffe they have a change of heart, but her horror
when they ask her to "follow us off the road" is caused
by apprehension of the physical, sexual attack that
the woman on the road need only fear from men. Although
Levitt and Tuck are actually Meg Murdockson's agents,
and Meg certainly intends no good towards Jeanie, it
is the men that she fears. Left alone with Meg and
Madge, she feels more comfortable: "the sense that
she was now guarded by persons of her own sex gave \
i
her some confidence" (p. 318), however ostensibly -j
ill-founded and apparently ironic.
By cleaving to women, Jeanie cleaves to her own
kind, a kind that is also symbolic of national
kindredship. Women understand each other and Scots ,
j
understand each other. If Jeanie is a "tidy nice Scotch j
body" to her various landladies, she is "a stranger I
. . . that cannot speak Christian language" (p. 30 4) ;
I
to a male host. That these words are given to a man
forges a symbolic link between the cultural arrogance
1 57
which obliterates Jeanie*s speech and those men on
the road whose physical strength threatens rape or
murder. The novel supports a sexual and a physical
! "clannishness," and implicitly defends national
"clannishness": no wonder Jeanie is clannish when such
annihilation is possible.
I
J
In this novel Scott tackles head-on the accusation
that Scots are clannish:
The eagerness with which Scottish
people meet, communicate and, to the
extent of their power, assist each
other, although it is often objected
to us as a prejudice and narrowness
of sentiment, seems on the contrary,
to arise from a justifiable and
honourable feeling of patriotism,
combined with a conviction . . . that
the habits and principles of the nation
are a sort of guarantee for the
character of the individual (p. 299).
This is a non-committal although direct comment from
Scott. But it comes hard on the heels of passages which
show that where there is prejudice, it is not on the
part of the Scots. Where national difference is noticed,
it is abused by the stronger power, just as sexual j
i
difference is open to abuse by men. Finding that her |
customary garb of bare feet and tartan screen "exposed ^
k
I her to sarcasm and taunts" Jeanie must alter her
! clothing to fit in with the English ways "although
i
in her heart she thought it unkind, and inhospitable, j
to sneer at a passing stranger on account of the fashion
of her attire" (p. 294). Jeanie's dress marks her out
as derisible "other" and so does her speech, but Scott
tells us that the "jests and gibes" are "couched in
a worse patois by far than her own" (p. 295). Unlike
the emigrant Mrs Bickerton whose ambivalent observation
that "ye are come into a more civilized, that is to
say, a more roguish country than the north" (p. 305)
shows something of an internalized sense of the shame
of otherness, Jeanie merely resists the jibes with
silence, resolving to "talk as little and as seldom
as possible" (p. 305). Silence is her tactic against
cultural persecution: but it is also the punishment
which cultural persecution metes out.
i i . Language, Gender and S u b v e r s io n .
While Effie and Jeanie are silenced by the
masculine discourse, Madge Wildfire takes language
in the other direction open to women: subversion. Madge
is given little credit for any sense within the novel,
and by her critics. Yet Madge speaks with the sort
of indirectness that Lear's fool uses and that we have
already seen in Meg Merrilies, and it seems that she
is only incomprehensible to the men of the law. Madge's
language is an example of what Helen Cixous calls
1 59
1 5
"Flying in language and making it fly," ignoring
the repressive structures of phallocentric discourse.
A good example of her language is the scene in which
the procurator fiscal is attempting to discover whether
Madge lent her clothes to Robertson as a disguise on
the night of Porteous' lynching:
"Come, my jo," said Sharpitlaw, "this
will not do; you must tell us what
you did with these clothes of yours."
Madge Wildfire made no answer, unless
the question may seem connected with
the snatch of a song with which she
indulged the embarrassed investigator:-
"What did ye wi1 the bridal
ring— bridal ring-— bridal ring?
What did ye wi1 your wedding ring,
ye little cutty quean, O?
I gied it till a sodger, a sodger,
a sodger,
I gied it till a sodger, and auld
true love o'mine 0" (p. 127).
As Ratcliffe (an initiated listener and an outlaw
himself) recognizes, Madge's "auld true love" is
Robertson. Madge's song incorporates the idea of giving
clearly enough, and reference to a bridal ring merely
signifies the relationship she should have had to
Robertson. Blinded by a fixed definition of what a
"bridal ring" or a "sodger" must signify, Sharpitlaw
cannot understand that Madge's song contains the
information that he requires. His reaction is to
threaten violence to "this d d Bess of Bedlam"—
1 60
threatening in fact to silence the voice he cannot
understand. Whatever the dominating culture finds
incomprehensible in the subordinate, it silences.
Tricked by the men into leading their party to
Muschat1s Cairn to catch her beloved Robertson, Madge
sings songs and tells stories which potentially tell
her own forlorn tale (which is new to the reader) and
warn Robertson of the pursuit. To Ratcliffe she is
quite comprehensible, but to Sharpitlaw she is a "mad
yelling bitch" and he angrily tells Ratcliffe to "knock
out that mad bitch's brains" (p. 181). Madge's language
is not senseless, but like Effie's court defence it
cannot be understood by the law because it does not
correspond with the law's pre-determined linguistic
expectations. Sharpitlaw*s anger at Madge is the anger
of self-righteous intolerance, and Scott's narrator
overtly and ironically calls him a "calumniator of
the fair sex" when he angrily tells Ratcliffe: "One
woman is enough to dark the fairest ploy that ever
was planned" (p. 185).
The culturally sublimated voice gains expression
in this novel through the female, and in this sense
it is a feminist novel. Jeanie's journey itself might
be seen as a subversive and feminist act, since it
is undertaken to subvert the course of the law. Jeanie's
journey to London is an arduous one. She places her
1 61
body at risk from the elements, from chance events,
from other human beings. Her plea is made by the body
rather than by verbal dispute-— the usual and masculine
form of legal discourse. The repeated emphasis on the
Scottishness of that body shows that the feminist act
is also an expression of national identity. Jeanie
is a "tidy nice Scotch body"; her person is her body,
and its nationality is inscribed upon it in its
cleanliness.
To the current French feminists "le feminin" can
be defined as "any radical force that subverts the
concepts, assumptions and structures of traditional
4 1 6
male discourse." To some extent, Scott's own narrative
structure might be recognized as "feminist." In this
century, Scott has suffered much from the accusation
that his work lacks structure, that it is careless.
These accusations are not new to Scott, however; even
at the height of his popularity they were levelled
at him. Feminist criticism, however, recognizes a
phallocentric impulse in the insistence on regularized,
linear narrative, and the narrative structure in a
novel such as Heart of Midlothian with its refusal
j : 1 1 ...... 1
to reach and to end on the expected narrative resolution
(Effie's release from prison) might be described as
"feminine." Scott's often amused and ironic response
to the accusations support the feminist perspective.
since it shows that his style is not unconscious, and
j that he casts at least a questioning glance at the
j traditions to which he does not adhere.
In an anonymous review of his own work in 1817
Scott writes:
Few can wish (Scott's) success more
sincerely than we do, and yet without
more attention on his own part, we 17
have great doubts of its continuance.
Here is an ironic detatchment from the "slovenly
indifference" (his own phrase!) of which he is accused
! with regard to narrative style. In his own defence,
however, he writes:
There may be something of a system
in it, however; for we have remarked,
that with an attention which amounts
to affectation, he has avoided the
common language of narrative, and
thrown his story, as mijigh as possible,
into a dramatic shape.
Scott shows an awareness, then, of a "language of
narrative" which he quite consciously avoids.
Another example of Scott's subversion of the linear
narrative model is his frequent habit of interjection;
the narrative is interrupted by extended footnotes
which expound upon historical facts or snippets of
folk-lore which bear tangential relation to the text.
1 63
Although these are authoritative interjections, they
nevertheless interrupt the flow of the narrative, often
I
precipitating the story by the information they reveal.
One short footnote about language shows how the
Scottish language was prone to be misunderstood by J
the English, falling foul of the dominant culture's j
expectation that responsibility for making discourse
comprehensible lies with the other. The narrator has
been describing the harsh measures introduced by the
]
English as a result of the Porteous incident: I
The magistrates were closely
interrogated before the House of Peers,
concerning the particulars of the
Mob, and the patois in which these
functionaried made their answers,
sounded strange in the ears of the
Southern nobles. The Duke of Newcastle
having demanded to know with what
kind of shot the guard which Porteous
commanded had loaded their muskets,
was answered naively, "Ow, just sic
as ane shoots dukes and fools with."
This reply was considered as a contempt
of the House of Lords, and the provost
would have suffered accordingly, but
that the Duke of Argyle explained,
that the expression, properly rendered
into English, meant ducks and waterfowl
(p. 207).
i
• Humorous as the anecdote is, it shows how the
!
language of the dominating party asserts itself over
I that of the weaker. The Scots are considered to be
J
*
1 64
using a "patois" because their answers "sounded strange
in the ears of the Southern nobles." This is the problem
of dialect highlighted in John Galt's Andrew Wylie
which I will discuss in the next chapter, and evident
in the critical reviews of Guy Mannering. Where there
is an imbalance of power, dialect becomes an affront
to the privileged ear rather than merely an indicator
of difference. The provost might have "suffered" had
his interpreter not been there to point out to the
dominating party the prejudice of its own ear. And
Heart of Midlothian contains much about that very
prejudice and offers itself as some sort of interpreter
for cultural differences.
The character most victimized by the prejudice
that accompanies unequal difference is Madge Wildfire.
She is marginalized for many reasons and finally is
brutally murdered as a witch. As I have shown, Madge
is defined as a witch earlier in the novel primarily
because the feminine language that she uses does not
match that prescribed by the law. Thus in her femininity
as with her nationality she resembles the Scottish
provost whose answer to the House of Lords is considered
to be contemptuous. But unlike that provost, Madge
1 9
has no interpreter to prevent her suffering.
The death of Madge Wildfire illustrates the dangers
of cultural prejudice. Madge and her mother are
1 65
persecuted by the mob at Carlisle as "Scotch witches
and Scotch bitches": the hysteria focusses itself on
their femininity as well as their nationality. Jeanie,
Archibald and the ghoulish English Dolly Dutton are
passing by in their carriage in time to see Meg
Murdockson hanged, and the mob begin to gather "with
many a yell of delight" around her distressed daughter
Madge. Although Madge clings to their carriage door
with her pitiful cries for help, Archibald is prevented
from helping her because he is recognized by the mob
as a Scot himself:
"Save her for God's sake!--save her
from those people!" exclaimed Jeanie
to Archibald.
"She is mad, but quite innocent; she
is mad gentlemen," said Archibald; "do
not use her ill, take her before the
Mayor."
"Ay, ay, we'se hae care enow on her,"
answered one of the fellows; "gang thou
thy gate, man, and mind thine own
matters."
"He's a Scot by his tongue," said
another; "and an he will come out o'
his whirligig there, I'se gie him his
tartan plaid fu' o' broken banes"
(p. 421).
Jeanie of course is also Scottish and so subject
to the same threats as Archibald, but as a woman she
is doubly barred from protest. Old Dame Hinchup, a
passer-by, merely dares the truth about Meg Murdockson
— "This was nae witch, but a bluidy-fingered thief
1 66
and a murderess" (p. 420)— but even these clear-sighted
words bring suspicion upon her own head: "Seest thou
how one witch will speak for t'other— Scots or English,
the same to them," says Gaffer Tramp. A Scot who speaks
for a Scot will have his bones broken; the woman who
speaks for a woman will be deemed a witch. So speaks
the logic of prejudice. And so Jeanie is prevented
by the threat of the mob from making her plea for
her national sister this time around, and although
she and Archibald rapidly enlist the help of the city
magistrate they are too late to save Madge from fatal
injury at the hands of the mob.
Even on her death-bed Madge's only articulations
are her obliquely relevant songs, and now it is Jeanie's
turn to be frustrated since she had hoped to gain some
last-minute information regarding the fate of Effie's
child. But, like Meg Merrilies, Madge represents a
culturally subordinate voice which is already lost
before she dies— already lost, in a sense, before the
narrative comes to be written around her. Jeanie can
save one silenced sister, but the other is already
gone. Madge is the victim of every subordination in
this novel of subordination: parental, sexual, cultural,
linguistic. Her death at the hands of an English mob
is the final silencing of the misunderstood voice,
the grave warning behind the issue of difference.
1 67
iii. Re-addressing the Issue of "Otherness."
Critics have compared Jeanie's journey from
Scotland into England with Edward Waverley's and Francis
Osbaldistone's journeys into Scotland from England.
A more important comparison might be made between Jeanie
and some of those real-life travellers discussed in
my introduction, whose recorded impressions of Scotland
informed English (and european) readers about the
differences between England and Scotland, and helped
define the latter's perceptions of itself as "other."
Lennard Davis writes about the way in which
physical space is subjected to ideological shaping
whenver it is described. These pre-novelistic diary
portraits of Scotland illustrate his point that
"description of any kind records the colonial space
and is part of the conquest, settlement and use of
20
that space." Scott's use of landscape in his novels
arrests the development of this conquest by the English
through description: he reclaims for Scotland the
ideological landscape in his own writing. Scott's novels
certainly turn Scotland into what Davis calls a "system
of meaning" and the strength of Scott's system is
evident in its ability to re-shape or even reverse
the diary accounts I discussed in my introduction.
As Davis puts it, "The modern state required the
1 68
recreation of its space through ideological means.
Modern patriotism is therefore a product of language
and information dispersal in rather a different way
than earlier types of patriotism linked to a land by
21
directly perceivable horizons." Patriotism in Scott
takes the form of characters and landscapes both imbued
with the same values. Jeanie Deans functions as both
character and landscape in this ideological re-shaping,
since it is through her that Scott most effectively
combats the negative constructions of Scotland by such
writers as Joseph Taylor.
Like Andrew Wylie, Jeanie is an emissary from
Scotland to London and part of her function for the
nationalist reader is to reverse that "othering" process
and to show London itself, or England itself, as other.
Jeanie*s principle interest, as she travels, is in
English modes of worship. Religion is of course of
paramount importance to Jeanie: her piety is the reason
why she could not commit perjury to save Effie, and
why she is on this journey in the first place. By making
the difference in habits and institutions of worship
the subject of most of Jeanie1s cultural comparisons,
Scott shows that she sees with particular eyes.
Religious difference is a principle difference between
the culture of Scotland and that of England, and thus
1 69
Jeanie will have different perceptions of "otherness"
from an English observer.
Through Jeanie the difference between Scottish
and English landscape is described with the Scottish
landscape taken as the norm against which all she sees
is to be measured. The changing landscape is the first
thing upon which a traveller remarks. A century and
a half after Jeanie*s trip Robert Louis Stevenson writes
that "there are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than
that of the windmills bickering together in a fresh
breeze over a woody country .... When the Scotch
22
child sees them first he falls immediately in love."
But not this Scotch lass: Jeanie notices the "mills,
whilk havena muckle wheels nor mill-dams, but gang
by the wind— strange to behold" (p. 296), but when
invited by a miller to "gang in and see it work" she
shows no interest, for she is "not come to the south
to make acquaintance with strangers" nor, it seems,
strange things. Similarly while for Stevenson's Scottish
traveller "the change from a hilly to a flat country
strikes him with delighted wonder," Jeanie shows no
delight: "My sight and my very feet are weary o' sic
tracts o' level ground— it looks a* the way between
this and York as if a' the land had been trenched and
levelled, whilk is very wearisome to my Scotch een"
(p. 303). Jeanie's lack of enthusiasm is perhaps in
1 70
answer to such English complacence about the superiority
of English countryside as Johnson expressed when he
quipped that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever
sees is the high road that leads him into England.
Another answer to Johnson can be found in Jeanie's
barefootedness. In his Journey to the Western Islands
Johnson deplores, amongst other things, the Scots'
habit of running barefoot. This they do, he writes,
despite Cromwell’s soldiers teaching them how to make
shoes. And he notes:
I know not whether it be not peculiar
to the Scots to have attained the
liberal, without the manual arts,
to have excelled in ornamental
knowledge, and to have wanted not
only the elegancies, but the 23
conveniencies of common life.
So we see Jeanie barefoot, but far from attributing
this to ignorance about shoe-making skills or ignorance
generally, Scott makes no apology for his barefoot
heroine. Instead, the English attitude to footwear
is shown as merely one perspective: "She was not aware
that the English habits of comfort attach an idea of
abject misery to the idea of a barefooted traveller"
(p. 270). Jeanie has her own perspective which sees
the wearing of shoes and stockings for the whole day
1 71
an English "national extravagance" (p. 294) to which
she conforms at the cost of her physical comfort.
