Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe through the perspective of imagology

<1> The character of the Jewess as a sexual object is part of the long tradition of Jewish stereotypes. Whereas during the nineteenth century the Jewish male character was almost always associated with money and greed, the Jewish female was associated with an alluring, and at times even corrupting, sexuality. Livia E. Bitton's study showcases that this nineteenthcentury association of the Jewess with sex and sensuality was part of an established literary convention in European culture. From Lope de Vega's Spanish Raquel and Jean Racine's French Bérénice in the seventeenth century, to Tobias Smollett's coquettish Emilia in eighteenthcentury English literature, the Jewess was conceived as a sex object. The literary convention of the erotic Jewess was most probably influenced by William Shakespeare's Jessica and Christopher Marlowe's Abigail, by historical figures like the Jewess of Toledo also known as Raquel la Fermosa (Rachel the fair), and well-known biblical characters such as Abishag the Shunamite, Sulamith of the vineyard and Queen Bathsheba (see Bitton 63-8).(1) Nadia Valman argues, however, that even though the Jewess was part of the literature, she was a marginal figure and it was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century that her figure became a "literary preoccupation" (2). Indeed, the figure of the enticing Jewess is easily traceable in the writings of Maria Edgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and many others. For example, the Jewess Rebecca Loth, in Anthony Trollope's Nina Balatka, is depicted in direct contrast to Nina Balatka's reserved Christian beauty. Rebecca is described as a woman 'somewhat hard withal, with a repellent beauty that seemed to disdain while it courted admiration" (83). The disparity between the sexy Jewess and the plain Christian beauty is clearly an extension to Sir Walter Scott's female heroines in Ivanhoe. <2> Valman's study of the Jewess in Victorian literature carefully shows the lasting influence ofIvanhoe on the representation of Jewish female characters in nineteenth-century British literature. According to Valman, despite her prominent sexuality, the Jewess Rebecca symbolized the "capability of the Jews for enlightenment and self-transformation" (7). Valman's reading of Rebecca is rooted in Ragussis' conversionist reading of the novel, where he maintains that Rebecca's heroism and loyalty to her clan serves to highlight Scott's "critique of conversion" (Ragussis 95). Valman expands this argument by suggestion that despite her refusal ©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue

As Linda Colley’s 1992 study showcases, nineteenth-century writers linked female virtue with national purpose to help define and defend the national conception of Englishness. Hence, the Englishwoman was perceived as passionless, educated, religious and above all modest. This definition of femininity, helped separate the Englishwoman not only from those residing outside of Britain, but also from other cultural and religious minorities within the nation. Looking at the representation of the Jewess in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, I hope to show that the Jewess’s sexuality is inscribed in and through her relation to early-nineteenth-century notions of Englishness and female behaviour. Scott’s configuration of the Jewess in Ivanhoe affirms the national barriers between Anglican women and the female other. Through his treatment of the Jewess, Scott reinforces the national idea of female Anglican patriotism and its inscription on the female body. The eroticism of the Jewess in Ivanhoe is presented insofar as to help define Anglican femininity and establish its moral superiority. Accordingly, what we find is that the authorial gaze burdens the Jewess with visual signifiers which though empty of actual meaning, allocate a cultural context that helps define her otherness and her body. Thus, what I wish to show in this paper is the ways in which the female body of the Jewess becomes a field of meaning, presented, defined and interpreted visually. Through my examination of Scott’s Ivanhoe, I will argue that meaning is regulated through the visual and that the authorial gaze constructs a grammar of the Jewess’s body that justifies the politics of inclusion or exclusion.

The Wenshan Review of Language and Culture, vol. 13.1, 2019

Walter Scott made wide use of his knowledge of historical linguistics —of the history of English and Scots— in writing dialogues in Ivanhoe and many other novels. This causes some problems for translators; the opening conversation between Gurth and Wamba in Ivanhoe, analysed here, is a case in point. Scott’s use of period language in his medieval novels, and also of a type of Scots which sometimes blends in with archaic English, as in the case of Rob Roy’s speech, should, ideally, be rendered in translation, since it is part of the author’s historical point of view. This, however, is not always possible to achieve with a result similar to that of the original. Nevertheless, if Scott became known worldwide it was, of course, due to translation.

SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH

Stories have been the source of moral lessons and entertainment, as far as the humankind of all the time, is concerned. The use of story- telling existed from the time immemorial. Stories appeared in the form of ballads and epics, in the ancient time, but later it took the shape of short and long fictions. The long fictions or novels varied in its theme and size. They are divided into many genres according to its subject matter- Gothic, Picaresque, Historical etc. The Ballad is nothing but a short story in verse. Its subjects are simple and memorable like adventure, love, war and the life etc. An Epic is a long tale in verse with famous heroes for its main characters. Iliad and Odyssey are examples. These stories gave the reader enjoyment and certain life-related ‘tips’. Hayden White, an American historian says, “the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of the history”. Historians and Novelists wish to provide a verbal image of ‘reality’. A novelist ma...

