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Nationalism and the scottish subject: The uneasy marriage of London and Edinburgh in sir walter scott's the heart of midlothian
History of European Ideas, Vol. 16, No. 1-3, pp. 41--47, 1993
0191--6599/93 $6.00+0.00 © 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd
Printed in Great Britain
NATIONALISM AND THE SCOTTISH SUBJECT: THE UNEASY MARRIAGE OF L O N D O N AND EDINBURGH IN SIR WALTER SCOTT'S THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN MIRIAM L.
WALLACE*
Sir Walter Scott's 1818 novel, The Heart of Midlothian, presents the presumably English reader with a story of Scottish moral bravery and triumphant domesticity.. The novel presents the political Act of Union between England and Scotland of 1707 as a metaphor for mediating relationships, between London and Edinburgh, as well as between characters. These relationships in turn, define the novel's attitude towards the Act of Union itself. The central character of Jeanie Deans travels between her native Edinburgh and foreign London, returning to the highlands in the course of the novel. Her marriage with Reuben Butler, a moderate Scottish presbyterian, and the grandson of an English-Scottish marriage figures as a successful melding of English and Scottish. However, the novel's focus on women and highlanders as criminally and sexually suspect unsettles this neat resolution. The criminal union of George Robertson/Staunton and Effie Deans, also a British-Scottish liaison, and the recurring image of highlanders as ruffians in skirts undermine the notion of compromise and union with the 'other'. Nationalism assumes the ideal inviolability of the body-national. Much of nationalistic discourse focuses on what is specific to the nation under discussion and of its people: carriage of the body, facial characteristics, dress or costume and presumed mental characteristics. Thus, the sketch as a literary form, and the 'physionomie' as a popular written or visual art form, and such sciences as phrenology occur as nations expand into colonisation and as cities grow in importance. Cities bring large groups of anonymous people together. 'Foreigners' are always a presence in cities. The need to identify and claim a recognisable and identifiable national characteristic for the 'native' inhabitants of the city arises from the perceived threat of the flow of 'outsiders' which potentially renders recognition of those who belong and those who don't impossible. Scott's novel unsettles the notion of national character rather than merely explicating and solidifying Scottish identity. If the Porteous mob is nationally characteristic, so is Jeanie, but so also are Effie and Madge and Duncan Knockdunder. And if Reuben Butler, descended from an English-Scottish marriage, represents the ideal moderate union in England and Scotland, Robertson/Staunton is also an example of another such union. The 'savage', Whistler, Effie and Staunton's illegitimate son is the product of an *Kresge College/Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, U.S.A. 41
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Miriam L. Wallace
English-Scottish union. By focusing largely on the final utopian section of Scott's novel, and through references to historical information on the popularisation of highland dress, I hope to suggest a reading of the bodies figured in Scott's novel as historically, geographically and culturally located. The novel is built upon multiple crimes. It opens as a story told by a freed debtor. The 'heart' or core of the stories is, as the title suggests, the prison at the heart of Edinburgh through which all the major threads of the story run. The story itself conflates several crimes: Wilson and Robertson's smuggling; the English taxing of the Scots which mediates and excuses Wilson and Robertson in Scottish eyes; Porteous' firing on the crowd; the Porteous' mob's hanging of Porteous; and finally the child-murder of which Effie is accused. Criminality is aligned with the female body early on. Female gender and criminality are oddly conflated in George Robertson/Staunton's disguising himself not only as a woman, but as the other mother of his illegitimate child, and in his attempt to free Effie, (mother of his second illegitimate son) as part of the same event which leads to Porteous' hanging. In this one event, the three central crimes of the storymMadge and Effie's suspected infanticide and illicit sexuality, Robertson's crimes against property, and his hand in the murder of Porteous against the English crown's clemency are all tied together through the figures of an English gentleman parading as a Scottish ruffian, and of a man dressed as a woman. Robertson/Staunton is nationally split yet again, as he is also 'the creole', due to his mother's West Indian origin (Scott, p. 342). He is of mixed blood even in his English identity. Some of the anxiety of colonial misingenation surfaces here. Madge Wildfire serves as a criminal by proxy as Robertson/Staunton hangs Porteous wearing her clothes and identity. But she is also encoded as criminal in her own right as an illicitly sexual woman and a vain one. William Acton, proponent of the Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 includes vanity in his