Jeanie's naked feet perhaps signal a deeper
vulnerability in this cultural fencing game. When he
tells us that Jeanie wasn't aware of the way the English
regarded barefootedness Scott also defends it against
another charge: "If the objection of cleanliness had
been made to the practice, she would have been apt
to vindicate herself upon the very frequent ablutions
to which, with Mahometan scrupulosity, a Scottish damsel
of some condition usually subjects herself" (p. 270).
Jeanie Deans is nothing if not clean. Frequently Scott
shows her tidying herself up or washing, and he clearly
intends this practice to be linked indisputably with
Jeanie's nationality. The epithet "a tidy nice Scotch
body" is applied more than once to Jeanie by her
landladies. When she meets the Duke of Argyle there
is almost no need for Scott to tell us that Jeanie's
clothes are "arranged with that scrupulous attention
to neatness and cleanliness, which we often find united
with that purity of mind, of which it is a national
emblem" {p. 373). By this point in the novel the link
between Scottishness and cleanliness has so frequently
been suggested that this explicit assertion seems almost
self-evident.
1 72
By repeatedly associating the idea of cleanliness
with Scottish femininity Scott deliberately reverses
the historically entrenched suggestion that Scottish
women are dirty. We find that suggestion in, for
example, Joseph Taylor's 1705 description of Edinburgh,
in which the Scottish women are associated with indecent
dress and dirt. Even Johnson seems surprised to find
that the women of the Hebrides are always clean and
educated. Scott's consciousness of such associations
is perhaps behind the shoes, the stockings, the bonnet
that Jeanie must don as she travels progressively
further south. But Scott takes these tainting
implications and boldly turns them on their head in
the figure of Jeanie Deans: she is neat, she is clean,
she is pure in mind— and she is all these things because
of, not in spite of, her Scottishness.
The criticism that Scots are underdressed is behind
Dolly Dutton's silly characterization of Highlanders
as "wild men with their naked knees," and Miriam Wallace
notes that Dunbar reproduced some French prints of
Scotsman titillating and scandalizing women with their
kilts just three years before Heart of Midlothian was
24
published. Wallace links suspicion of Highlanders
with suspicion of women in the novel, noting examples
of cross-dressing and vagrant sexuality in the criminal
elements of the novel, and pointing out that the kilt
1 73
offers a powerful combination as a symbol of
insurrection and as an item of "feminine" apparel.
Certainly there is much anxiety for Scott in the
idea that the Highlander might be derided as feminine.
The slip from a national past full of heroic masculinity
to a present feminized by political subjugation is,
I have argued, Scott's perpetual fear. In his earlier
fiction the Highlanders as Scottish emblems acquire
even an excessive masculinity to combat this fear,
and Scott begins at the same time to present Scottish
femininity in an assertive rather than a passive role.
If Scotland is to be feminized politically, given the
subordinate voice and obliged always to speak indirectly
to assert its own claims to justice, then Scott makes
sure that its femininity will be such a femininity
as Jeanie Deans's, with all the virtues she embodies.
Elaine Showalter points out that "if we study
stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and
the limited roles women play in literary history, we
are not learning what women have felt, but only what
2 5
men have thought women should be." Perhaps a feminist
reading of a novel of Sir Walter Scott is likely to
be guilty of this sort of submission to male
stereotypes. However, I believe that in Heart of
Midlothian Scott addresses many of the issues with
1 74
which feminist criticism engages— particularly those
of feminine language and the female community. I think
that Scott fully understood the roles of women Which
he explores in this novel, and that his identification
of women with the role Scotland found itself playing
in the early half of the eighteenth century (and which
it was still playing in his own lifetime) allowed him
to write with a certain degreee of feminine experience
upon which to draw.
1 75
NOTES
1. Lady Louisa Stuart in a letter in June 1818 to
Scott, quoted in J.G*Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter
Scott (London: J. M. Dent, 1967), p. 33 6.
2. Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and
Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987).
3. Ibid., p. 127.
4. Ibid., p. 132.
5. John G. Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott
(London: J. M. Dent, 19 67) p. 337.
7. Jane Millgate, Sir Walter Scott: The Making of
the Novelist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1 984), p. 1 61 .
8. See the discussion of this in John Henry Raleigh's
introduction to Heart of Midlothian (Boston: Houghton
Miflin Co, 1966), p. xiii.
9. Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: the Novels of Walter
Scott (Chicago, Universtiy of Chicago Press, 1981)
p. 129.
10. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (Boston:
Houghton Miflin Co, 1966). All subsequent references
to the novel in the body of the text refer to this
edition.
11. Helene Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" trans.
Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, Autumn 1981, p. 42.
12. See John O. Hayden, "Jeanie Deans: The Big Lie
(and a Few Small Ones)" Scottish Literary Journal,
May 1 979, Vol. 6 no. 1 .
Hayden claims that Jeanie*s facility for lying
makes her moral reasons for not lying in court
worthless. Hayden treats all her "lies" as equal.
Perhaps this is a male critic imposing upon Jeanie
similar sorts of restrictions to those which trap Effie
in court.
13. Susan Morgan, "Old Heroes and a New Heroine in
the Waverley Novels," Texas Studies in Literature and
Language, Fall 1983, vol 50 no 3, p. 559.
1 7 6
14. Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels (New York: Methuen,
1987), p. 73.
15. Susan Morgan discounts all these female encounters
by claiming that "Jeanie's walk to London involves
only one significant step, the meeting at Wilmingham
with Reverend Staunton and Geordie Robertson" (Morgan
p. 579). Morgan's overlooks the importance of the female
characters.
Judith Wilt gives an excellent analysis of how
Jeanie's meeting with the Queen reinforces the
patriarchy rather than celebrates sisterhood. By
unconsciously insulting the King's mistress Jeanie
gives the Queen an opportunity to punish that mistress
while still protecting the King's power and his own
immorality.
According to Wilt, "Man is the tabooed object,
woman the eternal forgiver" in this novel (and others),
and it supports this law over the law that "the
community pretends to believe": that women will cleave
to their own kind.
My own discussion regarding "clannishness" shows
that finally I disagree with this assertion, although
I do agree that there is a patriarchal structure in
tact at the end of the novel. As I have remarked earlier
with regard to Millgate, I do not think the novel
presents a feminist solidarity against the patriarchy,
nor does it intend to show an alternative to it. Rather
it makes a plea for the culturally sublimated voice,
whether Scottish or female or both.
15. Helene Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa," quoted in
"Introduction to Cixous," Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no
1, Autumn 1981, p. 887.
16. Jonathan Culler, "Reading as a Woman," in On
Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
(Ithaca, Cornell Universtiy Press, 1982), pp. 43-64.
17. Walter Scott, Unsigned Review in Quarterly Review
April 1817, p. xvi.
18. Ibid., p. xvii.
19. Ironically, Madge intuits this lack, and earlier
in the novel posits the Reverend Staunton as her
Interpreter while she travels through a mental perjury
as Mercy with Jeanie as Christiana from Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress.
1 77
20. Davis, p. 78.
21. Ibid., p. 64.
22. Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Foreigner at Home"
in Memories and Portraits (Glasgow: Richard Drew
Publishing, 1990), p. 6.
23. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands
of Scotland (Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1965),
p. 20.
24. Miriam Wallace, "Nationalism and the Scottish
Subject: The Uneasy Marriage of London and Edinburgh
in Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian" (as
yet unpublished).
25. Elaine Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics"
in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 130.
1 78
CHAPTER FIV E
John Galt and the Contemporary Influence of Scott,
jl. Galt and "Internal Colonialism."
Scott's success in finding literary emblems for
Scottish national identity can be better appreciated
if his work is compared with other Scottish writers
of his time. Here I propose to look at some of the
work of John Galt, Scott's contemporary, and show how
Galt's work displays some of the symptoms of "internal
colonialism," and how, for that reason, it could not
have the same effect on an emergent sense of national
identity as Scott's.
John Galt's first literary success, The Ayrshire
Legatees, was published in Blackwood's Magazine in
1820, six years after Waverley had established a firm
market for novels set in and about Scotland. Constable
had earlier rejected Galt's Annals of the Parish because
of the lack of such a market, but Blackwood welcomed
it after the success of the Waverley novels. After
this, Galt made a place for his own version of Scottish
tales, with The Steamboat, the re-introduced Annals
of the Parish, Sir Andrew Wylie of That Ilk, The Provost
1 79
and The Entail. All of these works portray small-town
life in the west of Scotland with varying degrees of
"pawky" comedy and sharp observation.
In some ways Galt's literary interaction with
Scott's work is uneasy: he competed with Scott in
historical fiction (The Spaewife in 1823 and Rothelan
in 1824) and Ringan Gilhaize was "provoked" by what
Galt considered to be Scott's unjust treatment of the
1
covenanters in Old Mortality. Although Galt makes
frequent literary references to Scott’s works, often
these references lie ambiguously between homage and
2
satire. But however they differed in their attitudes
towards their material and in their methods of treating
it, both Scott and Galt were concerned to record the
details of Scottish life and to preserve a certain
Scottish national cultural heritage against what they
perceived to be the decaying effects of time,
technological progress and encroaching anglicism. As
Galt's Balwhidder puts it, in Annals of the Parish
the aim is "to testify to posterity anent the changes
that have happened in my day and generation— a period
which all the best informed writers say, has not had
its match in the history of the world, since the
beginning of time." The extent to which the two
novelists differ in their perception of this national
culture and the extent to which they agree on what
was essentially, to them, Scottish, is the subject
of this chapter. The consideration of some aspects
of Galt's work throws light on the particular success
of Scott's own version of Scottish national culture
and the causes for its erosion.
The early nineteenth century had been enjoying
a revival of interest in the idea of a literature which
could represent Scotland. While the Scottish
Enlightenment had produced many extraordinary minds
and talents, it had perhaps contributed rather to the
pool of international intellectuals than to the
specifically Scottish. Writers of the Scottish
Enlightenment prided themselves on the quality of their
English prose, for example, thus losing ground for
the cause of the Scottish language while gaining ground
for the international reputation of Scottish education
and intellect. However, Robert Burns had triumphantly
re-established the Scottish vernacular as a literary
language with great popular appeal, and thus facilitated
its use in the nineteenth-century novel.
The difference between Scott's use of the
vernacular and Galt's is important. Scott uses dialect
relatively sparingly, usually for lower-class characters
or for humor, and often to indicate the limits of that
character's background or education. The use of the
1 81
vernacular in Scott is affectionate; it invites the
reader to explore imaginatively the parochial experience
and understanding. Galt, however, sometimes uses it
more aggressively. The reader must master the vernacular
in order to understand not only character (as in the
celebrated Lady Grippy) but also occasionally plot.
Like his character Andrew Wylie, Galt takes the language
of the subordinated culture into the mainstream and
requires that it be treated with equal regard.
But whereas Galt's initial claim for attention
on behalf of "Scottishness" may be more aggressive
than Scott's, finally it is Scott's version of what
is Scottish that prevails. The reason for this is,
I think, a difference in method. Galt is a satirist:
Scott is not. Thus, while both writers collect with
a keen eye the details of local or national life which
are to be recorded for posterity, Scott's are collected
in such a way that the nostalgic imagination can
construct from them a certain romantic grandeur. Galt's,
on the other hand, are limited or foreshortened in
their very means of preservation: this amounts to a
sort of literary pickling process in effect.
I have earlier discussed Lennard Davis's theory
concerning the reader's predisposition to identify
with a novel's characters, and the way in which this
1 82
theory might be extended to cover a national
4
identification with certain characteristics. In Jeanie
Deans, I have argued, Scott's willing readers found
just such an object for their desire. Galt's method
of delineating character frustrates the reader's desire
for identification with or possession of character,
however. Far from exhibiting noble or beautiful
characteristics a figure such as Andrew Wylie, for
example, exhibits quirky and eccentric ones, and Galt
gives just too little guidance to a reader "lost"
between identifiable pointers to enable that reader
to interpret, overcome and ultimately re-possess the
character. On a larger level, this frustrates a reader
who might look to Andrew Wylie for national
identification. Satirically recorded details of what
constitute "Scottishness" frustrate identification
with a larger, perhaps more magnanimous rendering of
national identity.
In Scott, character, landscape, narrator and reader
may all tend in one direction: towards the desired
construction of a mythical, empowered Scotland. In
Galt, discrepancies in narrative tone frustrate a
reader's attempt to read the novel as what Davis calls
a "form that allows for a feeling of community amongst
its readers, a powerful bond between the narrator and
183
reader that replaces the weakening bonds of family
and society."
By "bonds of family and society" we can also read
"nation" of course. My point is that while Scott and
Galt both record a version of "Scotland" for history,
Scott's style as a novelist provides a point of entry
for a reader who is pre-disposed to identify with the
noble character that Scott posits as essentially
Scottish, and thus to reconstruct a certain acceptable
ideology. Galt's narrative style frustrates rather
than facilitates this process.
In my discussion of Andrew Wylie of That Ilk and
The Entail I will show how, although both novels go
some way towards wresting the power of definition from
the hands {or the pens) of the English, Galt's satirical
tone is a symptom of the "internal colonialism" which
Michael Hechter identifies in natives of a subaltern
culture. But in my discussion I hope to show that in
The Entail Galt starts upon the trope of the woman
as resolution to historical anxiety; the very trope
that Scott uses so successfully in the character of
Jeanie Deans. Galt writes under the legacy of "internal
colonialism," exhibiting signs of cultural self-censure
where Scott does not. But it is interesting to see
that, in his move toward an escape from this
1 84
culturally-induced entrapment, he is moving in the
same direction as Scott.
ii. The Wily Scot.
Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk (1822) is a
rags-to^-riches story, a fairy-tale about a poor orphan
from a Scottish village ("Sandyholm") who, by his
intelligence and uncommon good sense (his "wiliness")
wins the respect of progressively more wealthy and
influential people in London. He gains for himself
status, wealth, power and the hand of the laird's
daughter with whom he has always shared a pure romantic
love. Like Scott's Jeanie Deans, Andrew is a cultural
emissary from the lowliest of Scottish worlds to the
loftiest of English, with only his native good sense
and good nature to commend him. As with Jeanie these
simple virtues prove to be universally recognized and
admired, and finally win the way even to the monarch's
notice and esteem.
An important function of Heart of Mid-Lothian
(1818) and Andrew Wylie is to go some way towards
reversing the "othering" of Scotland effected by the
travellers and diarists discussed in my introduction.
Andrew's impressions of London are both fresh and
1 85
generally unfavorable. "What do you think of London?"
asks the Earl of Sandyford soon after Andrew's arrival.
"Poo! . . . London! a whin [few] brick houses" is
Andrew's dismissive response. Reversing centuries of
comparisons in which Scottish cities and scenes have
been set unfavorably against English ones, he goes
on: "O, man, if you could but see Glascow and
Edinburgh— there you would see something— look at
Holyrood House, that's a palace for you— but St James's
6
here, it's just like an auld to’booth."
London becomes the place requiring definition,
and the powerful voice of description is Andrew's broad
Scottish and dismissive one. Just as earlier English
travellers to Edinburgh recorded only what struck them
as different from what they were familiar with and
thus characterized as un-English (Scottish) all the
things which most appalled them, so Andrew's first
experiences of London fill him with disgust. Prices
are unexpectedly high to him and the cost of honest
labor therefore seems dishonest. Unwilling to hire
help with his heavy possessions for this reason, he
confronts the real dishonesty of the streets in the
form of con-men and thieves on his first night in the
city. London's attractions— what the Earl calls the
"public amusements"— Andrew is not equipped to perceive.
i
1 86
He believes he has experienced them when he has merely
listened to ballad-singers in the street (and his chief
observation on this activity is that it renders one
vulnerable to pickpockets). His naivete leads him to
be tricked by the Earl into attending a masked ball
thinking it is the theatre.
These incidents do not merely show Andrew as a
rustic naif and London as a place of bedazzlement and
roguery; they illustrate the difficulties of
cross-cultural perception. Andrew's background and
experience have conditioned what he observes about
a new culture and to what he will be blind. This
mis-matching of perceptions is of course the source
of much that is interesting in, for example, travel
literature, and is also the source of much of the comedy
in Andrew Wylie itself. But it also has a distancing
effect on the place visited, and thus there is in
Scottish literature a need to turn London— and indeed
England— into the "other," since that has always been
the place in which Scotland has found itself in English
writing.
In Andrew Wylie the mis-matching works both
ways, in fact. Andrew's odd appearance and broad Scots
accent typically cause a succession of reactions
beginning with affront but ending with esteem. Andrew
1 87
is in his very person a challenge to complacent cultural
preconceptions, and in this novel as in the section
of Heart of Mid-Lothian dealing with Jeanie*s journey,
the culturally marginal is applauded and rewarded.