This article illustrates how historical romance, the genre invented by Sir Walter Scott, with its great fictional and narrative potential, gave rise to the modern novel. Even though Scott's genre ran into disrepute after a short stay, it was not simply dying out, but was permeating into the entire fictional fabric of the later period. For his fiction, Scott drew from the poets and philosophical historians of the past, assimilated the fictional world of romance with the realistic world of history, added to it a dramatic element and the fictional worlds of sentiment, tragedy, comedy, picaresque and satire, and thus created a highly composite fictional world. This new form of fiction influenced the novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth century's all over the world, and gave rise to the modern novel.

A biographical sketch of Walter Scott, a reading of Waverley and a full title bibliography. A shorter version of this piece originally appeared in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era edited by Chris Murray (2003): Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish poet, novelist, editor, critic and antiquarian. The ‘Enchanter of the North’ (as he was often known in his own day) was born in the College Wynd, Edinburgh in August 1771, the ninth child of Anne Rutherford and Walter Scott, solicitor, a strict Calvinist with whom Scott would later clash over his own Episocpalianism. By the end of his life, Scott was without doubt the most prominent, popular and influential novelist in the history of English letters; the year of his death, 1832, as the First Reform Act heralds the political concerns of the Victorian era, can be argued to mark the end of British Romanticism. In 1773 Scott contracted polio (which lamed him for the rest of his life), and was sent to recuperate at his grandfather’s farm in the Borders. It was here that he first encountered the Scottish oral tradition which would later inform almost everything he wrote. He learned folk-tales, legends and ballads from labourers and servants, and stories of Highlanders and eye-witness accounts of the last Jacobite rebellion of 1745 from his relatives, a debt he later acknowledges in the postscript to Waverley (1814): ‘It was my accidental lot, though not born a Highlander … to reside, during my childhood and youth, among persons of the above description; and now, for the purpose of preserving some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction … Indeed, the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact.’ The above also demonstrating the author’s use of popular literature and antiquarian sources in combination with vivid childhood recollections when constructing a supposedly ‘historical’ narrative. The paradox of Scott’s historicism being that he invented much more Highland tradition than he actually recorded and preserved. Scott attended the University of Edinburgh, reading law while also studying philosophy and German, which led to his first literary experiments: translations of Romantic German dramas and ballads. He also spent a year in Kelso with his Aunt where he met and befriended the Ballantyne brothers, James and John in 1783. After another period of ill-health interrupted his studies, Scott was apprenticed to his father’s legal firm in 1786 and was admitted to the Bar in 1792. Legal business took Scott to the Highlands for the first time, and in 1790 he met and fell in love with Williamina Belsches, a woman of higher social rank who rejected him for a banker’s son (Scott’s early poem ‘The Violet’ is very much a lover’s complaint, and probably refers to this period). Within a year Scott had married Margaret Charlotte Carpenter, leaving generations of critics to surmise that the rather mysterious Williamina was the model for many of his unattainable literary heroines. Between 1792 and 1796 Scott practiced as an advocate in Edinburgh. It was through his translations that he commenced his literary career, when his early work (an adaptation of ballads by G.A. Burger published anonymously in 1796) came to the attention of Matthew Lewis in 1798. Scott’s feel for folklore and the supernatural impressed the Gothic writer, who invited Scott to contribute to his ‘hobgoblin repast,’ Tales of Wonder. In 1802 Ballantyne published Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads, some traditional, some written by contemporary poets; an expanded, three-volume edition was published the following year and, in 1804, Scott produced a poetic version of the romance of Sir Tristrem, his work to date reflecting the influences of German Romanticism, the Gothic and his own antiquarianism in roughly equal measure. His work attracted the attention of William Wordsworth, who visited Scott at his new family home at Ashiestiel. It was the immediate success of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, based upon an ancient border legend, in 1805 that made Scott’s name as a Romantic poet. Thus began a period of long poems, most important among them Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810), which were extremely successful commercially but were soon superseded by the work of Scott’s friend Byron, and by 1813 Scott’s success as a poet was undoubtedly on the wane (Ballantyne losing money by advancing Scott £3000 for the unsuccessful Rokeby). There is evidence that Scott’s early epics survived in British schoolrooms throughout the century, but they are rarely considered today, which is unfortunate given their Gothic excesses and difference to Scott’s later prose fiction, where he attempted to assimilated the Gothic tradition into that of the historical novel, while becoming increasingly interested in the psychological effects of superstition, abandoning the supernatural for rationalism. During this period, Scott was also an energetic editor and critic, writing prolifically on matters literary, historical and antiquarian. In addition to numerous book reviews for the Edinburgh Review, Scott had edited Dryden, written several pseudo-historical books such as Original Memoirs Written during the Great Civil War (1806), The State Papers of Sir Ralph Sadler (1809), and The Secret History of James I (1811), contributed a notable essay on Chivalry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and been a driving force in the establishment of the Quarterly Review, a Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review. Any remaining energy was directed towards his business arrangements with the Ballantyne brothers which, as is well known, would ultimately lead to financial ruin. Having achieved the status of Sheriff-Deputy for the County of Selkirk in 1799 and Principle Clerk to the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh in 1805, Scott’s literary success allowed him to indulge an expensive ambition to live the life of the Scottish laird, and he purchased the farm of Clarty Hole in 1811, where he built a stately home, a physical manifestation of his Romantic imagination, which he called Abbotsford, the other primary factor in his eventual financial troubles. In 1813 Scott was offered the Poet Laureateship, which he politely declined, recommending instead Robert Southey. After the financial failure of Rokeby, the change in public taste was confirmed by the unenthusiastic responses to The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), and The Bride of Triermain (1813), and, with the exception of The Lord of the Isles (1815), Field at Waterloo (1815), and Harold the Dauntless (1817), Scott ceased to write long poems. Instead, as his business interests became increasingly convoluted and unstable, Scott resurrected a prose piece, begun as early as 1805 and already twice abandoned, and wrote his first novel. Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since was published on July 7, 1814 by Archibald Constable and Co, its author remaining anonymous, priced one guinea; sales were so high that it went through four editions that year...