analysis of the sources of women's tendency to fall into prostitution. As Acton puts it, the source of supply of brothels is 'derived from the vice of women' consisting of: Natural desire. Natural sinfulness. The preferment of indolent ease to labour. Vicious inclinations strengthened and ingrained by early neglect, or evil training, bad associates, and an indecent mode of life. Necessity, !mbued by the inability to obtain a living by honest means consequent on a fall from virtue. Extreme poverty. To this black list may be added love of drink, love of dress, love of amusement. (Acton, p. 118). Despite the fact that this description was meant to apply to 'real' historical bodies, and occurs somewhat later in the century than Scott's novel, the roots of Acton's symptomatology may be seen in the figure of Madge Murdockson. The daughter of a dissolute mother, Madge fulfills every item of Acton's prescription, but her vanity is especially castigated by the narrator: Madge Wildfire, who, among other indications of insanity, had a most overweening opinion of those charms, to which, in fact, she had owed her misery, and whose mind like a raft upon a lake, was agitated and driven about at random by each fresh
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impulse, no sooner beheld Jeanie begin to arrange her hair, place her bonnet in order, rub the dust from her shoes and clothes, adjust her neck-handkerchief and mittens, and so forth, than with imitative zeal she began to bedizen and trick herself out with shreds and remnants of beggarly finery, which she took out of a little bundle, and which, when disposed around her person, made her appearance ten times more fantastic and apish than it had been before. (Scott, pp. 305-6). Madge's vanity is contrasted here with Jeanie's modest neatness. As the exterior body is meant to suggest the interior soul, Madge, we are led to believe, is weak in virtue, weak in self-control, and correspondingly weak in mind. One of the voices which did historically precede the novel, and from whom some of Scott's language of control and self-restraint may be drawn as cultural currency was T.R. Malthus' Essay on Population (1798). In this essay, he suggests a kind of moral economy; the poor are in danger of over-populating England, and the answer is moral restraint of sexuality and other appetites for pleasure, power, goods, and everything else beyond their station (Angus McLaren, pp. 43-60). Restraint, containment, and control are the major forces of this novel, if not of the novel form itself. However, if Scott's novel contains its contradictions and metes out justice, it also allows the cost and doubts surrounding this containment to surface in the uncontainable figures of the highlanders, especially Duncan Knock. Even as the novel's final utopian section works to contain, to weave together, to moderate and to punish, echoes of anxieties from earlier in the novel resurface. If the female body is finally purged of its dangerous and excessive power by the death of Meg and Madge, the childlessness of Effie and her rebirth into the propriety of Femie, Jeanie's bodily daughter, then the body of the highlander takes on these disturbing attributes. While Heart of Midlothian is set in the historical period preceding the Jacobite rising of 1745 which led to the Act of Proscription (see appendix) of 1746, it is written well after the repeal of that Act (1782). Thus, the weight of a history of restraint and oppression is built into any discussion of highlanders in traditional garb. The historical distrust of the lowlanders for the highlanders is only exceeded by the English and Scottish distrust and dislike for each other, until some time after George IV's visit of 1822. After his visit, Scottish highland dress became not only the national sign of Scottishness even in the lowlands, but a fashionable form of dress in the English court as well. Despite its later popularity, wearing of the plaid (feileadh bhreacain), or the kilt (feileadh beag) is associated with the suspicion of hidden criminality and of suspect sexuality. Dunbar quotes Captain Burt in his Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland of 1754: Various reasons are given both for and against the Highland dress. It is urged against it, that it distinguishes the natives as a body of people distinct and separate from the rest of the subjects of Great Britain, and thereby is one cause of their narrow adherence among themselves, to the exclusion of all the rest of the kingdom; but the part of the habit chiefly objected to is the plaid (or mantle), which they say, is calculated for the encouragement of an idle life, in lying about upon the heath, in the day-time, instead of following some lawful employment; that it serves to cover them in the night when they lie in wait among the mountains, to commit their robberies and depredations; and is composed of such colours as altogether, in the
44
Miriam L. Wallace mass, so nearly resemble the heath on which they lie, that it is hardly to be distinguished from it until one is so near them as to be within their power, if they have an evil intention; that it renders them ready, at a moment's warning, to join in any rebellion, as they carry continually their tents about them... (Dunbar, p. 4).
