HISTORICAL FICTION:

SIR WALTER SCOTT

(1771 – 1832)

DISCUSSION OF WAVERLEY and

IVANHOE
•History is other, and the present familiar. The
historian's job is often to explain the transition
between these states. The historical novelist similarly
explores the dissonance and displacement between
then and now, making the past recognisable but
simultaneously distant and unfamiliar. According to
the famous Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785
– 1873,) the historical novelist is required to give “not
just the bare bones of history, but something richer,
more complete… in a way you want him to put the
flesh back on the skeleton that is history.”
•The figures we meet in historical fiction are identifiable to us, on the one
hand, due to the novel form, in that they speak the same language, and
their concerns are often similar to ours, but their situation and their
surroundings are immensely different. How does this affect the writing
and reading of fiction? Historical novelists concentrate on the gaps
between known factual history and that which is lived.
•The historical novel, then, is similar to other forms of
novel-writing in that it shares a concern with realism,
development of character, authenticity. Yet
fundamentally it entails an engagement on the part of
the reader (possibly unconsciously) with a set of
settings and ideas that are particular, alien, and
strange.
•The reader of such a work is slightly more self-aware
of the artificiality of the writing and the strangeness
of engaging with a text which strives to explain
something that is other than one's contemporary
knowledge and experience: the past.
• Throughout the nineteenth century what we might call the Historical
Novel was often, problematically and pejoratively, referred to as
“Historical Romance.” The ROMANCE was a type of fiction that was
more flexible; its subject matter not worthy of the rationalist and
civilising ideas associated with the “high” realist novel. The term
”Historical Romance” suggests the complexity and manipulability of the
genre, its ability to meld high and low types of writing, and its popular
appeal… especially for women.
•When the Scottish writer Walter Scott decided to
switch from poetry to prose, he produced a
HISTORICAL NOVEL. The novel in question was
Waverley, Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). It is
traditionally regarded as the first historical novel in
European literature, as well as the first of a series of
novels by Scott – known as the “Waverley” novels.
Waverley, Or ‘Tis Sixty
Years Since
Pub.1814
•Technological innovations relating to printing
meant that novels became the first mass
market literary medium, and the first novel to
be published widely and also to be marketed to
this new public was… Scott's Waverley.
•Scott's novel was massively, globally successful
and influential; it introduced a new form, the
historical novel; and it demonstrated the
range, reach and breadth of audience that the
new type of writing might reach.
•Therefore, we must consider Waverley in some depth.
The novel is a hybrid of styles. In addition, it is
accompanied by extensive notes which encompass
ballads and poetry (sometimes made up), political
occurrences, biography, culture and customs, classical
learning, sword making, accounts of actual events.
•Also, in spite of the fact that Scott is
celebrated as the FOUNDER OF THE
HISTORICAL NOVEL, we have to say that he had
his antecedents. He was a great synthesizer of
what a lot of writers before him had done.
•The novel’s plot revolves around the Jacobite uprising of 1745. The
Jacobites were supporters of the exiled Stuart dynasty.
•The uprising tried to restore the
Stuart dynasty upon the British throne
– in the person of Prince Charles
Edward Stuart, popularly known as
“Bonnie Prince Charlie”. After initial
success in the Battle of Prestonpans,
the taking of Edinburgh and advance
into England, the Jacobites were
repeatedly defeated. The final battle
was fought at Culloden in Scotland
and it marked the end of the uprising.
•Early in the nineteenth century, Scott
was appreciated for his use of Jacobitism
to emphasise Scottish difference and
imply strength and possibility. He
replaced the eighteenth-century image
of the degraded highlander – Sawney
invading the bog-house that divides
savagery and civilisation, plaid kilted up
and a leg down each hole – with the
striking Fergus Mac-Ivor of Waverley.
What is
the novel
about?
•Waverley follows the fortunes of Edward Waverley, an English gentleman
who first spends about two months in Lowland Scotland and then visits
the Highlands where he becomes embroiled in the rebellion of the
Jacobite Bonnie Prince Charlie.
•In the Lowlands, Waverley is
the guest of the Baron of
Bradwardine and his daughter
Rose.