South Atlantic Review, 1989

xi of onlookers; it is a twenty-five-minute walk from the Salisbury Crags, where one awesome night Jeanie Deans met with the seducer of her sister and where on pleasant days young Walter Scott and his friend John Irving used to go to read old romances together and to compose new ones for each other's amusement. I must also thank the library staff at the University of Bonn, where I read the German dissertations that I cite in this book; many of these had to be ordered on interlibrary loan, sometimes from East Germany. I am also indebted to many individuals for help, especially

This thesis examines the issue of anti-Semitism throughout three different eras in chosen classics of the English literature: “The Prioress’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales, The Merchant of Venice and Ivanhoe- comparing the demonization of the Jewish characters present in the texts. By examining the three texts, I intend to show the evolution of the demonization of Jews in literature throughout different periods in history. The historical and cultural aspects of the works will be taken into consideration, for anti-Semitism can be clearly traced as an ideology built throughout Western culture as a form of domination and exclusion of minorities. The Lateran Council of 1215 resurrected the spectrum of anti-Semitism by imposing laws such as the prohibition of intermarriage between Jews and Christians or the obligation of different dress for Jews. This is especially visible in the chosen works, for Jews are stigmatized as demonic, pagan, heretic and unclean. A trope present in two of the texts in the Christian aversion to usury—a task that was conveniently attributed to the Jews. Since they were considered inferior, such work was thought to suit their lot. Within this paradigm is the double demonization of the Jewish woman. This is done first by turning her into an object of desire and seduction in both Ivanhoe and The Merchant of Venice, then by trying to force their conversion to Christianity—which happens to the character Jessica but not Rebecca. The issue of purity and cleanliness is another important theme for this study. Jews are seen as particularly unclean, being associated with negative images such as latrines, mutilation, poison, sexual depravity and witchcraft. All of the anti-Semitic feelings above can be detected in the three works, and they can be effectively contrasted and compared in order to better understand the repudiation of the Jews in literature. This analysis is done by (1) the collection of historical data, related to anti-Semitism, from the different settings in which the literary works were written and the examination of it via cultural studies and (2) a comparative study of the Jewish characters and demonic themes present in the texts. Data have been collected from historical texts, archives and manuscripts. This dissertation challenges the reader to develop a critical reading of canonical writings, questioning anti-Semitism via demonization of the Jews in literature by offering a view of these literary texts of different genres and settings.

Prague Journal of English Studies, 2018

Published anonymously in 1814, Waverley; Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence is a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott which unfolds the story of a young English soldier, Edward Waverley, and his journey to Scotland. Regarded as the fi rst historical novel, it contains elements of modernity, heralding a new upcoming era in England. Scott obviously displays the concept of the modern/modernity diff erently from the perception that writers are conveying today, but he hints at the emergence of a society detached from feudal customs in several aspects through the issue of union between England and Scotland. Highlighting the modern characteristics of Walter Scott's Waverley, this paper argues that Scott employs elements of modernity in his novel long before their disclosure in literature and politics.

2014

History in Russia in the Enlightenment was represented not only by academic research, but by the series of literary works. They created a space of public history and satisfies the need for historical knowledge for those who could not or did not want to study serious scholarly works. They searched for cultural cliches, patterns, and metaphors to mold their historical images, schemes, and explanations. Walter Scott’s novels made an immediate impact on Russian society because it had been already prepared for such literature. In Scott’s historical novel there was a beneficial synthesis of simplicity and professionalism, out-of-body-ness of historical patterns and obviousness of moral lessons. The form was one in which history could bring about its true predestination, that is, to form the soul and the heart. Scott’s representation of the ordinary man in the background of largescale historical events had no influence upon Russian historiography that continued to describe only events of a...