Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: literature, Marxism, Marxist criticism, Rob Roy, Sir Walter Scott, Walter Scott, Waverly novels
Sir Walter Scott may have denied traditionalism and the ruling class culture of his time personally, but his novels provide no alternative to those bourgeois doctrines and rather in the values of that system find their own comfortable justifications for existence. To illuminate the question of class ideology and how it is reflected in Sir Walter Scott’s works, one only needs to examine aspects of the author’s life and how the prevailing culture influenced him. Following the path of cultural analysis, one can then investigate Scott’s works and see that his main characters follow the dominant bourgeois ideology. Whether or not this was intentional and the secondary, more passionate characters are meant to be the “true heroes” of the novels, the existence of the heroes themselves demonstrate Scott’s capitulation to established bourgeois perceptions of idealism and heroism.
This tendency has been noted by many of his critics, such as Alexander Welsh in The Hero of the Waverley Novels, who says about Waverly: “[Scott's novel] reverted to romance, which expresses, rather than criticizes, the desires of the mind. In Scott’s hands romance projected publicly accepted desires-the moral clichés of the time” (1). In addition to this, the central characters in Scott’s novels such as Edward Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone are amazingly unheroic, sniveling and incompetent fools. While Scott’s characters conform to the basics of the prevailing European culture of bourgeois morality, they possess few qualities that are worthy of admiration. The reader more often than not finds them cowardly and empty of exceptional traits-all of them heroes-to-be that never quite bloom. Since Scott himself was a faithful servant to a value system so centered in virtue, tradition and stability, his “heroes” were model citizens rendered almost unable to act. They are so perfectly molded to the debilitating standards of ruling class Platonic moralism, his creations become impossible to relate to.
Even early on, his choice of work showed that fiction to Scott was to be not only romantic, but romanticized-that is, to have the projection of an acceptable behavior pattern made before the reading public by the main character and the wholesome image served thereof-and show adherence to the dominant ideology of 19th century Europe. In the period of 1796-1797, at the age of twenty-seven, Scott translated several German dramas for various London booksellers, corresponding with these companies by post. Ruth Adams examines several of Scott’s letters and concludes that “a preoccupation with the chivalric past and a utilization of scenes from the Middle Ages have long been counted among the many attributes of romanticism” (2). Adams goes on to say that “the plays he had translated have elements in common with aspects of Scott’s later work. Characters have similar motivation, perform similar deeds of chivalric defiance” (2). Even before his career had begun, Scott found himself more interested in idealized tales of the distant past than in rebelling against current ideology in any outward way.
This attitude of moderation at the expense of realistic portrayal reveals itself in his most popular works of prose. Frank Osbaldistone from Rob Roy is a primary example. From the beginning, he is shown to give in to the will of stronger characters. When his father admonishes him for what he considers the foolish hobby of writing poetry, Frank merely narrates, “I felt at that instant a strong inclination to submit, and to make Owen happy by requesting him to tell my father that I resigned myself to his disposal” (3). Here Frank considers giving up his dreams to please his friend Own and his father. During a violent confrontation with his cousin Rashleigh, in which Rashleigh says, “‘I hate you with a hatred as intense, now while I lie bleeding and dying before you, as if my foot trod on your neck.’” Frank then narrates: “‘I have given you no cause, sir,’ I replied, ‘and for your own sake I could wish your mind in a better temper’” (3). Even in the middle of a fight Frank will not abandon his manner nor curse his opponent who is trying to bring him death. As well, the book’s namesake is the “true hero” of the novel-the perfect romantic leader of the revolution who rides off into the sunset while the narrator Frank refuses to join him, remaining unchanged.
While this may be an intentional effort on the part of the author to make the reader more sympathetic to the more revolutionary characters when contrasted with the dullness of the hero, the fact that the hero had to exist in the first place to fulfill the obligatory role of the supposed moral compass of the story shows an unwillingness to challenge established the norms of the system. Thus Scott’s preconceived pattern is set. The hero in his stories must never commit himself to positions or actions considered by the ruling class to be “extreme.” He must never join any socially outcast or revolutionary movements, no matter how justified they might be. He never kills, even in the middle of battle, except in self-defense, nor does he passionately love or lust after any particular object or person outside the “damsel in distress” model, and even then only in restraint.