•Rose:
•She was indeed a very pretty girl of the Scotch cast
of beauty, that is, with a profusion of hair of paley
gold, and a skin like the snow of her own mountains
in whiteness. Yet she had not a pallid or pensive cast
of countenance; her features, as well as her temper,
had a lively expression; her complexion, though not
florid, was so pure as to seem transparent, and the
slightest emotion sent her whole blood at once to
her face and neck. Her form, though under the
common size, was remarkably elegant, and her
motions light, easy, and unembarrassed. She came
from another part of the garden to receive Captain
Waverley, with a manner that hovered between
bashfulness and courtesy.
•In the Highlands, Waverley is
particularly drawn to the
impudent and charming clan
leader Fergus Mac-Ivor and his
sister Flora. Flora is the “dark”
heroine of the novel.
•The character of Edward Waverley is
presented to us as a foolish dreamer,
fired by romantic fiction to seek
adventure but discovering the relatively
grim realities behind the flourish: “It
was up the course of this last stream
that Waverley, like a knight of romance,
was conducted by the fair Highland
damsel, his silent guide” (Scott 1985:
175).
•This idealised version of things is seen to be a
fiction. For instance, even during the clan
celebrations Fergus Mac-Ivor admits he does not
really like the Highland celebrations, but he partakes
for the sake of his men. The romanticism of the novel
is generally problematic, and Scott himself calls his
protagonist a “sneaking piece of imbecility.”
•This demonstrates that Scott is interested in the ways in
which “reality” can be misinterpreted by the imagination .
The novel also meditates on the nature of reading fiction
and the experience of the reader. Scott's rationalist
perspective leads him to suspect the romanticising
tendency of those who read fiction.
•Again, this model suggests that in writing his
historical novel Scott was concerned to clearly
delimit his practice. Scott wanted to write of
“men not manners.” Customs and behaviour
are mere external fripperies, whereas Scott's
purpose was to reveal the actuality of the past.
•Waverley is in many ways a character typical
of Scott’s historical novels. He sees historical
events but experiences them personally and
from a variety of perspectives, very few of
them a clear, insightful understanding. His
witnessing of key battles, for instance, is
generally from the sidelines.
•Furthermore, as someone who takes a long
time coming to an understanding of the
significance of events, Waverley stands for the
audience's engagement with the historical
past: as something consciously understood
only with the benefit of hindsight.
•The novel shows Waverley's gradual
disillusionment with the rebellion and his
growing maturity as a person. He learns from
his experience, understanding finally, through a
kind of hindsight, the consequences and
meanings of his actions.
•Waverley witnesses the defeat of the
Jacobites, the approaching execution of Fergus
Mac-Ivor and the self-exile of Flora to the
continent where she intends to become a nun.
Eventually he marries Rose Bradwardine, the
gold-haired maiden from the Lowlands. The
marriage may be said to be emblematic of the
union of Scotland and England, which was
threatened by the Jacobite uprising and other
similar events. Typically, this union is
predominantly with Lowland Scotland, the
Highlands appear to be excluded from it.
•As various critics have argued, Scott was concerned
about the political instability that the presence of the
past might have in contemporary society, and his
writing sought to answer this: his consistent goal,
across a number of literary genres, was to anatomize
and neutralize such sinister energies of this past
while at the same time commercially exploiting the
appeal of that past to the reader. The novel, for all its
celebration of the traditions and lives of the
Highlanders, consistently undermines them. Scott’s
attitude to Jacobitism is mixed: Waverley is the novel
in which he is able vicariously to live out both sides of
this divided political self.
IVANHOE

Ivanhoe is considered to be Walter Scott’s

first medieval novel. It was published in
1819.
•In this novel Scott entered the debate on English ethno-
national identity. A number of English historians
proclaimed English identity to be “purely” Saxon. In his
novel Scott attacks the conventional formulations of
English history (as continuous) and English identity (as
pure). For him, history is a lengthy process of ethnic
mixture, and English history is no exception. The plot of
Ivanhoe delineates the mixed Saxon and Norman
genealogy of the modern Englishman.
•Interestingly, in the Dedicatory Epistle to this novel,
Scott disguises himself as the Englishman “Laurence
Templeton,” the apparent author of Ivanhoe, and
thereby erases his own Scottish identity.
•Scott envisions history as the record of difference; and history-
writing in Ivanhoe functions to demystify English subjectivity by
reconstituting the basis of English national identity in racial and
religious difference.
•Given this context, we can see the full importance of the
opening scene of the novel. Gurth and Wamba enter the forest
glade as belated figures in a historical drama of conversion that
has already been played out, in different ways, many times.
