Ivanhoe and the Making of Britain

Links & Letters 2, 1995 63-76 Ivanhoe and the Making of Britainl Chris Worth Departament of English Monash University Abstract Scott's Ivanhoe is more than a literary landmark or relic.The ideologicai work done by the novel has been underrated. Ivanhoe is a memorable narrative of a national myth: the synthesis of England from Norman and Saxon peoples. It contributed to the making and circulation of the analogous idea of a «British» nation during the imperial era. Highly popular in Europe, it provided a paradigm for imagining a synthetic nation bringing apparently opposed interests together. The historical fictions of the novel reflect a number of Scott's anxieties about contemporary political issues. Class conflict is displaced by the opposition of national and the alien. Scott's use of the Robin Hood legend demonstrates how he adapted his material: the first writer to link Robin Hood to a surviving Saxon resistance, Scott appears to combat Ritson's account of Robin as radical folk-hero by presenting him as a figure co-operating in a a natural community linking ail levels of society in resistance to that which is foreign, cosmopolitan, without stake in the land. The figures in the novel who cannot be accomodated within the newly imagined state must be defeated and exiled. Rebecca, as Jew, representative of commerce and science and perhaps as sexualized femaie, is multiply alien to the nation as imagined. Read critically, Ivanhoe continues to be an instructive text. Key words: Scott, Nationhood, Fiction, History. This paper began as a lecture in Melbourne in a series called ((Landmarks in the European Novel)). There is something rather depressing about calling a novel a ((landmark)). Who reads landmarks? We see them a long way off, on the horizon, familiar guides to territory we have long since passed by, or, perhaps, at best as signposts on the journeys we are still taking -but always somewhere other than where we are going. And we preserve them, unused or misused, or worse still, enclosed in glass. 1s Ivanhoe such a preserved landmark? 1. This article is an abridged version of a lecture given by Chris Worth at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in April 1994. We are grateful to Dr. Worth for agreeing to short- en his original paper. 64 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth Can it be: anything more? When ScottS novels were first published they appeared anonymously and their author was jocularly called «&e Great Unknown)). It has often been suggested he should be renamed «the Great Unread)), for he is no longer part of most educated people's experience, despite his importance as an historical novelist among the most influential writers in nineteenthcentury Eturope. In this paper 1 want to reassess not so much the literary merit of Ivanhoe as its ideological seriousness. 1 believe the novel can still be visited as a functioning text, although it may now no longer be possible to inhabitit as some of its earliest readers did or as younger readers continued to do throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper will focus on one motivated or interested reading of Ivanhoe: 1 consider it as illustrating a paradigmatic intervention of fiction in the construction of synthetic nationhood. Ivanhoe, composed in 18 19, was, Scott wrote in his 1830 «Introduction», a conscious attempt to explore new fields, being «an experiment on a subject purely English)). In his previous novels he had used Scotland as his scene and dealt witli narratives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The abandonment of Scottish dialect and the engagement with English history were both, to iny mind, aspects of a very deliberate widening of focus. There was the commer<:ial prospect of opening up a new market. But 1 believe the novel was also motivated by ScottS recognition of the potential of his historical fictions to intervene in the turbulent political arguments of the post-Napoleonic period. Scott was an interesting political agent of the time, interpellated in complex ways by a variety of long-standing and contemporary discourses. He was a patriot, a great believer in Scottish identity and in the nation of Scotland as defined rhrough Scottish ballads, historical narratives and literature, but he was also powerfully constrained by the need to support the continuance of the rational lUnion of Britain that had taken place in 1707, by his recognition of the economic value of such resolutions of ancient rivalries, by an ideological commitnnent to the value of a progressive and gradual evolution of the current constitutional settlement of the united kingdoms and by his engagement with universalizing chronotopes of Enlightenment and civilization. Not surprisingly, notions of nationality and the nature of national identity are anxiously at issue in almost: al1 his political statements and major fictions. There are further complications: he