In this way, Scott’s ultimate loyalty seems to be to the false consciousness promoted by the Scottish and European ruling class. Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone in Rob Roy are witnesses to but never participants in revolutionary action. They are rarely, if ever, responsible for a suspension of socially conditioned ethics. Remaining loyal to the establishment, they of course become the wealthy and married beneficiaries of the state at the conclusion of their respective tales. Happiness, according to Scott, can be achieved within the realm of the existing society, and his fiction seems at once progressive yet content with the present social relations.
However, it is not only the comfort of dominant ideologies that affect Scott’s works, but his geographical and economic situation as well. Scott was known to have visited the Scottish borderlands frequently throughout his life. The rich and rural nature of his stories is likely to have been shaped by these experiences, giving rise to such works as Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads showing Scott’s love for the Scottish tradition, Waverly, an account of the second Jacobite rebellion of 1745 which once again attempted to place the Stuarts to the British throne, and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a story about an old Scottish legend. Though his early life in Sandyknowe made his affection for Scotland flourish, his old love of romantic tales never failed to manifest in historical whitewashing and the promotion of chivalric values, especially given that he had the privilege to have seen the real Scotland, a land thought of as wild and untamed by the European and English aristocracy.
An article by William Everett elaborates on the political stance of the Scottish nation by saying, “What Scotland represented not only for Queen Victoria but also for countless others was pure escapism-a fantasy world devoid of any of the pressures of civilized life. [...] The novels of Sir Walter Scott certainly promoted [an] enticingly rugged image of Scotland” (4). Here Everett hits on two important points-both the indulgent fantasies of Scott’s works and the perceived exoticism of Scotland itself. Rob Roy and Waverly are portraits of Scotland’s greatest heroic battles which end up being safe, predictable and easily consumable product for the reader. By putting on display the bloody and rugged wars of old and at the same time making it conform to the standards of the time, Scott provided his 19th century audience with a myth of completed action, a convenient “division of time” in which all that is revolutionary and disruptive of the status quo has happened in the past, indulging his life-long love of romanticism.
Scott’s tendency to write dreamy moralistic tales and to reinforce ruling class ethics of “restraint,” “honor” and “saintliness” was criticized by many of his peers. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain openly mocked Sir Walter Scott for works such as Ivanhoe which take seriously and indulge the old-fashioned code that in Twain’s opinion should have been swept away long ago. He writes, “If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence,’ romanticism, sentimentality-all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too-innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact” (5). Indeed, Scott’s fantasy-oriented ideals were the polar opposite of Twain’s realist movement, which strived to show events as they truly were.
Noting all this, one can read Sir Walter’s works as tools of representing the process of history. Being an explorer and a political strategist himself, surely Scott must have seen the economic forces at work in Scotland, including the program for agrarian change, the Enlightenment and the rise of industrial society. Whether he sided with the new social forces or not, he was clearly conscious of the structure of his society, how the existing social relations concentrated power and the movement of radicals post-French Revolution and Napoleon. The profound effect these movements had on him is still quite clear in his novels, which take place at the center of the action. Like his characters, Sir Walter Scott may himself have been a mere “casual observer” rather than an active hero, but he saw clearly the dialectic processes at work and sought to bring them to life through literature.
Works Cited:
(1) Welsh, Alexander. The Hero of the Waverly Novels. PUBLISHER, 1963.
(2) A Letter by Sir Walter Scott. Ruth M. Adams, Modern Philology, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Nov., 1956), pp. 121-123 Published by: The University of Chicago Press.
(3) Scott, Walter. Rob Roy, Wordsworth Classics, 1995
(4) William A. Everett. Untitled. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Dec., 1999), pp. 151-171 Published by: Croatian Musicological Society.
(5) Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Harper & Brothers, New York. 1917.
Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: literature, Marxism, Marxist Literary criticism, Marxist reading, Nurse's Song, poetry, William Blake
In order to grasp their meanings, the two versions of the “Nurse’s Song” in both William Blake’s the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience are to be read not through what they show literally, nor even what they appear to mean (the obvious “red herring” interpretation), but rather what they hide. At their joined ideological base, both works reveal a stunning critique of the bourgeois and feudal culture. Ultimately Blake resists the dominant ideology, first by opposing it, albeit unintentionally, then by strongly affirming it in a satirical manner. All of this is accomplished through the actions and the shifts in perspective of the unnamed nurse character, which in the end reveal the true purpose of the two works.
Much like the two volumes in which they are contained, the two “Nurse’s Songs” seem at first to be examinations of human development and mental stages of life. The poem features children at play in the hills while their elder nurse watches over them. Eventually she bids them to come back inside when the daylight begins to die. The youths, of course, then plead for the right to stay out for as long as the smallest amount of light exists. Immediately, a few subtleties jump out at the reader.
Firstly, though it seems to be chiefly told from the nurse’s perspective, the poem itself takes the form of a dialogue between the children and the nurse, implying a close relationship between the two. Despite their age difference and different status in life, they have one common goal-the search for innocent happiness away from the consequences of the outside world. Much like “The Echoing Green,” the Innocence version contains adults sympathetic to youths who feel alienated from the world and culture of the time and seek to escape by reestablishing connection not only with other humans, but nature itself. This is shown when the children protest that they should be allowed to stay out because “In the sky, the little birds fly/ And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.” The children want to be closer to the animals, closer to nature, and desire to be as free as the wild animals they see in the fields. At the conclusion, the children’s voices are even said to be “echoing” through the landscape, showing that their animal sounds of joy have been blended with the surrounding nature as they would have wished.
Fittingly, the nurse then allows them the freedom to continue playing and singing outside, saying “Well well go & play/ till the light fades away.” The “light” here represents the light and energy of youth and the purity of children from the affairs of the world, which the nurse is nostalgic and happy to see in others, and which she most likely retains in part herself.
Meanwhile, in the Experience version, the nurse character within undergoes as much of a transformation as the poem itself does, becoming overtly bitter and resentful of the progeny’s youth. She reveals this when she exclaims upon hearing their playing noises: “The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, / my face turns green and pale.” Green is used here as the color of jealousy-the nurse is jealous of the children’s freedom and youth, neither of which she possesses due to her implied advanced age and social position. Significantly, whereas in Innocence the nurse and youth’s dialogue was joined together as one, here the story is told exclusively from the point of view of the stern nurse. There is no room for any other point of view in her mind since she has become so caught up in the ideology of the dominant class.
She has now tragically come to see little value in experiencing life, since for her it is all drudgery. She says of the children: “Your spring and your day are wasted in play, /
and your winter and night in disguise,” thereby claiming that they shouldn’t be wasting their valuable time with such pointless activities. Even more important, “spring,” “day,” “winter” and “night” are here used to represent different ages, while the “disguise” in question is the same one that the nurse has been wearing for so long-the disguise of her role in social production!
The speaker has now begun to doubt her own place in the proper order of things now that she has been reminded of the temporary nature of all things corporeal. The nameless nurse thus becomes a psychological construct, a symbol of the mental stages of human development. In the Innocence version she is known to fulfill the historical role of women as the nurturers and protectors of children against grief, experience and “darkness,” but here she is more interested in scolding them from a moral standpoint. Blake’s criticism of the moralist thinking of the ruling ideology of the time becomes clear here. In the Experience version there is no differentiation between play and idleness, and it is important to realize that in the religious fundamentalist and moralist view “idle hands” were seen as sinful. In these times it is the older, more traditionalist people like the nurse who uphold such values.
