Waverley (Scott, 1814)
From Commonplace Book
Walter Scott. Waverley. Pub. 1814. Ed. Peter Garside. New York: Penguin Classics, 2011. Print.
- Pub 3 volumes by Ballantyne in 1814 -- the 31s 6p model established with Kenilworth a few years later (Sutherland 1976)
- good for: centrally important historicism; scenes of reading; paratext and use of literary allusion in various registers
Context
- anonymous authorship and then "the author of Waverley" until 1827: imitating the feminine technique of keeping name off to generate interest
- early problem of inscription vs erasure in construction of authorship, which continues with periodicals and novels: see Buurma 2013 and Brake 2001
- 2 different types of narrative: Austen originating the C19 domestic novel tradition, Scott the historical novel (they reconverge in Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy, 1886))
- Progress vs primitivism: a novelist of modernization and nation formation (Ivanhoe) -> Waverley on the formation of Great Britain
- 1745 Jacobite Rebellion
- Protestant German George I on the throne
- Whigs, English (Waverley's father) (progressive, middle class)
- Catholic Scottish Stuarts: conservative, landed gentry - Tories, Highlanders (Waverley's uncle Everard)
- Waverley wavers (!) inbetween
- Protestant German George I on the throne
- Scott's reading much like Waverley's (romance, oral traditions, etc)
- print culture underpinnings (St Clair 2004)
- early c19 fad for "ye olden timey" literature: Scottish Minstrelsy -> antiquarianism (see Lynch 2015)
- Scott became a novelist because Byron came on the poetic scene in 1813
- Waverley as experiment on public taste
- different authorial guises foregrounding the mediation of storytelling: you can never forget you're reading, you're not left alone for long
- later, novel canon formation through the editorship of an anthology (see Price 2000)
- Historical context
- 1707: Acts of Union: parliaments united
- Scotland an "internal colony"
- Ensuring protestant succession (so Scotland couldn't have a Catholic monarch) -- James II overthrown in 1688 Glorious Revolution (key for Macaulay)
- Jacobites
- Scots landed families, feudal allegiance
- risings in 1715, 1745 (Charles, the Young Pretender, making a bid for the throne)
- Tension: Scott's dual Scottish/English audience (an exercise in sympathy through historical alterity)
- 1707: Acts of Union: parliaments united
- Novel expectations established in paratext: title and subtitle - a loaded description
- "more a description of men than manners" (p. 5) - again, vs. the domestic, feminized novel tradition
- action / private, exteriority / interiority, universal / particular: not just binaries but the cycling between them makes it a more complex work of interplay and emphasis
- "more a description of men than manners" (p. 5) - again, vs. the domestic, feminized novel tradition
- Conceptions of history (see Griffiths 2016)
- "the great book of Nature" (6) (see Chartier 1994 for book as metaphor)
- stadial theory of history (Enlightenment): peoples/societies move through the same stages of development at different rates
- Enlightenment historiography
- teleological, progressive, liberal
- interest in "primitive societies," like the Highlanders
- Spatial and temporal coordinates: as Waverley goes further north he goes back in time (Armstrong 2005)
- the way history develops according to universal rules
- the mediation between history and literature to see history as a series of revolutions
Reading/Class Notes
- 13-14 Waverley's reading
- W a feminized reader: doesn't finish her reading
- chivalric romances: honor, valor
- reading the world through genres, allows Scott to keep the romance plot of this realist novel (later characters in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) also use literature to interpret the world)
- bad effect of this reading: "retired and abstracted" (34) (Wavering), reading's isolating effects: "internal sorcery"
- 15 implied masturbating in the library rather than out playing sport (sexual education -> enervation)
- Scott is famous for feminized, passive heroes: Lukacs 1937 says they're passive for a reason
- real historical personages are minor characters in this kind of novel
- this type of passive hero functions to allow Scott to explore the conflict, a reflecting mirror: he's a nonentity for a reason
- Intro to Scotland (34ff Tully-Veolan): spatializing historical progress
- a pretty radical shift: picturesque and dirty - the double imperative to show need for improvement and that there's much to offer
- 49 Dryden footnote -- the authenticity of the textual apparatus raising the profile of fiction
- Function of verse (fragments)
- connection to tradition, women and "simple" Davy connect to informal/oral culture vs formal/written
- 114 legitimating by connecting to European aesthetics (vs the local and domestic) (Claude, Ariosto, the sublime)
- 64 editing the text of Rose's song
- Scott v much mediating the scene vs. the natural/authetic song of Rosa, Flora: too close to oral tradition
- Verse fragments
- some extratextual from other poets
