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)
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