It is worth noting the similarity of this analysis of highlanders' natural inclinations with Acton's of women's natural tendency towards wickedness. In both cases the 'other' being analysed is attributed 'natural' tendencies toward laziness, vanity, poverty and criminality. The plaid is aligned here not only with rebellion against British rule, but with a sense of national identity, and also with highway robbery. Nor is this shadow of dubious criminality associated with highland dress lacking in Scott's novel. Duncan Knockdunder is referred to as the namesake of the notorious Donacha Dhu na Dunaigh, or Black Duncan, thus linking the two at least by name (Scott, p. 502). Through the voice of Dolly Dutton, English dairymaid, we first see the Duke's highland men as 'these wild men with their naked k n e e s . . . ' (1bid., p. 404). Dolly's linking of 'wild' and 'naked knees' joins the legendary bellicosity of the Scotsmen with a suspect sexuality. That Duncan Knock is firmly connected with 'Black Duncan', and that he is also involved in illicit sexuality is indicated in the following parenthetical passage: ' . . . unfortunately [the church records] were destroyed in the year 1746, by one Donacha Dhu iaa Dunaigh, at the instance, it was said, or at least by the connivance, of the gracious Duncan of Knock, who had a desire to obliterate the recorded foibles of a certain Kate Finlayson' (/b/d., p. 438). Another illegitimate birth is here erased from the text of the novel and the records of the church, and repressed to the end of a chapter and of the sentence. The highland body as questionable, sexually perverse, and excessive, and the female body as sexually excessive are here linked. Duncan is described as another body incorporating the tentative ScottishEnglish union: The present representative of that ancient family was a stout short man of about fifty, whose pleasure it was to unite in his own person the dress of the Highlands and lowlands, wearing on his head a black tie-wig, surmounted by a fierce cocked-hat, deeply guarded with gold lace, while the rest of his dress consisted of the plaid and philabeg. Duncan superintended a district which was partly Highland, partly Lowland, and therefore might be supposed to combine their national habits, in order to show his impartiality to Trojan or Tyrian. The incongruity, however, had a whimsical and ludicrous effect, as it made his head and body look as if belonging to different individuals; or as some one said who had seen the executions of the insurgent prisoners in 1715, it seemed as if some Jacobite enchanter, having recalled the sufferers to life, had clapped in his haste, an Englishman's head on a Highlander's body. (/bid., p. 427). This description of Duncan highlights the eccentricity and problematics of such an embodiment of union. Rather than the Scottish bonnet and cockade, Duncan wears the lace-trimmed cocked hat of the lowland lairds, in imitation of the English. Instead of offering a strong model of the benefits of union, Duncan's attempt to incorporate union in his own body is presented as ludicrous, like Madge's borrowed finery which degrades rather than increases social status. The
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passage also highlights the split within even the national body of the Scots, as lowlanders of Norman descent, or as highlanders of Gaelic descent. Accounts of highland dress include many examples of scandalised English, and and anxiety about the loose sexuality and temptation to women implied by such a costume. Dunbar reproduces French prints showing Scottish soldiers wearing the kilt and scandalising or titillating French serving women and ladies. In the background, a row of well-trained soldiers lift the backs of their kilts in a perfect row, while one of their number looks on their exercises, hip cocked and one buttock exposed by a wayward breeze. In the foreground another Scotsman stands nonchalantly looking into the breeze while a peasant woman with a basket kneels at his feet, her hand to her face and her basket forgotten as his kilt blows up in her direction (p. 13). These prints are dated roughly three years previous to the publication of Scott's novel, and show the sexual display and exhibitionism associated with the loose kilt. Ian Grimble quotes an Englishman in 1630 who recounts that the kilts he saw only reached mid-thigh, and the stockings reached up m~d-calf such that '... in a windy day, going up a hill, or stooping, the indecency of it is plainly discovered' (p. 7). Grimble also points out that the French n a m e for the sporan is 'cache-sexe' (p. 7). After the repeal, various attitudes were expressed: Sir Phillip Jennings Clarke said he would oppose the Bill [of Repeal] ... if it did not confine the Highland Dress to the North of the Tweed; for he recollected an innkeeper in Hampshire, coming with a complaint before him as a Justice of the Peace, that four Highland Officer's were quartered on him, who being brawny, handsome fellows, he began to be jealous of his wife, who was not very old, and fearful for the virtue of his daughters; the Highlanders being in their own country dress, the females could not keep their eyes offthem (Ibid., p. 8, accompanying print taken from the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 18 June 1782). Despite the satirical nature of the print of Highlanders in short kilts being served wine by the innkeeper's wife and daughters which accompanied this passage, the link between illicit and unrestrained sexuality in both women and highlanders is suggestive of a larger cultural association. Prints and stories which suggest pathological sexuality associated with highland dress and by extension with highlanders themselves are not uncommon. Another print, ostensibly recording the way in which women's dress imitated men's military garb, also shows 'the daft captain' ridiculing this sexual cross-dressing by himself affecting a veil (/bid., p. 14). However, mocking or not, the adaptation of an overdetermined highly coded article of female dress unsettles strict gender-codification in a way female remodelling of feminine dress in imitation of masculine costume does not. There is something of this sense of transgression in the way the English perceive the Scottish kilt and plaid. As Dolly Dutton says: ' . . . Pray may I be so bold as to ask, if it is the fashion for you North-country gentlemen to go to church in your petticoats, Captain Knockunder (sic)?' (Scott, p. 431). Another instance of crossdressing occurs in obituary of 'Red Jean' from the Inverness Journal of 17 July 1812: Died, lately in the Parish of Knockando, County of Elgin, an eccentric character
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Miriam L. Wallace known as Red Jean or Jean Roy. She disliked her own sex, and always pretended to be a man, wearing a kilt, jacket, and blue bonnet. She generally worked as a day labourer (1bid., p. 102).