- some his (but only noted in the MS) (like Eliot's epigrams in Middlemarch)
- impt for Romantic writers, usually poets more than novelists (Coleridge, "Kubla Khan")
- fragment as potential, gesturing toward wholeness/completeness
- Davy: Gesturing toward lost cultural whole: all he has are the pieces of a culture in the process of fragmenting
- double valence of potential and decay/loss
- Davy himself somewhat fragmented in his place in the narrative, he eludes definition or motive
- Flora and Rose
- Rose -- Lowlands - semi-feudal (landlord, could try people but Branwardine doesn't do it)
- picturesque (Italian painting)
- Flora -- Highlands - fully feudal, political indifference beyond chief, sublime (awe-inspiring), savage
- Somewhat racially coded, too: R Anglo-Saxon, F Celtic/Gallic -- not racial in the contemporary sense but still highly coded
- Rose -- Lowlands - semi-feudal (landlord, could try people but Branwardine doesn't do it)
- Tully-Veolan liminal, on the edge of the higliands
- Rose's masculine reading vs. Waverley's (ch. 13)
- Waverley wavering
- he has no political opinions of his own - anti-Hanoverian but not yet pro-Jacobite
- Lukacs 1937: W is "neutral ground"
- French Revolution made history a "mass experience" by involving ordinary people in the political life of the nation-state
- also Anderson 1983 on nation as imagined community effected by and then reified in print
- Scott's conservative search for a "middle way" in English history
- Hegel - thesis / synthesis/ antithesis, Hanover / to be seen / Jacobite
- Aristotle: plot as more faithful to the real than character
- Lukacs 42: "re-experiencing social and human motives which led men to think, feel, and act as just as they did in historical reality."
- Reading Romeo and Juliet (3.7, 270-3)
- legitimation of his novel and of Waverley, who will be interpreted as fickle
- interweaving "domestic" and political thru Sh romance (across genre lines - R&J and Much Ado)
- inseparability of marriage and politics, which ties thematically to the Sh
- Domesticity as retreat
- Tully-Veolan - political space masquerading as domestic space (in Habermas 1962 terms, public-facing privacy)
- W living out his romantic daydreams when meeting Charles the pretender in ch. 43 (the scene of Charles sorting things out in Vol 3 ch. 11)
- Waverley's marriage to Rose as healing
- Waverley lack of development, or his lasting habit of aestheticizing tragic events even when more experienced (writing to Rose on 351)
- eliciting our sympathy by appealing to the pathos of the death of the Highland way of life
- Talbot as a foil for Fergus, as English as F is Scottish
- they represent legible political stances while W is a "morass of sentiment" (tho a nice guy)
- W's performances: R&J then the cultural appropriation of pibroch, strathspey, etc (312)
- followed by elegiac description of the aftermath of Culloden at the beginning of the next chapter
- conquest and appropriation: Highlanders explicitly related to black people at several points
- orientalism: picking pieces (vs. Shakespeare who suffeses the prose)
- fragments and quotation/appropriation vs. direct quotation, not offset
- trying to write himself into the English tradition
- idiom registering historical difference (Griffiths 2016)
- dialect in print - Scott an early practitioner of reproduction dialect
- cultural alienation, unintelligibility
- fine line betwen preserving history and making stereotypes
- Hardy received criticism of this for Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy, 1886)
- the more we get into war the more he hesitates to represent history
- rhetorical differentiation from history
- understanding of audience's knowledge
- Urban spaces sketched while Highland spaces are in detail (unknown space)
- urban space "too major," Lukacs might say
- too well-known and yet Bonnie Prince Charlie is very individually clear, a major character (301) (could tie this to Woloch 2003 on character space in historical novel)
- Evan Dhu defining "honor" in court scene (Griffiths 2016) (ch. 21, 340ff)
- Romance vs "real history" in W's character
- more experience but still things get figured out for him in the denouement
- people doing things behind the scene against him throughout and then he does something off-stage with buying Tully-Veolan
- Last chapter and/before "Preface"
- by the end he's a a functional role vs an individual one
- estate as metonym for nation, jointly founded
- ownership of property associated with caution and prudence in Scott's novel
- his capital does things, not him
- Waverley's emptiness: necessary to keep focus in an historical novel? But the emotional and personal experience of history is so much the focus here
- something about intrusive narrators in Scott and Dickens, they pile things up at the start and finish sketchily at speed
Writing Notes
- two collections in the novel, Scottish song and allusions to Shakespeare, arguing that in so doing Scott uses these texts to authenticate his Scottish historical novel on the one hand and authorize it as a part of the English canon on the other.