Finally London is the the odd place in both these
fictions. Home is the preferred place to which the
protagonists return contented. As Wylie says, "In my
thought, the mornings there [Sandyholm] are brighter
than those I have seen in any other place— the evenings
far grander, and the nights thicker set with stars"
(III p. 112). Home is the place where life really goes
on, where the morality that the novel supports is to
be found. London remains the strange place whose
principal function is to throw into relief and thus
to re-affirm these domestic values.
But unlike Jeanie Deans* trip to London, which
is for one limited philanthropic purpose, Andrew Wylie's
stay lasts for several years and his purpose is to
make his fortune. While Jeanie is dipped, so to speak,
into another culture and can remain unchanged by it,
for Galt to maintain that during so long an immersion
Andrew's "original and indestructible simplicity, like
the purity of the invulnerable diamond, underwent no
alteration" (II p. 217) takes some doing. Whereas the
Scottish idiosyncracies that Jeanie carries with her
1 88
can be suggestively made into virtues by Scott because
they are only briefly thrown into relief, Andrew's
idiosyncracies require a more thorough exposure to
establish themselves as positive. In the first half
of the novel his particular blend of ingenuousness
and wiliness is convincing enough as a distinctly
Scottish character, but after some years of steady
yet steep social soaring, Andrew's continued
parochialism begins to seem unlikely, and here Galt
becomes pedantic. Having defined Andrew's Scottishness
by his endearing idiosyncracies, Galt is determined
that those idiosyncracies shall be virtues, in order
perhaps to prevent the book from being merely a tale
of remarkable self-aggrandizement (the "bourgeois
7
fairy-tale" to use Russell Hart's phrase) and to make
it instead a fable of cultural triumph. Yet Galt's
method gets in the way of this movement.
Galt's method of portraying the idiosyncratic
tends to be consistently satirical. When he wants to
show something as virtuous, therefore, the tone becomes
ambiguous. An example of this is Andrew's language,
which remains broad throughout the novel. Often his
use of Scottish words and phrases shows how enriching
dialect can be, and makes a claim for the inseparability
of Andrew's frank good sense and warmth from the
language in which it is expressed— and thus his cultural
background. Yet although Galt uses dialect in a way
which challenges its usual subordination in power
relationships, he fails to use it consistently so,
and it is not clear at all that he even intends to.
His challenge to the power relations of dialect, in
other words, may be sub-conscious— and it is weaker
for this. Andrew's continued use of the vernacular
is a deliberate decision on Andrew's part, but Galt
does not explain the reasons for his decision:
He had, indeed, resolved in his own
mind to resume his former familiarity
[towards his friends on his visit
home], as well as the broad accent
of his boyish dialect; not that the
latter required any effort, for he
had carefully and constantly preserved
it, but he had unconsciously adopted
a few terms and phrases purely English;
and in the necessity of speaking
intelligibly to his clients and
fashionable friends, had habitually
acquired, without any of the Southern
tone, considerable purity of language
(III p. 130).
Andrew's broad accent is something he has
"carefully and constantly" preserved and the threat
against it seems to be the unconscious assumption of
certain anglicisms, as though these are corruptions
which his conscious mind would avoid if it were aware
1 90
of them. Yet Southern English is implicitly here the
intelligible language (and Scottish, by inference,
the unintelligible); it is the language of power, the
language of clients and fashionable people; and it
is the "pure" language. This passage shows Galt's
ambivalence towards the difference between Scottish
and English. While Andrew's broad Scottish indicates
his incorruptible Scottishness (and therefore
Scottishness as something wholesome) and his conscious
maintenace of it indicates an awareness of this, still
Galt does not seem to share his hero's stolid confidence
but gives way finally to the sense of the Scottish
as the "other." The accent belongs to the Scots; the
English speak the (pure) language merely with a
"Southern tone."
Galt's ambiguity with regard to language indicates
the extent to which his "internal colonialism"
interferes with his desire to celebrate Scottishness.
On the one hand he creates a strong character, one
of whose strengths is a solid tenacity with regard
to his birthright and his Scottish accent. On the other
hand, Galt exhibits misgivings about this accent which
belie the subaltern's inherited distaste for his own
badges of distinction.
Galt shows ambiguity when dealing with some of
Andrew's other Scottish idiosyncracies. When, after
1 91
some time, his peculiar suit of clothing wears out
and must be replaced, we are told that Andrew goes
to some lengths to ensure that his tailor will repeat
its unfashionable cut and cloth, rather than adapting
himself to something more in keeping with London life.
Why he does this is never explained: certainly the
suit is not to his advantage and is one reason why
the immediate response to him is usually negative.
Galt makes nothing of this idiosyncratic choice at
all, perhaps because of this same struggle between
celebration of difference and internalized shame.
More use is made of Andrew’s choice of decor and
entertainment. Reflecting (after some years) that "it
would no longer be respectable in him to continue those
parsimonious habits which he had hitherto maintained"
— at least not to so excessive a degree— Andrew takes
on an old-fashioned apartment and furnishes it with
eccentric taste. The dinner he gives there is a
phantasmagoric affair, where we are told that elegant
courses are purposely followed by outrageous ones in
a joke upon good taste which alters for his elite guests
the very notion of taste itself. Of course it is a
resounding success: "in a word, the house, the treat,
the wines, and the master, were pronounced unparallel’d"
(II p. 332). Andrew's eccentricity of taste is not
1 92
specifically Scottish here, except that he is
demonstrating his sense of otherness and is successfully
expressing it rather than suppressing it in the quiet
and studied pursuit of a more normalized "London" and
therefore "good" taste.
When he is in a position to give an entertainment,
the "ball" Andrew offers is a Sandyholm barn dance,
a rustic Scottish folk gathering, imposed upon the
very elite of London society:
I just mean to gie a decent dance
to fifteen lads and fifteen lassies— a
very good number for a country-dance;
and there's a blind fiddler in our
neighbourhood, that has promised to
come for half-a-crown, bread and
cheese, and a dram; and I'll gie you
penny-pyes, eggs, and strong ale,
when ye're weary wi' dancing to his
springs" (II p. 335).
The ball is as successful as the dinner, and by his
wily machinations Andrew is able to restrict his
selection of guests at this incongruous affair to the
"gayest and most beautiful" of London.
The fairy-tale that Galt tells is not just about
a poor man being accepted into the richest of societies,
it is about the parochial who sees his own culture
accepted— even adored— by the very group most empowered
to alienate it. Andrew Wylie, the undersized,
1 93
oddly-garbed, broad-accented Scottish everyman can
throw a barn-dance in central London and will be able
to choose amongst the clamouring would-be guests only
the finest flowers of the elite society.
This is a fantasy indeed. However, apparently
the most important coup that Andrew has effected in
all this is that he managed after all to do it cheap.
The chapter which details Andrew's extraordinary
domestic arrangements and his dazzling successes as
a host is itself entitled "Economy." Thus Galt
undermines the cultural coup that his hero achieves
by emphasizing his lowest motive in all this.
As Lennard Davis maintains, for a reader to achieve
the identifications with character that he or she
desires, the character must exhibit certain attractive
attributes or behaviour. Andrew is not beautiful, but
the reader, pre-disposed to love him, has perhaps by
now found worth in his wit, his canniness, and even
the flamboyance of his taste. These traits are, after
all, empowering to the Scottish reader who seeks to
identify with the marginalized character who is able
to redress his own marginalization and place his own
values at the center. But the Scottish reader recognizes
in the word "economy" not the invigorating reassessment
of marginalization and normalization, but the perennial
1 94
insult which places the Scot in the position of "other."
The Scots are parsimonious; the English, by inference,
are "normal." This is an example of Galt's internal
colonialism which, ever-present in the title of the
chapter, undermines a reader's attempt to construct
a Scottish hero with which to identify in Andrew Wylie.
Parsimoniousness is, from the beginning, one of
Andrew's most salient features, and Galt's attitude
to the old accusation of Scottish parsimoniousness
is very ambiguous. Galt satirizes it, using the language
of the heart and soul to describe Andrew's
penny-pinching. He "gasped as if a load was on his
heart" (I p. 94) when told the amount of his rent,
and "the very mention of [a five shilling porter's
fee] brought at once an interjection from the innermost
chambers of his soul and a cold sweat on his brows"
(I p. 96). This is in the spirit of the traditional
jokes about Scots and their money, and for the first
half of the novel Galt treats the subject with a levity
which makes no attempt to go beyond the stereotype.
In the third book of the novel, however, Andrew's
penny-pinching suddenly and surprisingly becomes a
virtue. The Earl and Lady Sandyford discover (for the
reader) that it is all for the sake of winning Mary
Cunningham's hand— in the service, in short, of a high
1 95
— — — 1
romantic love which constitutes a "nobler motive" than
they (or we) had hitherto guessed. Andrew's meanness
is thus transformed into the admirable "state of
self-denial in which you live," as the Earl puts it,
and is no longer, we are to believe, a subject to
snigger about.
But such a radical change in narrative tone builds
up defences in the reader and prevents the sort of
identification (and subsequent absorption of ideology)
that Lennard Davis discusses— especially if the reader
is seeking some sort of larger, national identification.
In Andrew Wylie Galt collects together, ever with a
satirical eye, a lively set of characteristics for
a Scotsman making his fortune in London. But instead
of analyzing those characteristics and why they are
specifically Scottish, and why they might be comic
and to whom, he extricates his character (or attempts
to) from the trap of his own satirical portrayal, by
means of the culturally neutral device of a love story.
As Douglas Gifford says of the novel:
Unfortunately, the dwarf-like,
comically naive Wylie strains our
credibility in his dealings with and
conversation of sophisticated and
decadent lords and ladies in London
to the point where this giant novel
. . . collapses in a kind of R
unintentionally grotesque fable.
1 96
The presentation of "Scottishness" is a major
difference between Scott and Galt. Scott identifies
the ways in which Scots and Scottish life have
traditionally been negatively characterized and turns
those supposed characteristics to advantage, or simply
reverses them. Thus the Highlanders become symbols
of male strength and clan fidelity rather than wild
men marauding in bands, and rather than the slovenliness
that every diarist from England writes about,
cleanliness becomes the national trait.
Behind the joke of Scottish parsimoniousness lies
a history of which Scott is aware. Not only had Scotland
always been a poorer country than England, and its
inhabitants thus used to less money and the constrained
lifestyle necessitated by relative poverty, but it
had also often been rendered the poorer for its
interactions with England. It was widely believed in
Scotland that the failure of the Darien scheme at the
end of the seventeenth century (an attempt by Scots
to establish a foreign market for their own exports
by forming a colony at Darien, Panama), which was a
national financial disaster for the Scots, was due
to English mismanagement and deception. And the unfair
taxes and political hypocrisies that followed the Union
in 1707 had caused riots in Glasgow against the English.
1 97
Joseph Taylor's journal, "A Journey to Edenborough"
(1705) repeats with relish this story of an English
Captain
who, having been well entertain'd
by the Scotch, was ask't how he lik't
the Country, he answered not at all,
upon which enquiring into the reason,
he told them, he thought they had
not so much Religion as other Nations,
At that they were amazed, knowing
their religion even carry'd them to
Superstition, so they requir'd why
he thought soe, because sayes the
English Captain, you have but 8
commandments, they told him they had
10, as well as he, No says the Captain,
you have but 8, for you have nothing
to covet, nor nothing to steale.
Taylor professes himself "of the same opinion," and
offers the story as a joke at the expense of the Scots-
Scott does not find this issue funny. Early in
Rob Roy he puts the same joke in the mouth of an
inn-keeper discussing Scottish virtues with a nervous
traveller, and then allows his hero to put the matter
in a sharp historical and political perspective:
"I respect the Scotch, sir [says the
traveller]: I love and honour the nation
for their sense of morality. Men talk
of their filth and their poverty: but
commend me to sterling honesty, though
clad in rags, as the poet saith. I have
been credibly assured, by men on whom
1 98
I can depend, that there was never known
such a thing in Scotland as a highway
robbery."
"That's because they have nothing
to lose," said mine host, with a chuckle
of self-applauding wit.
"No, no, landlord," answered a strong
deep voice behind him, "it's e'en because
your English guagers and supervisors,*
that you have send down benorth the Tweed,
have taen up the trade of thi^ery over
the heads of the professors."
In his footnote, Scott adds: "*One of the great
complaints of the Union." Thus Scott offers some
political analysis Of this old joke— gives, in fact,
a "strong deep voice" to the brunt of it, and a
contemptible chuckle of self-applause to the
perpetrator.
Both Scott and Galt have a keen eye for what is
local, what is idiosyncratically Scottish. Scott,
however, is concerned with a more romanticized,
fictionally wrought Scotland than Galt, and so Scott
never makes the specifically Scottish into a joke,
whereas Galt does. In Andrew Wylie this places him
in perhaps uncomfortable alignment with the English
perspective on Scotland, which may make awkward his
attempts towards the end of the novel to make the hero's
oddities into virtues, albeit in the pursuit of romantic
rather than nationalistic glory.
1 99
iii. Entailing the Future and the Past.
The Entail (1823), Galt's best-known work, retains
something of a satirical perspective, and much of the
humor in this darkly comic novel is derived from its
idiosyncratically Scottish characters. The most colorful
of these is the Leddy Grippy, the most vivid in the
tradition of portrayals of old Scottish women to which
Susan Ferrier contributes substantially with her novel
Marriage. Other particularly Scottish characters include
Mrs Eadie, a Highland woman and a mystic, in the
11
tradition of Scott's prophetesses. But here as
elsewhere it is not possible to be sure whether Galt
is being (rather unsuccessfully) imitative of Scott
or satirical in his purple treatment of this Scottish
character. Again, ambiguity in narrative tone denies
the reader access to any nationalist ideology in the
text even though, as I will argue, the novel can be
read as a personal treatment of national alienation.
Although it is not always clear how satirical
Galt is being about his subject, it seems that there
is a barbed jest even in the recording of the very
details that in his most serious moments Galt claims
it is his intention to preserve for posterity. This
creates an awareness of otherness even at the moment
of definition.
200
An example of this is the feast provided for Claud
by his future father-in-law:
As the critics hold it indelicate
to describe the details of any
refectionary supply, however elegant,
we must not presume to enumerate the
series and succession of Scottish
fare, which soon crowded the board,
all served on pewter as bright as
plate. Our readers must endeavour,
by the aid of their own fancies, to
form some idea of the various forms
in which the head and harigals of
the sheep, which had been put to death
for the occasion, was served up, not
forgetting the sonsy, savoury, sappy
haggis, together with the gude fat
hen, the float whey, which in a large
china punch-bowl, graced the centre
of the table, and supplied the place
of jellie^ tarts, tartlets, and
puddings.
Ironic distance from the subject matter is difficult
to gauge in this passage. On the one hand this is a
genuine catalogue of Scottish fare of interest to anyone
outside the culture, and to historians also. But there
is a brutal realism about, for example, "the head and
harigals of the sheep, which had been put to death
for the occasion" compared with the air of mystery
and romance that Scott likes to impart to descriptions
of all things peculiar to Scottish life.
Thus when Galt mentions a Highland family he names
them the "Campbells of Glengrowlmaghallochan" in a
201
parody of the resonant names that Scott reveres and
the people that he romanticizes. Funerals and weddings
are hilariously bungled affairs rather than the
opportunity for showing Scottish rites of passage,
and Galt has Leddy Grippy remark that "Biting and
scarting may be Scotch folks wooing" (p. 96) but she
won't tolerate the bride beating the groom in her own
house. The composite picture of Scottish life is of
penny-pinching, violence and quirkiness— however
comically drawn. This tends to confirm the outsider's
view of the Scottish, exhibiting Galt's own internal
colonialism.
Thus Galt tends to sustain a derisory "othering"
of Scottish life, even while he performs the service
to it of preserving it. While Galt's observations are
more intimate and of course more humorous than for
example Joseph Taylor's or Thomas Kirk's, his rather
bleak descriptions of Scottish life are not dissimilar
to theirs. While Scott would never describe Scottish
scenery unless to eulogize, Galt has one of his
characters perish as a result of a landscape as grim
as ever Joseph Taylor found:
He was overtaken on the Mairns Moor
by one of those sudden squalls and
showers, which the genius of the place
so often raises, no doubt purposely,
202
to conceal from the weary traveller
the dreariness of the view around,
and being wetted to the skin, the
cold which he caught in consequence,
and the irritation of his mind, brought
on a fever, that terminated fatally
on the fifth day (p. 27).
