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The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland Author(S): Richard Cook Source: ELH, Vol

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The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland Author(S): Richard Cook Source: ELH, Vol The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland Author(s): Richard Cook Source: ELH, Vol. 66, No. 4, The Nineteenth Century (Winter, 1999), pp. 1053-1073 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032108 . Accessed: 27/05/2013 15:30 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 27 May 2013 15:30:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE HOME-LY KAILYARD NATION: NINETEENTH- CENTURY NARRATIVES OF THE HIGHLAND AND THE MYTH OF MERRIE AULD SCOTLAND BY RICHARD COOK In his broad survey, Modern Scottish Literature, Alan Bold warns against quick dismissals of the popular late nineteenth-century "Kailyard School" of fiction: "we should be wary of categorizing the kailyarders as sentimental fools; they were men who had a shrewd judgment for public taste and the public responded by adoring the intellectually undemand- ing entertainment the kailyarders produced." Bold's evaluation of the Kailyard (literally, cabbage patch) and its unavoidable presence in Scottish literary and cultural history illustrate the tension between "public taste" and high art, "entertainment" and serious intellect, that still gathers around these national tales. The Kailyard's national and international appeal has been explained primarily, by critics such as Bold, through a tautology that depends on a self-evident and static "public taste" that has very little to do with history or culture. We are told, in other words, that the Kailyard was popular because it reflected popular, and we are to assume vulgar, tastes. The cantankerous modern- ist Scots poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, certainly had this in mind when in his 1923 poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, he mourned this "preposterous presbyterian breed" of popular fiction which had tossed real Scottish artists "owre the kailyard-wa.'"'2Bold echoes this argument at another moment in describing the less lofty Scottish verse of the 1920s as "a homemade product cultivated in the kailyard and handled by amateurs."3 George Blake's 1951 study of the Kailyard school con- demned the prose as a "mass of sludge," told by a "small fry" caste of bard who strolled "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 through the windows of the Presbyterian manse."4 The Kailyard's mass audience forced those wanting to defend high cultural standards into an uncomfortable position because an impressive number of middle-class readers demonstrated more interest in the morally affirmative and conservative sensibilities of these national tales ELH 66 (1999) 1053-1073 © 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 1053 This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 27 May 2013 15:30:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions than in high art and aesthetic criteria.5Characterized by its simple versions of pastoral Scotland rather than serious historicalrepresenta- tion, Kailyardfiction arrangesits exotic scenes of caricaturedbackwards folk figures aroundinterchangeable conventional tropes and themes of love, covenantry,and sentimentalizedrural life to contributeto a mythic depiction of Scottish history. Its authors were journalists and Kirk ministers rather than trained artists and their stories appeared in Rev. Will RobertsonNicoll's religious periodical the BritishWeekly (subtitled A Journalof Social and ChristianProgress) and WilliamHowie Wylie's ChristianLeader ratherthan in high culture literaryjournals. It was no secret that Kailyardfiction stood outside the walls of acclaimedlitera- ture, but this did not prevent its authorsfrom enjoyingprolific success. Ian Maclaren'sBeside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1896), for example, drew such a wide readership,including Queen Victoriaand W. E. Gladstone, that by 1908 it had sold 256,000 copies in Great Britainand 485,000 in the U. S. A.6 The British Weeklyreported in 1894 that S. R. Crockett's The Lilac Sunbonnethad sold 10,000 copies in the first day of publica- tion and promised the quick printing of a second ("making18,000").7 Kailyardnovels continued to be bestsellers in Britain throughout the period of 1888 to 1901, and, for a six-yearperiod from 1891 until 1897, Kailyardauthors ranked in the top ten annuallyin the Americanbest- seller lists.8 Kailyardprose was indeed popular,but it also gained the reputationof representingthe real Scotland-authentic literaturepeer- ing into the heart of Scottish nation, culture, and life. I am primarilyconcerned in this essay with the ideologicalwork the Kailyardperforms in constructingits Scottish Highland nation. I use MaryPoovey's definition of ideologicalwork which doubly emphasizes that narrativesare the "workof ideology"within a system of representa- tions that function in concert to bring meanings, like nation, to individuals.At the same time, representationslike the Kailyardcontrib- ute to "the work of making ideology"by constructingand contesting specific versions of nation, consolidatinga vision of Scotlandwhile also inevitablyrevealing the contradictionswithin these images.9With this in mind, I want to argue that Kailyardnarratives and their widespread readershipfit comfortablywith end-of-the-centurybourgeois anxieties about the excesses of urbanization,over-population, and moraldecay, as well as New Woman politics and the liberal municipalizationof social programs.The consumptionof Kailyardliterature outside of Scotland- in England and even more so in the United States and Canada- suggeststhat the popularityof these narrativesresponds to anxietiesthat extended beyond the realities of Scotland. The vision of an idyllic 1054 Nineteenth-CenturyHighland Narratives and the Mythof Scotland This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 27 May 2013 15:30:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions community appealed to a bourgeois nostalgia for the stable land and labor structure of aristocraticpatronage and the ease of paternalist countrygentry life, parishrule, and the strictcontrol of deviantcitizenry in the face of increasingeconomic disparitiesbetween the discontented lower classes and the triumphantmiddle class. In other words, the Kailyardillustrates the nostalgiafor a lost condition of a happy national home. The reactionaryimpulse of the "cabbagepatch" fiction mediated contemporarytensions of Western industry by imagining a pure and secure society of culturalharmony. In the first half of the essay I arguethat no nationis essentiallyreal or magically conjured into existence, but that the justification of its existence and truth must live somewhere.Viewing fictions of nation as home enables us to see how the naturalizednotions of privateproperty, morality,and gender are woven together in the Kailyardto constructan ideal image of nationalprosperity and productivitythat hegemonically reinforces the values of the ruling class. The Kailyardmaintains the integrityof its nationalhome, as the second half of the essay shows, by constructing a culturally coherent affective economy whereby social distinctionsof nationality,gender, and race are understood and disci- plined according to an emotional caste system. References to class privilege and gender subordinationare gently circumventedin favorof essentialized differences of feeling. Like its bourgeois readership,the Kailyardnation imagines its own legitimacyby naturalizingthe hierar- chies that sustainit. I. BUILDING THE HOME OF NATION Kailyardfiction, like other nationalnarratives, constructs a vision of a unified and safe space, or home. Terms like home-rule or home-front demonstratethat the rhetoricof nation and nationalismis motivatedby a need to locate a limited physical place of origin and social sover- eignty.'0 Yet home is also invoked as an affective response describing sentiments of shared experience and the purportedlycommon under- standings of familiarity,comfort, wholeness, safety, unity, and purity. The first associationof home refers to the division and distributionof property, the second describes one's relationship to that property. Nation, as it exists in both idea and practice,operates at the intersection of these two versions of home by providinga fiction that makes private property,along with its limits and borders,essential to its existence. At the same time, the myth contends that the nation democraticallyavails that propertypublicly to everyone within it. Plainly,differentiations of Richard Cook 1055 This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 27 May 2013 15:30:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions gender, class, race, and age are conveniently brushed aside in this ideological fiction. In the same fashion, the Kailyard home's welcome mat is laid out exclusively for the white male bourgeois subject. National fictions like those from the Kailyard employ a middle-class domesticated space as
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