- I begin with Scott’s own concept of antiquarian “gabions” to show that to understand something about Waverley’s “motley assemblage,” its function as a repository of antiquarian objects and literary allusion, is to understand something about Scott’s narratological innovation and the construction of literary authority in the period anterior to the Waverley Novels’ critical reception.
- But why “gabions”? Why use a neologism to describe artifacts that, prominent associations aside, were not unusual to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarian collections? David Hewitt suggests “gabions” are “an invention which raises the question as to whether antiquarians make antiquities” (Reliquae xii). Ann Rigney argues the term “is symptomatic of the fact that [Scott] was groping to articulate a new nexus between materiality, memory, and literature” (18). The madeness of antiquarian objects creates an opportunity to refashion historical association, to situate cultural meaning to achieve particular ends. In both material and literary practice, Scott’s curation displays a peculiarly narrative-building turn of mind. His collections at Abbotsford, his “romance of a house,” were arranged within a space that, famously, Scott described as being built along a similar scheme to the three-volume novel he introduced into common nineteenth-century publishing practice.
- Arranged within a fictional narrative such as Waverley, Scott’s repurposed literary objects can be seen operating at every textual level, including epigraphs, the idiolects of various characters, typographically offset fragments of poetry, places where the narrator or characters slip in phrases from Shakespeare, and later annotations to the Magnum Opus edition.
- 127 "curation" of a Scottish artifact in the song
- same on 317: Textually, this fragment – displayed offset from the narrative like an objet – collapses space and time into four couplets, resonating across three centuries and in three nations that, in the material lives of its witnesses, became one kingdom.
- Waverley reads Davie Gellatley on first sight as “not much unlike one of Shakespeare’s roynish clowns” (41). Toward the end of the novel, he interprets the Stuarts as suffering the same decline as Richard II: “He could not but observe that in those towns in which they proclaimed James the Third, “no man cried, God bless him”” (281; RII 5.2.28). These are but two examples of many: none can question Scott’s commitment to characterizing his protagonist as a “master of Shakespeare and Milton, of our earlier dramatic authors,” the latter through references to more specialist subjects including Ben Jonson and John Fletcher
- It is all the more striking, then, when in the sentencing scene at the end of the novel Evan Dhu ventriloquizes Richard II, the most lyrical and extravagant of the history plays:
“…If you can make up your mind to petition for grace, I will endeavor to procure it for you—otherwise—”
“Grace me no grace,” said Evan; “Since you are to shed Vich Ian Vohr’s blood, the only favour I would accept from you, is to bid them loose my hands and gie me my claymore, and bide you just a minute sitting where you are.” (342, emphasis mine)
Unlike other narrative gabions in Waverley, Scott does not alter the quotation, appropriating York’s chastisement of Bolingbroke from another scene when treason is at stake: “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle. / I am no traitor’s uncle” (RII 2.3.87-8). Rather, it is the juxtaposition of the Shakespearean language that is intriguing. Here the “traitor” against the English king rebukes his representative’s offer of dispensation, elevating the register from York’s pun on the appropriate form of address. Evan elevates the stakes as well by quoting Shakespeare, seemingly unwittingly, in service of an unrepentant bodily threat to the judge’s person.
- Rather than a linear building of literary authority, then, beginning with Waverley we can see cycle of literary-textual cultural construction that is rooted in material and discursive practices particular to Scott then taken up in the public sphere. In Waverley, we see these practices are flexible enough to create a narrative abundant with intertextual resonances, operating at every textual valence and purposed to create a sense of historical truth by authorizing the narrative in the case of Shakespeare and authenticating it in the case of the Scottish fragments. Some narrative gabions test the reader’s ability to “suspend belief” in the diegetic world of Waverley and Fergus, but I read their “motley assemblage” as increasing the narratological capacity of the novel to act at once as an immersive experience and an archive for texts that transmit nearly-lost signals by being preserved in a fictional narrative. The idea of narrative gabions may suggest new avenues of inquiry by seeing Scott’s practice in the fictive archive of Reliquiae Trotcosienses as more of a piece with his novelistic practice elsewhere. The use of this sophisticated cultural apparatus in Waverley certainly suggests Scott was a more experimental novelist, and antiquarian, than we have come to expect.
