Legends of Rebecca: Ivanhoe, Dynamic Identification, and the Portraits of Rebecca Gratz

Of Walter Scott's characters, one of the most enigmatic and the one that most threatens the ideological edifice upon which historical fiction is built is the figure of the Jewess, Rebecca of York, from the novel Ivanhoe. In the novel, Rebecca is a healer; she is also beautiful, and her beauty attracts more than one Christian lover. At the end of the novel, Rebecca and the hero, Ivanhoe, do not marry, to the chagrin of many a reader. Rebecca's choice to remain with her father, to go into exile, and never to marry has been one of the main focuses in the history of the tale's reception.

The full extent of Rebecca's originality and subversive potential is revealed when one compares this character to the historical Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia, who, many speculate, inspired the fictional Rebecca. Rebecca Gratz, we shall see, may have been inspired in turn by Scott's fictional heroine to explain (to herself and to others) some of her own life choices by way of the character's values and behaviors. This dynamic of identification will be explored through an analysis of a portrait of Rebecca Gratz that may have been shaped by her fictional counterpart. Of a series of three portraits of Gratz, painted by Thomas Sully in 1830–1831, the middle portrait, reputedly of Gratz wearing a turban, was said to have been rejected by her or her family, disowned, or simply erased. Nevertheless, the painting appears to have survived. Two different images have been identified as the "missing portrait." One of them is widely available, while the second, arguably the more viable candidate, missing at auction since the 1940s and from print since the 1970s, has been rediscovered and is restored herein to print.

To arrive at a satisfactory analysis of the portraits, we must first understand what it means for Scott to have put a Jewess in his text. In Ivanhoe, Scott creates a character that troubles traditional oppositions and identification. As a Jewess, Rebecca offers a particularly apt demonstration of the tensions arising from the opposition between truth and plausibility, concepts I shall explain further below. Scott's reflections on the problem of truth and plausibility evolved in relation to Rebecca and the unfolding of the character's reception and influence. She is a literary type, and therefore fictional; she is an ideal type, and therefore exemplary; being a type and a heroine of romance should put her beyond the truth–plausibility continuum. Scott nevertheless claims her as a character to be measured by historical fact, one whose origin, as his interpreters claimed, is purportedly historical.

Rebecca's characterization reflects the features of Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia, in accordance with the legend of "origins" that has come to surround both Rebeccas. Portraits of Gratz, in turn, illuminate how the historical Jewish woman became shaped by her fictional counterpart in a process of dynamic identification.

Truth versus Plausibility

Historical fiction's special features permit exploration of the exchange that occurs between fiction and history and between characters in books and the people who read them. Rebecca of Ivanhoe becomes an emblem of historical fiction's liminality and brings light to an old debate by unsettling the longstanding opposition between fiction and history. If the definition of historical fiction is the inclusion of a real person or event amid fictitious characters and events, then the genre's particular energy derives from its desire to retell history "in order to make a truer story"–not truer to the facts, that is, but more universal in its implications.¹ Critics contemporary with Scott insisted, despite the untenability of this demand, that the domains of history and literature remain categorically separate.² Novelistic plausibility was charged with a moral function, and the danger was that a so-called historical "truth" in historical fiction could potentially corrupt readers.³ Readers identified with characters in novels "because of the characters' fictiveness and not in spite of it."⁴ If history recounts the "true" story, that story is atypical; if fiction would exercise its moral function, it...