Waverley 2
Outline
• British fiction in transition – Waverley and
the novel
• Gender and genre
• The masculinized novel
• Waverley as the novel of novels in the
Romantic era
British fiction in transition
• The novel before and after the Romantic
period (see Burney, Austen)
• Henry Brougham on The History of the
Maroons in Edinburgh Review (1803):
‘The style is thoroughly wretched, and the
composition is precisely that of a novel’
British fiction in transition
• Thomas Babbington Macaulay in Edinburgh Review (1828) advises contemporary historians to learn lessons from the
historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, which
deploy ‘those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind
them’
British fiction in transition
• A re-positioning of the novel in the hierarchy of diverse genres of writing
• Scott’s extraordinary success with the Waverley Novels makes the novel into a major genre
• See T. H. Lister on Scott’s achievement in
Edinburgh Review (1832)
British fiction in transition
• Lister: ‘[Prior to the publication of Waverley the
novel was the form] the least respected in the
whole circle of literature, [whereas now it takes]
a place among the highest productions of human intellect’
• (For a full-length study of the reception of WS
and JA, see Annika Bautz, The Reception of
Jane Austen and Walter Scott (2007))
• What is it about Scott as a novelist and Waverley as a novel that explains this remarkable
transition in British fiction?
Gender and genre
• See Ina Ferris, ‘Re-Positioning the Novel:
Waverley and the Gender of Fiction’, Studies in Romanticism, 28 (1989), 291-301
• See also Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British
Empire (1997)
Gender and genre
• Trumpener: ‘Walter Scott … repoliticized
(and masculinized) the novel by reinserting it into the larger social field it had occupied with Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett….
the national tale and the historical novel
might seem to represent differently gendered ways of situating characters, cultures,
and history’ (p. 132)
Gender and genre
• The gender of genre – fiction as ‘feminine’
and verse as ‘masculine’
• Fiction as ‘feminine’: the producers and
consumers of novels into the Romantic
period are predominantly female
• Fiction as ‘feminine’: the legacy of ‘romance’ in the novel makes the form seem
less than fully serious
Gender and genre
• Verse as ‘masculine’: a more serious form
of literature, more technically and intellectually demanding than prose fiction
• Verse as ‘masculine’: utilizes elevated,
dignified forms of language, and draws on
wider learning and experience
Gender and genre
• Ferris: ‘The name of Walter Scott – name
of a famous poet, respected scholar, and
undisputed gentleman – immediately distinguished Waverley in a period when the
novel was not only held in low critical esteem but also (a not unrelated point) regarded as dominated by women to a degree unusual even for a genre that had
been closely linked to women since the
mid-eighteenth century’ (pp. 293-94)
Gender and genre
• Ferris: ‘. . . the assumptions about genre
are inseparable from assumptions about
gender’ (p. 294)
• Assumptions about gendered genre constitute the critical context of the reception
of Waverley
• Scott’s novel seen, in the reviews, as
marking a return to the novel of responsibility, rationality, public concerns
The masculinized novel
• Scott’s regendering of genre, with the
Waverley Novels – the masculinized novel
(poetry as newly ‘feminine’ – e.g. Percy
Shelley, John Keats)
• Defining characteristics: epic historical
sweep (compare the relative ‘confinement’
of CR or MP); variety of mode, scene, and
characterization; emphasis on fact and
historical accuracy
The masculinized novel
• Ferris: ‘After the intervention of Walter
Scott, the debate about fiction in the nineteenth century occupied a different
ground. The genre was now accorded a
literary authority and cultural centrality that
it had not been granted at the turn of the
century, largely because the Waverley
Novels had ensured that the novel could
no longer be perceived as the confined
genre of a confined gender’ (p. 301)
The masculinized novel
• What of women’s relation to the newly
masculinized novel?
• Mary Shelley: anxiety about appearing in
print
• The Brontës: use of ‘androgynous’ pen
names
• Marian Evans: use of a male pen name
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• W as a novel the opposite of ‘confined’
• Commenting on his choice of title, WS
indicates that he could have proceeded in
a number of different directions with his
work
• See W, vol. 1, ch. 1
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• ‘Had I … announced in my frontispiece,
“Waverley, a Tale of Other Days”, must not
every novel-reader have anticipated a
castle scarce less than that of Udolpho …’
(cf. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794))
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• ‘Again, had my title borne, “Waverley, a
Romance from the German”, what head so
obtuse as not to image forth a profligate
abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and
mysterious association of Rosycrucians
and illuminati’, etc.
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• ‘Or if I had rather chosen to call my work a
“Sentimental Tale”, would it not have been
a sufficient presage of a heroine with a
profusion of auburn hair’, etc.
• ‘Or again, if my Waverley had been entitled “A Tale of the Times”, wouldst thou
not, gentle reader, have demanded from
me a dashing sketch of the fashionable
world’, etc.
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• WS demonstrates his own understanding
of the contemporary gendering of genre
where the feminization of fiction is concerned
• ‘… an author so profoundly versed in the
different branches of his art’ (W, vol. 1, ch.
1)
• WS plays with the ‘feminine’ codings of the
novel itself
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• W located outside the context of women’s
production and consumption of fiction
• ‘From this my choice of an æra [‘’Tis Sixty
Years Since’] the understanding critic may
farther presage, that the object of my tale
is more a description of men than manners’ (W, vol. 1, ch. 1)
• The ‘novel of manners’ a ‘woman’s’ form…
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• WS aims to write a new kind of (gendered)
fiction
• Acknowledges influences from both men
and women writers
• Postscript (vol. 3, ch. 25): ‘It has been my
object to … emulate the admirable Irish
portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth’
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• Postscript: ‘Two works upon similar subjects [national manners], by female authors, whose genius is highly creditable to
their country, have appeared in the interval; I mean Mrs Hamilton’s Glenburnie,
and the late Account of Highland Superstitions [by Mrs Grant]’
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• Dedication: ‘These Volumes Being Respectfully
Inscribed to Our Scottish Addison, Henry Mackenzie, by An Unknown Admirer of His Genius’
• Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)
(Joseph Addison, English classical scholar)
• On W as a ‘bookish’ novel, see Peter Garside,
‘The Baron’s Books: Scott’s Waverley as a Bibliomaniacal Romance’, Romanticism, 14/3
(2008), 245-58
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• The less ‘confined’ W is as a novel – playing with gender codings, wide range of
influences – the more it is able to present
itself as a new form of prose fiction
• The ‘unconfined’ W opens up the novel for
the male gender (within a male-dominated
society)
• Scott as a pivotal novelist . . .
Waverley as ‘novel of novels’
• The coded masculinity of WS as a novelist
and of W as a novel is what explains the
decisive role played by this particular
novelist in promoting, from 1814 on, a
remarkable transition in British fiction