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Universidade de So Paulo
Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Cincias Humanas
Departamento de Letras Modernas
Trabalho para disciplina Introduo ao Romance
Profa. Dra. Sandra Guardini T. Vasconcelos
1 semestre de 2014

A Waving Journey
Some problems in the heroic turns in Walter Scotts Waverley

By Alexandre Lopes Rabelo de Morais

I.

In 1745, Henry Fielding had not yet published his canonical novel Tom
Jones, but he was already well known in Great Britain for his political and social
satires presented in his dramas and first novels, for whose he was even
persecuted. His critical positions against the Whigs hegemony at the Parliament
brought him some troubles. Even if he was a liberal and a progressist like the
Whigs, he was very sensitive to the injustices made by the elite of his time
against the general population of his nation. For all those reasons, we could
expect that in 1745 Fielding would pronounce some sardonic considerations
about the Jacobite uprising that was course in that year, when the English army,
under the Whigs interests, was organized to put an end to the Tory movements
in the borders of Scotland, leading by Charles Edward Stuart, the Great
Pretender, who was claiming for a conservative Kingdom lost in the Glorious
Revolution of 1688.
We could expect from Fielding a satire directed to both sides of the
conflict, for he was not a Whig, but much less a Tory. However, soon after the
first military campaigns, Fielding would publish a pamphlet called The History of
the Present Rebellion in Scotland, for the price of one shilling, in which we can
read these furious and humourless words:

The present Rebellion is a Matter of such Consequence to this country, and must so seriously
engage the attention of every Briton who hath the least regard either to his own real Good, or
the Welfare of his Posterity, that I shall make no Apology for the present Undertaking; in which
my reader may be assured, that as the utmost pains have been taken to procure the best
Intelligence, so he may safely rely on the Truth of the Facts related.

The seriousness of those declarations can be better understood if we
consider the menace that the Jacobites represented to the unity of Great
Britain, recently firmed in the Act of Union of 1707, by which the Scottish
Parliament had been incorporated to the English Parliament. Even if Fielding
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was not what we could call a governist, he was a nationalist after all.
Throughout the Modern Age, it was clear to everyone interested in politics that
great investments, necessary to survive at a global level, was only possible to be
undertaken by strong nations. Under this ideology, both English and Scottish
progressive elites had peacefully signed the Act of Union soon after the
bourgeois revolution, putting an end to a conflict that was formerly faced as a
dispute between Catholics and Anglicans.
However, those economical determinations had not be taken without
consequences for many social groups. On the one hand, it is easy to understand
for what the conservative Stuart dynasty was fighting for, but on the other hand
we could ask ourselves for what the traditional clans in the Highlands was
fighting for. Under the Stuart era, they were not a prominent group, and they
had been losing many lands for the Lowland nobility. Even before, under the
power of the Tudors, their traditional social organization had been constantly
menaced by the land reform represented by the enclosures created by Elizabeth
I in order to optimize the agriculture. So, for what cause the Highlanders had
been fighting on the side of the conservative royalists represented by the figure
of Charles Stuart?
A way to answer to that question is by understanding it on the cultural
level of mentality. The Highlanders represented the oldest form of social
organization in the British rising empire, so they was trying to resist to the
nefarious consequences of the new economic model lead the bourgeoisie by
allying themselves with the oldest type of government that they knew, even if
they would have to pay the price of some other form of subjugation. Mutatis
mutandi, we can observe the same phenomenon in the history of Brazil when,
in colonial times, the tamoios and tupinambs clans aligned themselves with the
French in order to face the Portuguese domination supported by the tupis.
For the mentality of a progressist English as Fielding, even if he was
sensitive to social causes, the Highlanders was an excrescency in all senses, as if
we can attest in the following sentences also present in his quoted pamphlet:

Such is the nature of this cause, and of the spirit with it is conducted; head by a young, rash
ambitious, fiery zealot, under the absolute government and guidance of furious, enraged
priests, who breath nothing but blood and desolation, and have so effectually breathed their
horrid principles into the poor wild wretches under their influence and command, that the
whole army, according to Macpherson, and others who have seen it, is liker to a legion of devils
than of men. May God confine them to their own borders, or if they attempt to overleap them,
inspire this nation with a spirit sufficient soon to drive them out of her own bowels, in which
they would quickly become the most violent and mortal disease.

For the purpose of this essay, it is enough to remember, after those
words of Fieding, that the Jacobite final defeat in 1745 represented, among
other things, a final permission to a new model of imperialism that would be
undertaken by English elites all along the next century, under a civilizational
ideology.
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II.