had numerous strong social and political views, mainly Tory, conservative and anti-democratic in cast, typical of those circulating through his milieu, but the discourses of Romanticism also affected the positions he took on a variety of issues (earlier works include translations of Sturm und Drang dramas and his own romantic narrative poems, such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel, indicative of his interest in Romantic redefinitions of humanity). The historical novel in Scott's hands becomes, in part at least, a means of exploring the fraught seams and ragged edges between these competing ideologies from behind the safety of a pseudonym or mask, of examining the disconcerting gaps, for example, between local or national rivalries and universal humanism, between feudal and mercantilist obligations, between subjectivity and society, between Enlightenment rationality and the new insights of a Iuanhoe and the Makine of Britain Link & Letters 2, 1995 65 romantic sensibility. Like some of the best of his early novels, then, Ivanhoe responds to political issues and social tensions of the day. Although it is certainly not the first historical novel about England (perhaps the first good one!), it is the first to have as one of its principal themes a sustained investigation of the nature of the English national experience in ways that also suggested an analogous construction of British and eventually Imperial identity. But the very success of its ideological positioning, its endless reproduction in the fabric of popular culture, has occulted the cultural work that it has done. Stripped of its romance component (dealing with the disinherited Saxon, Wilfred, and his love for the Saxon princess, Rowena), Ivanhoe tells the story of the ending of Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest and the creation, in the emblematic figure of Richard 1, of a king who is «English» rather than Norman or Saxon, one who, «even more than Ivanhoe)) is «a symbol of national uniqm ('Johnson, 1970, 1: 742), a king who has the respect (from his hereditary relationship to William 1 and his demonstrated military and chivalric prowess) of the feudal Norman aristocratic ruling elite, but also the respect and love of the «native» Saxon-derived yeomen and common people (effectively presented in the scenes in the forest and the interactions with Locksley and the outlaws). Al1 this is made very clear in the opening pages of the first chapter, in which Scott sets the scene by describing not only a location and a period, but also an ethnic issue. From the blend of Norman and Saxon comes the pre-destined and superior ethnic grouping of the «English». The process supposedly has an analogy in the emergence of the English language out of Saxon and Norman. The reader is offered an image of a synthetic nation state forged2, out of the providentially enriching merger of different races. Ivanhoe offers a powerful and memorable fiction by which a particular version of national emergence is given narrative shape. In terms of already available narrativizations of English national myths it fills an obvious hole, a part of history not touched on by Shakespeare, for example. The narrative of Ivanhoe fleshes out the bare bones of the legitimation imagined in its opening chapter. For example, the description of the Saxon aristocratic world at Cedric's house and then Athelstane's castle is contrasted with the description of their speech: whereas the Saxon language is pointedly described as adding a «manly» quality to the new hybrid English, Cedric and Athelstane are shown to be failures at coping with the reality of political life, Cedric impulsive, short-sighted and obsessed by the past, Athelstane lazy, unambitious and selfish. The effect is to suggest effectively that the vitality of the Saxon culture has devolved upon the lower classes, initially represented by the loyal and resourceful Gurth and Wamba, but eventually given paradigmatic representation in the skills and competence of the yeoman Locksley, Robin Hood. Alone, the unalloyed Saxon world deserves to perish in the 2. Linda Colley (1992) brilliantly argues that the image of the British subject hammered out in the period 1707-1807 was the great sustaining myth of the Empire. 