All this suggests an ambivalence towards the traditional highland garb on the part of lowlanders and British. It also implies a certain flexibility of gender roles. The costume of the highlanders is associated with the overdetermined masculine practices of highway robbery, war and political rebellion, but the costume itself is also coded as feminine by its loose skirts. Thus, the highlander in his kilt is doubly suspect. The emphasis on mutilated human bodies (Porteous' hanging with which the novel opens, the female disguises of the mob, mother's whose babies are missing, the threatened hanging of Effie, and the accomplished hanging of Meg Murdockson) highlights an ambivalent anxiety about metaphorical and institutionalised bodies: the nation, the church, the family, the monarchy. The body serves as a shifting metonymic ground for various displacements, and thus is itself no final answer, but merely another (perhaps privileged) link in the chain of contextualised constructions. This then, is finally what Scott's novel achieves. The text itself uncovers and recovers profound anxieties and ambivalences about the very 'others' the novel urges the reader to accept. Despite the novel's ostensible attempt to recontain and deeroticise the Scottish 'other' through familiarisation, by conflating that 'other' with criminals, loose women, 'savages', and cross-dressing, The Heart of Midlothian mirrors and reifies anxieties of Scottish otherness. Yet, this is another mode of insisting upon the English need for the Scots, for without an identifiable and contained 'other', the 'otherness' of one's own subjectivity and one's own nationhood might have to be recognised. Scott's novel, refuses to allow the reader a final, fixed and unproblematic subject position from which to interpret the text and offers rich and troubling suggestions about the purposes and desire for a nationalist identity. Miriam L. Wallace
University of California, Santa Cruz
APPENDIX Act of Proscription, 1746: ... That from and after the First Day of August, One thousand seven hundred and forty seven, no Man or Boy, within that Part of Great Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty's Forces, shall, on any Pretence whatsoever, wear or put on the Clothes commonly called Highland Clothes (that is to say) the Plaid, Philebeg, or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder Belts, or any Part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland Garb; and that no Tartan, or party-coloured Plaid or Stuffshall be used for Great Coats, or for Upper Coats; and if any such Person shall presume after the said First Day of August, to wear or put on the aforesaid
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Garments, or any part of them, every such Person so offending, being convicted thereof by the Oath of One or more credible Witness or Witnesses before any Court of Justiciary, or any One or more Justices of the Peace for the Shire of Stewartry, or Judge Ordinary of the Place where such Offence shall be committed, shall suffer Imprisonment, without Bail, during the Space of Six Months, and no longer; and being convicted for a second Offence before a Court of Justiciary, or at the Circuits, shall be liable to be transported to any of His Majesty's Plantations beyond the Seas, there to remain for the Space of Seven Years (quoted in Dunbar, p. 3).
BIBLIOGRAPHY William Acton, Prostitution (London, 1857). John Telfer Dunbar, History of Highland Dress (Philadelphia: Dufour, 1964). Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: a study of Victorian prostitutes in York (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979). Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986). Ian Grimble, Scottish Clans and Tartans (Hamlyn Publishing Group: New York, 1973). Hellerstein, et al. (ed.), Victorian Women (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1981). Vicki Kirby, 'Corporeographies'. Inscriptions 5 (Santa Cruz: U of California Santa Cruz, 1989). Ian Levitt, Povertyand Welfare in Scotland: 1890-1948 (Edinburgh; Edinburgh UP, 1988). Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Holmes and Meier, 1978). William Logan, The Great Social Evil: Its Causes, Extent, Results, and Remedies (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1871). C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford UP, 1962). Richard Allen Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877-1930 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1982). Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Sir Walter Scott (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1985).
Thank you also to the following colleagues for suggestions and careful reading: Murray Baumgarten, Anna Buchman, John O. Jordan, Lisa Seace, Richard Terdiman, and the members of the seminar on '19th Century London and Paris', Winter Quarter 1990, University of California at Santa Cruz.
