Waverley (Scott, 1814)

Walter Scott. Waverley. Pub. 1814. Ed. Peter Garside. New York: Penguin Classics, 2011. Print.

• Pub 3 volumes by Ballantyne in 1814 -- the 21s6p 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
• 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)
• 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
• 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

• idiom registering historical difference (Griffiths 2016)
• Evan Dhu defining "honor" in court scene (Griffiths 2016)