66 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth competitive environment of medieval life, but, allied with the positive features of Norman chivalry and education, it will flourish. Elsewhere the excesses of feudalism are emphatically associated with the tyranny of certain groups of Normans who have escaped the moderating bounds of either obligation to a sovereign (Bois-Guilbert or De Bracy with his ((Free Companions))), Christianity (Bois-Guilbert and Front-de-Boeuf), or a chivalric code of honour (Front-de-Boeuf and Waldemar Fitzurse). Feudalism itself is not scrutinized and, indeed, the right of Richard at the end of the novel to disperse favours, grant rights of «vert and venison)), and so on, is an essential part of the resolution of the story. The tyranny of feudal nobles in early medieval England is certainly historical. But Scott transforms this into one of the quintessential conservative motifs of British jction: the motif of the absentee landlord whose bad steward exploits the poor or subservient. Whereas for generations of reformist thinkers the idea that the Norman Conquest imposed tyrannical feudal customs on a democratic Anglo-Saxon constitution had enabled them to conceive of an earlier, Edenic, nation-state, Scott ensured that the dominant image of the Norman chivalric nobility that survives from reading Ivanhoe is of its potential to contribute to «Englishness», once purified from corrupting «foreign» influences by contact with the people of the land and wood, under the protection of a just and hybrid sovereign. The parallels with the seventeenth -and eighteenthcentury creation of a Britain joining the best of Scots, English, etc., are patent. Scott's construction of the state of English society in the 1190s is, of course, a fiction, not a generally agreed historical account but an artifice which shapes historical ~nderstandin~ as much as it reports a state of knowledge. What Scott does in the opening paragraphs of Ivanhoe is surely deliberate, not a failure to understand the past. He fills the poorly documented social life of Richard's reign with images derived from his own concerns, linking together severa1 disparate groups of stories, while retaining a whole host of accurate (if sometimes achronological) and often documentary details about people, places and manners. As has been frequently pointed out (by literary critics and historians alike), not only is the surviving heir of Harold (Rowena) fictitious, but also the whole idea of a surviving Saxon culture. Saxon resistance had certainly evaporated Iong before the 1 190s, indeed, in any organized sense had done so by the 1090s. Richard was an Angevin brought up as a Poitevin (Holt,1989:183) and had as little in cornmon with some of the Norman nobles as he had with most of his «English» subjects (nor was he necessarily very popular). The concept of an accommodation between Saxon and Norman laws has little validity (although tensions between central authority and independent power brokers were common whether the kings were Norman or Saxon and whether the local war-lords were dukes or earls). It is even uncertain whether the processes by which English evolved as a separate language can be described in the way that they are in the novel. Wilson, in his Penguin edition, gives other examples of anachronisms (and also a lively defence of Scott against pedantic criticism of his inaccuracies). More generally, the novel effectively Ivanhoe and the Making of Britain Links & Letters 2, 1995 67 replaces the dynastic and religious concerns of pre-rnodern Europe with the administrative and national concerns of post-Enlightenrnent national states. And what is more, by suggesting that rnodern national forrnation can successfully be a synthetic procedure, it allows for nationality to be a process of joining, not just of separation. As such it can be seen to apply powerfully to nineteenth-century ernpire-building ideologies. Let me here introduce something of the cornplex story of the novel's reception. Ivanhoe was published in Decernber 1819 and was an instant success. The 10,000 copies of the first edition were sold by the publishers within two weeks (Johnson, 1970, 1: 686-87), an extraordinary result given the thirtyshilling, nominal retail cost of each copy. The early three-volurne editions were followed by numerous others, eventually in cheaper and cheaper formats, widely distributed cornrnercially and educationally. But the novel's critical reception was sornewhat less enthusiastic than its general success. To surnrnarize very ruthlessly, the initially mixed reactions were the result of varying degrees of interest in the subject rnatter together with varying degrees of distaste for the means by which Scott had made his material accesible to readers. Soon a distinct split develops in British responses to Ivanhoe. On the one hand, it became, and continued to be, a verypopular text, indeed, so popular that it ranks almost with Shakespeare's plays, Frankenstein and Dracula as among the rnost widely recirculated of al1 British fictional text,s,if not directly, then in its echoes in most recent versions of the Robin Hood stories. On the other hand, it attracted considerable intellectual disparagernent. There is room here only to sketch briefly the arnazing spread of irnages, retextualizations, etc., of Ivanhoe. Sorne eighty-odd full editions of the novel had appeared within a century (Harvie, 1983: 18). Six dramatic productions of Ivanhoe were being performed on London stages within a year of publication. There have been, some 250 other stagings of Ivanhoe since then, including a very successful operatic version by Arthur Sullivan, burlesques, even an equestrian version. There have been comic-books of Ivanhoe, and filrns, the first two in 19 13, the best-known the 1952 MGM version with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine. The best-known B.B.C. TV series appeared in 1970. Although some of the numerous Robin Hood stories familiar in popular culture are quite distinct frorn the novel, many still show the tinge of Scott's irnpact -e.g. antagonisrn between Saxons and Normans indicates intertextuality with Ivanhoe, as Holt points out: Whatever strange fantasies Robin's narne had aroused one was notably absent. So far no one had suggested that he stood for the oppressed Anglo-Saxon, the genuine Englishman struggling against the Norman oppressor. That role was foisted on him by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe in 1820.. . There was nothing to support it. (1989: 183) In contrast to its popular and comrnercial success, British literary figures and critics began to deprecate the novel systematically not long after its appearance. Thackeray's parodic version, ((Proposals for a Continuation of "Ivanhoen», 68 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth later expanded as Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance upon Romance (1 850), may have encouraged the development of an image of Scott's book as suitable only for youth. By the time the discipline of English studies was firmly established in England in the 1920s, Ivanhoe was seen, as Sir Herbert Grierson put it, as «mainly a good adventure story for boys», or, in Una Pope-Hennessfs words: «first and 1st a bofs book» (Duncan, 1968: 142). By the 1950s it had been deleted from academic consideration outside the community of Scott scholars -hence Duncan's defence of the appropriateness of taking the novel seriously in his revisionary article of 1955. This intellectual disparagement was, however, contemporary with the widespread adoption of the novel as a pedagogic text, as indicated by the memories of many people who went to all-male schools before the 1950s and by the existence of various school editions, in Britain and its dependencies. The adoption of Ivanhoe as part of school curricula, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the Second World War, 1 find particularly significant. To my mind, the critical disparagement oE the novel, begun well before its loss of popular status, while part of the post-romantic aesthetic programme that placed the highest premium on literature of the individual psyche, was also directly related to the construction of English Studies themselves as necessarily withdrawn from political or sociological tasks. Meanwhile, within the national and imperial educational agenda, the role of literature was being defined in much more instrumental terms, in ways which relied precisely on the work which a novel such as Ivanhoe could do in the maintenance of specific ideological structures3. 1 would claim that Ivanhoe, consciously or unconsciously, gave imaginative form to a useful and successful myth of the British enterprise, circulating as widely as any formal historical account. As the case of Shakespeare in Richard 111 and Henry Vindicates (Holderness, 1988; Bate, 1989), the potential of Ivanhoe to affect popular understanding 3. Christopher Harvie notes that Scott's fiction became (&e acknowledged precursor of those reconstnictors of historic identity who were to dorninate European nationaiisrn in the nineteenth ct:ntury» (1983, 444; see also Massie, 1983). Ivanhoe in particular played a central role in this process, as the exarnples collected by Buchan (1932: 201), Wilson (1980: 208), Ochojoski (1973), and Jack (1973), arnongst others, indicate. Perhaps the most interesting case is qiloted by Katona in her study of the reputation of Scott in Hungary. She notes: «When Ivanhoe was first translated into Hungarian in 1829 the translator rnade it clear that he undertook the job as a patriotic duty, and so did the publisher who declined al1 profit)) (273- since this was presurnably András Taisz's six-volurne translation it was no srnall sacrifice to rnake!). In general, the production of Ivanhoe-like historical novels al1 over Europe was strongly associated with the ernergence of nationai narratives «irnagining» the authenticating past of new national consciousnesses. While poetry was an essential dernonstration of the reality of a nationai language, historical fiction was the natural vehicle for circulating the key narratives of nationai culture and cultural formation. Although its vivid recreation of the past, its rnedievalisrn, rnay well have contributed to Ivanhoe's success overseas as in Britain, its ideological undertones were an essentiai ingredient in its influence on severai ernerging national literatures. Ivanhoe and &e Making of Britain Links & Letrers 2, 1995 69 of the past and the notion of the synthetic nation-state comes not from some brilliant aesthetic