The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity (review)

In contrast to the extensive research into the material lives and representations of Scottish women by scholars of history and literature, serious studies of Scottish masculinity are hard to find and are limited to analyses of the “hard man” image in the twentieth century or the refined manliness cultivated during the Scottish Enlightenment. This study does not aim to fill the historical gap for the nineteenth century, as it has little to say about the material lives and experiences of Scottish men. Rather, Maureen M. Martin’s interest is in the power of representation, and specifically, in the influence of a myth of Scottish masculinity that played a role in the conceptualization of national identity amongst the English and within Scotland.

The central conceit of this book is that the myth or mystique of Scottish masculinity—essentially a “rugged primal” Highland masculinity (6)—was a necessary element of the English construction of a Scotland within Britain. Scotland, in short, “could be narrated as Britain’s masculine heartland” at a time when English masculinity, caricatured here as resting upon the refinement and self-restraint of the commercial world and therefore emasculated, was under pressure (3). At the heart of this study then is narrative, or the deployment of particular constructions of masculinity to tell a story about nation and identity at a time when the meaning of both concepts was under negotiation as a result of rapid and transformative economic change, commercial development, and social disruption. Against this backdrop Martin shows how a range of well-known writers (namely Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant) and artists (Edwin Landseer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Margaret Macdonald) imagined the Scottish nation. Following the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 and the demise of the Scottish Parliament, the meaning of Scottishness was transposed onto narrative, since, in the absence of a nation-state, narrative was the only way the nation could reproduce itself. And at the heart of these narratives, argues Martin, was the entwining of nation and masculinity; the imagining of the nation was conducted through narratives of the mystique of Highland masculinity.

For the majority of artists and writers considered in detail here, Scottish masculinity is constituted by the myth of rugged Highland virility, a timeless masculine essence. It is represented as much by the artist Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen (1851)—the great portrait of the stag suggestive of the primitivism and danger of stalking, and an image that allowed effeminate middle-class men to imagine themselves as Highland warriors engaged in a struggle with a noble opponent—as by Stevenson’s Alan Breck Stewart in Kidnapped (1886), the Highlander who represents to his Lowland friend David an alternative model of being a man, “rich in . . . boldness, warrior spirit, and ancient dignity” (89). But if the Highland masculine figure of myth worked so well south of the border, it was less successful in Scotland itself precisely because the nineteenth-century Scotsman—be he a Glasgow industrialist, an Edinburgh intellectual, or a Lanarkshire miner—could not appropriate this figure of authentic Scottishness. Scotland the nation as well as Scotland the narrative was certainly not united in how it saw itself. What Martin ascribes to a “Caledonian antisyzygy” (84), a split personality, a Jekyll and Hyde scenario of the feuding brothers prefigured in Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1889), containing the two poles of primitive, warring Highlands and Calvinist, industrialising Lowlands, was traced on the ground in many ways in the economic, social, and cultural character of Scotland. For Martin, this, the last of Stevenson’s novels, throws into sharp relief the “dilemma of Scottish nationality” that is the “tortured relationship” of Lowland Scotland with its Highland half (108).

Of course representations of masculinity must be defined not just against each other but against representations of femininity. At the end of...