0191--6599/93 $6.00+0.00 © 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd
Printed in Great Britain
NATIONALISM AND THE SCOTTISH SUBJECT: THE UNEASY MARRIAGE OF L O N D O N AND EDINBURGH IN SIR WALTER SCOTT'S THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN MIRIAM L.
WALLACE*
Sir Walter Scott's 1818 novel, The Heart of Midlothian, presents the presumably English reader with a story of Scottish moral bravery and triumphant domesticity.. The novel presents the political Act of Union between England and Scotland of 1707 as a metaphor for mediating relationships, between London and Edinburgh, as well as between characters. These relationships in turn, define the novel's attitude towards the Act of Union itself. The central character of Jeanie Deans travels between her native Edinburgh and foreign London, returning to the highlands in the course of the novel. Her marriage with Reuben Butler, a moderate Scottish presbyterian, and the grandson of an English-Scottish marriage figures as a successful melding of English and Scottish. However, the novel's focus on women and highlanders as criminally and sexually suspect unsettles this neat resolution. The criminal union of George Robertson/Staunton and Effie Deans, also a British-Scottish liaison, and the recurring image of highlanders as ruffians in skirts undermine the notion of compromise and union with the 'other'. Nationalism assumes the ideal inviolability of the body-national. Much of nationalistic discourse focuses on what is specific to the nation under discussion and of its people: carriage of the body, facial characteristics, dress or costume and presumed mental characteristics. Thus, the sketch as a literary form, and the 'physionomie' as a popular written or visual art form, and such sciences as phrenology occur as nations expand into colonisation and as cities grow in importance. Cities bring large groups of anonymous people together. 'Foreigners' are always a presence in cities. The need to identify and claim a recognisable and identifiable national characteristic for the 'native' inhabitants of the city arises from the perceived threat of the flow of 'outsiders' which potentially renders recognition of those who belong and those who don't impossible. Scott's novel unsettles the notion of national character rather than merely explicating and solidifying Scottish identity. If the Porteous mob is nationally characteristic, so is Jeanie, but so also are Effie and Madge and Duncan Knockdunder. And if Reuben Butler, descended from an English-Scottish marriage, represents the ideal moderate union in England and Scotland, Robertson/Staunton is also an example of another such union. The 'savage', Whistler, Effie and Staunton's illegitimate son is the product of an *Kresge College/Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, U.S.A. 41
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Miriam L. Wallace
English-Scottish union. By focusing largely on the final utopian section of Scott's novel, and through references to historical information on the popularisation of highland dress, I hope to suggest a reading of the bodies figured in Scott's novel as historically, geographically and culturally located. The novel is built upon multiple crimes. It opens as a story told by a freed debtor. The 'heart' or core of the stories is, as the title suggests, the prison at the heart of Edinburgh through which all the major threads of the story run. The story itself conflates several crimes: Wilson and Robertson's smuggling; the English taxing of the Scots which mediates and excuses Wilson and Robertson in Scottish eyes; Porteous' firing on the crowd; the Porteous' mob's hanging of Porteous; and finally the child-murder of which Effie is accused. Criminality is aligned with the female body early on. Female gender and criminality are oddly conflated in George Robertson/Staunton's disguising himself not only as a woman, but as the other mother of his illegitimate child, and in his attempt to free Effie, (mother of his second illegitimate son) as part of the same event which leads to Porteous' hanging. In this one event, the three central crimes of the storymMadge and Effie's suspected infanticide and illicit sexuality, Robertson's crimes against property, and his hand in the murder of Porteous against the English crown's clemency are all tied together through the figures of an English gentleman parading as a Scottish ruffian, and of a man dressed as a woman. Robertson/Staunton is nationally split yet again, as he is also 'the creole', due to his mother's West Indian origin (Scott, p. 342). He is of mixed blood even in his English identity. Some of the anxiety of colonial misingenation surfaces here. Madge Wildfire serves as a criminal by proxy as Robertson/Staunton hangs Porteous wearing her clothes and identity. But she is also encoded as criminal in her own right as an illicitly sexual woman and a vain one. William Acton, proponent of the Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 includes vanity in his analysis of the sources of women's tendency to fall into prostitution. As Acton puts it, the source of supply of brothels is 'derived from the