Home and Nation in The Heart of Midlothian

Readers of The Heart of Midlothian--particularly those who read Walter Scott as a historical novelist--are often troubled by its fourth volume, with its quotidian worries about bridal trousseaux, cheese recipes, and house payments, and its apparent retreat from the political purposes that dominate the first three volumes. The real work of this novel, such readers claim, is done when Jeanie's pilgrimage to London ends, gaining pardon for her sister and a new rapprochement between England and Scotland; her establishment in the Firth of Clyde is merely an extended opportunity to see her virtue rewarded. One of Scott's contemporaries wrote to him to indicate that "he approves of the first three volumes of the H[eart] of Midlothian but totally condemns the fourth." ¹ More recent critics have been only slightly less harsh. Ian Duncan claims that The Heart of Midlothian's "'fable of national regeneration' ends up, in fact, turning away from the political idea of the nation and concentrating upon the domestic and moral economy of a private estate whose virtue consists in its seclusion from a hopelessly chaotic external world." ² James Kerr claims that the fourth volume's "scenes were written to create an artificial world in which history has lost its sting." ³ Avrom Fleishman, perhaps more gently, reads the fourth volume as misfocused and counters the claim that it is "an unnecessary appendage" by turning his attention to the peripheral portrait of Knockdunder's local government. ⁴ Such readings treat Jeanie's domestic life as an uncomfortable surplus, a mere idyll, a divergence, or even a dodge on the part of the novel that cannot be integrated into a view of the Waverley novels as exploring the political foundations of Great Britain.

These readings, however, accept the dichotomies of private and public, domestic and political, feminine enclosure and masculine adventurousness that were in the process of being established at the time Scott wrote The Heart of Midlothian. To claim, as Duncan, Kerr, and Fleishman do, that the political ends where the domestic begins is to acquiesce all too readily to the ideologies of gender that were under construction in the fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Nancy Armstrong has argued, particularly notions that women belonged in a domestic space protected from politics. ⁵ This is not to argue that The Heart of Midlothian does not participate in this construction: Jeanie Deans is clearly held up as a model of woman's happy immurement within bourgeois domestic confines. However, any adequate reading of The Heart of Midlothian must acknowledge the extent to which this ideology of feminine domestic isolation and the Waverley novels' ideology of a Great Britain founded on political inclusiveness distort each other when brought together as they are here in this novel where the Waverley hero is a heroine. Neither of these conflicting ideologies survives their encounter intact; both prove to be ethically flawed in some respects, prompting a re-evaluation and--to some extent--a reformulation of both.

A reading of this novel that sees the fourth volume as "an unnecessary appendage" fails to see the extent to which Jeanie's adherence to an ideology of feminine isolation makes the first three volumes' pilgrimage a failure insofar as her function as a Waverley protagonist is concerned: though she gains pardon for her sister, she does little to plead the cause of Scotland's wrongs to England's hegemonic interests. Rather than bringing about political and cultural expansion, Jeanie's encounters with both Madge Wildfire and Scotland's unruly populace result in misrecognition, abhorrence, disavowal, cruelty, or simple disregard. Jeanie's failure makes all the more clear the extent to which Scott's inclusive politics are grounded in a transformed feudal order, where those with power and property can include their dependents within the sphere of their benevolence. Jeanie's marginal position--a Scot in...