However comic the tone of this description is, it
illustrates to some extent that internalized negative
self-image. Galt may make a comic point of it, but
his bleak coloring of the Scottish landscape blends
sadly with the observations of generations of English
travellers. Similarly his perception of some of the
unattractive aspects of Scottish behaviour may follow
from those same accounts which recorded Scottish
"nastiness."
The Entail is, in a way, an illustration of this
self-consuming internal colonialism. The old accusation
of parsimoniousness is central to the novel in the
form of an obsession with property. Claud Walkinshaw's
obsession with gaining enough money to buy back his
ancestors’ property and then his determination to keep
that property entire for posterity lead him to disregard
all other concerns of life, and project him and his
family into a spiral of self-destruction that continues
some time after his death.
203
Russell Hart links this individual character's
obsessive relation to property with a national
preoccupation with the past. For him the story is an
essentially Scottish one in its relation to time and
loss:
[Claud Walkinshaw's] is the terrible,
obsessive relation to an irrecoverable
past that Stevenson thought unique
to the Scot. It is the burden of elegy.
The past is lost; can any gain be
found in the loss? To this,
Walkinshaw*s is the false, blasphemous
answer. He seeks to impose his will
in entail upon time and change, to
substitute a cruel, spe^ous legalism
for a human continuity.
Walkinshaw's is not just a personal obsession,
according to Hart; his parsimoniousness is a
manifestation of a general national regret about the
past and an anxious desire to retain something of it
as a defence against an uncertain future. I have said
that the novel situates itself entirely locally in
that its interest and action are confined exclusively
to Scotland. But while this is true, it is not possible
to entirely disassociate what is essentially Scottish
from what is not Scottish, since the one is defined
by its "otherness" to the other. The Scottish is both
an essence and an emptiness. Thus the sense of loss
204
and elegy that Russell Hart detects cannot be
disassociated from real losses that Scotland suffered
over centuries in its relations with England.
The loss of property and patriarchal rights was
a cause of widespread grief and indeed shame in Scotland
in the eighteenth century, following the confiscation
of estates and the abolition of heritable jurisdictions
that the English imposed after the 1745 uprising.
Walkinshaw's own plight has a different cause in fact:
his family inheritance was lost in the Darien financial
disaster. But even that catastrophe was widely held
to be due to English treachery, and in any case the
sense of loss is a metaphoric one, as Russell Hart’s
comment above suggests.
Walkinshaw angrily rejects Keelevin the lawyer's
suggestion that disinheriting his first-born is an
unnatural act for which he personally is responsible:
"Me cut him off frae his
inheritance! When my grandfather brake
on account o' the Darien, then it
was that he lost his inheritance.
He'll get frae me a 1 that I inherited
frae our forbears, and may be mair;
only, I'll no alloo he has ony
heritable right on me, but what stands
with my pleasure to gie him as an
almous."
"But consider, he's your own
firstborn?"
"Weel, then, what o' that?"
205
"And it stands with nature surely,
Mr Walkinshaw, that he should hae
a bairn's part o' your gear."
"Stands wi1 nature, Mr Keelevin?
A coat of feathers or a pair o' hairy
breeks is a' the bairn's part o' gear
that I ever heard o' in nature, as
the fowls o' the air and the beasts
o' the field can very plainly
testify.--No, no, Mr Keelevin, we're
no now in a state o ' nature but a
state o' law" (p. 58).
Walkinshaw is here expressing angrily the
resentment that many sons of eighteenth-century Scotland
must have had. What had hitherto been regarded as the
laws of nature regarding property and heredity had
been forcibly proven to be the laws of man, and subject
to arbitrary change. Since 1707 these laws had been
in the hands of the English, but resentment at this
is covert. Walkinshaw's anger is directed explicitly
at his grandfather who was, as the second sentence
of the novel tells us, "deluded by the golden visions
that allured so many of the Scottish gentry to embark
their fortunes in the Darien Expedition" {p. 3). The
Darien Scheme had failed by 1704 and taken with it
the fortunes of many of Scotland's eminent families;
the lands of many more, this time Highland families,
were forfeited after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.
Although Scottish opinion about these events was very
much divided and responsibility for misfortune was
206
by no means always attributed to the English, for the
first half of the eighteenth century there was plenty
of ill-feeling and anti-English activity (such as the
Porteous lynching and the Malt Tax riots) and I think
that this mood shadows The Entail, even if the action
of the novel avoids explicit treatment of Anglo-Scottish
relations. And the sense of self-recrimination which
is the other side of the blame for such events is
detectable in the novel's grim characterization of
Scottishness.
The action of the novel is motivated, then, by
loss: initially the loss of the Walkinshaw fortune
together with baby Claud's father. Father and family
fortune are lost in the Darien Scheme, the ill-fated
Scottish attempt to colonize, the failure of which
did such harm to Anglo-Scottish relations. The venture
had much against it, including tropical diseases and
climate, but King William and, to a lesser extent,
general English mismanagement, were popularly blamed
for its failure. (Certainly the king was against it
for political reasons: it involved a quarrel with Spain
for one thing).
A real historic event launches the action of the
novel/ but beyond this the history of Anglo-Scottish
relations has a less explicit but nevertheless pervasive
207
influence on the novel. As Lennard Davis points out,
the novel may provide a collective defense for society
against alienation, but "the subject of alienation
in the novel must always be treated through the
1 4
personal, biographical history of a character."
Claud is born shortly after the setting up of
the Darien scheme, but when it is already showing signs
of failing. The Darien disaster begins the novel, but
Claud's early life is only briefly dealt with, and
already by chapter five he is forty-seven years old
and preparing for his marriage with Girzy Hypel. The
date at this point must be 1746, a year after the
great uprising. No mention of this event is made, and
indeed it does not directly affect the characters or
the action of the novel, yet the coincidence of these
dates may serve to underline the national character
of the sense of loss that drives Walkinshaw personally.
It is the general sense of inherited failure, of fathers
having failed their sons: the blow to paternalism
through God and King and Laird that that defeat
represented.
Girzy's grandfather provides another of the faint
echoes of Scotland's historical link with England,
and a link created from disillusionment and loss:
208
[He] was by profession an advocate
in Edinburgh, and had sat in the last
assembly of the States of Scotland.
Having, however, to the last, opposed
the Union with all the vehemence in
his power, he was rejected by the
Government party of the day; and in
consequence, although his talents
and acquirements were considered of
a superior order, he was allowed to
hang on about the Parliament-house,
with the empty celebrity of abilities,
that, with more prudence, might have
scured both riches and honours
(p. 39).
The story is briefly told of how this learned
but disaffected gentleman devoted the remainder of
his life to educating his daughter, but then was obliged
because of his poverty to marry her off to the loutish
Malachi Hypel. This story of educated values constrained
by poverty to make sad compromises might be a reflection
on the Act of Union itself, and the pragmatic
observation that "with more prudence, [he] might have
secured both riches and honours" begs the question
of whether riches and honours are worthy goals. The
novel itself begs this question.
Girzy's mother, after years of languishing, rallies
rapidly after Malachi Hypel's death to become "a
cheerful old lady, who delighted in society," and the
education of Charles, Claud Walkinshaw's first-born,
is consigned to her in Glasgow. The old lady brings
209
up young Charles according to the values of the past:
values which will clash tragically with those of
Charles's father Claud. Under the old lady's care,
Charles's "natural sensibility was exalted and refined"
and he learned "to value Love as the first of earthly
blessings and of human enjoyments" (p. 41).
Love is not rewarded in the world of The Entail,
however; nor are any of the gentler virtues which
Girzy's mother and grandfather have represented, and
have passed down to Girzy's son Charles:
These romantic lessons were ill
calculated to fit him to perform that
wary part in the world which could
alone have enabled him to master the
malice of his fortune, and to overcome
the consequences of that disinheritance
which his father had never for a moment
ceased to meditate, but only waited
for an appropriate opportunity to
carry into effect (p. 41).
When Charles discovers that he has been
disinherited, and learns the full extent of his father's
cold calculations which pass over human values in favour
of property, the shock throws him into a fever and J
he dies. Charles is destroyed by the same clash of J
values which ruined his maternal grandfather: the clash j
between "romantic" traditional values and pragmatic i
i
ones. This clash of values was behind the tragedy of ,
21 0
the uprising of 1745, and Charles's grandfather acts
as a generalized bridge between that event and the
Union of 1707, bringing into the novel a sort of
ancestral store of antagonistic values. Thus even in
this family matter the story of The Entail is affected
by the misery of Anglo-Scottish relations.
iV_. Conclusion: Some Differences between Scott and
Galt and an Important Similarity.
The question of The Entail is, in Russell Hart's
words: "The past is gone; can any gain be found in
15
the loss?" Galt’s answer is manifestly different
from Scott's. The recompense that Scott locates (or
creates) comes from making mythic heroes of past
figures; recovering what is lost in such a way that
heroism can be found in loss, strength in failure.
The Entail, of course, offers no such gallant
restitutions. The loss itself is figured in terms of
property or wealth and is belittled in the attempt
at restitution. And this attempt is portrayed not as
noble but as ugly and circular, as self-consuming.
Walkinshaw vents his anger against his forefathers
for losing him his birthright, and although he denies
the modern validity of such a thing as birthright to
211
Keelevin when he is disinheriting his first son Charles
in favor of the half-wit Watty, his reason for doing
this is of course to protect that birthright for the
sons of his son. Yet sons become fathers, as he is
forced to recognize. As such they have their own
authority, and nothing Claud can do will ensure that
these future fathers will be wiser than their ancestors.
Indeed in order to ensure that the historical Walkinshaw
property shall be passed down intact to posterity,
Claud must pass it on to Watty, the most foolish (though
also the most malleable) of his own sons. But Watty's
own paternity seems to solidify Watty's foolishness
and also his resolve. When his wife dies in childbirth,
Watty declares the child is his wife re-incarnated,
and refuses to perform his proper offices at the
funeral. When the exasperated Claud threatens him with
his own paternal authority in "the weight o' my staff,"
he is forcibly brought to recognize that his is no
longer the only paternal authority:
The widower looked him steadily in the
face, and said,— :"l.'m a father noo; it
would be an awfu' thing for a decent
grey-headed man like you, father, to
strike the head o' a motherless family"
(P. 117).
212
In the words of Watty's refusal, Watty is "the
head of a motherless family" and Claud is "a grey-headed
man." Both are fathers, but Claud is only just realizing
this fact and its implications with regard to his own
authority. Claud must recognize that the son has become
the father, and that he himself cannot control what
fathers will do: nothing can prevent the loss of his
own power. Before this Watty had merely been an
extension of Claud's own will: a half-wit, good-natured
son. As such, Claud could be content that control over
the Walkinshaw property still lay effectively in his
own hands. Watty's assertion of his own fatherhood
destroys this illusion. When Claud's eldest and
overlooked son Charles dies, the full force of his
own failure as a father is brought home to Claud and
shortly leads to his own death. Fatherhood itself has
come to be so synonymous with blight by this point
that when, before he dies, the broken-hearted Claud
offers his kindness and protection to Charles's little
son, the boy asks him suspiciously, "But were nae ye
ance papa's papa?" (p. 154).
Thus the system which preserves the past (in the
form of property) for posterity— through legacy,
inheritance, patrimony— is also constantly undermining
itself and threatening to destroy the very thing it
21 3
is intended to preserve. Ironically, the way out of
this degenerating circularity of bad fathers begetting
bad fathers is through the very thing that Claud
contemptuously ignores; the women.
Obsessed as he is with the problems of patrimony
and male lineage, Claud regards women as at best the
means to this end, and at worst a curse against it.
Maudge Dobbie, the woman who brings him up when he
is orphaned, he treats despicably, leaving her to die
in lonely poverty rather than share with her any of
the wealth he is amassing as a pedlar. The next woman
in his life is his wife Girzy Hypel, to whom he says
in his old age "T'ou's the curse o' my life" (p. 118).
He confesses to Dr Denholm, "Heaven may forgive the
aversion I had to her; but my own nature never can"
(p. 150). Too blind to see that the curse in his life
is his own obsession with his property, he blames
Providence for the fact that Watty's only child is
a girl, not having realized before "how futile his
wishes and devices might be rendered either by the
failure of issue, or the birth of daughters" (p. 121).
Since all that Claud thinks about is patrimony, the
birth of girls is nothing to him; it is the same as
the failure of issue— or worse. A female inheritance
214
will destroy the patrimony; it will be the failure
of the issue at hand.
Yet in fact it is through the women of the novel
that Claud's wish is at last fulfilled, and fulfilled
in a way which surpasses his schemes, since the estate
finally falls to the son of Claud's first son, thus
perpetuating the patriarchal lineage in the traditional
manner. The person primarily responsible for effecting
this happy conclusion is Girzy, the Leddy Grippy, whose
wily way with lawyers at last disproves Claud's
insistent opinion that she knows nothing and is a curse
to him, although of course Claud himself has been long
dead by the conclusion of the novel.
In this way, The Entail resembles Scott's Guy
Mannering. The fantasy fulfilled by the endings of
both of these novels is that of an hereditary
aristocracy or landed gentry maintaining benign
lairdship over a fixed land throughout posterity. It
is a fantasy at odds with the realities of eighteenth
and nineteenth century Scotland, but it is a healing
fantasy. Galt's story, however, focusses primarily
on the meanness of the characters rather than the
adventure of the plot, and his portrayal of Scotland
incorporates many features— and attitudes to them— which
had been the focus of negative portrayals by earlier
21 5
English writers. Thus Galt exhibits in his style the
anxieties and ambiguities of the colonized, who cannot
quite throw off the definitions of their culture made
by the dominant culture. On the whole the Scotland
which he preserves is a satirical portrayal whereas
Scott's is a "Mythic Regeneration" to use Douglas
1 6
Gifford's phrase. But like Scott his resolution is
effected by a woman: indeed, by a garrulous, old and
unlovely woman, and the character who is most strikingly
and idiosyncratically Scottish in the novel. Galt's
struggling sense of national emergence begins to find,
interestingly, the same direction as Scott's does.
Both Scott and Galt choose the marginalized female
as the character who can solve domestic tensions and,
on a symbolic level, national ones.
21 6
NOTES
1. John Galt, Literary Life, and Miscellanies
(Edinburgh: Blackwoods, 1834).
See also H.B.De Groot, "Scott and Galt: Old Mortality
and Ringan Gilhaize" in Scott and His Influence, ed.
J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Association for
Scottish Literary Studies #6, Aberdeen, 1983) p. 321.
2. See Erik Frykman, "Galt and Scott— Dependence and
Independence" in Scott and His Influence, p. 312-320.
3. John Galt, Annals of the Parish (London: Oxford
University Press, 1967) p. 201.
4. Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels (New York: Methuen,
1987) p. 126.
5. Ibid., p. 133.
6. John Galt, Andrew Wylie of that Ilk in 3 volumes
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822), Vol. I p. 106.
All further references to the novel in the body of
the text refer to this edition by volume and page
number.
7. Russell Hart, The Scottish Novel from Smollett
to Spark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978),
p. 35.
8. Douglas Gifford, "Myth, Parody and Dissociation:
Scottish Fiction 1814-1914" in The History of Scottish
Literature Vol. 3, ed. Douglas Gifford (Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University Press, 1988) p. 225.
9. Joseph Taylor, A Journey into Edenborough in
Scotland in 1705 (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1903),
p. 101.
10. Walter Scott, Rob Roy (Boston: Estes and Lauriat,
1893), p. 43.
11. See Frykman, p. 318
12. John Galt, The Entail (London: Oxford University
Press, 1970), p. 20. All further references to the
novel in the body of the text refer to this edition.
13. Hart, p. 46.
21 7
14. Davis, p. 132.
15. Hart, p. 46.
16. Douglas Gifford, "Scott's Fiction and the Search
for Mythic Regeneration" in Scott and His Influence,
p. 180.
21 8
CHAPTER SIX
Margaret Oliphant: The Tidy Nice Scotch Body Sixty
Years On.
_i. The Decline of Scottish Literature from 1832.
I have been arguing that Scott's trope of the
capable female was an empowering emblem for Scottish
national identity in the early nineteenth century.
However, a glance at Scottish literature of the later
nineteenth century shows that this trope proved less
fertile for other writers than it did for Scott. Scott's
nostalgic Scotland placed aggressive masculinity at
a safe distance, and perhaps the disappointing lapse
in Scottish literature can be attributed to the gap
that such nostalgia leaves for the present. Gender
certainty continues to play—an important role In
Scottish nineteenth century national identity, if only
in that masculinity can be seen as a sort of force
for suppression in the middle of the century. However,
I will argue that Scott's feminine trope does indeed
re-emerge at about the same time as the Scottish
Nationalist Association was established, and is seen
21 9
at its most clearly recognizable— although of course
with significant and interesting variations— in a novel
by a woman writer: Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen,
published in 1888.