vice of women' consisting of: Natural desire. Natural sinfulness. The preferment of indolent ease to labour. Vicious inclinations strengthened and ingrained by early neglect, or evil training, bad associates, and an indecent mode of life. Necessity, !mbued by the inability to obtain a living by honest means consequent on a fall from virtue. Extreme poverty. To this black list may be added love of drink, love of dress, love of amusement. (Acton, p. 118). Despite the fact that this description was meant to apply to 'real' historical bodies, and occurs somewhat later in the century than Scott's novel, the roots of Acton's symptomatology may be seen in the figure of Madge Murdockson. The daughter of a dissolute mother, Madge fulfills every item of Acton's prescription, but her vanity is especially castigated by the narrator: Madge Wildfire, who, among other indications of insanity, had a most overweening opinion of those charms, to which, in fact, she had owed her misery, and whose mind like a raft upon a lake, was agitated and driven about at random by each fresh
Nationalism and the Scottish Subject
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impulse, no sooner beheld Jeanie begin to arrange her hair, place her bonnet in order, rub the dust from her shoes and clothes, adjust her neck-handkerchief and mittens, and so forth, than with imitative zeal she began to bedizen and trick herself out with shreds and remnants of beggarly finery, which she took out of a little bundle, and which, when disposed around her person, made her appearance ten times more fantastic and apish than it had been before. (Scott, pp. 305-6). Madge's vanity is contrasted here with Jeanie's modest neatness. As the exterior body is meant to suggest the interior soul, Madge, we are led to believe, is weak in virtue, weak in self-control, and correspondingly weak in mind. One of the voices which did historically precede the novel, and from whom some of Scott's language of control and self-restraint may be drawn as cultural currency was T.R. Malthus' Essay on Population (1798). In this essay, he suggests a kind of moral economy; the poor are in danger of over-populating England, and the answer is moral restraint of sexuality and other appetites for pleasure, power, goods, and everything else beyond their station (Angus McLaren, pp. 43-60). Restraint, containment, and control are the major forces of this novel, if not of the novel form itself. However, if Scott's novel contains its contradictions and metes out justice, it also allows the cost and doubts surrounding this containment to surface in the uncontainable figures of the highlanders, especially Duncan Knock. Even as the novel's final utopian section works to contain, to weave together, to moderate and to punish, echoes of anxieties from earlier in the novel resurface. If the female body is finally purged of its dangerous and excessive power by the death of Meg and Madge, the childlessness of Effie and her rebirth into the propriety of Femie, Jeanie's bodily daughter, then the body of the highlander takes on these disturbing attributes. While Heart of Midlothian is set in the historical period preceding the Jacobite rising of 1745 which led to the Act of Proscription (see appendix) of 1746, it is written well after the repeal of that Act (1782). Thus, the weight of a history of restraint and oppression is built into any discussion of highlanders in traditional garb. The historical distrust of the lowlanders for the highlanders is only exceeded by the English and Scottish distrust and dislike for each other, until some time after George IV's visit of 1822. After his visit, Scottish highland dress became not only the national sign of Scottishness even in the lowlands, but a fashionable form of dress in the English court as well. Despite its later popularity, wearing of the plaid (feileadh bhreacain), or the kilt (feileadh beag) is associated with the suspicion of hidden criminality and of suspect sexuality. Dunbar quotes Captain Burt in his Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland of 1754: Various reasons are given both for and against the Highland dress. It is urged against it, that it distinguishes the natives as a body of people distinct and separate from the rest of the subjects of Great Britain, and thereby is one cause of their narrow adherence among themselves, to the exclusion of all the rest of the kingdom; but the part of the habit chiefly objected to is the plaid (or mantle), which they say, is calculated for the encouragement of an idle life, in lying about upon the heath, in the day-time, instead of following some lawful employment; that it serves to cover them in the night when they lie in wait among the mountains, to commit their robberies and depredations; and is composed of such colours as altogether, in the
44
Miriam L. Wallace mass, so nearly resemble the heath on which they lie, that it is hardly to be distinguished from it until one is so near them as to be within their power, if they have an evil intention; that it renders them ready, at a moment's warning, to join in any rebellion, as they carry continually their tents about them... (Dunbar, p. 4).
