The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population

The Emptiness at The Heart ofMidlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population Charlotte Sussman After Effie Deans is convicted of infanticide, one of the other characters in The Heart ofMidlothian remarks on the seeming hypocrisy of that legal decision. Says Plumdamas, Do you think our auld enemies ofEngland care a boddle whether we didna kill ane anither, skin and birn, horse and foot, men, women, and bairns, all and sindry, omnes et singulos, as Mr. Crossmyloofsays?1 A reasonable enough assumption, one might think. Yet, Scott's novel proves Plumdamas wrong about the value of Scottish bodies to England , and thus wrong about the nature of "internal colonialism." Indeed, when the fate of Effie's still-living child is revealed, it neatly refutes Plumdamas's claim. Rather than dying at his mother's hand, he has been purchased by "an agent in a horrible trade that carried on between Scotland and America, for supplying the plantations with servants," that is, with "human flesh" (p. 501). Unwanted, undomesticated, the child is commodified by a system that needs bodies to power colonial production. In this aspect of its plot, The Heart of Midlothian comes close to the vision of one eighteenthcentury reformer, who thought Scotland might become "A PeopleWarren for supplying [the] King with brave soldiers and sailors and the more fertile parts of the kingdom with faithful servants of every 1 Walter Scott, The Heart ofMidlothian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 240. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 1, October 2002 104EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION description."2 Scottish bodies acquire the most value in the process of imperial expansion not when they kill each other, but when they become portable units of labour. Although Effie's child, called the Whistler, at first avoids being sold to the American colonies through his purchaser's affection, a colonial destiny eventually overtakes him: the captain of the ship on which he escapes from Knocktarlitie sells him as a servant in Virginia (p. 506). In a way, the Whistler takes on the punishment of banishment his mother has avoided: both the Duke ofArgyll and Mrs Glass expect Effie herself to "go over to America and marry well" (p. 381). But no marriageable tobacco merchant such as "Ephraim Buckskin" (p. 382), willing to absolve him of all guilt, awaits Effie's child; instead , the Whistler is gradually absorbed into the colonial strife of the American colonies.3 The child does generate a certain amount of pathos and concern in the Butlers, his aunt and uncle, but when Reuben Butler tries to locate him he finds that this aid came too late. The young man had headed a conspiracy in which his inhuman master was put to death, and had then fled to the next tribe of wild Indians. He was never more heard of; and it may be presumed that he lived and died after the manner of that savage people, with whom his previous habits had well fitted him to associate, (p. 506) This information, coming as it does in the last paragraphs of the novel, may seem perfunctory, yet it performs two important functions in the novel. For one thing, in relocating the Whistler's violence from the Highlands to America, the novel can be seen as displacing the disputes over the "inhuman" conditions ofagricultural production which broke out in Scotland throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into more distant colonial territory.4 The violence ofbanditry the child learns in the Highland glens turns out to be best "fitted" for the plantation world. For another, the novel, 2 Utters of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergusson, 1756-1813, ed. James Fergusson (London, 1934). Quoted in Eric Richards, "Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire," Strangers within the Realm: CuUural Margins ofthe First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 107. 3 Although she does not discuss the colonial implications of the issue, Andrea Henderson provides an illuminating reading of"the novel's techniques for regulating the surplus energies of circulation [both economic and literary]." Romantic Identities: Varieties ofSubjectivity, 1774-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp...