EN1004: Explorers and Revolutionaries

Essay 2 – Dr Kristen Treen

‘Whatever else it is, [‘Tam o’ Shanter’] is a poem about gender, gender roles and sexuality.’ How

does Burns represent masculinity in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, and to what end?

Tam O’ Shanter (1790), by Robert Burns is a poem in thrall to lower-class masculinity in Scotland: to

the misogynistic band of brothers that dominate the pub-scene in the opening stanza and define the

landscape around Ayr; to a sense of manhood defined predominantly through opposition and exclusion

of the female other, as manifested both by the coven of witches and Tam’s wife Kate. Burns’ use of

juxtaposed imagery, symbolism, the self-other binary, and dual narrative construct rural masculine

identity in direct opposition to the feminine, stressing the dominance of men within this hierarchical

relationship. As James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome were to put it some one hundred and seventy

years later:

‘This is a man’s world, a man’s world,

But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.’ 1

In his 1818 lectures on Burns, contemporary William Hazlitt described Tam O’Shanter as ‘[a

story] of patriarchal simplicity and gravity in describing the old national character of the Scottish

peasantry.’2 It is this ‘patriarchal simplicity’ that first greets the reader in the poem’s opening location,

the public-house where ‘we sit bousing at the nappy’ (line 5).3 The masculine ‘we’ includes the narrator,

protagonist, Burns, and the reader – thus establishing its masculine audience to be much like that

assembled in the pub – at the expense and exclusion of Kate, the ‘sulky sullen dame’ (line 10), whose

domestic setting is juxtaposed, and literally isolated, from the society of men. In addition to denoting

ale, knap or ‘nappy’, from the 16th century onwards came to mean ‘the point of the elbow’, suggesting

equality between the men, and indeed the reader, sat elbow-to-elbow with one another, this brotherly

1
It's a Man's Man's Man's World, by James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome, produced by James Brown, King,
1966, LP.
2
William Hazlitt, Hazlitt Lectures on Burns, 1818, in Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald A. Low
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp.302-3.
3
All quotations from Tam O’Shanter taken from Robert Burns, Tam O'Shanter, 1790, in Robert Burns: Selected
Poems, ed. Donald A. Low, Everyman's Poetry (London: Everyman Paperbacks, 1996).

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bond later made explicit, with ‘at [Tam’s] elbow, Souter Johnny’ (line 41). 4 This fraternal atmosphere

is furthered by Tam’s flirtations with the landlord’s wife as:

‘The landlady and Tam grew gracious,

Wi’ favours, secret, sweet and precious’ (lines 47-8)

The landlady is marked out as the sole woman in the pub-scene, but is portrayed not as an equal, sitting

elbow-to-elbow with the men, but rather at their service and as the subject of their objectification. In

his own life, Burns was a member of a number of fraternal societies, including the Freemasons, who

met at a room in his local public-house, and employed a local girl to undress during meetings in which

according to Crawford ‘masturbation and phallic exhibitionism’ were a staple, presenting her ‘simply

as a sexual object’ in much the same way that Burns portrays the landlady.5 Indeed, Burns renders the

objectification of women inherent to the masculinity of Tam and the other rural men, when Tam

involuntarily “roars out, ‘Weel done, Cutty-sark!’” (line 189) upon observing the coven of witches at

Kirk-Alloway; ‘cutty-sark’ denoting a short skirt, or lingerie from the late 18th century, and used by

Tam in place of Nannie’s name.6

The power over women this suggests, is further evoked by the domination of men over the

traditionally female landscape. On his way home, Tam rides by ‘Whare, in the snaw, the chapman

smoor’d’(line 90, smoor’d denoting suffocation in a blizzard); ‘Whare drunken Charlie brak’s neck-

bane’ (line 92);‘Whare hunters fand the murder’d bairn’ (line 94); and ‘Whare Mungo’s mither hang’d

herself,’ (line 96).7 Each of these local landmarks are defined by their relationship to men: either the

sites of natural male death, or of violence, in turn related to a man. The ‘murder’d bairn’ is known only

through its relationship to the male hunters; whilst St. Mungo’s mother, St. Thaney, is identified only

by relation to her son, the patron saint of Glasgow. St. Thaney is acknowleged as the first recorded

4
The Concise Scots Dictionary, ed. Mairi Robinson (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985), s.v. “knap,”
p.346.
5
Robert Crawford, "Robert Fergusson's Robert Burns," in Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p.10.
6
The Concise Scots Dictionary, s.v. “cutty sark,” pp.130-131.
7
Ibid., s.v. “smuir &c,” p.637.

