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5 Scottish Women Poets
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c h a p t e r f i v e Scottish Women Poets 1212 Women and the Scottishness of Scottish Writing during the Romantic Period When we come to the poetry of Scotland—and that of Ireland, which is the subject of the next chapter—the inescapable realities of political and cultural history intersect with those of literary history. For while the literary history of England has customarily been sketched in relatively straightforward lines in terms of a dominant “English” national culture, that of Scotland (and of Ireland, and to some extent also of Wales) has had to accommodate the consequences of the shifting relative minority status of its writers and citizens. The Act of Union that brought Scotland together with England and Wales in 1707 under the political umbrella of an ostensibly “United” Kingdom could go only so far in producing the heterogeneity implied by nationalist terms like “Britain” and “Britons,” especially when so many of those “Britons” continued to call themselves not “British” but “English.” A “united” kingdom was in many respects an illusion in any event, for as Leith Davis observes, ever since the Act of Union of 1707, “Great Britain has been a site of contest—not always on the material level, but certainly on the discursive level—between the nations from which it was constructed” (1). Indeed, recent initiatives in Scotland to reclaim full national political independence, beginning with the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1999, illustrate how fierce and ultimately ineradicable is the resistance to such political and cultural forced marriages, which are never egalitarian and companionate but are instead unsteady, artificial arrangements in which violence, abuse, and rape play no small part, as the record of Britain’s ongoing experience in Ireland has amply and tragically demonstrated. As Davis and others have argued, the “nation” that emerged from this first Act of Union, like the more complicated one that was produced a century later by the subsequent Act of Union that added Ireland to the kingdom, involved at least as 202 British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community much cultural fracture, displacement, and dislocation as it did happy combination and assimilation. Some scholars of Scottish literature and culture have read in the title of Linda Colley’s important book Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 a perhaps unintentional pun:1 the nation that was “forged” by the acts of union was itself a “forgery” in that it was not a homogeneous national entity but instead one that retained what David Daiches calls a significant “dissociation of sensibility” that reflects incongruent (and frequently incompatible) national cultural practices (21). Douglas Mack has described this complicated union, wherein the participants were never either actual or functional equals, in terms of a business partnership in which “Scotland, as the junior partner in the British Imperial project, took a coloniser’s role within Britain’s external Empire, but shared with Ireland and Wales the experience of being colonised within a process Katie Trumpener has described as ‘British internal colonialism’” (7). As Mack suggests, England’s relationship with Scotland—and with Ireland even more so—was inextricably connected with its imperial aspirations first in the eighteenth-century age of exploration and colonization and then in the nineteenthcentury age of capitalism and industrialization.Throughout both centuries the pressure to assimilate with what postcolonial theory identifies as the dominant (English) cultural unit met with varying degrees of resistance among the subaltern (Scottish and/or Irish) unit and its constituent members. Pressed to identify with that dominant culture for reasons of political, social, and economic exigency, the Scots (and the Irish) worried, with good reason, about what abandoning their own cultural identity might cost them. Many were ambivalent at best, while others were fiercely opposed, and these responses are evident in the period’s literature. That literature reveals, too, a further division of which the Scots were themselves fully cognizant: the cultural divide between the lowland Scots (epitomized by the culturally literate university cities and by Edinburgh in particular) and the Highlanders (the isolated, apparently backward and culturally alien rural culture). The former became “one of the generative centers of European and north Atlantic literary culture” between 1740 and 1840, while the latter became the locus of a sentimentalized rusticity characterized by vernacular literature, programmatic “wildness” and a pseudomythology of a Scottish national past (Duncan, 2–3). As we shall see, this cultural and linguistic divide figures significantly in the Scottish writing examined in this chapter. “Can the Subaltern...