It is worth noting the similarity of this analysis of highlanders' natural inclinations with Acton's of women's natural tendency towards wickedness. In both cases the 'other' being analysed is attributed 'natural' tendencies toward laziness, vanity, poverty and criminality. The plaid is aligned here not only with rebellion against British rule, but with a sense of national identity, and also with highway robbery. Nor is this shadow of dubious criminality associated with highland dress lacking in Scott's novel. Duncan Knockdunder is referred to as the namesake of the notorious Donacha Dhu na Dunaigh, or Black Duncan, thus linking the two at least by name (Scott, p. 502). Through the voice of Dolly Dutton, English dairymaid, we first see the Duke's highland men as 'these wild men with their naked k n e e s . . . ' (1bid., p. 404). Dolly's linking of 'wild' and 'naked knees' joins the legendary bellicosity of the Scotsmen with a suspect sexuality. That Duncan Knock is firmly connected with 'Black Duncan', and that he is also involved in illicit sexuality is indicated in the following parenthetical passage: ' . . . unfortunately [the church records] were destroyed in the year 1746, by one Donacha Dhu iaa Dunaigh, at the instance, it was said, or at least by the connivance, of the gracious Duncan of Knock, who had a desire to obliterate the recorded foibles of a certain Kate Finlayson' (/b/d., p. 438). Another illegitimate birth is here erased from the text of the novel and the records of the church, and repressed to the end of a chapter and of the sentence. The highland body as questionable, sexually perverse, and excessive, and the female body as sexually excessive are here linked. Duncan is described as another body incorporating the tentative ScottishEnglish union: The present representative of that ancient family was a stout short man of about fifty, whose pleasure it was to unite in his own person the dress of the Highlands and lowlands, wearing on his head a black tie-wig, surmounted by a fierce cocked-hat, deeply guarded with gold lace, while the rest of his dress consisted of the plaid and philabeg. Duncan superintended a district which was partly Highland, partly Lowland, and therefore might be supposed to combine their national habits, in order to show his impartiality to Trojan or Tyrian. The incongruity, however, had a whimsical and ludicrous effect, as it made his head and body look as if belonging to different individuals; or as some one said who had seen the executions of the insurgent prisoners in 1715, it seemed as if some Jacobite enchanter, having recalled the sufferers to life, had clapped in his haste, an Englishman's head on a Highlander's body. (/bid., p. 427). This description of Duncan highlights the eccentricity and problematics of such an embodiment of union. Rather than the Scottish bonnet and cockade, Duncan wears the lace-trimmed cocked hat of the lowland lairds, in imitation of the English. Instead of offering a strong model of the benefits of union, Duncan's attempt to incorporate union in his own body is presented as ludicrous, like Madge's borrowed finery which degrades rather than increases social status. The
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passage also highlights the split within even the national body of the Scots, as lowlanders of Norman descent, or as highlanders of Gaelic descent. Accounts of highland dress include many examples of scandalised English, and and anxiety about the loose sexuality and temptation to women implied by such a costume. Dunbar reproduces French prints showing Scottish soldiers wearing the kilt and scandalising or titillating French serving women and ladies. In the background, a row of well-trained soldiers lift the backs of their kilts in a perfect row, while one of their number looks on their exercises, hip cocked and one buttock exposed by a wayward breeze. In the foreground another Scotsman stands nonchalantly looking into the breeze while a peasant woman with a basket kneels at his feet, her hand to her face and her basket forgotten as his kilt blows up in her direction (p. 13). These prints are dated roughly three years previous to the publication of Scott's novel, and show the sexual display and exhibitionism associated with the loose kilt. Ian Grimble quotes an Englishman in 1630 who recounts that the kilts he saw only reached mid-thigh, and the stockings reached up m~d-calf such that '... in a windy day, going up a hill, or stooping, the indecency of it is plainly discovered' (p. 7). Grimble also points out that the French n a m e for the sporan is 'cache-sexe' (p. 7). After the repeal, various attitudes were expressed: Sir Phillip Jennings Clarke said he would oppose the Bill [of Repeal] ... if it did not confine the Highland Dress to the North of the Tweed; for he recollected an innkeeper in Hampshire, coming with a complaint before him as a Justice of the Peace, that four Highland Officer's were quartered on him, who being brawny, handsome fellows, he began to be jealous of his wife, who was not very old, and fearful for the virtue of his daughters; the Highlanders being in their own country dress, the females could not keep their eyes offthem (Ibid., p. 8, accompanying print taken from the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 18 June 1782). Despite the satirical nature of the print of Highlanders in short kilts being served wine by the innkeeper's wife and daughters which accompanied this passage, the link between illicit and unrestrained sexuality in both women and highlanders is suggestive of a larger cultural association. Prints and stories which suggest pathological sexuality associated with highland dress and by extension with highlanders themselves are not uncommon. Another print, ostensibly recording the way in which women's dress imitated men's military garb, also shows 'the daft captain' ridiculing this sexual cross-dressing by himself affecting a veil (/bid., p. 14). However, mocking or not, the adaptation of an overdetermined highly coded article of female dress unsettles strict gender-codification in a way female remodelling of feminine dress in imitation of masculine costume does not. There is something of this sense of transgression in the way the English perceive the Scottish kilt and plaid. As Dolly Dutton says: ' . . . Pray may I be so bold as to ask, if it is the fashion for you North-country gentlemen to go to church in your petticoats, Captain Knockunder (sic)?' (Scott, p. 431). Another instance of crossdressing occurs in obituary of 'Red Jean' from the Inverness Journal of 17 July 1812: Died, lately in the Parish of Knockando, County of Elgin, an eccentric character
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Miriam L. Wallace known as Red Jean or Jean Roy. She disliked her own sex, and always pretended to be a man, wearing a kilt, jacket, and blue bonnet. She generally worked as a day labourer (1bid., p. 102).