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victim of rape in Scotland, further establishing brutal sexual dominance over women, and the

environment, as a hallmark of Burns’ country masculinity.8

Further, Burns portrays the rural man as deeply patriotic, therefore establishing nationalism and

politics as important to masculinity, a thread Thomas Paine would pick up in The Rights of Man just

one year later, and a further sphere from which women were excluded. Burns describes Tam riding

steadfast:

‘Whiles holding fast his gude blue bonnet;

Whiles crooning o’er some auld Scots sonnet’.

‘Blue bonnet’ refers to the ‘flat topped cap without a peak’ commonly worn by lowland Scots labourers,

and can thus be taken to symbolise the myth of the labouring-class Scottish man, which in these lines

Burns typifies.9 Tam, ever the patriotic Scot, is thus ‘holding fast’ to his rural heritage as he progresses

through changes to his environment, just as Burns wished Scots to retain their heritage following the

1707 Union of the Parliaments, indeed Tam O’Shanter is itself an effort to preserve such heritage,

derived from a folk tale of Ayr, not dissimilar to Tam’s ‘auld Scots sonnet’, and preserved by Burns in

poetic form. Thus the narrator stresses the importance of the nation, and of history and heritage to shape

the Scottish man: portraying ‘a man’s world’, with masculinity as a brotherhood: defined by patriotism

and heritage, hegemony over women and the landscape, and brazen sexuality.10

However, much of the meaning attributed to masculinity throughout the poem comes from its

opposition to, and fear of, the female other. This is most evident in Burns’ description of the

supernatural at Kirk-Alloway, where Tam witnesses ‘Warlocks and witches in a dance’ (line 115).

Whilst the modern reader may read ‘warlock’ as the male equivalent to the female ‘witch’, in the 18th

century it denoted both men and women, and therefore lacked the masculinity the poem has so far

sought to celebrate.11 Indeed, the ceilidh at the Kirk is directly juxtaposed to the male-dominated pub,

firmly rooted in the secrets and rituals of the witches, of women, with only one man present, ‘auld Nick’

8
John Durkan, “What’s in a Name? Thaney or Enoch?” The Innes Review 51 no. 1 (2000): p.80.
9
The Concise Scots Dictionary, s.v. “blue~bonnet,” p.50.
10
It’s a Man’s Man’s World.
11
The Concise Scots Dictionary, s.v. “warlock &c,” p.772.

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(line 120), who is not rendered an equal. We are told that ‘To gie them music was his charge’ (line 122),

establishing Satan as in service to the women, furthered by the denotation of ‘charge’ as commitment

to internment.12 The aforementioned sexual overtones of the dance, rousing Tam to verbally exclaim,

attest to the sexuality of the women’s worship of the Devil; thus he and the witches serve as counterpoint

to the landlady and her punters, clearly defining masculinity and fraternity, the self, through opposition

to the repressed female other. This is furthered by Burns’ description of the witches pursuing Tam ‘as

bees bizz out wi’ angry fyke’ (line 193), with the hive the realm of the Queen bee, ruling over her male

workers, and thus symbolising the threat of female dominance which is the driving force behind the

poem’s plot: fear of female dominance and emasculation keeping Tam drinking late, and from returning

home to Kate’s sphere; and after the encounter at the Kirk driving him homeward in order to escape the

witches. Indeed, many critics have seen – as List does – the loss of Tam’s mare’s tail, as a symbolic

emasculation at the hands of the witches, thereby stressing the value of restraint on male sexuality, to

ward the reader from such a predicament as Tam’s:

‘Ae spring brought off her master hale,

But left behind her ain greay tail’ (line 216).13

However, Tam’s mare is not just an extension of himself, but a separate female entity that suffers for

his transgressions and is subservient. Rather than warning Tam to heed his wife’s advice, the loss of

Maggie’s tail can thus be read to assert male dominance over, and opposition to, the female other

represented by the witches. Neither they nor Kate are vindicated: the coven fails to exact revenge for

Tam’s intrusion, and Kate’s prophecy of ‘deep drown[ing] in Doon’ (line 30), fails to come true. The

loss of the phallic symbol of the tail thereby symbolises the inherent subjectivity of women to men

within the gender hierarchy, marking women as ‘other’ by genitalia, thus stressing difference to women

as a key tenet of masculinity.

