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Form in Scott's Novels: the Hero As Subject

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Form in Scott's Novels: the Hero As Subject 5 Form in Scott's Novels: The Hero as Subject Although they followed one another in rapid succession and represent Scott at the height of his powers, The Bride of Lammermoor and The Heart of Midlothian are radically different novels. The Bride is full of gloom, pessimism, and a hallucinatory Gothic power; Midlothian is as celebratory and affirmative a work as Scott ever wrote. Comparing the protagonists of the novels underlines their differences. Ravenswood, the doomed aristocrat, is moody, sometimes arrogant, but always brimming with passionate interiority; Jeanie Deans, the unself-consciously heroic peasant, has few thoughts and fewer pas­ sions. Beside her quiet strength, his flamboyance threatens to turn into rant; beside him, she seems a trifle dull. Yet in one respect the two characters are after all alike. Both serve as the substantial centers of the works in which they appear. Scott, as we have seen, generally creates an oblique relationship be­ tween the central interests of a novel and its protagonist. Conjunctive and disjunctive form describe two ways in which he handles this rela­ tionship, neither of which gives the protagonist substantial centrality. Both kinds of works respond to what I have called the problem with historical novels-their inability to represent simultaneously all levels of human generality-by avoiding it in its fullest form. They employ a hero who shifts the part of the human spectrum they treat toward the social and historical, and away from the personal and internal matters a substantially central protagonist is ideally suited to explore. We have, it is true, observed one of Scott's most interesting conjunc- THE HERO AS SUBJECT 213 tive heroes, Henry Morton, edging toward the inwardness of the sub­ stantially central protagonist. But Morton is exceptional, and this as­ pect of his characterization creates significantly problematic results. With Jeanie Deans in Midlothian and Ravenswood in The Bride of Lammermoor, the centrality toward which Morton fitfully reaches becomes dominant. One purpose of the present chapter is to describe the special conditions that make possible this centrality. Beyond that, Scott's success in putting his protagonist at the center of these two great novels recalls with some urgency certain questions that lie at the heart of this study. First, there are the limits of representation in stan­ dard historical fiction. Do Edgar Ravenswood and Jeanie Deans solve the problem with historical novels? Might they not at least solve the local version of that problem reflected by the split between conjunc­ tive and disjunctive form? Do they bridge the aspects of Scott's histor­ ical vision those forms embody-his interest in historical process on the one hand, and historical particularity on the other? Certain critics have sought to give Ravenswood and Jeanie Deans precisely such a healing power, but I shall be at pains to deny it to them. Despite their unusual structural roles, both characters confirm the notion that in standard novel form, it is possible to concentrate on certain aspects of human existence only at the expense of others. Even Scott never solves the problem with historical novels, though his response to it creates particularly rich and varied results. Second, there is the question of evaluation and the ideological pre­ suppositions that underlie it. I have not hesitated to call The Bride and The Heart of Midlothian "great" Scott novels, even though their pro­ tagonists are uncharacteristic of Scott. Or is it because they are uncharacteristic? A major purpose of this study has been to demon­ strate that the expectations created by the standard novel tradition as a whole may be unhelpful in approaching works of historical fiction. One such expectation is that a protagonist who, like the Waverley protagonists, appears to be at the center of structure ought to embody a novel's meaning as well. Yet I myself am willing to give very high marks indeed to the two Scott novels where this state of affairs comes closest to existing. In such a judgment, conventional expectations concerning protagonists seem to be reasserting themselves with a ven­ geance. With The Bride, they probably are: Scott is here working with the one subject he can imagine deeply and intensely in terms of indi- 214 THE FORMS OF HISTORICAL FICTION vidual interiority, his own deepest personal rejection, and the result is a novel easily assimilable to a familiar form of standard fiction-the Gothic novel. But Midlothian is different. With Helen Walker, Jeanie Deans's historical prototype, Scott found for once a historical figure who could serve as his protagonist without violating his sense of what matters in history. Jeanie Deans is central to her novel in a way Waverley never is to his, and Morton is only at