But here is where readings of the texts diverge-is it possible that his dual-sided poem is even more telling and subtle than Blake intended? Is it possible that this very apparent and esoteric “meaning” of the text as an allegory of human mental stages is merely a distraction, a convenient set-aside for contemporary readers? Yes, the text is most likely an analysis of aging and growth, but clearly has a political subtext that is seditious to say the least! Whether Blake intended this layered reading is beside the point, since even if he did not, his own subconscious would compel him to write such rebellious words. The text suggests that the values of his audiences, particularly the royals, were not ready to handle an overt message, and was thus hidden beneath layers of language and double and triple-meanings.
The historical perspective of the economic standings of the characters is essential to understanding the underlying subtext presented. As is usual of Blake’s works, the lower economic groups and/or “ignored” social groups get the major focus. The children are most likely the sons and daughters of the ruling classes, and the nurse’s skills (whether these be as a wet-nurse or as a slave caretaker of children) make her a valuable commodity for those same classes. Indeed, upon the expenditure of small effort at further reading, one can easily see a mockery of Blake’s own class society.
For example, while it is true that her age is most likely a source of jealousy for the Experience nurse, more than anything her bitterness shows she has become alienated with her subservient role in society and is envious of the youth’s freedom. In capitalist society the traditional family unit-the nuclear family model including that of the wife and child-is a byproduct of a society based on property, accumulation and competition in which constant groups of people prevent excessive alienation and find themselves practical units for work and socialization. The nurse’s role as a surrogate and a slave is held in a very unquestioning manner in the Innocence version, where she instead chooses to focus on more cheerful facets of life. The world outside has become too commercial and too alienating, and her slave status in life has left her with a passionate desire for a return to the utopian past of her youth, personified in his poems by the frolicking children.
The nurse in Innocence is the hired and voluntary protector of the children from the horrors of the “night” of innocence, which will result in the children being exploited the same way she is. On some level she realizes this and tries to protect them from awful reality-the refuge taken by the nurse thus becomes a safe haven, a paradise of intimate human connection and happiness, making the economy of the objective situation easier for her to handle. The innocence of the children does not so much show methods of specific play (none are listed) rather than a certain kind of natural human interaction-one of harmony, attacking the capitalist idea of colonialist man as the “natural state” of humanity in general. This would be especially risky to say in the eighteenth century, when wealth and status was gained exclusively by colonialist methods between nations, classes and people alike. Blake puts forward a vision in Innocence of social interaction based on openness, not domination.
In the “red herring” interpretation of the text, the children become a symbol of development and the progress of the individual, “moving beyond” the alternating libertarian or strict and conservative nurse. While this can be applied to the nurse’s age group, this could be said also for the social relations of old, the very exploitive and feudal ones the nurse is used to and the children will someday reject and fight against. Thus Blake forms a “thesis-within-a-thesis” for his work, enabling him to communicate with the reader on both a psychological and revolutionary front.
Filed under: Anti-Colonialism, Art & Culture, Literary Criticism, Women's Rights
The main character Oothoon in The Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a liberation figure challenging not only male chauvinism and marriage but the institution of slavery and imperialism in general. The female protagonist Oothoon, a sex slave who is raped by the slave driver Bromion, is clearly made to represent both the fertile, virginal and innocent lands of the pre-colonialism New World and the oppression of the women of Blake’s time, who were, like slaves, treated as property of their husbands. In the course of his poem Oothoon becomes the ultimate symbol for liberation both as a woman and as a slave. Even though the author slyly created Oothoon as a European woman whose skin is described as “snow white” in order to elicit sympathy from European readers that a dark-skinned woman might not have received so heartily, she still becomes the voice of subjugated races.
Social conditioning is also examined as a force in society, since all three characters are chained (literally on the accompanying plates) by the conventions of the society they inhabit and the patriarchal, property-oriented and colonialist attitudes thereof. Bromion says explicitly to Oothoon, “Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun: They are obedient, they resist not[.]” The double meaning here is transparent.
The idea of people and land as property is also examined, since Theotormon as a lover and owner cares not whether Oothoon as a person is harmed, but rather about his own possession of her and what his failing to obtain such a prize means for himself. He symbolizes the insecurity and oppression of colonialist man—specifically his feeling that for himself to have any value he must enslave and oppress others. It is also not a coincidence that Bromion is sketched as being very masculine and powerful, the idealized man who delights in domination. Like most of Blake’s more revolutionary works, Visions of the Daughters of Albion communicates the social and political ills of the time without having a traditional ending or clear resolution—Blake ultimately places the responsibility for true change upon his observers of the Visions, his readers.
