Back in December, I wrote a post about Walter Scott in which I analyzed his 1818 novel The Antiquary and argued that the work demonstrated that Scott was anything but the overly nationalistic Romantic author that other writers like Mark Twain accused him of being but was instead a postmodernist ahead of his time, using the titular antiquary Jonathan Oldbuck to make a literary joke about history and the nature of plot and storytelling. The Antiquary, though, was one of Scott’s later works, and it’s worth noting that Scott’s postmodern attitude towards history and narrative forms wasn’t something he developed only in his later novels, but something present in his very first novel, Waverley (full title Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since). Published anonymously in 1814, Waverley tells the story of English officer Edward Waverley, who travels to Scotland while on leave and once there decides to join the Scottish Highlanders fighting to restore Charles Stuart, the Young Pretender, to the throne of England during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. It’s a classic plot that’s been reused several times in recent years, in the Kevin Costner movie Dances with Wolves, in the Tom Cruise movie The Last Samurai, and even in James Cameron’s movie Avatar, of a character who falls in love with a more traditional culture and switches sides to join a doomed rebellion. But what makes Waverley different from the three contemporary films that use its plot is that Scott doesn’t indulge in any saccharine Romanticism and clearly views his hero as more amusing than heroic. Instead, just as he would later do with The Antiquary, Scott uses humor and a postmodern consciousness of narrative form to turn Waverley into a commentary on the course of history rather than a nationalistic celebration of a doomed rebellion.
Waverley begins with an amusing introduction in which Scott himself discusses how and why he chose the title (“The title of this work has not been chosen without the grave and solid deliberation which matters of importance demand from the prudent,” the first line reads.). From there, he demonstrates a brilliant understanding of the narrative forms of his day by listing various other titles and subtitles he could have given his novel and analyzing the effect those other titles would have had on the reader:
Had I, for example, 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, of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could it have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the heroine’s fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servants’ hall?
Here Scott brilliantly deconstructs the various tropes of a Gothic novel like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, everything from ruined castles to the stock characters that inhabit such narratives, the “aged butler,” the “clownish valet,” the “garrulous…fille-de-chambre,” and of course the owl. He goes on, then, to list other narrative forms of his day, deconstructing each with his characteristic wit:
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, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors, and dark-lanterns? 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, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of transporting from castle to cottage, although she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, and is more than once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a blowzy peasant girl, whose jargon she hardly can understand? 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, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled, and if lusciously painted, so much the better? a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four-in-Hand, with a set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow-Street Office?
Thus, from the very first page, Scott is doing what any good postmodernist does, reminding us that what we’re about to read is a work of fiction, just a construction of his own mind, and making us consider it’s relation to other written works of its time.
But it’s not just the first page and the choice of title that operates in this postmodern mode—because Waverley, though his head is filled with Romantic ideas about battles and heroism and glory, is very much not the traditional Romantic hero we associate with this narrative (unlike Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise or the blue guy from Avatar). Instead, Waverley is very much a non-hero—he rarely ever makes any decisions in the narrative and just sort of goes along with whoever he happens to be with at the time. He joins the army not out of any desire to be a military man, but because his father wants him to, and he joins the rebellion not necessarily out of any firm commitment to Scotland or the Jacobite cause, but because while visiting Highland chieftain Fergus Mac-Ivor, he misses a letter calling him back to his barracks and is thus declared a deserter and accused of treason. He therefore joins the Highlanders and travels with them as they fight, but rarely fights himself, and instead continually wavers (thus his apt name) between loyalty to his new friends, and loyalty to England. Eventually, the rebellion fails and Waverley feels sad.
If anything, it is Fergus, the Highland Chieftain, who is the traditional tragic hero, fighting valiantly for a lost cause until he is captured and executed. Waverley, by contrast, is Scott’s way of satirizing the Romantic temperament. Waverley has such grand ideas about fighting but when it comes to the moment, he can’t actually be heroic. Flora, Fergus’s sister and Waverley’s love interest (who completely rejects him), analyzes Waverley Romantic temperament in a passage towards the end of the novel which demonstrates just how much Walter Scott finds his central character amusing rather than heroic:
But high and perilous enterprise is not Waverley’s forte. He would never have been his celebrated ancestor Sir Nigel, but only Sir Nigel’s eulogist and poet. I will tell you where he will be at home, my dear, and in his place—in the quiet circle of domestic happiness, lettered indolence, and elegant enjoyments of Waverley-Honour. And he will refit the old library in the most exquisite Gothic taste, and garnish its shelves with the rarest and most valuable volumes; and he will draw plans and landscapes, and write verses, and rear temples, and dig grottoes; and he will stand in a clear summer night in the colonnade before the hall, and gaze on the deer as they stray in the moonlight, or lie shadowed by the boughs of the huge old fantastic oaks; and he will repeat verses to his beautiful wife, who will hang upon his arm;—and he will be a happy man.
From one perspective, it could be a happy scene of domestic tranquility—but remember, Flora Mac-Ivor is a woman of action, valuing boldness and bravery and a strong will, and so when she says all this about our Romantic hero, it’s hard not to read it as a critique, that Waverley will not be a valiant warrior like his ancestor, or like Fergus, but just a “eulogist and poet” enjoying his “lettered indolence” in his Gothic library and staring out at his garden. Thus, it’s wrong to describe Walter Scott as a Romantic writer—as this passage makes clear, Scott is deeply critical of the Romantic spirit, and Romanticism to him is writing and reading and dreaming about heroic battles rather than participating in them.
Finally, then, there is the novel’s ironic ending. Ultimately, Waverley returns to Scotland and to the ruined estate of Baron Bradwardine, one of the Scottish loyalists who Waverley came to see as a surrogate father and who lost everything after the failed rebellion. But through a deus-ex-machina style stroke of good luck, one of the English soldiers Waverley befriended and saved decides to repair the Baron’s estate and return it to him, along with all his property and possessions. The novel then ends with Waverley sitting at the Baron’s table, enjoying a fine meal, just as he had when he first arrived in Scotland towards the beginning of the novel, before the rebellion. It’s a seemingly happy ending, with everything restored to the way it was—yet, the truth is, despite outward appearances and despite the Baron’s toast to everyone’s future prosperity, a sharp reader can’t help but see this ending as ironic, since, with the failure of the Jacobite rebellion, Scotland will never be the same as it once was, and the Highland culture Waverley so admired will soon disappear. Scott says as much in his postscript, where he describes how much Scotland has changed since the events the novel, and how his purpose in writing it was partly to embody through fiction some aspects of this now vanished time and culture. In this light, the seemingly happy ending takes on a wistful and melancholy cast, an image of a group of characters who don’t seem to understand that history has shifted and that their world is set to vanish in less than sixty years.
György Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist literary critic, praised Walter Scott in his book The Historical Novel, arguing that “Scott endeavours to portray the struggles and antagonisms of history by means of characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces.” For Lukács, this made Scott ultimately a great realist writer. But I’d argue that Scott’s genius goes beyond realism: for all its virtues, realism can often get in the way of dramatizing historical change, as an overfocus on individual human emotion makes it hard to zoom out and recognize the broader shifts of time. No, to me Scott is not a realist but, as I’ve argued before, a postmodernist, using novels like Waverley not simply to depict the realistic emotions of a group of characters in a particular historical moment but more broadly to use humor and irony to make a comment on the relationship between that moment and the present.