Literary historians have generally agreed that
Scottish literature in the nineteenth century took
a sharp decline after the decade which included the
death of Scott. In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries Edinburgh had been a capital city
remarkable for its intellectual liveliness. But after
the last of the great names had died, the city— and
indeed the nation itself— seemed unable to produce
fresh writers to perpetuate the tradition. As Paul
H. Scott puts it, "There was a loss of cohesion and
self-confidence, a decline which lasted about fifty
,.1
years.
Scottish writers of the early nineteenth century
were themselves aware of imminent change in their
culture. I have discussed Walter Scott's sense that
what was distinctly Scottish was "melting and
dissolving" as Scotland slipped nearer, culturally,
to England. Henry Cockburn remembers in his Life of
Lord Jeffrey an Edinburgh full of life and intellectual
vigour, when "the whole country had not begun to be
2
absorbed in the ocean of London." Cockburn attributes
220
the decline of Scottish letters to the increased traffic
between Edinburgh and London, the reduction of distance
and thus distinctness that was facilitated by the
railway and steamboat. London was easily able to lure
away Scotland's most talented thinkers, leaving none
in their native country to write of it in a way that
was characteristically Scottish.
The railway and steamboat and the Industrial
Revolution that came with them did indeed precipitate
a migration of intellectuals away from Scotland, but
Paul H. Scott's analysis of the decline of nineteenth
century Scottish literature includes other factors
than these. Scott discusses the more insidious factor
of English interference in Scottish affairs which,
he claims, was new in the nineteenth century. For the
first hundred years or so of the Union England was
happy to ignore Scottish affairs. As Walter Scott's
Letters of Malachi Malagrowther testify, the unwelcome
encroachments of the early nineteenth century were
perceived as cultural as well as political impositions.
The principal cause of the cultural malaise of
the later nineteenth century was, according to Paul
H. Scott, the Great Disruption of 1843. And this in
turn he sees as the end result of the meddlesome
Patronage Act of 1712:
221
The Patronage Act, passed in that
year in violation of the Union
settlement, gave rights to the heritors
(or landowners) in the appointment
of ministers. This had become
increasingly intolerable to the
Evangelicals who gained control of
the General Assembly in 1834. They
passed the Veto Act in the Assembly
to give an absolute right to the
congregations to refuse a minister
presented by the heritors. When the
Court of Session and the House of
Lords upheld the authority of the
State against the Church, the
Evangelicals saw no alternative to
withdrawal from the established Church.
In the Disruption of 1843, 470 of
the 1,200 Church of Scotland ministers
abandoned their manses and their
salaries and walked out of the General
Assembly to form the Free Church.
Paul Scott calls this act "magnificent but . . . also
disastrous." He explains that the clergy in Scotland
was immensely cohesive: indeed, the ministers and the
"national character" were "inexticably intermingled."
His argument, then, is that the slump of the mid- to
late nineteenth century in Scotland is profoundly linked
to the Great Disruption of the Scottish church and
the causes of this, in turn, can be traced back to
the Patronage Act of 1712, an act imposed in violation
of the Union, by England onto Scotland.
Thus England can be figured both as causing
Scotland's nineteenth-century cultural malaise in the
first place, and then as perpetuating it by constantly
222
drawing away the healthy vigor of Scotland's intellect
towards London. Paul H. Scott points out that although
the relationship of the decline in literature to the
decline in the church is not simply one of cause and
effect:
It meant that Scotland was deprived
of an important line of defence and
force of cohesion at a time when strong
pressures were tending in any case
to undermine national identity and
self-confidence and reduce^the country
to a provincial backwater.
Once again, it is difficult to separate the
subaltern culture's external oppression from its
internal repressions. However, Douglas Gifford stresses
that nineteenth-century Scotland was, in T.C. Smout's
words, "an exceptionally male-dominated society,"^
and this internal domination affected its intellectual
output. In his own analysis of the fifty-year cultural
slough,“Gifford ~makes“an interesting connection'between ~
gender roles and literature. He quotes Sidney and Olive
Checklands' description of the leaders of Scottish
society in the industrial age, since it presents vividly
a certain form of masculine energy which, Gifford notes,
"would hardly sympathise with the survival of folk
culture, or the Scottish vernacular":
223
The magnates of the Scottish basic
industries at the end of the century
may perhaps be taken as a distillation
of the Victorian ethic. It centred
upon the dominant male of middle age
or over, brooking no interference,
speaking only with his equals in so
far as there was any conferring at
all, keeping under authority not only
his labor force but also his wives
and daughters. Even his sons could
be kept under tutelage until old age
or death broke his grip. Perhaps some
of these magnates saw themselves as
living legends, naming the^r forges
Vulcan, Atlas, or Phoenix.
This sort of patriarchal tyranny is of course
not exclusive to nineteenth century industrial Scotland,
but Smout1s assertion that Scotland's male domination
was exceptional is reinforced by Gifford. Gifford points
out that Trollope's Robert Kennedy, the Scottish magnate
of Phineas Finn, was "the archetype seen beyond Scotland
g
as uniquely authoritarian and materialistic." These
negative qualities of extreme and repressive
patriarchalism had come, then, to be seen as typically
Scottish.
The possibility of breaking this patriarchal
i
stranglehold on national cultural identity lies,
somehow, in the feminine domain. Gifford laments, along !
with Henry Cockburn, "the passing of the earthy,
I
vigorous women" of previous literature such as Galt's i
Leddy Grippy. He remarks that Scottish literature was
224 :
not to recover the "sexual balance . . . essential
to full creativity" until the "Scottish Renaissance"
9
of the nineteen twenties and thirties.
If, as I have argued, Scott's creation of the
Jeanie Deans character provided a vehicle to lift
Scottish national identity over the obstacle of its
doomed "masculine" past and on to a progressive path
for its "feminine" future, what has happened to this
empowering trope by the end of the century? Certainly
it is possible to argue that much of what seems odd
to us about later nineteenth century Scottish literature
is odd because of its uncertainty about gender and
how to re-construct it, as Scott did, affirmatively.
For example the so-called Kailyard fiction,
although it was Scotland's most copious and popular
literary production, seems distastefully sentimental
to the modern reader. Like all sentimentality it is
stultifying because it makes no attempt to enlarge
upon stereotypes but timidly re-runs them ad nauseum.
In this genre Scott's trope of the empowered female
can break no new ground but becomes stuck, instead,
in a gooey preservative which sweetly suffocates her.
J. M. Barrie's A Window at Thrums, published in 1889,
is a good example of this. Intended as the highest
tribute to his mother, the novel presents an "angel
in the house" so overladen with the feminine "virtues"
of modesty, self-denial and self-effacement that the
result is more the portrait of a female monster whose
"vice" of self-absorption has somehow beguiled her
son into complicity, and locked the two of them in
an Oedipal relationship which empowers neither. William
Sharp (1855-1914) is another late nineteenth century
Scottish writer whose desire to re-create the idealized
female looks unhealthy to the twentieth century eye.
Sharp was a successful poet in his own right but also
under the pseudonym of Fiona McLeod, a fictional person
whom he fervidly maintained (always with a great horror
of detection) was his reclusive cousin, living
romantically in the Highlands and gaining her
inspiration from her spiritual, mystical unity with
her celtic history. These two writers, Barrie and Sharp,
are alike in that they seem to be caught up by the
idea of a feminine representation of what is desirable
about" Scottishness, and yet unable to take the idea
beyond certain stereotypes which ultimately cannot
develop.
Nevertheless, these writers were writing at a
time when national confidence was reviving, and their
striving toward a feminine ideal is, I think, linked
with these political stirrings. The 1880s saw the
226
establishment of the Home Rule Association and with
it the political self-awareness that made the literary
"Renaissance" of the twentieth century possible. "Sexual
balance," as Gifford calls it, may not have been
actually achieved in Scottish literature until thirty
or forty years later, but the progress towards it is
noteworthy.
Margaret Oliphant has been largely overlooked
in this regard, and yet it seems to me that with her
Scott's feminine trope finally could engage creatively.
Oliphant not only writes about "vigorous" (if not
actually earthy) women, but she was herself one. Her
writing is uncharacteristically Victorian in its
unsentimentality; therefore she gives the portrayal
of women an edge that is lacking in her male Scottish
contemporaries. In the 1880s, when Scottish Home Rule
began to be a political issue, Oliphant was writing
about women who broke the traditional molds for feminine
-behaviour or at least questioned them. Oliphant's novel
Kirsteen, which I will be discussing here at length,
features a woman who leaves her excessively patriarchal
home to avoid an unwelcome marriage, and by the end
of the novel is still single and happily so. Kirsteen's
father is exactly the patriarchal type that the
Checklands describe above (although Drumcarro is not
227
an industrial magnate), and Kirsteen's personally
successful struggle against him speaks for the larger
spirit of liberation in the 1880s.
Until recently Margaret Oliphant has not been
seen as a feminist. In part this is due to what Laurie
I Langbauer terms the "bowdlerization" of her
1 0
autobiography and letters by her neice, Annie Coghill.
In part, however, it is due to the complexity of the
issue of women's writing, and the difficulty of
separating the woman as writer from her cultural role.
The complexities of interdependent roles present
difficulties for the expression of national identity
as well as for femininism. Kirsteen reflects this:
for all that the father is hateful, this is not simply
a story of escape from him; the specific source of
oppression is rather harder to locate. If Drumcarro
is an oppressive father as an individual, the type
that he represents (as the Checklands describe it)
is oppressive nationally^ ahd““at—the same time-is“seen
as nationally typical.
For Kirsteen, freedom is obtained symbolically j
by shedding her family name. This name conflates !
I
I
national pride and patriarchal oppression, and yet i
j of course by liberating herself from it Kirsteen loses
I a part of herself at the same time. What to sever and
I
228 |
what to save: here is the problem for Kirsteen, for
Oliphant herself as a writer in a masculine tradition,
and it is also the problem of nineteenth-century
11
Scottish cultural identity. In Kirsteen there is
the optimistic thrust of the decade which first saw
agitation for Home Rule, but against what or whom that
thrust should gain its initial momentum remains a
difficulty. As a woman, Oliphant is able to give life
to this problem: her femininity provides the appropriate
voice for a reassessment of woman's subjection and,
implicitly, for Scotland's.
ii. Margaret Oliphant and the Anxiety of the Influenced.
For Oliphant as a writer (as for Kirsteen as a
character) the shaping of future development comes
from reaction against the past. In the tradition of
Harold Bloom, we might posit Scott as her monolithic
literary' father:"she takes life from "him in that he
has created the capable Scottish female about whom
she writes and, on a more intimate level, even seems
herself to be. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have
shown how Bloom's analysis of literary paternity might
translate into a discussion of women writers:
"The "anxiety of influence" that a male
poet expresses is felt by a female poet
as an even more primary "anxiety of
authorship"— a radical fear that she
cannot create, that because she can never
become a "precursor" the act cpij writing
will isolate or destroy her."
Gilbert and Gubar's brilliant study of the ways
in which nineteenth-century women writers sublimated
this debilitating anxiety hardly mentions Margaret
Oliphant, even though she was one of the most prolific
women writers of the century, and one in whom the
"anxiety of authorship" is, I shall argue, desperately
manifest. Perhaps this is because Gilbert and Gubar
inevitably if somewhat paradoxically study women who
have succeeded in the male-ordered terms of
canonization. Their study is founded on the early
assertion that: "inappropriate as male-devised genres
must always have seemed, some women have always managed
1 3
to work seriously in them."
Although Margaret Oliphant worked seriously in
the male-devised genre of the novel, the twentieth
century has found it easy to ignore her because so
i
i
many of her novels have obvious faults of structure, I
pacing, style. These faults are apparently unforgivable
i
to Oliphant s critics because she knew about them. I
I
She chose a prolific and profitable mediocrity over !
i
i
230 |
a more careful art which was, she claimed, a privilege
which she could not as a mother afford. Her crime is
compromise: she upbraided herself for it and has always
been criticized for it. Virginia Woolf wrote in 1938
that Oliphant had "prostituted her culture and enslaved
1 4
her intellectual liberty" to live and educate her
children. Although she admires Oliphant, Woolf can
not endorse her choice, and ignores her.
Yet I think that what we term "failure" might
reward further analysis. Perhaps if we can learn to
listen to Oliphant's subdued voice (rather than the
successful one that is successful because we already
know how to listen to it) we can learn something of
how the subaltern sounds. I use the term "subaltern"
here as a link between the politically repressed nation
and woman: as a woman writer, I think Oliphant displays
some of the characteristics of "internal colonialism"
that I have earlier discussed with regard to the nation
of Scotland. In the course of self-definition the woman 1
writer faces combat with the negative definitions
imposed upon her by a history of male writers, and
since she cannot shake off all of them she will end
up by assuming some as her own.
As Laurie Langbauer points out, Oliphant is her
own worst enemy in establishing her reputation as a \
hack. Her autobiography is full of the lament that
familial responsibility always stood between herself
and greater literary achievement. As the sole provider
for an extended family of dependants, Oliphant bitterly
compares her own opportunities with those of George
Eliot and women writers without family, and male writers
who could delegate those very responsibilities which
always were too urgent to her. Langbauer refuses to
allow Oliphant to deny her own choices, and sees behind
her insistence on family responsibility a somewhat
blunted strike for power, since "Acceding to such
constraints might seem to provide its own consolations,
even its own (illusory) access to the power system
1 5
that rejects and regulates her." And if finally we
can ignore Oliphant, Langbauer tells us that we do
so "only at a price. . . . Ignoring Oliphant because
we tell ourselves that she is a commonplace writer
helps maintain the power of the ordinary, for constraint
_ ____ _ - | g
is enacted precisely at that level."
Indeed, it might be argued that it is one of
Oliphant's achievements to balance maternity and writing
in such a way that both are constantly present to her
'
reader. By alternately surpassing and failing to achieve !
the standard of writing really acceptable for public j
consumption, Oliphant weaves together the two ;
232
conflicting lives of the woman writer so that both
must show. Writing of women's autobiographies Nancy
K. Miller points out that "conventional female moments
are not assigned privileged status" in literature and
that women who are determined to go beyond convention
must perform "the meaningful trajectory: the
transcendence of the feminine condition through
1 7
writing." Yet in contrast to the women writers that
Miller discusses (George Sand, Colette, Simone de
Beauvoir) Oliphant refuses (or fails) to suppress her
"feminine condition," performing the meaningful
trajectory only by fits and starts and always bringing
to the foreground what these other women successfully
relegate to the background. Thus if she cannot be "as
good as a man" at the same time as she is "only a woman"
then at least she can be each in such quick succession
that the effect might be rendered the same.
It seems to me that what Oliphant (and her critics)
count as failures might also be attributed to what
Gilbert and Gubar call the "anxiety of authorship."
Again I would like to stress the similarity between
the difficulty of self-expression encountered by the
woman writer, and the difficulties encountered by the
emergent subaltern nation:
i
233 '
The loneliness of the female artist,
her feelings of alienation from male
predecessors coupled with her need
for sisterly precursors and successors,
her urgent sense of her need for a
female audience together with her
fear of the antagonism of male readers,
her culturally conditioned timidity
about self-dramatization, her dread
of the patriarchal authority of art,
her anxiety about the impropriety
of female invention— all these
phenomena of "inferiorization" mark
the woman writer's struggle for
artistic self-definition and
differentiate her efforts at
self-creatioijigfrom those of her male
counterpart.
These debilitating conflicts must surely have been
true for Oliphant. For her, Scott was the grand yet
kindly patriarch with half a century of silence behind
him. To break the silence she must break Scott's hold
over it, and yet she owes much of her own literary
strength and shape to him.
An analysis of Oliphant's relationship to Scott
in her work provides an insight into how one nineteenth
century woman writer deals with the "anxiety of
authorship" and also provides some insight into the
i
complexity of the subaltern's self-expression. Oliphant j
appears to play dutiful daughter to her literary parent, j
but even in her affectionate or respectful tributes
she manifests her difference; even as she engages with .
Scott she spars with him. This spirit of rebellion j
234
is akin to the larger political spirit of the eighteen
eighties and in Oliphant it is, I will argue, a feminist
one.
iii. Kirsteen and Claustrophobia.
