Waverley 1

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Waverley 1
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Outline

• Scott, Austen, and Edgeworth
• Waverley as a historical novel
• Scott and the middle-of-the-road hero
• Scott and the question of empire

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Scott, Austen, and Edgeworth

• Walter Scott a poet turned novelist
• Waverley, first novel, 1814
• Success of the Waverley Novels (Scotts business
  interest in James Ballantyne Co., printers)
• Scott uses his fame to promote the career of JA
  and, more generally, a style of novel which
  has arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty
  years

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Scott, Austen, and Edgeworth

• This new novel presents to the reader instead
  of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a
  correct and striking representation of that which
  is daily taking place around him
• The exceptionally fluid (Eagleton) literary
  situ-ation in the era of the Romantic novel grows
  more stabilized as the newly crystallized mature
  realism becomes the dominant mode of fiction

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Scott, Austen, and Edgeworth

• Waverley a remarkably well read novel gathers
  up into itself previous modes of prose fiction
• ME amongst those who are gathered up in this
  way
• See W, vol. 3, ch. 25 A Postscript, which
  should have been a Preface

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Scott, Austen, and Edgeworth

• WS It has been my object to describe these
  persons his novels Scottish char-acters, not
  by a caricatured and exagg-erated use of the
  national dialect, but by their habits, manners,
  and feelings so as, in some distant degree, to
  emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by
  Miss Edgeworth

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Scott, Austen, and Edgeworth

• WS influenced by MEs regional novel an
  interest in regionalism makes for a realist
  emphasis in fiction
• MEs Irish regionalism replicated in terms of
  JAs English regionalism (North-amptonshire and
  the enclosures) in MP and WSs Scottish
  regionalism in W the novel emerges as a history
  of nation

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Scott, Austen, and Edgeworth

• With W, WS develops MEs regional novel into a
  full-blown historical novel
• ME a general interest in Irish affairs before
  1782
• WS a general interest in Scottish affairs
  specifically with reference to the Jacobite
  Rebellion of 1745 W as a historical novel

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Waverley as a historical novel

• W the first historical novel
• Georg Lukács What is lacking in the so-called
  historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is
  precisely the specifically historical, that is,
  derivation of the individuality of characters
  from the peculiarity of their age (The
  Historical Novel (1937), p. 15)
• History in so-called historical novels treat-ed
  as mere costumery (ibid., p. 15)

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Waverley as a historical novel

• What is it about the history of the Roman-tic era
  that determines the rise of the his-torical novel
  proper in the shape of W in 1814?
• GL It was the French Revolution, the
  revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of
  Napoleon, which for the first time made history a
  mass experience, and moreover on a European
  scale (p. 20)

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Waverley as a historical novel

• History post 1789 accelerated pace of change
  felt on the pulses
• History post 1789 creation of mass armies
  (contrast with the professionalized armies of
  preceding periods)
• History post 1789 Napoleon single-handedly
  redraws the map of Europe (hence correlatively a
  concern with bor-ders and regions)

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Waverley as a historical novel

• History post 1814 the Napoleonic end-game
  (Britain gains ascendancy in Europe and on the
  world stage)
• History post 1814 sense of 1814 itself as a
  watershed in European history (what course has
  history been following up to this point? what
  course is it likely to follow in the immediate
  future?)

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Waverley as a historical novel

• Questions about the history of the past, present,
  and future are precisely those which inspire WS
  in the work he carries out for W
• Waverley or, Tis Sixty Years Since begun in
  1805 (laid aside), resumed in 1810 (laid aside),
  completed in 1814

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Waverley as a historical novel

• Jacobite Rebellion, 1745-46 Jacobites vs.
  Hanoverians uprising led by (the Catholic)
  Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender),
  ends with the Battle of Culloden (1746)
• Scottish civil war Highlands (romance) vs.
  Lowlands (realism)
• Romantic old Scotland defeated by its
  modernizing, pragmatic counterpart

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Waverley as a historical novel