strategy that defeats a «true)) representation of history, but from its attachment to already circulating ideological notions. For Ivanhoe these include the following: notions about the first «heroic» king in English history, the focus for a whole series of national legends about strength and fidelity; folktales about the democratic tastes of good kings; concepts of exogamic ethnic strengthening, attached to language but also to stereotypes of national type and national behaviour; notions about military strength (e.g., the combination of chivalric prowess with the potential of the «English» longbow that here partly defines Richard's Englishness and preserves his life, but which really belongs to the later successes of Agincourt, Crécy and Poitiers); legends which associate the «native» with a «local habitation)) and hence with both nature and the «national» soil (legends echoing interestingly in the treatment of the outlaws). Al1 these are features evident in the later circulation of the Ivanhoe story and those versions of the Robin Hood story influenced by the novel. The melding of Norman and Saxon in the person of Richard 1 was presumably widely understood to prefigure or typ@ the experience of Scots and English, brought together under one crown in 1603, constitutionally linked by the 1707 Union, «now», in 18 19, hopefully evolving towards a new Great British alignment. It is easy to see Ivanhoe as a novel as much concerned about the evolution of the synthetic British subject as about the evolution of the English subject. 1 would speculate that it was precisely its contribution to the great sustaining myth of the Empire which explains the repeated appearance of Ivanhoe on school syllabuses and examination curricula well into the 1950s, in Britain, Australia, India and elsewhere. There is of course a grim irony in Ivanhoe 'S success, given the ever-increasing absorption or complicity of Scotland within the United Kingdom or Britain during Scott's life, an absorption he resisted but also from which he benefited. Benedict Anderson answers the question of why Scotland did not become more nationalist towards the end of the eighteenth century (as so many places in Europe did) by suggesting that, unlike the American States, say, or Ireland, Scotland had access to the administration of the nation state and to «English» as a language, i.e., that it shared fully in the image of Britain. The account of the battle for control of «access» to the good seats at Ashby in Chapter 8, access protected as much by the Saxons as by the Normans, might then be a fable of the success of the forging of the Briton as subject, Scottish aristocratic complicity in the Union, and, at the same time, a token of Scott's own ambivalent participation in the subordination of Scottish local identity to a more competitive and fateful imperial citizenship. Other implications of the Ashby scene might be framed within the analogies between Ivanhoe and political processes in Scott's time. Accounts of the creation of the identity of England in Ivanhoe tend to assume it to be linguistic and cultural. Saxon and Norman represent an advantageous ethnic mixture,, a potential for successful combination of institutions (i.e., strong Norman 70 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth feudal sovereignty with free Saxon parliaments and courts), languages and habits. Bu.t, as one or LWO critics have pointed out, there are some interesting class parailels too, and here the sub-textual ideologicai structures of the novel begin to do further work. Scott's writing is not that of a romantic feudalist, rather that of a Burkean conservative, anxious to reject unfettered and arbitrary power as much as mob rule. The rejection of tyranny in the novel is effectively imaged in, for example, the fail of the castle of Torquilstone, not only an exciting episode, the kind of «hoy's own» adventure story that everyone agrees Scott wrote quite well, but also a metonym for local tyranny in ruins, defeated by the combination of a brave and concerned ruler and his loyal and liberty-coriscious people. But the anxieties of Ivanhoe in the end seem to me to be less about resistance to tyranny than about the potentiai for anarchy that follows tyranny. In this sense, the novel is Scott's equivaient of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses cycle. The historicai context is crucial here. The years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars were tense ones for conservative politicians, as the pent-up frustrations of moderate and radical reformists stimulated working-class audiences into open action around Britain. In August 18 19 the disaster of J?eterloo4 brought the culmination of this unrest, occurring just as Scott was writing Ivanhoe. From a modern perspective the Government's repression of the radical democratic dissent of 18 19 was crushingly effective: the gagging acts of 18 19 left Sidmouth and the government in almost dictatorial