About two-thirds of the way through Kirsteen all
expectation of a romantic conclusion to the plot is
dashed. The young soldier whose whispered request for
Kirsteen to wait for his return from India has sustained
her through six troubled years and kept the reader
in happy suspense for 227 pages is suddenly killed
in action. This event transforms the novel from a
conventional romance with beginning (love begun), middle
(love challenged) and end (love resolved) into something
quite different. Kirsteen remains unmarried— a very
unusual status for the Victorian heroine. And marriage,
the desired end of the conventional linear love-plot,
_ is replaced by success of a less definable, less'
distinct nature. Kirsteen derives some satisfactions,
both social and financial, from her success as a i
i
I
mantua-maker.
But on whose terms does she succeed? Certainly
not on those of her family, scarcely on those of her
society— nor even on those of Oliphant's late Victorian ;
readers, with all their narrative expectations already
confused. She is able to buy back her father's
lands but this has been his goal and not hers. Yet
at the end of the novel the image of Kirsteen Douglas
as an elderly woman, "her eyes still full of fire,"
wearing fine lace and adored by the best society is
a cheerful one. This is a happy ending to challenge
contemporary definitions both within the novel and
outside of it. Refusing to fulfil the requirements
of the love-plot, the novel finally refuses resolution
on quite any terms, and I would argue that feminist
i
pleasure in this text is gained from these very j
evasions.
In this chapter I will examine the ways in which
in Kirsteen Margaret Oliphant adheres to and departs
from the construction of Scotland, Scottishness and
femininity inherited from Scott and even Galt. By
placing her characters in that inherited construction
and exploring irt from a feminine viewpoint--exploring
the woman's motives, describing women's lives, interests
and activities— she challenges these literary fathers
even as she pays tribute to them. Indeed, I will argue
that the most distinct references to Scott, specifically
to Guy Mannering, occur just at the point at which
the novel Kirsteen diverges and begins to display a j
i
I
I
I
236 |
more feminine, non-linear structure. At this point
the novel becomes more satisfactorily located in the
feminine domain and this is reflected stylistically
by its open-ended structure. When Oliphant fully assumes
a feminine direction her departure from Scott is
reverent but, I will argue, inevitable. Scott provides
both frame and point of departure for Oliphant.
I have argued that the success of Scott's myth
of Scotland depends on his manipulation of certain
gender roles. Whereas Scott's historic Scotland takes
most of its color from the hierarchies inherent to
male social orders and the promotions, demotions,
battles and bondings characteristic of those orders,
Oliphant flattens out these crucial masculine
differentiations and turns her attention instead to
the feminine. Communities of women take the place of
male clans, dressmaking details take the place of battle
descriptions. In her novel Drumcarro may be a brutish
patriarch, but the gentlemanly Glendochart and the
dignified Duke are also figures of oppression. The
patriarchy is in all these various forms alike, in
that it is oppressive to the spirited woman.
Oliphant places her heroine in just the sort of
excessively masculine world that Scott makes glamorous,
and re-works the material from the feminine viewpoint.
Kirsteen Douglas might be seen as a later version of
Ellen Douglas, Scott's Lady of the Lake. Kirsteen*s
father, Douglas of Drumcarro, is also a forceful
patriarch, although he has more in common with Roderick
Dhu, the darker masculine force of "The Lady of the
Lake," than with James Douglas, Ellen's father.
Oliphant's interest lies with the female character:
Kirsteen really is the focus of her novel, while Ellen
Douglas must remain a marginal figure for Scott.
Oliphant is not interested in distinguishing between
a Roderick Dhu and a James Douglas with regard to
masculinity, while these differentiations are crucial
to Scott. For Oliphant the question is what happens
to a woman in such a world.
Many of Oliphant*s tributes to Scott are overt.
Like him, she is manifestly writing a historical novel,
concerned with recording details for posterity before
the peculiarities, the distinctive characteristics,
of a certain time and placre are 'lost. — The place that
she is concerned with is Scotland, but it is Scotland
on the eve of its romantic transformation at the hands
of Scott. Oliphant acknowledges the real impact Scott
was to have on Scotland when she records, for example,
that the roads and inns were still at this time
inhospitable to travellers since "there were as yet
1"9
no tourists (nay, no magician to send them thither)."
Thus she salutes (or at least acknowledges) Scott the
"magician"— but her own history will not be concerned
with perpetuating the glamour of his construction.
The time of which Oliphant writes in Kirsteen
is "seventy years ago"— recalling the "sixty years
since" of Scott's Waverley. Scott looks back to his
grandfather's heyday, while Oliphant looks back to
Scott's. Indeed, the moment of Oliphant's nostalgic
focus includes the emergence of Waverley: Waverley
is the exciting new novel read aloud to Kirsteen's
fellow seamstresses in London to lighten their nightlong
labors. It is brought in to the workroom with
"triumphant delight" (p. 222) by Miss Jean, and Oliphant
perhaps makes a little joke about the reading public
through the seamstresses: "No doubt the young women
accustomed only to Ellen and Emily were a little
confused by the new and great magician with whom they
were thus suddenly brought face*to'face;“but they were-
greatly stirred by the Highland scenes and Fergus
Maclver's [sic] castle" (p. 222). Later it is into
exactly this eager and emotional forum that Miss Jean
innocently brings the newspaper report of Ronnie
Drummond's death that is so catastrophic both to
Kirsteen and to the expected course of the novel. Into
239
the receptive circle of listeners come first the
fictional adventures of Waverley and then the even
more affecting "real" adventures of Ronnie Drummond.
Oliphant transposes Kirsteen*s "real" story over Scott's
fiction within her fiction, playing games with the
"magician" she has herself conjured up to compliment.
Already Oliphant*s tributes to Scott are double-edged.
The plot of Kirsteen is one of the links between
Oliphant and Scott— and indeed Galt. Characters such
as the domineering father and the independent-minded
elderly spinster are reminiscent of novels I have
discussed earlier. Like Jeanie Deans and Andrew Wylie,
Kirsteen is an emissary from Scotland to London, making
the laborious and dangerous journey with splendid
results, but encountering on the way a great deal of
ignorance about and prejudice against the Scots. Like
Galt and Scott, Oliphant uses her character to present
the virtues of hard work, determination and honesty.
“But although Kirsteen is undeniably Scottish, and her-
Scottishness is one of the ways in which she is foil
to the mean-minded seamstresses who goad her when she j
first arrives, she is not presented as a representative j
of Scotland or as an embodiment of virtues which are ;
implicitly claimed to be typically Scottish. Kirsteen
is a fugitive from Scotland— from the patriarchal •
l
j
____________________________________________ 240 j
Scotland which Scott's and Galt's fantasies aim to
obscure and transform— and Oliphant represents her
heroine's nationality as both a source of personal
strength and of significant weakness.
Like Andrew Wylie and Jeanie Deans, Kirsteen gives
her author the chance to cast the antipathy between
Scotland and England anew, through fresh eyes. But
whereas Scott's and Galt's use of character allows
them to introduce the issue of Anglo-Scottish relations
from a certain distance, Oliphant addresses it quite
openly. This assessment of the issue is given in the
narrative voice:
The standing feud between the Scotch
and English, and the anger and jealousy
with which the richer nation regarded
the invasions of the poorer, had not
yet fallen into the mild dislke which
is all that can be said to subsist
nowadays in the way of hostile feeling
between the two countries. Fierce
jests about the Scotch who came to
make their fortune off their richer
- -- neighbours, about their clannishness-
and their canniness, and their poverty
and their pride, and still lower and
coarser jibes about other supposed
peculiarities were then still as
current as the popular crows of triumph
over the French and other similar
antipathies; and Kirsteen's advent
[to Miss Jean Brown's] was attended
by many comments of the kind from
the sharp young Londoners to whom
her accent and her slower speech,
and her red hair and her ladyhood
were all objects of derision (p. 162).
241
The division between the two cultures is far more
hostile in Oliphant's account than Scott likes to
acknowledge, even though Oliphant is writing of Scott's
own heyday. Oliphant bluntly names what Scott seeks
to conceal, and national antagonism, like sexual
antagonism, is not to be romantically resolved in this
novel.
Oliphant makes little attempt to champion one
culture over the other, but instead shows all national
pride as subjective and foolish. The seamstresses who
mock Kirsteen's accent are admired by her for their
own, but with some reservations:
They spoke fine English with an accent
which was to be sure not so easily
understood as her own, but had an
air of refinement which impressed
Kirsteen much (p. 159).
There is an absurdity in giving any hierarchical
value" to such a subjective thing as dialect," an "
absurdity emphasized later when Oliphant directly
reports the seamstresses' speech. The seamstresses
regard the Duke's interest in Kirsteen as an example
of Scottish "clannishness":
"But that's how they do, they all
hangs together," was the comment
afterwards, couched in less perfect
language perhaps than the supposed
pure English which Kirsteen admired
(p. 173).
Through their own fictional characters, Scott
and Galt attempt to reverse the historical process
by which Scotland has always been the "other," described
in estranging terms by English travellers. By making
England "other" Scott and Galt can launch an assault
without acknowledging injury. Much is of course at
stake, here, in terms of national identity and national
pride and perhaps these tactics have something to do
with masculine pride also. But in the late nineteenth
century Oliphant addresses the issue squarely,
championing neither place. Galt's Andrew Wylie is comic
when he says London is "a whin brick houses" compared
with the glories of Glasgow and Edinburgh, but still
he is a participant in the game of cultural comparisons.
Oliphant will play no such game in her fiction:
"Glasgow!" said Miss Jean with disdain.
"Glasgow has no more right to be named
with London than the big lamp at Hyde
Park Corner, which burns just tons
of oil, with the little cruse in my
kitchen. It's one of the points on
which the Scots are just very foolish.
They will bring forward Edinburgh,
or that drookit hole of a Glasgow,
as if they were fit to be compared
with the real metropolis. In some
ways the Scots, our countryfolks,
have more sense than the rest of the
world, but in others they're just
ridiculous. I hope I've sense enough
to see both sides, their virtues and
their faults" (p. 182).
Cultural partisanship for Kirsteen is a complicated
folly. Her own loyalty to Scotland is manifest in her
loyalty to her family name, Douglas, an aristocratic
and until recently a powerful family. The larger
patriarchy of Scotland is inseparable from the smaller
patriarchy of the Douglas (Drumcarro) household for
Kirsteen, and she must escape both in order to assert
(or even discover) a satisfactory individual identity.
But escaping both inevitably means losing something
of each (and therefore of herself) and Oliphant allows
her heroine only partial recognition of her own function
in resisting these oppressive systems.
Kirsteen runs away from her home because of the
intransigence of her father. She knows that she has
only two choices: to obey her father, marry the man
he has chosen and be "man-sworn" to her secretly
betrothed Ronnie Drummond; or run away and be for ever
banned from her father's house. The first terrible
choice has too many men in it, with Kirsteen trapped
by the incompatibility of their various mandates. The
second choice has too few men in it: to be cast out
244 j
by one man and not yet claimed (if ever to be claimed)
by another. She chooses the second, but in fact although
Ronnie Drummond dies before he can marry her, Kirsteen*s
strength of spirit is such that she cannot remain
summarily banished (as her sister Anne is) from the
father's house, but re-enters it at first in spite
of him and then later at his invitation/demand. But
this is only partly the feminist triumph that it sounds.
Despite her personal success and stature, Kirsteen
never contradicts her family's assertions that her
trade is demeaning, never puts the family name to it,
and diffidently consents to use her personal wealth
for the family's aggrandizement, despite their
ingratitude.
When she first runs away from home, Kirsteen has
a proud dispute with her sister Anne, estranged from
the family because of her sin of marrying a man with
no "name," the otherwise quite wonderful Dr Dewar.
Anne asserts of-her husband that "His name -is a kent
[known] name where the Douglases was never heard."
The shocked Kirsteen denies this with unworldly family
faith: "That can scarcely be in Scotland" (p. 141).
But as the novel takes her further away in time and
place from her father's world, Kirsteen must necessarily
test and break the boundaries of this faith in family
as well as the physical ones of the domestic sphere.
She finds out that the name of Douglas is quite
insignificant in London; indeed, the sign of her success
is a partnership which quite obliterates it. "We'll
say Miss Brown and Miss Kirsteen," her partner tells
her, "— The English, who are very slow at the uptake,
will think it's your family name" (p. 183). Kirsteen's
motive in agreeing to this concession is to protect
her family name from her own actions, and the family
name remains absent from Kirsteen's business at the
end of the novel. Although this can be read as a triumph
for Kirsteen, the extent to which she regards it as
such herself is somewhat undetermined.
Kirsteen’s own first name is important throughout
the eponymous novel. "Where is Kirsteen?" is the opening
question of the novel, and Oliphant's
narrative-without-a-conclusion resists an easy answer.
Certainly she is not to be found in Scott's
- blonde/brunette dichotomy:- significantly, Kirsteen's -
own untameable locks are fiery red. Oliphant closes
her novel with the words "MISS KIRSTEEN," and this
provides a possible but indirect answer to that opening
question. "Miss Kirsteen" is emphatically a female
name: "Kirsteen" after her mother, no "Douglas" after
her father, and "Miss" to denote no husband. Whether
246
or not she intends or wants it, Kirsteen is a liberated
woman at the end of the novel, and the fact that the
words "Miss Kirsteen" are those of the sign above her
fashionable and lucrative business establishment shows
how constructively she has turned her fate. The
concluding words "MISS KIRSTEEN" suggest these answers
to the initial question of "Where is Kirsteen?": alone,
without a man, standing bold like the capital letters
of her name-plate. The name of Douglas which is the
focus of her father's masculine pride and links him
with a history of national virility, is at first removed
for delicacy's sake, and then finally consigned to
obscurity.
To some extent Kirsteen is a later version of
Jeanie Deans, but her adventures do not lead her back
to the domestic sphere as do Jeanie's. In Oliphant's
hands, Scott's hopeful symbol of Scottish national
identity is a singular figure: without her father's
name^ which presents many problems throughout the story,
she leaves off the vestiges both good and bad of the
patriarchal society from which she comes but from which
she has released herself.
Names are very important in this novel, and in
the family name of Douglas much of the nostalgic pride
in the past is invested. Kirsteen's father, Neil Douglas
of Drumcarro, has a misguided sense of his own social
importance because of his name, refusing to adjust
his social pretensions to suit the realities of his
impoverished estate, and thus subjecting his family
to misery and humiliation. Drumcarro cannot forget
that "One of the old Douglas family before the attainder
was as good as any one of their new-fangled dukes"
(p. 58). He values his daughters too little to educate
them or to dress them appropriately, but when his own
pride is piqued by hearing that gossip paints him "so
poor or so mean that [he grudges] the poor things a
decent gown, and keep[s] them out of every chance"
(p. 59), he angrily responds "that Drumcarro's lasses,
when he pleases, can just show with the best, and that
I'll thole no slight to my name, any more than I would
were I chief of this whole country as my forbears were"
(p. 59). A mean-spirited bully, Drumcarro is the dark
shadow of James Douglas of Scott's "The Lady of the
Lake," who is finally roused to action only-when-his
daughter is not being treated with the respect that
a daughter of his name should receive.
The sense of the historical dignity of the name
of Douglas and the respect due to it is shared by
several of the Scottish characters of the book, and
vitally informs their actions. But it is already
248
anachronistic. The more worldly Scottish characters
recognize this, including Kirsteen as she becomes more
of a Londoner. But that same sense of
historically-bestowed dignity which provides Miss Jean
Brown's small society of ex-patriots with a comfortable
nostalgia as they dine together in London, can still
be a real tyranny over Kirsteen. Pride in the name
of Douglas is pride in the clan, and all of the
masculine values upon which Scott focusses his
nostalgia* But in Douglas of Drumcarro Oliphant
encapsulates the oppressiveness of this masculinity
and shows how the nostalgia which renders it
harmless— even romantic and glorious— is still
oppressive to the woman.
Drumcarro is a tyrant because of bis nostalgia.
He is a man quite at odds with the present, motivated
entirely by an anachronistic pride in his ancestry,
and the desire to regain the family lands lost by
-confiscation: "This was his ideal; all others, such ~
as love, or affection, or the ties of human fellowship
having died out of his mind long ago, if they had ever
occupied any place there" (p. 198). The character is
very like Galt's Claud Walkinshaw, even down to the
irritable impatience with women, and the mistaken
_______________________________ 249 |
conviction that they are useless to his ends at best
and destructive at worst.
Drumcarro is the son of a Jacobite who lost his
ancestral home as a result of the 1745 uprising. His
childhood was spent in fearful hiding and poverty,
which Oliphant with arguable irony terms "the romance
of the disinherited" (p. 31). On the eve of Scott's
revival of interest in the clans, Drumcarro lurks in
the crepuscular world of the most ignoble savage.