For Scott’s natural landscape bears not simply the
marks of civilization, but the marks of conversion—
those signs of religious and national change that
constitute the history of civilization. The setting of
King Richard’s return from the Crusades reveals the
signs of a previous religious worship, “the rites of
Druidical superstition”; in the midst of the glade that
Scott’s characters enter, “there still remained part of
a circle of rough, unhewn stones, of large
dimensions.” While seven of these stones stand
upright, “the rest had been dislodged from their
places, probably by the zeal of some convert to
Christianity” (4). History-writing, then, uncovers the
signs of those conversions by which one culture
absorbs, erases, and succeeds another.
When “[ t] he human figures which completed this landscape”
(4) actually do arrive on the scene, they enter to announce the
latest chapter in the history of conversion. The elaborate
descriptions of Saxon dress and manners by which Scott
introduces Gurth and Wamba are freighted with irony, given
that the characters themselves speak of the danger of their
erasure in Norman culture.
Wamba recommends to Gurth the swineherd, “leave
the herd to their destiny, which, whether they meet
with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of
wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be
converted into Normans before morning” (7). Wamba
explains his use of the figure of conversion: while
“swine” designates the live herd in “good Saxon,”
“the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and
quartered, and hung up by the heels . . . becomes a
Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to
the castle hall to feast among the nobles” (7–8).
The change in translation from one
language to another signals, for Wamba,
the complete absorption and erasure of
one culture by another in conversion;
both changes signify the difference
between life and death. In the initial
dialogue of the novel, then, Wamba
introduces the radical definition of
conversion that will frame the entire plot
of Ivanhoe: conversion can be nothing less
than genocide.
THE CASE
OF
ULRICA….
…. At first glance, she’s
nothing but a minor
character…
•Ulrica’s story of the Norman slaughter of
her Saxon family is the novel’s most potent
and most condensed narrative illustration of
Wamba’s definition of conversion as
genocide. While Scott records the slaughter
of the male line of Saxons—in the case of
Ulrica’s family the Normans “shed the blood
of infancy rather than a male of the noble
house of Torquil Wolfganger should survive”
(239)— he seems more interested in
exploring woman’s role in the annihilation
or preservation of racial and national
identity, in the parallel stories of Ulrica,
Rowena, and Rebecca. Such an exploration
helps to crystallize the idea of conversion as
rape.
•Precisely insofar as Ulrica’s story demonstrates the
way in which conversion functions as a sexual
transgression that is at the same time a racial/ethnic
erasure, her story represents a narrative model that
threatens to overtake the stories of the two major
female characters in the novel, Rowena and Rebecca.
By exposing the double identity of the convert,
Ulrica’s story demonstrates the way in which the
convert’s case history is the model of all historical
writing for Scott— the uncovering of an earlier, lost
identity.
 • Living among Normans under a false name (Urfried, “the slave”)
speaking the language and assuming the customs and manners of the
Normans that she secretly despises, Ulrica is like a false convert. With
her name lost, and her face no longer clearly bearing the features of her
family, Ulrica becomes the tragic mime of the male characters in the
novel who deliberately hide both name and face: Richard, Ivanhoe,
Gurth, Cedric, Robin Hood.
Ulrica’s story ends in her enactment of the text’s most disturbing version of
racial/ethnic preservation; she dies to become once again a Saxon and to
support the Saxons who are currently storming the Norman castle. Only death
restores her to her name— she succeeds where Front-de-Boeuf fails, to “perish
as becomes my name” (284)— and in her last appearance, at the moment of
committing suicide, she is described as “the Saxon Ulrica” (299). Moreover, the
fire by which Ulrica kills herself allows the two heroines to escape from their
Norman imprisonment at Torquilstone— an imprisonment that, in both cases, is
being used to threaten them with conversion, to make Rowena a Norman (and a
bride) and Rebecca a Christian (and a paramour).
Rowena, “the Saxon heiress” (203), functions in the
racial/ethnic politics of medieval England as the object of two
competing marriage plots, both of which subdue her personal
identity to her racial/ethnic identity.
•Prince John’s plan to marry Rowena to the Norman
Maurice de Bracy is an attempt at annihilating the
Saxon dynasty, while Cedric’s plan to marry her to
Athelstane, “that last scion of Saxon royalty” (295), is
an attempt at preserving it.
• John plans Rowena’s marriage to “amend her blood,
by wedding her to a Norman” (123), to “produce her
not again to her kindred until she be the bride and
dame of Maurice de Bracy” (144).