In 1805, when Walter Scott, noble by birth and magistrate by profession,
decided to adventure himself in writing a novel called Waverley, or Tis Sixty
Years Since, the world was very different from that one where Fielding
published his pamphlet.
Napoleonic wars was in course. In comparison to English History, the
bourgeois revolution in continental Europe was late for about a century, but in
the two processes, the experiment of a republican government was fragile. The
case of France was more acute, and Napoleon had received the support of
French bourgeoisie to impose himself as emperor. Differently from the
parliamentarian twist in England one century before, the new global industrial
economy would not permit to firm a bourgeois supremacy isolated in just one
country. For that reason, the battle against the Ancien Rgime was not to be
played locally as in England, but all over Europe.
Despite the participation of England as the great opponent of France
during all the period of Napoleons offensives, in the first years of war the acts
of British government restrained to help militarily the nations that would have
the power to contain the French advances, such as Spain and Portugal. The
British naval force was imposing and sufficient to keep calm on the Islands.
Under the relative power of the German House of Hannover, open to the
commercial routes over the North Sea, the British government was even
expecting the disaggregation of others German Kingdoms by the Napoleonic
forces.
Internally, the parliament was now under the Tory supremacy, and this
hegemony would endure for about three decades. Evidently, the Tories were no
longer a simple royalist party who disliked the bourgeois economy. The
industrial revolution was feeding British economy day by day, and this path was
uncontested and without return. However, the conservative vision of the Tories
was more appropriate to an economy less open to the quarrelsome continent,
and it was based in cooperation between the bourgeoisie and some aristocratic
families.
This passage from a Whig government to a Tory prominence would
certainly not go unnoticed to a magistrate and Scottish noble as Walter Scott.
For decades his ancestors, allied to the Tory party, had fought for more
participation in English economy, and one way to do so was participating in the
foundations of new laws, which were meant to be more appropriated for the
new times and restrain centralized power.
But even if the Tories were then leading the situation, the social and
economic condition in Scotland were the same. Scott was very attached to the
traditional cultures of his country and they were increasingly in process of
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disaggregation due the economic pressures implemented by both dominant
parties.
It is not illicit to say that this disappointing political change in the British
Government, from the point of view of Scottish people, as well as the French
Revolution and its universalistic and humanitarian laws based on the power of
terror, war and guillotine, would have put Walter Scott in a professional and
political crisis which pushed him to the realisation of his ancient dream: to write
a novel about another model of social conviviality, that one of the Scottish
traditional culture. Lukcs, in his essay The Historical Novel, where Walter
Scotts novels, especially Waverley, play a major role, note acutely on this point:

A relativa estabilidade do desenvolvimento ingls nessa poca conturbada, em
comparao com o continente, possibilitou que o sentimento histrico recm-despertado
pudesse se condensar em uma forma grandiosa, objetiva e pica. Essa objetividade
intensificada pelo conservadorismo de Walter Scott. Com sua nova viso de mundo, ele
permanece fortemente ligado s camadas da sociedade arruinadas pela Revoluo Industrial,
pelo rpido desenvolvimento do capitalismo. Scott no faz parte nem dos entusiastas do
desenvolvimento nem de seus apaixonados e patticos contestadores. Por meio da
investigao de todo o desenvolvimento ingls, procura encontrar um caminho mediano
entre os extremos em luta. (p.48)

Scott would represent this median path in his hero, Waverley, whose
name is already a position of this statement. As he says in Chapter I:

I assumed for my hero, WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of
good or evil, excepting what the reader shall hereafter be pleased to affix it.

Scott is ironically softening his choice for his heros name, for it is obvious
that the reader would affix to this name the verb wave, which can signify,
according to Oxford Dictionary, move or sway to and fro while remaining fixed
to one point.
If we follow the reflexion launched by Lukcs, this one point in which
Waverley is hypothetically fixed is a posture of indecision or neutrality kept by
someone who is the middle of a historical crisis, and this characteristic would
have esthetical consequences in the formation of paradigmatic Historical Novel:

O destino que cabe ao heri mediano, que na grande crise de seu tempo no se alia a nenhuma
das partes em conflito, pode fornecer facilmente, do ponto de vista da composio, esse elo.
Tomemos o exemplo mais conhecido. Waverley um nobre ingls que, apesar de pertencer a
uma famlia a favor dos Stuart, no demonstra por eles mais que uma simpatia serena e
politicamente incua. Durante sua estada na Esccia como oficial, Waverley levado por suas
amizades e aventuras amorosas para o campo dos proslitos revoltosos dos Stuart. Em
consequncia de suas antigas relaes de famlia e de sua indeciso quanto a envolver-se na
rebelio suficiente para uma corajosa participao militar, mas no para uma tomada de
partido fantica -, ele mantm as relaes com o partido hannoveriano. Desse modo, o destino
de Waverley bastante apropriado para resultarem uma trama cujo desenrolar no apenas
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apresenta a luta dos dois partidos, mas tambm nos aproxima humanamente dos
representantes mais importantes de ambos os lados. (p. 53)

However, Lukcs does not clarify why Waverley would have merely this
serene sympathy for his ancestors, sentiment that would put him almost in an
apathy concerning the political and social crisis that he was about to experience
so closely. We could also argue that Lukcs simplify the participation of
Waverley in the Jacobite Rebellion by saying that he did so under the influence
of friends and romantic adventures, as if being neutral or waving would mean
simply being someone implausibly passive, when we all know that even
neutrality or passiveness is an engagement that hides something more, some
programed alienation, as the same Lukcs would observe in his important
Marxist study History and Class Counsciousness.
For this discussion, we must look Waverleys journey with more detail, in
a way that was not the purpose of Lukcs in the general scope of his seminal
essay The Historical Novel.

III.

The first fact that we must mobilize in order to discuss the supposed
neutrality of Waverley as a hero, as well as that of the narrators point of view,
is the Scotts choice to publish his novel in anonymity. In his further general
preface to the cycle of Waverley Novels, Scott justifies that choice alleging some
discretion necessary in his metier. If the novel were to be considered neutral
from the political point of view, what would be the problem in revealing its
authorship? One could argue that being a novelist at that time was not
necessarily a prestigious position for a lawyer, but this argument may not be
seriously considered if we remember many cases of important politicians,
moralists, magistrates and freethinkers whose prestige was increased by their
novelistic productions since early times in the history of English Novel, such as
Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, all of them previously well established as public
figures. Anonymity was traditional since the previous century for oeuvres
frankly polemic in their content, such as Therse Philosophe in France.
The representation of Scottish traditions must neither be considered as
threatening to the bourgeois society. Scott had the example of Miss Maria
Edgeworth, who had attained a considerable success by his novels representing
Irish manners. However, in that case, the aim pursued by Edgeworth was mainly
satirize what she and the English progressist groups considered as a bad land
administration made by the traditional Irish farmers. In addition to this point of
view, the work of this novelist was represent a time that was definitely gone,
represented as a type of folkloric memoir.
Such was Walter Scotts aim in the beginning of his project, by the year of
1805, before he would abandon his manuscripts for almost a decade. It is not by
chance that the first chapters of Waverley was more a descriptive study than
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properly a novel. If we bring to this discussion another important study written
by Lukcs, Narrate or Describe, we could consider those first chapters of Scotts
novel as a formalist description of the previous world experienced by Waverley.
Strongly schematic, almost fake, without any dialogue or direct discourse, the
narrator presents us his hero as totally distanced from his point of view. We
could argue that Scotts narration had assumed this almost hygienized point of
view, typical of a narrator completely out of situation, according the discussion
of Henry James, for the purpose of not compromising himself, in his condition of
bourgeois magistrate, while he describes a very polemical situation of a young
man whose family is divided between a Whig and a Tory branch.
No critical study consulted for this essay seems to consider the first
Scotts novel by the contradictions between the times represented in it and the
times where the novel have been written. It would be of great interest to the
first readers of Waverley that the heros father was almost indifferent to his son
due his ambitions at the Whig Party in those times sixty years since, even if he
was a noble Scottish man by birth, whose family was traditionally linked to the
Tories and his royalists pretentions. The world described has much more to do
with the times of Napoleonic wars, when both sides of English Parliaments are
interested, with few differences, in a liberal internationalization of English
industrialism. Those twists and turns in the same family denotes as well the
confusion established by Napoleon wars and the French revolution in regard to
what is revolutionary or emancipating and what is despotic and conservative.
This hypothesis is reinforced when we are given to know, by the middle of the
novel, that Waverleys father is being judged by fraud. The first readers of the
novel would be very possibly attentive to the series of scandals involving cases
of corruption that associated in the same manoeuvre members of the Tory and
Whig parties. William Pitt, the Prime Minister during the period of French
Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, a Tory by formation, called himself an
"independent Whig" and was generally opposed to the development of a strict
partisan political system.
If we consider the Tory branch of the Waverly family, it is flagrant the
way Scott highlights their relations with the French nobility, persecuted by
Napoleon by the time the novel was written.
Thus, considering the novel by some of those illuminating anachronisms
waged by its author, we can recompose some of the interest that those issues
would have caused among the large public that this work mobilized.


