dramatized not only by Scott in the harem-yearning, skirt-wearing priest-warriors of the Temple, but also, interestingly, by the Scott of Redgauntlet and later the Thackeray of Henry -316- Esmond. Both novels feature Stuart «Pretenders» whose political «cause» fails because they link their rights as rulers to the right to keep a mistress. Writing in the Regency England of George IV, Scott was perfectly aware of the propensity of the Hanoverian kings to keep even more mistresses than the Stuarts: it was simply that as the psychic «sports» and «throwbacks» of Universal History the Catholic Stuart kings had to be not only feminized but Orientalized, like the Templars.
In this Orientalizing light the 'dark lady' of Scott's romance plots stands forth not only as the symbolic psychic double of the hero's forbidden desire but specifically as the racial 'other,' the locus of the return forbidden and prized by Universal History (the Oriental) and Universal Psychology (the mother). We can see this pattern dimly in Waverley's Flora MacIvor, educated in Paris and transported to the Highlands. Her recovery of Celtic tradition and Gaelic language, and her devotion to Stuart and Highland liberties are «purer» than they can be for the brother who seeks entry into the political and commercial synthesis of Great Britain, and her toleration of the English youth Waverley's attraction to her is entirely maternal. We can see this atavism in the witches and «gypsies» of the Scottish novels that followed, all imagined by their «superstitious» countrymen to be chattels of the 'black man' of Semitic and Persian myth systems. We can also see it most clearly in
When
If it is part of Universal History to celebrate contemporary Western freedom by locating slavery (of women and workers) in the Oriental past, then we expect to find the black man standing with the Oriental woman at the edge of the synthesis. Brian De Bois Gilbert, himself 'burned to almost Negro blackness' by the Palestinian sun, appears attended by two African slaves richly dressed to mark their master's importance and carrying Turkish daggers and Saracen javelins. Orientalized Templar and African slaves speak «Arabian» together, as Reginald Front de Boeuf does with the 'sable functionaries' who do his torturing for him. Scott's descriptions emphasize the naked black skin of the slaves, and his footnote disingenuously explains that he uses them both for dramatic visual contrast to the white protagonists and to point up the Orientalization of the Templars: 'What can be more natural' than that these corrupted Westerners copy the corrupt Saracens who enslaved the Africans.
For all his tolerant humanism, then, Scott instinctively plotted according to the duplicitous racial dynamic laid down by Universal History. The Westerner, Front de Boeuf, had 'perhaps learnt his lesson of cruelty' in the East, while the chivalrous and witty Easterner who meets the Crusader in the opening pages of The Talisman had 'caught a part of [the Crusaders' Western] manners.' Black male and female slavery is a primitive Eastern habit caught by the worst in the West, chivalry a Western achievement imitated by the best in the East.
This exchange is strangely figured in the extraordinary bodily transformations of Kenneth, the protagonist of The Talisman, who undergoes both black male slavery and femininity before he reclaims his real Scottish persona. Forbidden by his venal and politically astute father to fight in the East under the banner of the Norman English king, the heir to the Scottish throne masks his royalty (or puts it to sleep) in the frayed silk and unwieldy steel of a poor knight whose half-defaced coat of arms 'seems to read,' ambiguously enough, 'I sleep-wake me not.' He falls in love, between battles, with a Plantagenet princess whom Richard of England destines as Saladin's bride: if the jealousy and prudence of his Western allies will not let him win the Orient in battle, the monarch will, if necessary, marry it. -318-
Angry at the presumptuous knight, Richard transfers him as feudal dependent to the Saracen whose talisman cured him: the Saracen paints the knight black and sends him back to Richard as a «Nubian» body slave to guard him from Western-hired Moslem assassins. Richard guesses the deception when he makes to suck the assassin's poison from the wounded (and dyed) skin of his protector, but sends him, thus degraded, to deliver the Soldan's proposal of marriage to Edith, hoping his cousin will be «disgusted» by the black skin of the man standing in for the «Paynim» who wants her for his harem. The scene in which Edith rages at the mute black Sir Kenneth, both for being the enslaved and enslaving Oriental in his black skin and for being in features the white Western man she loves and cannot have, is perhaps the novel's most powerful one. It is a schizoid moment of Orientalist desire and disgust that the subsequent untangling of the plot and reordering of races-the killing of white evildoers, marriage of white protagonists, and brotherhood of Western chivalric monarch with Westernized Eastern monarch- cannot quite reprogram into the synthesis.
And the novel is not yet finished with strange moments of desire/disgust. His body dissolved across racial lines, Sir Kenneth is immediately afterward subjected, symbolically, to another transformation across gender lines in a long ballad sung at Richard's command by his minstrel Blondel, whose hero Sir Kenneth is explicitly called by his king to emulate. In this long ballad a lady requires her knight to fight a tournament dressed only in her nightgown. He does so, and she rewards him by wearing the bloody rags to dinner that evening.
These fantastic visions of racial and gender blurring constitute an excess familiar to readers of Gothic novels and of the Romantic and often Orientalist tales of Byron and Southey. The excess is referrable, in part, to new visions of the role, and necessity, of imagination in Universal Psychology. But it also points to a genuine new consciousness of race and gender in the movement of history, as well as to the limitations of that consciousness.
For all its engagement with utilitarian politics and the new realism of character, with Universal History and the complex psychology of the modern mind within the patterns of history, the historical novel is fundamentally a descendant of the Gothic novel. The reading public being -319- created through the novel in the late eighteenth century first experienced «history» there as prophecy-a pleasurable consciousness of doom associated with the painful reign and inevitable fall of the proud and the powerful, and with the continuing poignant revelation of the inadequacy of reason. For English Gothic fiction, history was a place where one could explore and experience the disappearing engines of unbridled wrath, pride, and lust. The barons and clerics of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve and M. G. Lewis, exercised a prepolitical, ahistorical brand of power drawn in rationalist terms as a kind of madness. The immense dilation of power and ambition, the preternatural humanity, of the great Gothic villains, could be safely walled off in the past, which because it was the prerational time could contain an accompanying preternatural apparatus of omens, tales, and powers prophesying, actually accomplishing, the fall of the preternatural human and the return of the rest of the world to Christian salvation history.
The Gothic historic could present the fall of magnified humanity, trace its «backslidings» through paganized Christian and Islamic forms of belief further back to prehistoric magic and superstition, because it thought it knew, through Universal History, which direction was forward. In the evolving syntheses of Universal History those cultures of the past driven by preternatural humans under supernatural compulsions, prerational cultures of earth and air magic and their descendants, tragic and comic myth, are left behind, or more often aestheticized, and returned to the synthesis as entertainments.
Scott takes a prominent role in this effort, as collector-purveyor of the supernatural tales first of Scotland and then of the wider West and finally the Orientalized East, through his poetry, prose fiction, and nonfiction essays, and through the legendary-artifact-stocked museum-dwelling of Abbotsford itself. He is convinced of this developmental view of magic, even lends it, anachronistically, to some of his favorite heroes. The Talisman's Saladin, for instance, chants a set of verses about Ahriman, the ancient Persian Manichean Lord of Darkness, claims descent from him, and takes the moderate modern view that it is well neither to erase his culture's memory of origin in 'Elementary Spirits' nor to organize the heterogeneity of magic too rigidly into the categories of modern
