The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature (review)

90 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION questions of faith and belief. Only Fontenelle emerges as explicitly and uncompromisingly a materialist. In chapter 4 there is a discussion of the relationships between the topographical, architectural, and political structures of these imaginary societies. Except in the case of Fbigny, the common obsession with order and symmetry seems to have a similar function but a different significance for these authors. Chapter 5 takes up the question of Utopian economics and its generally egalitarian basis. Work is an essential ingredient of all these supposedly classless communities that, on closer examination, display notions of hierarchy and private property. Sexual inequality is the subject of chapter 6. Although one would not expect to find it in a colony of hermaphrodites, male dominance remains a constant feature of Foigny's world as it does, though with variations, in all the works studied. Chapter 7 discusses the narrative techniques employed by the authors in an attempt to achieve vraisemblance. All, except Gilbert, provide a realistic framework, although Föigny subverts the authenticity through the introduction of incredible adventures. Fontenelle is less interested in the narrative framework than in the description of the ideal society, whereas Tyssot is more taken with the adventures than with the account of a utopia. The author concludes by emphasizing the injustice of treating these writers as a homogeneous group simply because they used the same vehicle of the imaginary voyage cum utopia to express their ideas and display their creative skills. For the general reader whose knowledge of this somewhat marginal genre is confined to More's Utopia, Leibacher-Ouvrard's well-written and well-organized book will be of inestimable value and interest. For the specialist, the material will be largely familiar, although the arrangement of it is sometimes novel and thought-provoking, which, as Pascal once observed, is what scholarship is all about: "Qu'on ne dise pas que je n'ai rien dit de nouveau: la disposition des matières est nouvelle; quand on joue à la paume, c'est une même balle dont joue l'un et l'autre, mais l'un la place mieux." Aubrey Rosenberg University of Toronto Kenneth Simpson. The Protean Scot: The Crisis ofIdentity in Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988. ? + 287pp. £16.90. Kenneth Simpson's mind broods habitually on paradoxes; even his title may suggest a paradox to those who find the Scots more inclined to rigidity. He follows in this one of his two acknowledged guides: the lectures David Daiches delivered a quarter of a century ago at McMaster University and published as The Paradox REVIEWS 91 ofScottish Culture: the Eighteenth-Century Experience (1963). The central paradox , productive of many more, is of a patriotic people who threw away the last vestige of their political independence in 1707 and then went on to win international fame by suppressing almost everything endemic in their native traditions. Reasoning politely in a language they did not customarily speak, the Scottish literati remained emotionally attached to their national past, and by promoting a falsely sentimental account of it prepared Scotland to become a cynosure of Romanticism, but not to be receptive to Romanticism itself. Simpson amplifies the paradoxes sketched by Daiches, but also takes guidance from Thomas Crawford's reminder (in Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, I960) that cultural environment explains writers only as it conflicts with their uniqueness. For that reason most of his chapters study individuals—Smollett, Macpherson, John Home, Boswell, Mackenzie, and Bums—whom he sees as united by their propensity for role-playing. He paints a nation of posturers, hectically adopting personae and projecting often-contradictory self-images. What was the cause of this instability? Compulsory Anglicization, most obviously, affecting even those who did not move to London; but Simpson offers other reasons too. Perhaps , in a small country, people got tired of telling each other the truth and resorted to the ironic use of voice as a defence against parochialism. Possibly an impulse to self-dramatize surfaced as Calvinism loosened its grip. Simpson 's main argument, however, proclaimed by his sub-title, is that the century after Union saw Scotsmen becoming increasingly unsure of what their country...