In depicting what today might be deemed toxic masculinity in a dual narrative that moves

between what at the time was deemed low-brow Scots and a more restrained high-brow English, Burns

12
Ibid., s.v. “chairge &c,” p.90.
13
Nigel Leask, "Robert Burns," in The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. Gerrald Carruthers and
Liam McIlvanney, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p.81.

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deliberately obscures his narrative voice, thus leaving its moral open to two juxtaposed readings in the

closing line, ‘Remember Tam O’ Shanter’s mare’ (line 224). On one hand Burns attempts to celebrate

and reinvent a highly-sexualised mythic Scottish masculinity, ridiculing the well-to-do Kirk and

unionist society for whom it was commissioned, adopting an almost pretentious mock-English tone in

the similes of stanza seven, beginning ‘But pleasures are like poppies spread’ (line 59), whilst keeping

narrative distance to avoid censorship and irresectability. The moral of poem is then that man’s

hegemonic power is unlimited, that he can do what he pleases. Indeed, Tam’s name, like those of the

other living characters, is italicised until the final line, where it appears unitalicized, drawing

comparison to the demonic creatures the poem describes, with Tam transcending the confines of reality

to become a mythic legend. Yet the Standard-Scottish-English voice throughout the poem distances

itself from what it renders a comic retelling of the local folk story, suggesting scorn for what was at the

time, and remains (though for very different reasons), the vulgar masculinity of perceived social

inferiors. It is this voice which, though just as misogynistic, lends itself to List’s reading of Tam’s

symbolic emasculation: warning of the dangers of unchecked male sexuality, and placing emphasis on

restraint from the various vices Tam pursues, in accordance with Kirk morality. In pursuing these two

narratives - one broadly nationalist, one broadly unionist – Burns therefore succeeds in capturing what

Davis terms the inherent ‘doubleness’ of the nation following Union, mirroring the differing viewpoints

of the labouring and upper-class men for whom it was simultaneously intended. 14

In conclusion, Tam O’ Shanter celebrates rural masculinity as a sexualised, nationalistic

fraternity, whilst simultaneously ridiculing such a definition as brutish and vulgar. Whilst these readings

present two very different morals – of urged self-restraint, and celebrated hegemony – they nevertheless

agree that masculinity derives meaning in the poem from the objectification, exclusion, and otherness

of women: speaking of a man’s world given meaning by opposition to a woman or a girl.

Word Count: 1,889

14
Davis, Leith. “Gender and the Nation in the Work of Robert Burns and Janet Little.” Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900 38, no. 4 (1998): p.151.

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Bibliography

Burns, Robert. Tam O'Shanter. 1790. In Robert Burns: Selected Poems, edited by Donald A. Low,
pp.69-75. Everyman's Poetry. London: Everyman Paperbacks, 1996.
Crawford, Robert. “Robert Fergusson's Robert Burns.” In Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, 1-23.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
Durkan, John. “What’s in a Name? Thaney or Enoch? The Innes Review 51 no. 1 (2000): pp.80-83.
doi:10.3366/inr.2000.51.1.80.
Davis, Leith. “Gender and the Nation in the Work of Robert Burns and Janet Little.” Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900 38, no. 4 (1998): pp.621-45. doi:10.2307/451090.
Hazlitt, William. Hazlitt Lectures on Burns. 1818. In Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, edited by
Donald A. Low, pp.297-304. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.
It's a Man's Man's Man's World. By James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome. Produced by James
Brown. King, 1966, LP.
Leask, Nigel. "Robert Burns." In The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, edited by Gerrald
Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney, pp.71-85. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
The Concise Scots Dictionary, edited by Mairi Robinson. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1985.

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