Abstract
The marriage of Henry Morton, one of the commanders of the Covenanter army defeated at Bothwell Bridge, to Edith Bellenden, heiress of a Royalist family, resembles that of Waverley and Rose Bradwardine in its exemplary reconciliation of antagonistic factions and cultures. On the political and historical level, it is the constitutional principles and religious tolerance won by the Glorious Revolution which allow the exiled Morton to return, and his long-delayed love story to reach consummation. As in Waverley, there are prices to be paid for this resolution: the hero’s principal rival must once again be permanently removed — yet retained in admiring memory — before the wedding can take place. But in Old Mortality his is by no means the only significant death. As the novel’s title suggests, mortality here is omnipresent.
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Notes
Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 128.
Hart paraphrasing Coleridge, Scott’s Novels (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1966), 86.
James Reed, Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality (London: The Athlone Press, 1980), 4.
‘Informing the narrative act of Old Mortality ... was a distrust of ... reenactment and memory.’ Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 164–5.
Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 38. See also H. J. C. Grierson, Sir Walter Scott, Bart.: A New Life (London: Constable, 1938), 159.
See Bruce Beiderwell, Power and Punishment in Scott’s Novels (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 47.
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 35.
Jana Davis, ‘Scott’s The Pirate’, Explicator 45 (Spring 1987): 22.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 157.
This reading, as well, needs to be argued in more detail, as it runs counter to frequently expressed views to the effect that Munro shares with Heyward, and with Cooper and his readership, an unshakable prejudice. I would argue that when Munro uses words like ‘misfortune’ and ‘degraded’ in this passage, he does so in a bitter but dignified recognition of his interlocutor’s (common) attitude, and that when he speaks of the injustices of slavery he is not merely expressing the conventional pieties of an embarrassed racism. This case is developed below, but I might anticipate by asking, why would racism create a heroine as admirable as Cora Munro? ‘Uncas and Cora represent the noblest ideals of their respective cultures.’ Robert E. Long, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Continuum, 1990), 58.
Unless one adds a third adversary, modern critical opinion, which doggedly asserts, for example, that ‘no woman in the Leatherstocking Tales belongs to herself’. Nina Baym, ‘The Women in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales’, American Quarterly 23 (1971), 703. Baym makes a partial exception of Judith Hutter of The Deerslayer, after disqualifying the admirable Mabel Dunham of The Pathfinder on the grounds that her strengths are essentially male, and that, besides, she is lower-class. But Cora resembles both these women, and has a kinship as well with other self-assertive Cooper heroines, such as Anneke Mordaunt of Satanstoe or Katherine Plowden of The Pilot.
A transformation noticed by several critics. See, for example, James Franklin Beard, ‘Historical Introduction’ to The Last of the Mohicans (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), xxxiv. Or, Long, 60.
Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge, 1961), 111. It should be noted that Edwin Fussell takes a view of this passage quite the opposite of Davie’s. Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 42–3.
And one must agree with T. A. Birrell that Hawk-eye is not a ‘mouthpiece for the novelist’. From Cooper to Philip Roth, ed. J. Bakker, and D. R. M. Wilkinson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), 7.
The Eccentric Design (London: Chattow and Windus, 1959), 77. Compare, also, Richard Chase: ‘When the American novel attempts to resolve contradictions, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways.’ The American Novel and Its Tradition (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1957), 1.
René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
For a discussion of tragedy in this context, see in particular Chapter 3 of Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 40–2.
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© 1997 Ian Dennis
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Dennis, I. (1997). The Waverley Solution. In: Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25557-3_4
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