certain moments. Yet she remains a typical product of Scott's usual modes of characteriza­ tion, reflecting the ways in which his assumptions concerning the rela­ tionship between human personality, society, and history differ from those of the main novel traditions that follow him. It is hardly surprising that the formal values implicit in standard fic­ tion should assert themselves in the judgments of a critic who is writ­ ing in the twentieth century but who has a bias toward the fiction of the nineteenth, and a conviction that, for good and ill, the values im­ plicit in the form of that fiction remain central for the way in which our society imagines itself. Whence arise our judgments of value-the ones we feel on our pulses, I mean, not those we may manufacture in attempts to transcend or negate our selves and our society-if not from cultural traditions? Self-conscious, tentative complicity with tra­ dition seems the most we can hope for. Attempting to take seriously a writer like Scott can be useful in achieving such a stance. As we at­ tempt to account for the contradictions in our reactions to his novels, the biases on which our judgments depend begin to come into focus. The Bride of Lammermoor Th e Bride of Lammermoor has a power to excite and disturb the imagination unique in Scott's fiction. The novel's hero, Edgar Ra­ venswood, is an exception to the rule that Waverley heroes are not ends but means, existing to mediate between historical forces, or to see historical sights, or to press us toward certain conclusions about the shape of historical process, but not to have deep souls or interest­ ing minds. With most Waverley heroes, our interest lies in what they see: with Ravenswood, the focus shifts toward his mode of seeing, which in the strongest moments of the novel becomes hallucinatory despair. Any reader of The Bride will recall scenes in which Ra­ venswood faces visions of the supernatural which overwhelm him THE HERO AS SUBJECT 215 even though he disbelieves in them. At such times, he gains a heroic stature, strangely at variance with his irresolute passivity in other parts of the novel. This heroism stems from his willingness to look de­ spair in the face without flinching and to persist in hopeless resis­ tance. Most Waverley heroes have, to be sure, a rhetorical dimension: they rouse and explore feelings concerning historical process or his­ torical particularity. But Ravenswood's affective side is of another or­ der of intensity and significance, for us and for the novelistic structure that surrounds him. The Bride has a unique power to fascinate and disturb us because it expresses a complex of personal emotions with less historical media­ tion than any other of Scott's works. As it happens, we can identify in Scott's biography the source of these turbulent feelings, and this knowledge supplies the most convenient way to describe them. It has long been recognized, though sometimes resolutely ignored, that the novel reflects Scott's unhappy love affair with Williamina Belsches. The story of their relationship is well known. As a youth, Scott grew increasingly attached to Williamina over a number of years; finally, he more or less proposed to her. Exaggerating what seem to have been her ambiguous replies to his advances, he grew to believe that she had pledged herself to him at the very time when she had fallen in love with another man, more nearly her social and economic equal than Scott. When their engagement was announced, Scott was shat­ tered and angry; the scars from this affair remained with him to the end of his life, as his Journal, written during his fifties, reveals. On a number of occasions in his writings he refers to the dangers involved in forming strong early romantic attachments, pointing out that social forces nearly always thwart them and lifelong suffering results. As a critic, he betrays a weakness for literary works depicting thwarted love, perhaps because they allow him to relive a trauma he never en­ tirely mastered, forgave, or forgot.1 Edgar Johnson has shown that this material makes sporadic appearances in a number of Scott's nov­ els.2 What sets The Bride apart from such works, I shall argue, is that l. For the importance to Scott and to The Bride of one such work, Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne, see my "Scott, Mackenzie, and Structure in The Bride of Lammermoor," Studies in the Novel, 13 (1981), 349-66, which treats more fully certain points raised in the following discussion. 2. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 124, 469. 216 THE FORMS OF HISTORICAL FICTION its central formal principle reflects the wish to revivify these emotions and transmit them to the reader. Ravenswood is the substantial center of The Bride so that he can focus and express a rejected lover's sense of horror, loss, and betrayal, and above all his violent ambivalence concerning himself and the woman who rejected him.
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