• The lesson of 1745 (Sixty Years Since)
  realism the order of the day, both in pol-itics
  and in novel-writing
• Romance and realism in Scott admiring attachment
  to the ways and passions of Highland clan
  society, but he is enough of a realist to realize
  that the future lies along the path of
  modernization and moderation

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Scott and the middle-of-the-road hero

• Edward Waverley Waverley by name and by
  nature
• See Fiona Robertson, Waverley, in Dun-can Wu,
  ed., A Companion to Romantic-ism (1998), pp.
  211-18

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Scott and the middle-of-the-road hero

• FR The technical innovation of Waverley is to
  tell a story of national history through the
  Bildungsroman (a novel tracing an individuals
  growth into adulthood). In order to investigate
  the events of 1745 Scott invents a hero who, as
  his name indicates, is inclined to waver in his
  political loyalities (p. 213, emphasis add-ed)

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Scott and the middle-of-the-road hero

• Waverleys wavering brought up in part by his
  father (a Hanoverian) and in part by his uncle
  (Jacobite leanings)
• In Scotland, develops an attachment to the
  Jacobite cause via his relationship with Flora
  Mac-Ivor
• Rejected by Flora, he eventually marries Rose
  Bradwardine (following his rehab-ilitation
  amongst the English forces)

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Scott and the middle-of-the-road hero

• Marriage to Rose rather than Flora the triumph
  of realism over romance the romance of his
  Ws life was ended . . . its real history had
  now commenced (Vol. III, Ch. xiii)
• Telling a national story through a Bildungsro-man
  WS relates the history of the Scottish civil
  war from a popular viewpoint rather than from
  above
• Thus the idea that history has become a mass
  experience is affirmed by W

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Scott and the middle-of-the-road hero

• Note WSs repeated deployment of the
  middle-of-the-road hero in his fiction see
  Ivanhoes relationship to the Saxons and the
  Normans in Ivanhoe, for example
• Typically, the fanaticism of extremes is
  rejected in favour of the conservatism of the
  middle way

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Scott and the middle-of-the-road hero

• The ideological programme of WSs fiction
  history is a series of crises, the way out of
  which in each case lies along the gold-en mean
  between opposing parties
• WS sees it that the nation needs to be or-ganized
  not unlike a realist novel in terms of an
  accommodation of the local within a larger
  structure

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Scott and the question of empire

• On the idea of organizing nations as though they
  were forms of realist fiction (preserving what is
  local within a greater whole), see Eagleton, The
  English Novel
• TE The empire must be like this too, as Britain
  seeks to govern its colonial peo-ples, not
  despite their customs and beliefs, but through
  them (p. 101)

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Scott and the question of empire

• TE A nation thus fortified by accommodation of
  the local, by adopting the middle way is then
  all the better furnished for its imperial role in
  the wider world (p. 101)
• W raises the question of Scotland as colonial
  in relation to England as a metropolitan centre
• See further Michael Simpson, Wavering on Europe
  Walter Scott and the Equilibrium of Empires,
  Romanticism, 11/2 (2005), 127-42

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Scott and the question of empire

• MS Having sympathized in turn with the
  Low-landers, the Highlanders and now even with
  the French, Waverley finally projects his
  sympathy into the perspective of the English and
  looks at the Scots and the French as an
  Englishman would (p. 140)
• . . . Scotland seen as existing in a strategic
  al-ignment with England in WSs imagination

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Scott and the question of empire

• At the same time W seems like MP re-markable
  for how little, in respect of its strategic
  imagination, it stands in the way of the
  accelerating imperial process (Said) post 1814
• A concern about slavery appears now rep-licated
  in terms of a concern with region-alism . . .

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Scott and the question of empire

• The material dependency of the centre on the
  margins (colonies, regions) a marked feature of
  the organization of the British empire in the
  nineteenth century (see also Jane Eyre)
• The degree of this dependency means that
  interrogation of colonialist practices is left
  off the political agenda

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Scott and the question of empire

• The realist novel emerges as a literary form with
  which to ratify a silence about the imperial
  process in this period