The Columbia History of the British Novel

greenwood is an example of Scott's instinct for the materialist basis of History. His first truly royal figure, the exotic Highland Chief Fergus MacIvor, controls an economy in which the romantic credits of fealty, mystery, and love circulate alongside the real credits of coins, lands, and titles. What looks at first like a Highland -312- thieving of Lowland cattle is really a momentary breakdown in the complex network of «protection» by which the supposedly peaceable Fergus feeds a tenantry too large for a farming community, but large enough for an army. More deeply still, the thieving is actually an exercise in quarrel and reconciliation designed by Fergus to produce emotional capital in old Lowland and Highland cavaliers, capital to be expended in the Jacobite rebellion for the Stuart Pretender.

Edward's journey north through Fergus's land to the camp of the Stuart brings him face to face with that homicidal, suicidal honor from which he instinctively recoils, leaving it to Fergus's opposite number, the Hanoverian Prince's chieftain, Colonel Talbot, to negotiate Edward's return to his king. The credits Talbot employs to buy Edward back his reputation and his estate include a complex transference of land and cash but also, and importantly, the new modern capital of his 'vote in the House' of Parliament.

Scott's first novel thus sets up a narrative of historical process. The story begins by referring, through the Shakespearean headnote, to the macro beginning of modernity in the duel between Plantagenet cousins, and dramatizes, by reference to Edward's early fixation on the death of the youngest Waverley son in the service of King Charles II, the acceleration of this process in the seventeenth-century civil war that produced everywhere houses with a Hanoverian brother and a Stuart brother, swords half-drawn upon each other. It ends by enforcing a unity on the warring human houses, transferring the war to the fictive house of political parties. Colonel Talbot's negotiations result in a property transferred from Scottish Jacobite to English Hanoverian ownership.

The allegiance to Hanoverian government by the father, Sir Richard Waverley, was an ignoble matter of a younger son's looking to survive and prosper: the allegiance of the son, Edward, to the same government is now a fealty laid hold on from a rational distance after a thick experience of doubt and dream and contemplation-the authentic, if speckled, fealty of modernity. The Waverleyan drama finds its synthesis in unions; the freely chosen (every reader feels it destined) marriage of English Edward and Scottish Rose grounds, well after the fact, the Scottish-English union of 1707, that confirming icon of Universal History's 'desire.'

But if between 1814 and 1832 Scott and the enormous reading public of the Waverley Novels accepted and enacted the fact of union as -313- History's desire, the terms of union were always still up for renegotiation. Walter Scott, sheriff and 'writer'-to the court, to the people under the authority of the British Empire-was yet, as Peter Garside and others have demonstrated, a Scottish patriot in his own way. And it is interesting to note that the two elements of Scotland almost erased in the synthesis of union, which Scott is most famous for (almost) restoring to some degree of separateness within the synthesis, are the Royal Scottish Regalia and the Scottish bank note. These are fitting symbols of the old and new nationhood the Waverley Novels held unerased within that synthesis, a nationhood degenerated somewhat into spectacle and game, yet speaking of the price of unity and the uncertain solubility of elements of that nationhood.

The 'Soldan' and the Lady

As postcolonial theorists study the long and devious meditation of English literature upon English imperialism, the Waverley Novels might rightfully achieve an unexpected new prominence. The enforced union of England and Scotland in 1707 marked the formal beginnings of an English imperialism confirmed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by an unusually large presence of Scotsmen in the military and commercial brigades of conquerors/light-bringers. It seems quite likely that the writer, and especially the readers, of the Waverley Novels understood, however obscurely, that in the dramas of imperial union on and among the islands of Great Britain- dramas highlighting the consolidation of various races Celtic, Pictish, and Scandinavian under the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon-they were together experiencing, even at some level promoting, the imperial elation that accompanies the rationalizations of 'unity.'

The excitement of empire, as the West has known it, is intimately bound up with the awe of origins, the desire for mingled with fear of the primitive and even the prehuman, symbolized for the West primarily by the ancient civilizations of the East. As a philosophical channel for this excitement, Universal History constructs from these materials a coherent «development» by which all that has been (East) is restored or rearranged in what is, and is coming to be (West). As Edward Said formulated it in his influential Orientalism (1978), the «discourse» of Orientalism had its beginnings roughly contemporary with the Waverley Novels. Orientalism used the new disciplines of linguistics and anti-314- quarian anthropology and history to manage and domesticate an East whose imaginative parameters were an almost boundaryless sexuality and a sacred origin: both real and fictional journeys to the East were invariably imaginatively cast as returns. Yet what the Western imagination saw in the Orient was a series of terms that countered the identity the West had constructed for itself. To the rational certainty, linear progressiveness, and shapeliness of the West is opposed the Oriental world of uncertain, fluid dreams infinitely multiplying themselves past resolution, definition, materiality.