Described as being without finer feelings and without
conscience, the dark rumours which surround his years
as a slave-driver in the West Indies are borne out
when he kills a man with his bare hands close to the
end of the novel. His mental state after this event
is really little more self-conscious than that of an
animal, but Oliphant has been stressing his brutality
throughout the novel. Through him, she presents Scottish
masculinity at its most brutal and oppressive.
Drumcarro is particularly oppressive because he
is shown in the domestic sphere. Scott might lend
a glowing mystique to such a character roaming the
i
glens, but Oliphant situates him among the women and J
children at home, where it is hard to romanticize him. j
He is domineering on every domestic issue, from what j
is eaten at family festivities to what the girls are j
I
250 |
allowed to wear. His principal objection to introducing
his daughters into society— which, apart from any human
benefit, is presented to him as increasing their chances
of marrying and being some other man's financial
burden— is that suitors might eat and drink at his
expense for some time before they propose.
Mrs Douglas is an invalid and her ailments are
undiagnosed, but every doctor agrees that she would
recover if she could leave Drumcarro— the name is of
course that of her home as well as her husband— for
a "change of air." Marriage with Drumcarro has resulted
in the wearying birth of fourteen children, and his
sexual tyranny is part of his character and type:
Her husband was an arbitrary and
high-tempered man, whose will was
absolute in the family, who took
counsel with no one, and who, after
the few complaisances of a grim
honeymoon, let his wife drop into
the harmless position of a nonentity
(p. 2_J._
His contempt for his daughters is clear. "They were
unlucky accidents, tares among the wheat, handmaids
who might be useful about the house, but who had no
future, no capabilities of advancing the family,
creatures altogether of no account" (p. 33).
251
The opening chapters are the ones which are located
in Scotland, and there is an intense claustrophobia
about them because of Drumcarro. Confined to the house
and to their sewing and housework, the women can never
be free from his invasion:
"What were ye colleaguing and
planning, laying your heads together
— that you're all so still when I
come in?"
"We were planning nothing, Neil,
just nothing," said Mrs Douglas
eagerly. "I was telling the bairns
a bit of an auld story— just to pass
the time."
"They'll pass the time better doing
their work," said their father. He
came first to the fireside round which
they were sitting, and stared into
the glowing peat with eyes almost
as red: then he strode toward the
only window, and stood there shutting
out the light with his back towards
them. There was not too much light
at any time from that narrow and
primitive opening, and his solid person
filled it up almost entirely (p. 48).
“Here the women are shown-in "their" place, the sewing
room, yet at the mercy of Drumcarro's invasion even
there. Moving around while they are static, and
dominating first the fire and then the window, Drumcarro
exhibits a physical tyranny to accompany his
inquisition. (Much later in the novel the Duke comes
to visit Kirsteen in her London establishment to
252
convince her of her duty to return to her father's
house. He too is described as "standing against the
window, blocking out most of the light" (p. 173), but
by this point Kirsteen has made of her sewing a
significant bolster against such paternalistic
invasion).
The girls are finally allowed to attend the Duke's
ball, but the excitement generated over this event
emphasizes how confined they are in their father's
house, unable to experience any other society. And
indeed it is at the ball that Kirsteen wins the heart
of the elderly Glendochart, whose suit presents for
her the impossible choice: to enter this alternative
father's house as a wife, or to be banned for ever
from her own father's house.
The women seek the only escape routes open to
them: Mrs Douglas takes to her sickbed and to whatever
memories of a happy youth she can summon (although
Drumcarro pursues her~vindictively“even into memory,
insulting her youthful finery as "bits of red glass
and bits of white, and a small paste head on the end
of a brass preen" (p. 51)); Mary and Marg'ret take
to household chores; and Kirsteen to the outdoors.
She takes frequent brief walks, even if she must justify
her sorties as part of some household errand, and must
253
always suffer some remark or rebuke or actual pursuit.
From the beginning of the novel, her response to the
oppression of the domestic space is to cross its
threshold and to move out and beyond.
In the character of Drumcarro, Oliphant sets up
Scottish masculinity of the sort that Scott made
romantic, in order to show how stiflingly restrictive
the role of the female must be in such a regime. And
so Oliphant initially situates her heroine in the milieu
of a Scott novel, but shows how she must burst through
its constraints and find an alternative space. Like
Jeanie Deans, Kirsteen leaves the narrow Scottish life
for London, but unlike Jeanie Kirsteen does not return
to her home to take her own place in it. Kirsteen's
i
place remains outside, though still perhaps revolving
around her family. Still, she is untethered in a way
that looks like failure to some (particularly her sister
Mary and her brother Alexander) but which Oliphant
presents as freedom. " " ~ ~ —
To initiate this liberating trajectory, Kirsteen
must think for herself, find her own opinion on matters
over which her father assumes complete control.
Feminists might recognize the glee in this process. I
J
When Kirsteen is at her most desperate, faced with j
i !
the dilemma in which her father and her fatherly suitor ,
254
have placed her, she escapes from the house to think
and makes for the linn "without knowing why" (p. 88).
There she remembers how one day when they were out
walking Glendochart had slipped and hurt himself, but
she had dared not laugh nor offer assistance, for fear
of exacerbating his discomfort at an accident which
emphasized his age. Respect for the patriarchal figure
made her repress her feelings at the time, but at the
memory of it "there burst from her in the midst of
her trouble an irrepressible laugh, which rang into
the roar of the linn and went down into the depths
echoing among all the rocks" (p. 89). And this is the
I
laugh that allows her entry into autonomous emotion
and thought:
That laugh did Kirsteen good. It
liberated her soul; she escaped as
from the hand of fate and became able
to think. And then a wild anger swept
over her mind against her father,
who wanted nothing but to get her,
as he said, ~off his hands, and against ~
Glendochart for daring to think that
she would take him, an old, old man.
All the sense of his kindness
disappeared in this illumination as
to his motives: indeed the more
kirsteen esteemed him before, the
more she despised and hated him now
(p. 89).
i
i
255
This is the feminine laughter which Cixous describes;
20
the laugh which confounds masculine authority. For
Kirsteen it releases the tight grasp that patriarchal
dictates have over her thoughts and actions and marks
the beginning of her independent roamings.
Kirsteen's laughter is reinforced a little later
by Marg'ret's. In Marg'ret's assessment it is clear
how much the patriarchal situation that Kirsteen must
escape resembles the patriarchy that Scott treated
from such a very different perspective:
"The laird himself is very fierce
sometimes, but his bark is worse than
his bite. . . . Things like [force]
never come to pass noo. They're just
a relic of the auld times. Maybe the
auld Douglases that we hear so much
about, that had the rights of fire
and sword, and dark towers and dungeons
to shut ye up in, they might have
done it. But where would he shut ye
up here? There's not a lock to any
room in this house I"Marg'ret's laugh
had a cheerful sound in the air, it
broke the spell (p. 100).
As it turns out, Marg'ret is a little too ready in
her mockery of anachronistic masculinity. Drumcarro's
! response to Kirsteen's defiance is a violent one.
Shaking her hard, he threatens her with worse, in
defence of the family name:
256 |
"If ye go against me in a strange
man's presence and expose the family
I will just strike ye down at my feet,
let what will come of it . . . and
who's will be the wyte if your father,
the last of the Douglases, should
be dragged to a jail for you? If ye
expose my family to scorn and shame,
I'll do it more" (p. 104).
When Drumcarro speaks of "my family" he is not
talking of his present one, the wife and children of
whose welfare he is in general rather careless. "My
family" is the ancestors whom Kirsteen is expected
to revere and of whom Marg'ret has been so
disrespectfully dismissive, the "auld Douglases that
we hear so much about." Drumcarro wields the authority
of so many accumulated Douglases like a club, and it
is to escape the blows of this solidified patriarchal
history that Kirsteen flees the house and heads for
London. But finding that she can laugh at male
authority, and that Marg'ret can too, is the important
first step~in~th~is venture. “ “ ~ “ ~ “
iv. The Feminine Trajectory.
I
I
Luce Irigaray says of women's desire:
Thus what they desire is precisely
nothing, and at the same time
257
everything. . . . Their desire
. . . really involves a different
economy more than anything else, one
that upsets the linearity of a project,
undermines the goal-object of desire,
diffuses the polarization toward a
single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity
to a single discourse.
The point at which Oliphant's novel "upsets the
linearity of a project"— if the love-plot which at
first shapes the action of the novel may be called
a project— is the death of Ronnie Drummond. This is
of course the end of the love-plot and it is also the
end of Kirsteen's last attachment to a man. It is the
point at which Oliphant's novel breaks away into the
sort of irresolvability that, according to Irigaray,
characterizes women's writing. And yet at this point
of divergence into the realm of feminine writing
Oliphant makes one last significant contact with Scott
through the symbolic talisman which Kirsteen retains
as a reminder of a male-centered past.
Kirsteen's and Robbie's betrothal is a secret,
but the tangible proof of it is the bible in which
he has inscribed their initials intertwined, and the
handkerchief with his initials sewn by her with her
own red hair as thread. Kirsteen keeps the bible while
Ronnie takes the handkerchief with him to the wars.
The newspaper story of the hero who died with this
258
token pressed to his lips tells Kirsteen of his death,
and to reclaim the handkerchief from his mother for
herself, she makes a wearying pilgrimage to Scotland.
The description of the way in which this symbolic
handkerchief is preserved echoes that all-important
symbolic token of patriarchy in Guy Mannering, the
nativity prediction sewn by Guy's mother into a velvet
bag and then protected by Meg Merrilies with a spell.
Spells are replaced, in the late-Victorian Oliphant,
by the language of religion, yet the similarity between
the feminine encasement of each of these tokens I find
striking.
After Ronnie's death, the handkerchief had been
<
I
wrapped by his mother in a "piece of faded silk" (p.
239) and placed in a box within a cabinet. Kirsteen
reclaims it and takes it back with her to London, to
the home that she has made above Miss Jean's shop and
which she now "recogniz[es] as her permanent
resting-place":
She bought a little silver casket
. . . [which] seemed to suit the sacred
deposit, and unfolded the little
"napkin" to take from it at once,
like a sacrament, the touch of his
dying lips. There was the mark, with
her thread of gold shining undimmed,
and there, touching the little letters,
the stain— and even the traces of
his dead fingers where he had grasped
259
it. She folded it up again in his
mother's cover and put with it the
little blue Testament with the
intertwined initials. The silver casket
stood in Kirsteen's room during her
whole life within reach of her hand.
But I do not think she opened it often
. . . she did not profane her sacred
things by touch; they were there— that
was enough.
And thus life was over for
Kirsteen; and life began. No longer
a preparatory chapter, a thing to
be given up when the happy moment
came--but the only life that was to
be vouchsafed to her in this earth
so full of the happy and the unhappy.
She was to be neither (p. 241).
Neither happy nor unhappy, falling between states
of mind and being, Kirsteen finds the undefinable
plurality Irigaray describes, because her desire is
no longer focussed but has become diffuse. Life has
begun because it has ended for Kirsteen: that is, a
life of feminine desire, of more generalized happiness,
has begun because of the death of her focussed desire
22
-for her man-. Amongst the sewing women-foik, engaged
in the feminine life of seams, Kirsteen actually seems
to enter the world and be of it, in a way that would
paradoxically be denied to her had she entered the
world of domesticity denied to her by Ronnie's death.
There is a sort of circularity in this idea of
life beginning at the same time as it ends, a
circularity which fits Helene Cixous's definition of
the feminine text:
This is how I would define a feminine
textual body: as a female libidinal
economy/ a regime of energies, a system
of spending not necessarily carved
out by culture. A feminine textual
body is recognized by the fact that
it is always endless, without ending:
there's no closure, it doesn't stop,
and it's this that very often makes
the feminine text difficult to read.
For we've learned to read books that
basically pose the word "end." But
this one doesn't finish, a feminine
text goes on and on and at a certain
moment the volume comes to an end
but the writing continues and for
the reader this means being thrust
into the void. These are the texts
that work on tlje beginning but not
on the origin.
Kirsteen is a novel which confounds any reader reading
for the "end." Kirsteen's new life is content but
unconventional because of her lack of a man ("'Any
sort of a man, if he had been a chimney sweep, would
have been better,' said Sir Alexander" (p. 341)), and
the eponymous text is unconventional for the same
reason. There is no man in it, no conventional ending
in which the female takes her place in a domestic sphere
which has at its center a man. Certainly Kirsteen's
l unmarried, untethered, free-floating state confounds
her family, but there is a challenge to the reader
not to read Kirsteen by any convention that they might
approve.
Oliphant closes the book with a sort of epilogue
in which she describes an older Kirsteen:
In the times which are not ancient
history, which some of us still
remember, which were the high days
of youth, as far down as in the fifties
of the present century, there lived
in one of the most imposing houses,
in one of the princeliest squares
of Edinburgh, a lady, who was an old
lady, yet still as may be said in
the prime of life. Her eye was not
dim nor her force abated; her beautiful
head of hair was still red, her eyes
full of fire (p. 342).
The passage continues to describe Kirsteen's
munificence, her humor, her popularity, and I think
it is more interested in playing with an ending than
in giving one. Kirsteen, we are told, is both "an old
lady" and in the prime of her life. She is without
a man and yet she seems to embody sexual energy and —
fulfilment, with her abundant and colorful hair and
fiery eyes. Oliphant tells us that the "common question
in many circles" is why she is without a man; and
although the reader is satisfactorily in possession
I
of the answer to this particular question, this j
J quasi-epilogue poses others which are left unanswered. 1
262
Why is Kirsteen in Edinburgh? Why did she return to
Scotland rather than stay in London? Is she still a
mantua-maker? Does she remain happy beyond this
apparently arbitrarily chosen moment?
Oliphant suggests a life for her heroine beyond
the scope of the novel so that it goes on and on, as
Cixous describes, "always endless, without ending."
Unlike the conventional epilogue which seems to have
as its intention definitive closure, the ending of
Kirsteen opens up more questions than it provides
answers for. Oliphant seems to situate the "ending"
of her novel at a real point in history, but the
vagueness of this temporal placing (who are "some of
us?" Who can be included in the "we" of "our youth?")
playfully challenges a reader who would sit down and
work out chronologies. Is Kirsteen still alive as
Oliphant writes, then? Could she even be? The point
is that she continues, like the feminine text itself,
beyond the boundaries of the text at hand. Indeed,
the last words of the novel take us back to the
beginning in that suggestive loop that I have already
discussed: "MISS KIRSTEEN" half-answering that opening
question of "Where is Kirsteen?"
And as these last words, the female-only name,
leave off the masculine construction of history
contained in the surname/sirename of Douglas, so
Oliphant leaves behind the masculine construction of
Scotland which is Scott's. She closes her novel— and
opens it up, in her feminine manner— "in the times
which are not ancient history." Ancient history is
Scott's territory, a time and place fused together
by nostalgia and peopled with heroes. Scott's masculine
heroes are brave and doomed, and his sprightly heroine
steps out to redeem their memory with a forward-looking
feminine Scotland strengthened by her masculine past.
Oliphant shows us another side of the story: however
she might esteem that masculine world, Oliphant's
heroine can only find liberty and growth by recognizing
how she is trapped by patriarchal values, and eschewing
them.
_v. "The Library Window" and the Entrapped Writer.
Margaret Oliphant's "The Library Window," published
at the very end of the century in 1896, is almost a
fable about the anxiety of female authorship. It is
a story about a young girl who has been sent to stay
with her Scottish aunt in "St Rule's" for her health.
Although she is warned against her own imagination
; the girl becomes fascinated by the window opposite
her own. Her elderly acquaintances cannot decide whether
it is a real window or an optical illusion, and caught
up by the controversy the girl stares and stares at
it until she can see not only into the room but also
its furnishings and a young man who sits at a desk
fervently writing. The story is a supernatural tale:
the girl has fallen under a spell cast many years before
when a woman "of her blood" became obsessed with a
scholar who, spurning her love in favor of his books,
was murdered by her brothers.
The supernatural tale is very much part of a
Scottish tradition, but it is also the perfect form
for Oliphant's tale about the female imagination. In
the late nineteenth century medical science was keen
to discover connections between problems in women's
reproductive systems and their intellectual
24
activities. Margaret Oliphant had been frightened
25
herself by such tales as a 'young woman and forty-four
~ years later "The Library Window"-deals with some of -
the anxieties of female authorship in an open-ended
story of sexual beguilement, obsession, mystery, and
creativity. The genre of the supernatural tale allows
Oliphant to combine hocus-pocus scaremongering with
|
I more serious aspects of female repression. j
t
I i
I !
