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6Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modem Scottish Novel’ UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW DEPARTMENT OF SCOTTISH LITERATURE A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosonhv 6Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modem Scottish Novel’ LEAH N. RANKIN JUNE 2002 SUPERVISED BY DR GERARD CARRUTHERS ProQuest Number: 13818809 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 13818809 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 \1S&1 g o p H \ Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modern Scottish Novel CONTENTS Abstract i Acknowledgements ii 1 Introduction: ‘Landscapes of Eden and Hell: The Kailyard and the Real Scotland’ 1 -2 4 2 George Douglas Brown: ‘From Idylls to Nightmares: Uprooting the Kailyard’ 25 - 45 3 Catherine Carswell: ‘Closed Doors and Caged Birds: False Edens in Scotland and Beyond’ 46 - 69 4 Willa Muir: ‘Hell-fire and Water: Examining the Elements of Calderwick’ 70 - 95 5 J.M. Barrie: ‘The Purgatory of Scotland: A Final Farewell to the Kailyard’ 96 - 123 6 Robin Jenkins: ‘The Regeneration of Good and Evil: The Garden of Eden Stripped Bare’ 124 - 142 Conclusion 143 - 146 Bibliography 147 - 155 Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modern Scottish Novel ABSTRACT The following thesis examines the portrayal in a number of modem Scottish novels of Edenic and hellish landscapes, these depictions being primarily connected with the effect of Calvinism on the Scottish mentality. The novels are linked by their focus on landscape, on the discrepancies between public and private lives, mythology (specifically relating to notions of Eden and hell) and in their in- depth examination of the Scottish psyche. It will be argued that the chosen novelists implicitly argue that the Calvinist inheritance in Scotland creates a type of hell (incorporating sometimes false paradises) in respect to the detrimental aspects of the religion resulting in an unamenable environment and even sometimes a dystopia. Initial note of the ‘kailyard’ mode of writing is taken in an attempt to compare and contrast the Edenic fa9ade of this writing with the later, more modem novels in question, which deal more realistically and in greater depth with the Scottish cast of mind and with Scotland overall. The later novelists produce what I would call truer versions of artifice compared with the ‘kailyard’ sketches and it will be argued that in the former, the incorporation of the themes of evil as well as good produce harder hitting representations of Scotland, highlighting a new, more philosophically and religiously engaged direction for Scottish fiction during the twentieth century. Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modern Scottish Novel ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank first and foremost Dr Gerry Carruthers for his continued help and support throughout my BA (Hons) degree at Strathclyde University and my MPhil degree at Glasgow University. Your guidance and patience have been greatly appreciated. I will hopefully have the pleasure of your supervision at PhD level in the near future. Thank you to the staff at Strathclyde University Library, Glasgow University Library, The Mitchell Library, Glasgow and The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. I would also like to thank my flatmates, Karla, Caroline, SJ and Joanne, and also my friends, especially Lainnie, Lisa, Leigh and Rhona - thank you for your help and for many a drunken night out. I would lastly like to thank my family - Mum, Claire and David - for their continued support and my Dad for giving me the determination to get through University. Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modern Scottish Novel CHAPTER______1 INTRODUCTION Landscapes of Eden and Hell: The Kailyard and the Real Scotland l Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modern Scottish Novel The Scottish cast of mind in the Victorian period can be generally characterised in terms of a number of dualities: a Manichean division in religion, a split in private and public life, where outward morality and private sin clash, and a duality in respect of retaining a distinct Scottish identity in the face of widespread Anglicisation.1 These characteristics retain their importance in later Scottish thought and culture and are evident to a large degree in modem Scottish literature, defined from 1901 onwards, but an unusually small amount of literature of the Victorian period actually dealt with them2, as George Blake, writing in 1951, points out: The bulk of Scottish fiction during the nineteenth century [...] fell into either of two categories: the domestic or the parochial on the one hand, the romantic on the other [...] The Scots storyteller either followed Scott and Stevenson through the heather with a claymore at his belt, or he lingered round the bonnie brier bush, telling sweet, amusing little stories of bucolic intrigue as seen through the windows of the Presbyterian manse.3 Those who adhered to the kailyard mode of writing, predominant from the 1880s to the late 1890s, focused on a superficial view of parochial Scotland rather than concentrating on Scotland as a nation and the overall Scottish psyche, for which failings they were heavily criticised. An attempt will be made in the following chapter to highlight that these general characteristics of the Scottish psyche are more evidently examined in later Scottish literature, and also briefly to examine the kailyard phenomenon in terms of the effect that it had on modem Scottish writing in terms of a reaction. Landscapes and notions of Eden and hell will also be discussed as these are main elements in the discussion of how Scottish literature has been shaped from the Victorian period; they tend to recur over and over again, very tellingly in the novels that will be focused on in subsequent chapters - George 1 Olive and Sydney Checkland bring this point to the forefront inIndustry and Ethos: Scotland 1832 - 1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997; 1984), p. 133. The Checklands’ book importantly brought together discussion of literary, economic and social matters. Such duality of course has frequently been identified as of more longstanding existence. For a reading of Scottish cultural dichotomy along such lines from the late seventeenth century see David Daiches,Literature and Gentility in Scotland: the Alexander lectures at the University of Toronto, 1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982) and Daiches,The Paradox o f Scottish Culture: The eighteenth- century experience (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 2 There are a number of very successful novels published during the nineteenth century, such as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and, most especially, by Robert Louis Stevenson with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Weir o f Hermiston (1894), which reflect the wide dualities diagnosed in the Scottish mind of the Victorian and earlier periods. 3 George Blake, Barrie and the Kailyard School (London: Arthur Baker, 1951), p. 13. Blake’s book represented an important post-World War II reappraisal of the literary character of Scotland. 2 Landscapes of Eden and Hell in the Modern Scottish Novel Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901), Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door! (1920), Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners (1931), J.M. Barrie’s Farewell Miss Julie Logan (1932) and Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers (1955). An apparent Manichean division, in respect to religion in Victorian society, is discussed by Olive and Sydney Checkland inIndustry and Ethos: Scotland 1832 - 1914: Victorian religious life in Scotland in its evangelical form, as a major part of its inheritance from its Knoxian church, was shot through with an almost Manichean distinction between good and evil. This left little room for the middle ground upon which real debate about human behaviour could take place, and where most of life resided. It reduced the question of behaviour to a simple addiction to the good or the bad, the former to prevail only through Christian atonement.4 This Calvinist inheritance is evident to a large degree in the Scottish literature that does not find consolation in landscapes of the past or in romantic, sentimental notions of Scotland. As Caims Craig points out in The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination: Calvinism was the foundation of the key institutions - religion, education - through which Scottish identity was shaped, and through which it maintained its distinctness during Scotland’s participation in the British Empire: whether for or against Calvinism’s conception of human destiny, no Scot could avoid involvement in the imaginative world that Calvinism projected.5 Colin Manlove in Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey, claims that ‘however far the writers of Scots fantasy may be from their roots, they all show something of the influence of Calvinism. Some of them take an almost Manichean view of the world. In Hogg’sConfessions [...] it seems largely the devil’s territory.’6 This is evident too in later fantasy writing. All of the novels that will be discussed can be described as Scottish fantasy literature, according to Manlove’s identification of three main features in this strain of literature - ‘the stress on the unconscious, on uncertain identity and on 4 Olive and Sydney Checkland,Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832 - 1914, p. 133. 5 Caims Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p.
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