These qualities of 'the other,' iconically both Eastern and female, make 'the lady' and 'the Soldan' (or Sultan) close relatives in literary forms of Orientalism. The Western adventurer pilgrim who crosses water to engage with this dyad in its own land meets what Freud would call the oceanic of his own origins, the contradictory elements of his identity whirled asunder. Should he try to master it, or marry it, he may, devolving, become it. Scott's imagination of the Crusades, from the brief background references in Waverley to the open treatment in Ivanhoe and The Talisman, is haunted by the figure of the Templar, the Roman Catholic priest-knight whom he sees as devolved because of long residence in the East, fallen-in terms borrowed from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire-from «Roman» rationality and civilization back to the «barbarian» Orientalism from which he came. Within this Orientalism stand the sensual pasha or the Turk or the 'Soldan,' the 'unbelieving dog' the Templar has himself become, and the harem girl who confirms the Templar's reversion. The ancestor of the hero of the Waverley Novels is the Crusader, who has on the contrary neither married nor mastered the Orient; instead he has been humbled, even humiliated, by it.

It is in this light that we should see the romantic triangle of Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, the priest-knight Brian de Bois Gilbert, and the Oriental Rebecca of York. In this light as well we should view the truly astonishing shape-shifting and momentary Orientalizing and feminizing of the Scottish hero of The Talisman. Both the Saxon Wilfrid of Ivanhoe and the Celtic David, Prince Royal of Scotland, are depicted as having broken with and been disinherited by their fathers for following the Normans, perhaps the first major imperialist race of the West, into the Orient. In each novel an Oriental redefines the Christian purpose of the Crusades. Isaac the Jew's comment that 'the noblest of you will take the staff and sandal in superstitious penance and walk barefoot to visit -315- the graves of dead men' and the Kurdish Saracen Sheerkohf's marveling at 'that insanity which brings you hither to obtain possession of an empty sepulchre' both point to still another aspect of Orientalist discourse. This is the Western tendency to regard the East as exhausted, emptied. The breasts of Jerusalem, 'communis mater-the mother of all Christians' as Ivanhoe's Prior Aymer calls her, remain flat until reengorged by the violent visitations of faith-bearing Crusader sons. In both novels the faithless Templar has reverted not to the faith of his Islamic enemy but to the Eastern brand of folk magic and demonology that the faith system of Islam sought to contain and reorganize even as the faith system of early Christianity sought to contain and reorganize the folk and earth magic of Western pre-Christian culture.

In both novels what Scott calls in Ivanhoe the 'habits of predominating over infidel captives and Eastern bondsmen' have transformed the Crusader governments into Sultans contemptuous (and fearful) of the complexly chartered and peopled third space of government between the ruler and the people that is just beginning to be constructed in Western law. 'I have caught some attachment to the Eastern form of government,' proclaims the baron of the Crusader kingdom in The Talisman, complaining about the feudal privileges Richard Coeur de Leon is forced to allow his barons. The Talisman begins in fact with a debate between East and West on 'liberty.' The Westerner claims the 'Christian freedoms' of modern indulgence in pork and wine that have replaced the rigidity of the old Semitic law, while the Oriental argues that the «slavery» of chivalric love and marriage limits a man in the most precious part of his manhood. Thus are the complex 'freedoms'-of the Western female to give laws to her knight and of Western knights and barons to win charters from their rulers-contrasted with the Oriental's primitive, lascivious, and tyrannical patriarchal rule over his harem and his councillors.

This is a species of self-congratulatory Orientalism fundamental even to the Western liberal construction of gender roles: see for instance George Meredith's liberal Diana of the Crossways, who complains that 'men may have rounded Seraglio Point: they have not yet doubled Cape Turk.' Less liberal thought, of course, is always backsliding out of the evolving synthesis of contracted freedoms and toward the life of 'the Turk,' a backsliding