I
265
At the beginning of the story Oliphant plays with
the notion of woman’s work. The girl sits in the recess
of her window with her books and her "basket of work":
I did very little work, I fear— now
and then a few stitches when the spirit
moved me, or when I had got well afloat
in a dream, and was more tempted to
follow it out than read my book, as
sometimes happened. At other times,
and if the book were interesting,
I used to get through volume after
volume sitting there, paying no
attention to anybody (p. 253).
Work, then, is the occupation of an idle moment, an
accompaniment to a pleasant dream but taking second
place always to the fervid activity of reading. Although
the story later tells about a scholar with an exclusive
passion for books, reading is not an acceptable activity
for the girl, and it certainly cannot be "work." Nor
is the creative dreaming which accompanies her work.
This dreaming is inseparable from her reading since
it seems to arise from it, but it is clearly something
she makes for herself— one might even say "writes"
herself— since she includes in it the remarks of
I
j passers-by or things said in the room behind her. But
j such "writing" is precisely what a young girl must
» be guarded against:
My mother would not have let me do
it, I know. She would have remembered
dozens of things there were to do.
She would have sent me upstairs to
fetch something which I was quite
sure she did not want, or downstairs
to carry some quite unnecessary message
to the housemaid. She liked to keep
me running about (p. 253).
!
The message that comes through all of this play on
the nature of a girls' work is this: "work" for a young
woman is whatever circular, self-cancelling, unnecessary
task keeps her away from the creative play of
imagination and intellect. "Work" is an invention by
older women to keep a young one busy: most of the time
it does not even warrant a description— hence the
metonymic basket, which is at the same time a metaphor
for female containment.
The girl is, nevertheless, aware of all this.
Partly her day-dreaming is self-conscious:
Everybody" had said, since ever I
learned to speak, that I was fantastic
and fanciful and dreamy, and all the
other words with which a girl who
may happen to like poetry, and to
be fond of thinking, is so often made
uncomfortable. People don't know what
they mean when they say fantastic.
It sounds like Madge Wildfire or
something of that sort. My mother
thought I should always be busy, to
keep nonsense out of my head. But
really I was not at all fond of 1
nonsense (p. 254). j
2 67 j
The reference to Madge Wildfire is appropriate: it
is an acknowledgement of Oliphant's (and her narrator's)
literary father. I have earlier discussed Madge's
importance as an emblem of female language. The narrator
of Oliphant's story seems to align herself with those
who think Madge is mad (in Scott's novel these are
the men of the law) and yet she mentions her in order
to show the difference between herself and Madge. Madge
is "fantastic"— quite literally she is fiction, the
fiction of a male author picturing a female one. Like
the reference to Waverley in Kirsteen this reference
to Scott claims: that is fiction; this is reality.
Yet despite her insights into the conspiracy that
would prevent her from attempting the pen, the girl's
imagination does indeed present pitfalls. Ultimately
it is the man writing that she admires and then desires.
The scholar in the controversial window seems to be
a combination of her father and Walter Scott. These
two men-form the girl"' s only frame of reference when
it comes to writing: she has observed her father at
close quarters and waits for her "Unknown" to come
to the window, drum his fingers, play with the fringe
of the curtain as her father does. Throughout the story
she imagines telling her father about him, and imagines
i his response to the tale. The other man with whose
writing habits she is familiar is Scott; and so she
waits for her "Unknown” to "turn the page, or perhaps
throw down his finished sheet on the floor, as somebody
looking into a window like me once saw Sir Walter do,
sheet after sheet” (p. 270). Gradually daughterly
respect for the writing man of her imagination gives
way to desire, and in a sort of fevered dream the girl
is led to the window and communion with him:
I watched him with such a melting
heart, with such deep satisfaction
as words could not say; for nobody
could tell me now that he was not
there,— -nobody could say I was dreaming
any more. I watched him as if I could
not breathe— my heart in my throat,
my eyes upon him. He looked up and
down, and then he looked back at me.
I was the first, and I was the last
• . . I was in a kind of rapture#
yet stupor too; my look went with
his look. . . .
I dropped back upon my seat,
seeking something to support me (p.
287) .
This exchange of glances seems like an acknowledgement
of the girl's desire; it seems to make her an equal
with her visionary man and to be the culmination of
her desire to be like him (a writer) or to be one with
him (a lover). Writing and sexual passion fuse
dangerously and for the intensity of her passion the
girl suffers greatly. She has a fever for the whole
269
night, during which her aunt tends her anxiously. She
is under the "spell" for three nights, after which
her mother arrives to take her briskly home. "And for
years of my life I never looked out of a window when
another window was in sight" (p. 293).
Men, it seems, are the rightful writers. Papa
and Sir Walter and the young scholar are all doing
what they should. The pen in the woman's hand, however,
is symbolized in the story by Old Lady Carnbee1s
diamond, a "big diamond in an ugly old claw setting
. . . [which] blazed underneath in the hollow of her
hand, like some dangerous thing hiding and sending
out darts of light" (p. 256). The girl's imagination
works on this gem, too, so that she is terrified of
it and convinced that it bites her. Yet a diamond can
decorate a man with impunity. The diamond pin on old
Mr Pitmilly's shirt
Sparkled as much as Lady Carnbee's ~
ring; but this was a fine frank kindly
stone, that looked you straight in
the face and sparkled, with the light
dancing in it as if it were pleased
to see you, and to be shining on that
old gentleman's honest and faithful
breast (p. 281).
The diamond as a symbol of the power of
imagination, of writing itself, is "kindly" on the
270
gentleman's breast but "dangerous" in the hollow of
the lady's hand. These jewels speak vividly in the
girl's imagination the same message that she has been
learning from all around. Like the native of the
2 6
colonized nation she has learned her own identity
from others so thoroughly that she takes it on as her
own self-definition. Her colonization is internalized.
Since she has been told that a girl's imagination is
a dangerous thing she finds that it is, and that it
brings her to the brink of tumbling from a window while
still in her dreams. She trains herself for years not
to look out, not to allow herself to imagine.
The Library Window has a dual narrator, however.
The young girl's cautionary tale is framed by a
narration by her much older self. This narrator tells
us that, after Lady Carnbee's death, she herself
inherited the diamond ring. Although she is afraid
of it still, it "is locked up in an old sandalwood
box in-the lumber-roomin-the little old country house
which belongs to me, but where I never live" (p. 294).
Like Kirsteen's treasured handkerchief, the diamond
does not need to be looked at when its power is
controlled. And like Kirsteen's handkerchief this
boxed-away talisman is a symbol of Scott, of a male
tradition, which Oliphant can allow her heroine to
271
tuck safely away as she begins a new life in which
she will be her own creator. The narrator tells us
that she has made peace with her "Unknown": she has
seen him on occasion and knows "he means good and no
longer harm" to her and her kind (p. 293). And since
the narrator has told us her story, we know the most
important thing about her history: we know that she
writes.
vi. Conclusion.
Oliphant may have been a writer with a great many
misgivings about writing: she records many of them
in her Autobiography. Her self-deprecation needs to
be looked at, I think, as an interesting result of
her status as a professional woman writer of the
nineteenth century and not merely as an unfortunate
result of it. But I think it also should be seen both
as a result of her succeeding so great a male writer
as Scott, who gave her the trope of empowered femininity
and in a sense trapped her in it, and also as an aspect
of the nationality she shared with him, her status
as a member of a nation which for centuries had been
a subaltern one.
272
In Margaret Oliphant's self-deprecation and behind
her life-long habit of self-limitation I think there
are traces of the internal colonialism that caused
limitations in earlier writers such as John Galt. As
a literary successor to Scott, Oliphant has access
to a system of empowering national emblems that Galt
did not have access to, but as a woman she also finds
herself compromised by those very emblems. The way
in which she engages with this problem provides us
with an insight into both national subalternship and
sexual subalternship. In her success she conveys a
managed portrait of her perception of Scottishness;
in her failure she conveys something of the historical
difficulty of her nation: the difficulty of independent
self-definition. Writing at the end of the nineteenth
century Oliphant embodies many of the issues involved
in the construction of national identity for which
her immediate predecessors had been responsible. The
twentieth century' has seen aT"burgeoning' of~ Scottish
literature: at the end of it Margaret Oliphant is again
beginning to enjoy an appreciative readership.
273
NOTES
1. Paul H. Scott, "The Last Purely Scotch Age" in
The History of Scottish Literature Vol. 2, ed. Douglas
Gifford (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989),
p. 13.
2. Henry Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey (1852), quoted
in P. H. Scott's essay, p. 15.
3. Paul H. Scott, p. 18.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
5. Ibid p. 20.
6. T. C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People
1830-1950 (London 1986), p. 238, quoted in Douglas
Gifford's introduction to The History of Scottish
Literature Vol. 2, p. 9.
7. Sidney and Olive Checkland, Industry and Ethos:
Scotland 1832-1914 (London, 1984) pp. 178-9, quoted
in Gifford, p. 9.
8. Gifford, p. 9.
9. Gifford, p. 9.
10. See Laurie Langbauer, foreword to The Autobiography
of Mrs Oliphant, ed. Mrs Harry Coghill (London:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. viii. See also
Merryn Williams, Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography
(New York: St Martin's Press, 1986). This fine biography
includes much previously unpublished material which
helps build a rounder picture of Oliphant for the modern
— reader—than -was available-to her-earlier readers_
11. That the Scottish sensibility must accustom itself
to certain paradoxes or dualities of thinking has often
been said. In his introduction to The History of
Scottish Literature Douglas Gifford describes Scott
and his followers as successfully expressing "a sense
of Scotland divided between its past and its present,
between perceptions of nationality swayed in opposite
directions by nostalgic emotion and materialistic
reason" (p. 4). The nationalist imagination must choose
with which aspects of these poles to associate iself.
274
12. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in
the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979), p. 49.
13. Ibid., p. 79.
14. Virginia Woolf, 1938, quoted in Merryn Williams,
p. 187.
15. Laurie Langbauer, p. ix.
16. Ibid., p. xiii.
17. Nancy K. Miller, "Women's Autobiography in France:
For a Dialectics of Identification," in Women and
Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally
McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Barker, and Nelly Furman (New
York: Praeger Publishers, 1980), p. 265.
18. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 50.
19. Margaret Oliphant, Kirsteen (London, MacMillan,
1984), p. 114. All further references to the novel
in the body of the text are to this edition.
20. See Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa,"
trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no. 1, Autumn 1981.
21. Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One" (Paris:
Minnuit, 1979), p. 29.
22. In her Autobiography Oliphant uses a phrase
significantly similar to describe herself in early
widowhood. Returning to England with her little children
after Frank's death in Italy, "I thus began the world
anew,u(p. 64). There'is- the same mixture of grief and"
resolution in Oliphant*s life as there is in her
heroine's: Frank Oliphant's death left his widow no
choice but to write for her living, and this is a happy
permission after all.
23. Helene Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" trans.
Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no. 1, Autumn 1981, pp. 36-55.
24. Intellectual exertion in women was thought to
contribute to the decline of the reproductive organs.
275
25.
"We met the Howitts— Mary Howitt,
a mild, kind, delightful woman, who
frightened me very much, I remember,
by telling me of many babies whom
she had lost through some defective
valve in the heart, which she said
was somehow connected with too much
mental work on the part of the
mother,— a foolish thing, I should
think, yet the same thing occurred
twice to myself. I alarmed and saddened
me greatly."
This first-hand experience of Victorian medical lore
is recorded in The Autobiography, p. 40.
26. See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The
Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536-1966
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
276
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, J. H and David Hewitt, eds. Scott and His
Influence: The Papers of the Aberdeen Scott
Conference, 1982. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish
Literary Studies, 1985.
Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge
Kegan Paul, 1990.
Bold, Alan. Sir Walter Scott: The Long-Forgotten Melody
London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1983.
Boswell, James. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
with Samuel Johnson L.L.D. Ed. Allan Wendt. Boston:
Houghton Miflin Co, 1965.
Cixous, Helene. Introduction to Cixous. Trans. Annette
Kuhn. Signs 7, Autumn 1981.
Cottom, Daniel. The Civilized Imagination: A Study
of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and
Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell
Universtiy Press, 1982.
Cullinan, Mary. Susan Ferrier. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1984.
Daiches, David. Sir Walter Scott and His World. New
York: Viking Press, 1971.
Davis, Lennard. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction.
New York: Methuen, 1987.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Eagleton, Terry, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said.
Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York:
Norton, 1965.
Galt, John. Andrew Wylie of That Ilk in Three Volumes.
Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822.
277
______. Annals of the Parish. London: Oxford University
Press, 1967.
_______ . The Entail. London: Oxford University Press,
1 970.
________. Literary Life and Miscellanies. Edinburgh:
William Blackwood, 1834.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed. "Race, Writing, and
Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1983.
Gifford, Douglas, ed. The Hitory of Scottish Literature
Volume 3. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century
Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Goslee, Nancy. "Romance as Theme and Structure in 'The
Lady of the Lake'" in Texas Studies in Literature
and Language Volume 17,1976.
Graham, Henry Grey. The Social Life of Scotland in
the Eighteenth Century. London: Adam and Charles
Black, 1899.
Hart, Russell. The Scottish Novel from Smollett to
Spark. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Harvey, W. J. Character and the Novel. New York: Cornell
University Press, 1965.
Hayden, John O. "Jeanie Deans: The Big Lie (and a Few
Small Ones)" in Scottish Literary Journal Volume
6, no. 1, May 1979.
Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic
Fringe in British National Development 1536-1966.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Range, eds. The Invention
of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1 983.
Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which I Not One." Paris:
Minnuit, 1975.
27 8
Johnson, Edgar. Sir Walter Scott; The Great Unknown.
London: MacMillan, 1979.
Johnson, Samuel. A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland. Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1965.
Kerr, James. Fiction Against History: Scott as
Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989.
Kirk, Thomas, and Ralph Thoresby. Tours in Scotland
in 1677 and 1681. Ed. P. Hume Brown. Edinburgh: David
Douglas, 1892.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
Lockhart, John G. The Life of Sir Walter Scott. London:
J. M. Dent, 1967.
Lowther, C., Mr R. Fallow and Peter Manson. Our Journail
Into Scotland A.D. 1629. Edinburgh: David Douglas,
1 894.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production.
Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 19 78.
McCallum, Neil. A Small Country: Scotland 1700-1830.
Edinburgh: James Thin, 1983.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally, Ruth Barker, and Nelly Furman,
eds. Women and Language in Literature and Society.
New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980.
McMaster, Graham. Scott and Society. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981.
McLynn, Frank. The Jacobites. London: Routledge Kegan
Paul,1985.
Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981.
Miller, J. H. The Form of Victorian Fiction. Notre
Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.
Millgate, Jane. Sir Walter Scott: The Making of the
Novelist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
279
Morgan, Susan. "Old Heroes and a New Heroine in the
Waverley Novels" in Texas Studies in Literature and
Language Volume 50 no. 3, Fall 1983.
Muir, Edwin. Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of
the Scottish Writer. Edinburgh: Polygon Books, 1985.
Oliphant, Margaret. Autobiography of Mrs Oliphant.
Ed. Laurie Langbauer. London and Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1988.
_______ . . Kirsteen. London: MacMillan, 1 984.
Rubenstein, Jill. "Symbolic Characterization in 'The
Lady of the Lake'" in Dalhousie Review Volume 51,
Autumn 1971.
Rubin, Gayle, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the
Political Economy of Sex" in Toward a New Anthropology
of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Scott, Sir Walter. Guy Mannering. London: MacMillan,
1924.
. ____ . Heart of Midlothian. Boston: Houghton Miflin,
1 966.
________. Letters. Ed. H. J. Grierson. London: Constable
and Company, 1832.
________. Rob Roy. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1893.
________. Waverley. Ed. Claire Lamont. Oxford: Clarendon
Press,1981.
________. The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther. Ed. Paul
H. Scott. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press,
1981.
Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985.
Shaw, Harry E. The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir
Walter Scott and His Successors. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1983.
Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
280
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Memories and Portraits.
Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing, 1990.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. The Female Body in Western
Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Taylor, Joseph. A Journey into Edenborough in Scotland
in 17 05. Edinburgh: William Brown, 1903.
Wallace, Miriam. "Nationalism and the Scottish Subject:
The Uneasy Marriage of London and Edinburgh in Sir
Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian" (As Yet
Unpublished).
Welsh, Alexander. The Hero of the Waverley Novels.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
Wilt, Judith. Secret Leaves: The Novels of Sir Walter
Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Williams, Merryn. Margaret Oliphant: A Critical
Biography. Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1986.
281

Linked assets