Rowena’s marriage to Ivanhoe at the end of the novel does not represent
merely the fulfilment of her own personal desire. It more importantly
represents a political and historical middle ground between Cedric’s plan to
marry Rowena to Athelstane (thereby securing the Saxon dynasty) and John’s
plan to marry her to De Bracy (thereby erasing a prominent Saxon family).
•Once we realize that Rowena’s marriage to the Normanized
Ivanhoe anticipates the happy intermarriage of the
races/ethnicities, we realize that it functions as an alternative to
the historical problem on which Scott predicates his entire
novel: “Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile
blood of the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by
common language and mutual interests, two hostile races” (2).
• The solution to the hostility of the races of the first
chapter is clearly represented in the festival of
marriage in the last chapter, when the nuptial
“union” of the couple is made to signal the future
political “union” of the races/ethnicities:
These distinguished nuptials were celebrated
by the attendance of the high-born Normans,
as well as Saxons, joined with the universal
jubilee of the lower orders, that marked the
marriage of two individuals as a pledge of the
future peace and harmony betwixt two races,
which, since that period, have been so
completely mingled that the distinction has
become wholly invisible. Cedric lived to see
this union approximate toward its
completion; for, as the two nations mixed in
society and formed intermarriages with each
other, the Normans abated their scorn, and
the Saxons were refined from their rusticity.
But it was not until the reign of Edward the
Third that the mixed language, now termed
English, was spoken at the court of London,
and that the hostile distinction of Norman
and Saxon seems entirely to have
disappeared. (447)
•As a historical novel based on “a subject purely
English,” Ivanhoe’s final public event is a marriage
whose pretext is clear: to bestow on the incipient
English population their proper name. The
conventional announcement of progeny that
frequently completes the marriage plot becomes
freighted with historical and political significance in
the novel; the nuptials of Rowena and Ivanhoe
become a baptism of their symbolic progeny, the
English people. Rowena and Ivanhoe’s marriage
represents the first step toward solving the
hostilities between the Normans and the Saxons
insofar as it represents a kind of intermarriage.
•Ivanhoe, the eponymous hero, is the critical
figure in Scott’s plot because he represents a
hero caught between two historical moments
— the ancient Saxon past of his father and the
new Norman ways of his king. Ivanhoe ends
with the Normanized Ivanhoe marrying the
Saxon heiress, and with an important naming
ritual in which King Richard rejects the name
“Richard of Anjou” to call himself “Richard of
England! whose deepest interest— whose
deepest wish, is to see her sons united with
each other” (421), a father figure whose sons
include both Saxons and Normans.
•In this way Scott is able to define “England” as the
product of racial/ethnic and cultural mixture—
neither as the simple preservation of the Saxon past
in the face of the Norman invasion, nor as the simple
conversion of the Saxons into Normans.
•Rowena’s marriage may be read as a political allegory about English history;
Rebecca’s destiny, on the other hand, may be interpreted as a political allegory
about Jewish history. While the Saxon-Norman plot in Ivanhoe averts De
Bracy’s conversion of Rowena (chapter 23) through her marriage to Ivanhoe, the
Jewish plot averts Bois-Guilbert’s conversion of Rebecca (chapter 24), only to
lead to two further attempts at converting her and ends not with Rebecca’s
marriage but with her exile. And just as Rowena’s three suitors represent three
different solutions to a racial problem in English history, the three attempts at
converting Rebecca represent three different responses to the question of
Jewish identity in European history.
•By dramatizing the historical reality of
the conversion of the Jews, these three
scenes allow Scott to move beyond the
use of conversion solely, or even
primarily, as a rhetorical figure that
represents the genocide of the Saxons.
These scenes open the widest gulf
between his history and the purely
figurative use of conversion in English
historical writing in the nineteenth
century, and ultimately they suggest
another way of defining English
national identity.
•Bois-Guilbert’s seduction of
Rebecca refers to the
contemporary English debate
over whether the “atheistical
French” would be the nation to
restore the Jews to their
homeland. The atheistic Templar,
who tries to woo Rebecca with
visions of material advantage and
military might, ends by tempting
her with a vision of her queenly
restoration to Palestine.