control of the country. But it was not so clear to Scott and his circle that they were safe from a threatening democratic storm. Rather than an escapist text looking away from the problems of the age back to the «romantic» middle ages, 1, like Brown or Wilson (1984), see Ivanhoe as a distinctive combination of powerful images of politicai life, motivated by ScottS response to such contemporary issues. Take the following passage from the scene of the Tournament at Ashby which describe the ((sufficiently miserable)) (Scott, 1852,16:99) condition of England under Prince John's regentship, an account highly relevant to what 1 am proposing about the novel. Roaming the land are bands of «lawless resolutes)) (ibid.,100), ~accomplished in the vices of the East, impoverished in substance, and hardened in character, and who placed their hopes of harvest in civil commotion)); in addition, there are bands of outlaws «driven to despair by the oppression of the feudal nobility)), for, unchecked by central authority, the nobles raise private armies and tyrannize over their neighbours. John and the Norman landowners raise money from moneylenders to support their behaviour «at the most usurious interest, which gnawed into their estates like consuming cankers)). Scott concludes: 4. «Peterloo» or the Manchester Massacre refers to a rnass meeting, held in St. Peter's Fields on 16 August 1819, of cotton workers demanding manhood suffrage, which was dispersed by a charge of cavalry in a cruel and unnecessary manner. Viscount Sidmouth, rnentioned below, was Horne Secretary at the time. Ivanhoe and the Making of Britain Links & Letters 2, 1995 71 Under the various burdens imposed by this unhappy state of affairs, the people of England suffered deeply for the present, and had yet more dreadful cause to fear for the future. To augrnent their rnisery, a contagious disorder of a dangerous nature spread through the land; and, rendered more virulent by the uncleanness, the indifferent food, and the wretched lodging of the lower classes, swept off rnany whose fate the survivors were ternpted to envy, as exempting them frorn the evils which were to come. (Scott, 1852,16:101) The disease is clearly both literal and allegorical. The evocation of a land ravaged by the effects of discord between elements of its population and threatened with the prospect of outright civil war seems to resonate pointedly with the distressed condition of Britain in 1819. Consider the narrative at this point: the disloyalty of John and some of the nobles to the constitutional structures under which a civil society might subsist, opens the country to a host of disasters and warring factions. Scott vividly represents these: the potential power of transnational pseudo-religious and cosmopolitan communities such as the Templars; the violence of self-interested men of power, of varying degrees of moral quality (from Front-de-Boeuf to De Bracy and his ambivalently narned Free Companions); and the plague of potentially communistic popular movements, again of varying degrees of morality (from the loyal and hierarchically organized community of Robin Hood's forest-dwellers down to those bands of ((lawless resolutes~, <caccomplished in the vices of the East», etc., mentioned so early in the novel). Only by the reimposition of an idealized, feudal constitutional monarchy (tali~manicall~ acknowledged by the outlaws) is there any hope that the disparate political forces and classes of the country will be successfully united to wrench «Merry England)) out of the hands of aliens, villains and radicals. Each of the fictional threats has its counterpart in Scott's personal demonology of contemporary political life (as seen in The Visionary, for example): Scott's lingering anti-Catholicism, mild anti-Semitism and interest in Freemasonry play a role in the depiction of the Templars; wealthy manufacturers without an interest in land and politicians only protective of their personal interests, both currently undermining Britain's established parliamentary constitution, could be seen as analogous to the medieval freebooters; the bands of lawless wanderers are clearly equivalent to the «mobs» of radicals and strikers Scott so despised. Ivanhoe, by apparently resolvingin its narrative the class conflicts of history, offers a means by which to imagine the triumphant destiny of England, by vividly demonstrating the community of interests (between king, landowners, yeomen and peasants) on which this destiny might be supposed to depend. Analogically this process might then be transferable to the imagining of «Britain» and the «British» (concepts of extraordinary artificiality whose fragility is only now beginning to be fully recognized (Nairn, 1977). As with so many discourses of nationalism, the narrative which reconstructs the past in order to gloriSl the present must rapidly obliterate al1 sites of conflict. So, although the opposition of Norman and Saxon runs through-