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Landscaping Justice, Rebellion and Dynastic Failure in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley and Redgauntlet

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Landscaping Justice, Rebellion and Dynastic Failure in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley and Redgauntlet Chapter 4 Landscaping Justice, Rebellion and Dynastic Failure in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley and Redgauntlet Our environment, conceived as landscape scenery, is fundamentally linked to our political landscape. kenneth r. olwig1 ⸪ There is no shortage of critical appraisal focused on Scott’s use of landscape to explore his thematic concerns in the Waverley Novels.2 As Jenni Calder points out, much of Scott’s popularity was the direct result of “his conjuring of a myth- ic history out of mountains, lochs and ruins”.3 Of course, Scott uses Highland 1 Kenneth R. Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), xxxii. 2 See, for example, James Buzard’s Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nine- teenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Penny Fielding’s ‘Curated Regions of the North: Art and Literature in the “Scottish Border” and the “Transpen- nine Corridor,”’ Visual Culture in Britain, 15 (2014), 159–72, and Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Yoon Sun Lee’s chapter on Scott in Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 74–104. See also the following recent commentary on Scott and his use of landscape: Chris Ewers. ‘Roads as Regions, Networks and Flows: Waverley and the “Periphery” of Romance,’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37 (2014), 97–112; E. García Díaz. ‘An Overview of Justice in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels: The Heart of Mid-Lothian.’ Oñati Socio-legal Series [online], 4 (2014), 1167–72; Anna Faktorovich. Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (Jefferson, nc: McFarland, 2013); Caro- line McCracken-Flesher’s ‘Scott’s Jacobitical Plots,’ The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott, ed. Fiona Robertson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 47–58 and ‘Walter Scott’s Romanticism: A Theory of Performance,’ The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Ro- manticism, ed. Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 139–49. 3 Jenni Calder. ‘Figures in a Landscape: Scott, Stevenson and Routes to the Past,’ Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries, ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 121. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/978900435�780_006 <UN> Landscaping Justice, Rebellion and Dynastic Failure 101 and Border landscapes for such purposes as to represent the Jacobite cause as anachronistic in relation to a united and prosperous future Britain. However, with Sharpe’s notions of monarchical representation in view, I wish to explore how Scott uses landscape to represent the sovereign body politic—whether actual or aspiring—in such a way as to construct the counter-revolutionary, “unifying national narrative” with which The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley and Redgauntlet each close.4 I want, therefore, to consider these three novels in relation to Sharpe’s iconographic work but also in the context of Kenneth R. Olwig’s Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic. A landscape theorist, Olwig examines interrelated notions of landscape, country, nature, nationality and sovereignty. His analysis commences with the ascension of James VI and the Stuart dynasty to the English throne. Among other things, he considers James’ use of landscape in the theatre to position the sovereign body politic as a geo- political ideal in connection with the Stuart ambition to unite Scotland and England. Olwig’s primary point of reference is Jonson’s Masque of Blackness of 1605, a copy of which Scott held in his library at Abbotsford.5 Like Olwig, Scott has a fascination with the nexus of landscape, politics and sovereignty. Both are intrigued by the idea of geography being represen- tative of political and social institutions. Particularly relevant to The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley, and Redgauntlet is what Olwig terms the “body geo- graphical,” that is, the use of landscape to represent the sovereign body poli- tic.6 With this in mind, I want first to consider how Scott uses landscape in The Heart of Mid-Lothian to create what Olwig might call a unified geopolitical vision of post-Union Britain; for the locales of Richmond and Knocktarlitie are constructed to function—at one level, at least—as positive representations of the sovereign body politic, and as sites of natural justice premised on Tory notions of landscape. I then want to explore how Scott constructs the failed and degenerative nature of rebellion and the Jacobite cause as he presents individual, dynastic, political and geographical landscapes in Waverley and Redgauntlet. It thus becomes clear that Scott’s twinning of various characters and their families with the associated landscapes enables the positioning of rebellion as an inherently futile and barren endeavour. Conversely, counter- revolutionary support of the Hanoverian monarchy is represented as innately 4 Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, xxix. 5 Jonson’s (Ben) Works; with notes, &c. and a Biographical Memoir, by William Gifford. 9 vols (L.P. Lond, 1816) is included in the Catalogue of the Library at Abbotsford (at page 209). The Masque of Blackness is included in the third of the nine volumes comprising this work, spe- cifically Vol 3, 2–9. 6 Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, 67. <UN>.
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