•The Templar’s strategies of temptation
stem from the question asked in so many
European nations during the
Enlightenment and at the beginning of the
nineteenth century: would the Jews, as
the price for emancipation, give up their
religion for civil power? But the Templar’s
strategy requires not only that Rebecca
“embrace our religion” (217), but that she
yield to his desire, so that his demand for
her conversion is inseparable from his
threat of rape. Rebecca retaliates with the
threat of suicide— a choice that many
medieval Jews made as an alternative to
forced conversion.
•The second attempted conversion of
Rebecca functions as Scott’s critique of
the Catholic treatment of the Jews.
The Templars’ trial of Rebecca for
witchcraft, reminiscent of an
Inquisitorial trial, actually puts the
fanaticism of priestcraft on trial in
Scott’s focus on the superstition and
xenophobia that guide the
investigation of the Jew. The particular
charge of witchcraft is no more than a
pretext to inspect and attack Rebecca
as a Jew, for the Grand Master is
willing to acquit her if she will convert:
“Repent, my daughter, confess thy
witchcrafts, turn thee from thine evil
faith, embrace this holy emblem, and
all shall yet be well with thee here and
hereafter” (369).
•Scott questions this contrast by
making Rowena, in her role as the
harbinger of the new England, the
instrument of the third and final
attempt at converting Rebecca. Scott
carefully positions the meeting
between Rowena and Rebecca directly
after the marriage celebration of
Ivanhoe and Rowena, thereby
displacing their marriage as the climax
of the novel. In other words, the
marriage that anticipates the happy
union of the Norman and Saxon races
is not allowed to suppress the still
unresolved question of another race’s
future in England— that of the Jews.
Rebecca’s sudden and unexpected
arrival in Rowena’s chamber in
Ivanhoe’s final chapter precludes the
completion of the writing of English
history without the inclusion of Jewish
history.
•Rebecca’s sudden re-entrance into the
plot – after the marriage of Wilfred and
Rowena - represents the power of the
return of the repressed. After all, she
arrives from her trial by the Templars,
having survived the attempt to convert
her and to burn her at the stake. She is
the erotic power that neither Ivanhoe
nor Rowena can exorcise. But she is also
the blot on the conscience of England
insofar as she represents a religious and
racial question that England cannot
solve.
•Rebecca’s visit becomes an announcement to quit Christian England for Muslim
Spain; her voluntary exile anticipates the forced expulsion of the Jews from
England in 1290, the earliest general expulsion of the Jews in medieval history—
one that historians see as a direct consequence of the new nationalism of late
medieval England and the failure of English policy to convert the Jews.
•The other purpose for Rebecca’s visit, to requite the debt she owes to
Ivanhoe for championing her at Templestowe, Rowena gracefully
dismisses, acknowledging that she herself and Ivanhoe are still in
Rebecca’s debt: “Wilfred of Ivanhoe on that day rendered back but in
slight measure your unceasing charity towards him in his wounds and
misfortunes. Speak, is there aught remains in which he or I can serve
thee?” (448). But Rebecca has not come to receive, to be indebted; she
has come for the opposite purpose so that, after rejecting Rowena’s
promises of safety in England, and after saying farewell, she makes known,
almost as an afterthought, her visit’s further purpose: “One, the most
trifling, part of my duty remains undischarged” (449). Suddenly she
reveals that she means to make Lady Ivanhoe a gift of a silver-chased
casket containing a diamond necklace and earrings.
•At this moment Rowena’s most potent
trial begins, as Rebecca fires a series of
rhetorical questions at her that
overturn the stereotypes by which
Jewish identity is traditionally distorted
—especially the Shakespearean
stereotypes of the Jewish father (who
compares the value of his daughter
and his ducats) and the Jewish
daughter (who steals her father’s
wealth as part of her flight from him
and his religion). “Think ye that I prize
these sparkling fragments of stone
above my liberty? or that my father
values them in comparison to the
honour of his only child? Accept them,
lady— to me they are valueless. will
never wear jewels more” (449).
•At Rebecca’s surrender of the casket,
Rowena patronizingly offers the
solution of conversion: “You are then
unhappy! . . . O, remain with us; the
counsel of holy men will wean you
from your erring law, and I will be a
sister to you” (449).
•In the end, Rebecca transfers to Lady
Ivanhoe the sign of material value that
stereotypically marked the Jew and that
both state and Church periodically
confiscated from the medieval Jew; at
the same time, Rebecca refuses to wear
the Christian disguise that would allow
her safe settlement in England—
reminding us of all the disguises in the
novel, including Scott’s disguise as an
Englishman.