English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 by Kelly Gary

Author:Kelly, Gary [Gary Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134960842
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Heroism and the Abyss: The Betrothed to Castle Dangerous

In the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth, Scott's later novels such as the Tales of the Crusaders (1825) were sometimes dismissed as 'mere' adventure stories, fit for childhood reading but not much else. It is true that in the novels that came after Redgauntlet Scott seems to turn more decidedly to far-off times and places, to indulge his partly escapist wish to fuse antiquarian lore with prose romance. Of his remaining seven novels, four have medieval settings, three are set outside Britain, only one takes place in Scotland, and the closest Scott comes to his own time and place is seventeenth-century England. But Scott realized that boys and men (women he was less concerned about) could read the same novel with equally deep feeling, if different (though not necessarily better) understanding.20 At the height of his fame in the 1820s, he was also very aware of his rivals in the novel market, and perhaps he was also responding to the success of novels of exotic places (discussed in the next chapter). More important, in the 1820s Scott was increasingly concerned over the growing political and social crisis that dominated the period before the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Images of the hero lost, wandering, or benighted, which recur often in the earlier novels as representations of heroism's doubtful enterprise, seem to acquire in the later novels more menace, and images of the hero poised over a precipice or abyss become prominent.

Heroism of various kinds, public and domestic, is a continuing theme in the Waverley Novels; and it is inseparable from adventure, as it is strongly associated with the chivalric culture that had been made such a vital political topic by Burke and the entire French Revolution debate, as well as by the career of Napoleon, whose biography Scott now in the mid-1820s undertook to write. But in the accelerating political and social crisis of the late 1820s and early 1830s Scott may have felt heroism's relevance to contemporary life even more strongly, and his own sense of the personal and public significance of heroism may have been sharpened by his private trials. It is no accident that in resolving to discharge honourably every penny of the enormous debts left by his bankruptcy in 1826 he should several times have used the chivalric slogan, 'My own right hand shall do it.'21 At the same time, Scott continued to reveal deep scepticism about the sentimental versions of chivalry, adventure, and the heroic, rapidly becoming major elements of nineteenth-century professional middle-class ideology and national imperialism. Thus Scott's later novels reveal a deep yearning for heroism alongside a painful awareness that heroism could lead to the abyss; and, as in his earlier novels, it is again the image of the woman as mediator, civilizer, and domesticator which stands against the perilous heroics and adventuring of men, expecially in 'pre-modern' times.

Tales of the Crusaders (1825) focuses specifically on the male culture of 'antient chivalry' which

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