WALTER SCOTT AT 250: SO MUCH MORE THAN A GREAT HISTORICAL NOVELIST

Ulmus Media/Shutterstock

Daniel Cook, University of Dundee

Wander through Edinburgh and you will find glimpses of Scotland’s most famous novelist, Walter Scott, everywhere: pubs named after characters or places in his books, his walking cane and slippers in The Writers’ Museum, and snippets of his work adorning the walkways of Waverley train station – named after his first and most famous novel. And just outside, towering over Princes Street Gardens, his statue stands beneath an elaborate monument affectionately dubbed the “Gothic Rocket”.

THEMES & TOPICS - WAR IN SCOTT'S NOVELS

Just some reflections on how war and fighting are seen in Sir Walter Scott’s novels.

Scott has a Romantic idea of war: he presents it as heroic, shaped by the code of romances. According to him the battlefield is a place where every man can practise and show his bravery, his loyalty, his desire to sacrifice himself for other human beings or for a cause. War is the field of the hero and the rebel dissatisfied with society and its unjust rules. War is considered an idealized moment, men fight for some right reasons and for their ideals. 

Scott doesn’t describe the atrocities of killing, he distances the violence of a conflict transforming war into a source of imaginative pleasure, he undercovers the horrors of war with the idea of  future glory. Connected to this conception of war there is the cult of the individual, typical of the Romantic age: a rebel, a hero who fights to defend people unjustly accused, who fights to restore the just lists, against society .

WAVERLEY & IVANHOE: TWO ROMANTIC HEROES

WAVERLEY (1814)

PLOT

•       Edward Waverley is educated in an English Jacobite aristocratic family.

•       He is sent to Scotland to join the Hanoverian army of king George II.

•       He visits a Jacobite family friend, whose daughter, Rose, falls in love with him.

•       He , instead, is attracted by Flora Mac Ivor, the sister of the chief of the      rebels, Fergus.

•       Edward betrays his mates and joins the rebels.

•       He is finally forgiven by the king and marries Rose.

•       Fergus is killed and Flora retires into a convent.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Waverley is set during the period of the Jacobite uprisings: it starts in the late summer of 1744 and ends many months after the battle of Culloden (1746) when the Jacobites were defeated and their cause was virtually destroyed.

AN OVERVIEW OF LATE 18th - EARLY 19th CENTURY FICTION

The last three decades of the 18th century saw a great amount of new fiction written and published in England. The novel had risen at the beginning of the  century to respond to the needs of culture and education of the new ascending social class: the bourgeoisie. A new sensibility was now spreading and , though the audience was still made up of upper and middle-class readers, the novelists offered a great variety of new genres rooted in and indebted to the previous production of Richardson, Fielding or Sterne but different and original in many ways

If you have a look at the chart below, you’ll immediately realize that the major representatives of the three main kinds of novel wrote or published more or less in the same years.

WALTER SCOTT - THE FATHER OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL

Download the Power Point Presentation THE HISTORICAL NOVEL with notes about Walter Scott,  Waverley and Ivanhoe, the themes and main features in Scott's work, the historical context of his novels, similarities and differences between Scott and Manzoni.  DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION from the Widget_Box on the right sidebar.

THEMES &TOPICS

WAR IN WALTER SCOTT'S NOVELS

Scott has a Romantic idea of war: he presents it as heroic, shaped by the code of Romances. According to him the battlefield is a place where every man can practise and show his bravery, his loyalty, his desire to sacrifice himself for other human beings or for a cause. War is the field of the Hero and the Rebel dissatisfied with society and its unjust rules. War is considered an idealized moment, men fight for some right reasons and for their ideals. 

Scott doesn’t describe the atrocities of killing, he distances the violence of a conflict transforming war into a source of imaginative pleasure, he undercovers the horrors of war with the idea of  future glory. Connected to this conception of war there is the cult of the individual, typical of the Romantic age: a rebel, a hero who fights to defend people unjustly accused, who fights to restore the just lists, against society .

Scott emphasizes heroic individual actions so a great importance is given to single combats or duels fought according to the rules of chivalry.

 Ivanhoe can be considered the Romantic Hero: he fights on the right side, to save Rebecca , to help Richard I; he doesn’t accept compromise, he is ready to die for his ideals, he is characterized by a disinterested personal virtue. Ivanhoe fights with the Anglo-Saxons against the evil Normans: patriotism is a virtue that implies active resistance to tyranny and oppressio, a heroic self-sacrifice for the public good. But the sacrifice will be rewarded, in fact the heroe is destined to be separated from the stern demands of patriotic duty and to be consigned to the enjoyment of persoonal liberty and prosperity.

In Ivanhoe, the clash between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans reflects the social struggle between the aristocracy and the lower classes. In Waverley  the battlefield is also the place where the protagonist is subjected to an evolution: the war is the moment of the moral growth of Waverley, he will learn loyalty and bravery. The war consists also in a cultural conflict between the jacobite rebels, who want to restore the Stuart Dynasty on the throne, and the Hanoverians. Waverley is the point of contact between the two opposite sides. Also in Ivanhoe the two cultures in conflict, Anglo-Saxon and Norman, find their meeting point in the protagonist .