IV.

Notwithstanding those political backgrounds, which must have
contributed to the unprecedented success of his publication, we are allowed to
say that the centre of interest of Scotts novel is the representation of
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traditional Scottish culture in all its ranges, from the more civilized groups,
such as the Lowland families, educated in classical culture and associated to the
Ancien Rgime, to the Highland groups, which were divided in estate
proprietary families and wandering groups, such as the marauders.
The narrative strategy adopted by Scott is a certain parallelism between a
journey into space and a journey into time. After the few first chapters which
are more descriptive, the reader follows a narrative where the hero goes from
south to north, and from present to past.
In the initial chapters, we are given to know the previous history of
Waverley family as well as Edwards personal education. From the beginning,
Scott seems to emulate the structure of a Bildung Romance, when we are given
to know that Waverley has an oscillating educational trajectory which is divided
between London, where he receives a formal and urban education, and the
estate of Waverley-Honour, where he passes half a year, in contact to simple
men and the pleasures of nature and solitude. This oscillation will have
consequences in his character, since he doesnt feel completely comfortable in
any of these two ambiances. Waverley is very simple for the town and very
educated for the country. Perceiving that dilemma, his father and uncle would
accord to engage Waverley in the British Army, where he could know the world
and the valour of discipline.
The space and time where he seems to be more comfortable is the virtual
world of romance. The comparison with Don Quijote is inevitable, and the
narrator is attentive to that point, marking some differences. In truth, we learn
by his further journey that Waverley will contrast his former education to the
real experiences of love and war. A certain falling from his initial naivety,
important experience to turn him into a decisive bourgeois, can be compared to
that of Goethes Wilhelm Meister, the Buildung Romance for excellence. We will
return to this point further. For now, wed like to notice that Waverleys literary
repertoire, listed in Chapter III, is a curious anachronism, for it is mainly
composed by authors and books important to the generation in which we can
include Scott and his friend Lord Byron:

In English literature he was master of Shakespeare and Milton, of our earlier dramatic authors,
of many picturesque and interesting passages from our old historical chronicles, and was
particularly well acquainted with Spencer, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised
themselves on romantic fiction, of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination,
before the passions have roused themselves and demand poetry of a more sentimental
description. In this respect, his acquaintance with Italian opened him yet a wider range. He had
perused the numerous romantic poems, which, from the days of Pulci, have been a favourite
exercise of the wits of Italy, and had sought gratification in the numerous collections of novella,
with were brought forth by the genius of that elegant though luxurious nation, in emulation of
the Decameron. In classical literature, Waverley had made the usual authors; and the French
had afforded him and almost exhaustless collection of memoirs, scarcely more faithful than
romances, and of romances so well written as hardly to be distinguished from memoirs. The
splendid pages of Froissart, with his heart-stirring and eye-dazzlings descriptions of war and
tournaments were among his chief favourites; and from those of Brantome and De la Noue he
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learned to compare the wild and loose, yet superstitious, character of nobles of the League
with the stern, rigid, and sometimes turbulent disposition of the Huguenot party. The Spanish
had contributed to his stock of chivalrous and romantic lore. The earlier literature of the
northern nations did not escape the study of one who read rather to awaken the imagination
than to benefit the understanding. And yet, knowing much that is known not to few, Edward
Waverley might justly be considered as ignorant, since he knew little of what adds dignity to
man, and qualifies him to support and adorn an elevated situation in society.