All this suggests an ambivalence towards the traditional highland garb on the part of lowlanders and British. It also implies a certain flexibility of gender roles. The costume of the highlanders is associated with the overdetermined masculine practices of highway robbery, war and political rebellion, but the costume itself is also coded as feminine by its loose skirts. Thus, the highlander in his kilt is doubly suspect. The emphasis on mutilated human bodies (Porteous' hanging with which the novel opens, the female disguises of the mob, mother's whose babies are missing, the threatened hanging of Effie, and the accomplished hanging of Meg Murdockson) highlights an ambivalent anxiety about metaphorical and institutionalised bodies: the nation, the church, the family, the monarchy. The body serves as a shifting metonymic ground for various displacements, and thus is itself no final answer, but merely another (perhaps privileged) link in the chain of contextualised constructions. This then, is finally what Scott's novel achieves. The text itself uncovers and recovers profound anxieties and ambivalences about the very 'others' the novel urges the reader to accept. Despite the novel's ostensible attempt to recontain and deeroticise the Scottish 'other' through familiarisation, by conflating that 'other' with criminals, loose women, 'savages', and cross-dressing, The Heart of Midlothian mirrors and reifies anxieties of Scottish otherness. Yet, this is another mode of insisting upon the English need for the Scots, for without an identifiable and contained 'other', the 'otherness' of one's own subjectivity and one's own nationhood might have to be recognised. Scott's novel, refuses to allow the reader a final, fixed and unproblematic subject position from which to interpret the text and offers rich and troubling suggestions about the purposes and desire for a nationalist identity. Miriam L. Wallace
University of California, Santa Cruz
APPENDIX Act of Proscription, 1746: ... That from and after the First Day of August, One thousand seven hundred and forty seven, no Man or Boy, within that Part of Great Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty's Forces, shall, on any Pretence whatsoever, wear or put on the Clothes commonly called Highland Clothes (that is to say) the Plaid, Philebeg, or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder Belts, or any Part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland Garb; and that no Tartan, or party-coloured Plaid or Stuffshall be used for Great Coats, or for Upper Coats; and if any such Person shall presume after the said First Day of August, to wear or put on the aforesaid
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Garments, or any part of them, every such Person so offending, being convicted thereof by the Oath of One or more credible Witness or Witnesses before any Court of Justiciary, or any One or more Justices of the Peace for the Shire of Stewartry, or Judge Ordinary of the Place where such Offence shall be committed, shall suffer Imprisonment, without Bail, during the Space of Six Months, and no longer; and being convicted for a second Offence before a Court of Justiciary, or at the Circuits, shall be liable to be transported to any of His Majesty's Plantations beyond the Seas, there to remain for the Space of Seven Years (quoted in Dunbar, p. 3).
BIBLIOGRAPHY William Acton, Prostitution (London, 1857). John Telfer Dunbar, History of Highland Dress (Philadelphia: Dufour, 1964). Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: a study of Victorian prostitutes in York (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979). Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986). Ian Grimble, Scottish Clans and Tartans (Hamlyn Publishing Group: New York, 1973). Hellerstein, et al. (ed.), Victorian Women (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1981). Vicki Kirby, 'Corporeographies'. Inscriptions 5 (Santa Cruz: U of California Santa Cruz, 1989). Ian Levitt, Povertyand Welfare in Scotland: 1890-1948 (Edinburgh; Edinburgh UP, 1988). Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Holmes and Meier, 1978). William Logan, The Great Social Evil: Its Causes, Extent, Results, and Remedies (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1871). C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford UP, 1962). Richard Allen Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877-1930 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1982). Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Sir Walter Scott (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1985).
Thank you also to the following colleagues for suggestions and careful reading: Murray Baumgarten, Anna Buchman, John O. Jordan, Lisa Seace, Richard Terdiman, and the members of the seminar on '19th Century London and Paris', Winter Quarter 1990, University of California at Santa Cruz.