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence is often thought of as the lighter, happier of the two collections of poems known as the Songs, the other of course being its polar opposite—the Songs of Experience. Upon the first reading of the text this proves to be superficially true, in that the Innocence songs are more uplifting. Upon further inspection however, there is undeniably a dark cloud of foreshadowing hanging over the work. Almost no poem in the collection is completely free from darkness, even if the characters inside the text do not outwardly recognize it. The introduction seems happy enough, with a fanciful cherub figure instructing the narrator to write his song down on paper so that it might be preserved forever and “all may read.” The underlying acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of man-made creations boasts of an unusual maturity for a so-called “Song of Innocence.”
Soon after this, the verses of “The Ecchoing Green” subtlety speak of the process of aging and the passage of time by portraying a group of “old folk” reminiscing about their younger days when they played sports on the Green, which is now “darkening,” literally and figuratively. This disturbing trend continues with “The Blossom,” which contrasts contention with existence, personified in the happy sparrow, with suffering, personified by the sobbing robin. At the same time this depicts the two opposing views of society—the classes who benefit from it and those that suffer from it. The most infamous examples of this are “The Chimney Sweeper,” in which child laborers are comforted by the bourgeois idea “if all do their duty, they need not fear harm,” and “Holy Thursday,” in which Blake uses negative imagery of angels and metaphor to ridicule the pious idea of pity as a virtue. Class consciousness is considered to be a facet of “experience,” but the reader should remember that children are also aware of injustice, which Blake is aware of and shows to be so.
Fittingly, because of the hidden and gradual growth of righteous anger within the Songs of Innocence, the transition into the Songs of Experience does not feel like a sudden change from white to black, but rather a stage of natural progression—doubtlessly the author’s intention, as this concept of mental stages reflects accurately the actual stages of a person’s perception. Also like the Songs of Innocence, the Songs of Experience blend beautiful and haunting images from Blake’s imagination with references to the external world. More importantly, when taken together the pair acts as a united entity, at once showing the wonderfulness of innocence and the reality that if it is not cast off when experience and action is needed one can never reach their full development. The constant foreshadowing of the Songs of Innocence only maintains the notion that whether a people are innocent or not objective reality continues in all its injustice and he must eventually come to experience in order to bring about social change and revolution. The mention of social injustice by the characters within the Songs of Innocence only prove that their urges to fight injustice exist even in states of youth and that they will eventually recognize the need for maturity.
In the meantime, the transition can be painful for those experiencing—in the poem “Earth’s Answer” and preceding introduction, a bard calls to the earth to return, only to be greeted by a planet with “locks covered in grey despair.” This illustrates the natural longing for a return to a more innocent time once one has reached the age of experience and at the same time tears asunder the idea that the earth, and not our own vision, was fundamentally different before. In “The Clod and the Pebble,” Blake examines the enormous duality of love, first by showing the almost altruist feelings of affection, the idea of love “for another [giving] its ease,” and making “a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” then by showing the individualist perception of affection by saying that “love seeketh only self to please/ to bind another to its delight.” The speaker is interested in the realities of love, not the fantasies of it.
The recognition of institutionalized wickedness reappears stronger than ever in the second “Holy Thursday.” Blake rants and rages in blunt terms about poverty and class division, the fields of the poor “bleak and bare” and England portrayed as “eternal winter.” Another sequel comes later in the form of “The Chimney Sweeper,” in which another child chimney sweeper has been abandoned in the cold by his mother and father, who have gone to worship and pray in a church—a bitter and brutal portrayal of the passivity instilled in people of modern religion, who ignore actually social ills in favor of the “God is in heaven and all is right with the world attitude.” Despite the apparent division of the opposing titles, William Blake’s Songs both communicate the same thing, the only difference being a variation in subtlety.