Edwards sensibility is that of Romanticism, turned to past, mostly to
medieval history. So was Scott himself, and even if his narration declares in
many moments that his book is not a simple pastiche of romance, it is
productive to an analysis of his work to think how the romances of chivalry
influenced the narrative structure of Waverley. Even if Walter Scotts novels can
be mostly analysed by their place in development of realistic novel, following
the thoughts of Lukcs, Ian Watt and Auerbach, among others, it is also true
that he mobilizes different traditions as that of romance. Skipping to an
adventure to another, with many scenes of hospitality, courteous love and
physical danger, Scotts novel owes a lot to that cultural and literary tradition.
But as we have suggested above, Waverley is trapped between two worlds, one
modern and other ancient, or more precisely, hes searching his way between a
mythical and an historical sensibility, according to Lukcs in his Theory of the
Novel. Thus, it is important evaluate how Scott mingle those different literary
traditions and the effect that he produces in it.
On this point, wed like to discuss two big issues in the novel, love and
war. First of all, the representation of the two damsels for whom Edward
believes to be fallen in love, Rose Bradwardine and Flora MacIvor. With their
floral names, both seem to be opposing sides of the same ideal type in the
tradition of romance. We could compare these counterparts to the christianised
versions of the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde. In the later version of that
myth, we are presented to two Isoldes, one blond, with a clear character, closer
to Christianity, like Rose; and another one, with dark hair, obscure intentions,
closer to magical traditions, responsible to help the hero to find his way, like
Flora. Both Rose and Flora studied together in France and are close friends.
Rose is more civilized, shes a Lowlander expecting to marry a good proprietor
of lands. But in a novel like Waverley, placed between two worlds, shes not just
a simple romantic damsel, being a little more active, practical or even
independent, as a good protestant woman:

Rose Bradwardine, beautiful and amiable as we have described her, had not precisely the sort
of beauty or merit which captivates a romantic imagination in early youth. She was too frank,
too confiding, too kind; amiable qualities, undoubtedly, but destructive of the marvellous, with
which a youth of imagination delights to dress the empress of his affections. Was it possible to
bow, to tremble, and to adore, before the timid, yet playful little girl, who now asked Edward to
mend her pen, now to construe a stanza in Tasso, and how to spell a very very long word in
her version of it? All these incidents have their fascination on the mind at a certain period of
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life, but not when a youth is entering it, and rather looking out for some object whose affection
may dignify him in his own eyes than stooping to one who looks up to him such distinction.

One the contrary of Rose, Flora MacIvor is someone immersed in the
ancient Celtic traditions. As member of an important Highlander family in
disaggregation, shes a keeper of old tradition. On her, Edward projects all the
final excrescencies of his romantic disposition. He promises his love to her, but
shes compromised with the history and destiny of her people. Condescending
to his imagination, she tries to seduce him for the cause of war, and for that
purpose, she leads him to the experience of an idyllical scene, one of the turning
points of the novel, in chapter XXII:

Here, like one of those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Poussin, Waverley found
Flora gazing on the waterfall. Two paces further back stood Cathleen, holding a small Scottish
harp, the use of which had been taught to Flora by Rory Dall, one of the last harpers of the
Western Highlands. The sun, now stooping in the west, gave a rich and varied tinge to all the
objects which surrounded Waverley, and seemed to add more than human brilliancy to the full
expressive darkness of Floras eye, exalted the richness and purity of her complexion, and
enhanced the dignity and grace of her beautiful form. Edward thought he had never, even in his
wildest dreams, imagined a figure of such exquisite and interesting loveliness. The wild beauty
of then retreat, bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled feeling of delight and
awe with which he approached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto, by whose nod
the scenery around seemed to have been created an Eden in the wilderness.

But theres no more time for dreaming. The war is close. Even if Edward
admires the passion that involved the members of Highland clans for the cause
of the Great Pretender, at Glennaquoich, all the experiences that he passes
through, from the beginning of the novel to the first battles, are lived by him
with a certain distance. In a way, Edward is the eye of the common reader,
civilized, occupied with his prosaic world. In the beginning of the novel, the
routine of his military training deceives him, not only because his romantic
disposition expected more, but because the English Army were too formal, just
another face of the world that he had already known. From his journey to the
Bradwardine estate, Tully-Veolan, at the Lowlands, to Glennaquoich at the
Highlands, passing through the convivence with the Catarans at the Kings
Cavern, with the Highland marauders, hes always involved until a certain point.
Hes an observer, as the reader.
However, we can suspect that, like the major modern heroes, hes a little
bit demonical, he wants more, even if hes too good or too nave to be
ambitious. He enjoys the journey for the search, but in any case he must search
for something, he has such impulse. For him, the meaning of life is not in any
specific cause. However, his supposed love for Flora and his brother, Fergus, a
passionate partisan, in addition to the deception he suffers with his fathers
fraud and the bad consequences of his desertion in the English Army, lead him
to decide to engage himself in the war, side by side with his new friends.
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Participating the war is not exactly a political decision, but a way to decide what
is good for him in an historical level.
Lukcs observes the role of the new model of war, created by Napoleon,
but also by Cromwell, in the creation of a new conscious of history, in this last
movement of passage from the mythical sensibility to a historical consciousness:

Em sua guerra defensiva contra a coalizo das monarquias absolutas, a Repblica Francesa foi
forada a criar exrcitos de massa. No entanto, a diferena entre os exrcitos mercenrios e os
de massa qualitativa e diz respeito precisamente relao estabelecida com a massa da
populao. Se se trata de formar um exrcito de massas, em vez de recrutar pequenos
contingentes de marginais para o servio militar ou fora-los a servir, ento o contedo e a
finalidade da guerra tm de ser expostos populao de maneira clara, na forma de
propaganda. (...) Essa propaganda, no entanto, no pode limitar-se a uma nica guerra
isolada. Ela tem de revelar o contedo social, os pressupostos histricos e as circunstncias da
luta, estabelecer a conexo da guerra com a vida em sua totalidade e com as possibilidades de
desenvolvimento da nao. (P.39)

In that sense, Scotts novel has a didactical role, the same that Tolstoy
would embrace in his major work War and Peace. Its not by chance that Scott
retake the writing of his novel in the crucial moments of the Napoleonic Wars,
in the decade of 1810. It was the case to discuss English nationalism by
highlighting the historical formation of Great Britain, giving voice not only to the
capitalist forces, but to a voiceless population which was in the origin of an
authentic sense of patriotism, as the highlanders did, mostly because they were
not fighting for imperialism expansion or for an idea, but in defence of their
lands, as Scott expected the British would do, facing Napoleon. This statement
can be confirmed by the poem Patriotism, written by Scott in other occasion:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.
So is Scotts vision that all his narrative concerning the battles between
the Jabobites and the English forces is written in the sense of revealing not who
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side is better or fairer, but in the sense of revealing, on individual level, who is
honoured and who is betrayer, for example.
Edward, according to his median character, keep himself considerably
modest in his participation in the war. When the Stuart pretender wants to give
him more responsibilities under a better post, for example, he modestly refuses.
It is not his war, anyway, hes only a supporter. During the battles twists and
turns, his participation is mostly in the order of discourse. Hes always trying to
clarify misunderstandings between the parts. That is because the narrative
focus in the battle chapters is not Waverley, but the war in itself, and it was the
interest of the readers of that time to know in details what is exactly a war, and
how it affects their lives in different levels, in a way that a simple pamphlet, like
that one of Fielding, would not be sufficient. But a novel would have this
political power at that time.
So is the truth that this novels end is not the predicable marriage
between Edward and Flora, but a final chapter where Scott, after his long and
didactical novel could confidently say:

There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century or little more, has
undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of
1745, - the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs, - the abolition of the
heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons, - the total eradication of the Jacobite
party, which, averse to intermingle with the English, or adopt their customs, long continued to
pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners and customs, - commenced this
innovation. The gradual influx of wealth and extension of commerce have since united to
render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as
the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeths time. () This race has now almost
entirely vanished from the land, and with it, doubtless, much absurd political prejudice also
many living examples of singular and disinterested attachment to the principles of loyalty
which they received from their fathers, and of old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour.

Nowadays, mostly in a country like Brazil where the natural rights of
Indians are far from being preserved, a position like that of Walter Scott in his
first novel is difficult to be judged as conservative, opinion that Lukcs
contributed to disseminate. We must not forget that all great thinkers have
their limits, and one limit of Lukcs thought was the sovietic imperialism,
imposed to a large range of traditional communities, like the Siberian traditional
clans.
The communities we imagine as being our natural nations are always
problematic constructions, according to Benedict Anderson. Scott has produced
a new form in novel development by giving a modern and historical approach to
subjects that, under the bourgeois ideology, were relegated to the domain of
folklore and romance, as a world already gone. In Scotts novel, history and
myth come together to problematize a world that must not been seen by the
simple opposition between ancient and modern, but a culture which is formed
simultaneously by different temporalities, as suggest Perry Anderson in his
essay Modernity and Revolution. Under the same problematization, we could
12

propose similar analysis for other important novels such as Emily Brontes
Wuthering Heights, Conrads Heart of Darkness and even Rosas Grande Serto:
veredas. For it is true that many important novelists have been discussing in
their works those issues involved in the relation between progress, modernity
and imperialism.


13

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