Pointed Encounters: Dance in Post-Culloden Scottish Literature by Anne McKee Stapleton (review)

In early nineteenth century laments for what they presented as a vanishing Highland society, the poets Anne Grant and Alexander Campbell evoked that culture not just through dress or language but also through music and dance, as they imagined locals enjoying a ‘sprightly dance by rapid Spey’ or ‘trip[ping] it to the sweet Strathspey’ (p. 59). As Anne McKee Stapleton establishes in this study, references to dancing were pervasive in Scottish literature produced between the middle of the eighteenth century and the 1820s; her argument is that there has not yet been sufficient attention paid to the ‘political meaning’ (p. 32) of dance in what is, by now, the extensive critical work on national identities in British literature of the period.

The study is two-pronged, with the first half of the book focusing on the social practice of dance and the second on representations of dancing and dances in early nineteenth-century fiction. Stapleton’s work on the political implications of the Strathspey and on the neglected genre of the dancing manual is particularly intriguing. Fashion meets politics, she argues, in works such as a popular manual by the early nineteenth-century dancing master Thomas Wilson. Wilson’s firm preference for English decorum over such ‘barbarous’ practices as snapping fingers or calling out during a reel becomes, in Stapleton’s analysis, not just an aesthetic preference but also part of a network of cultural practice shaping and redefining concepts of Scottish and British identity.

This social and cultural analysis of early nineteenth-century ideas about dance underpins Stapleton’s readings of the Scottish novels that are the focus of the second part of her book. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this study is the wide array of fiction that Stapleton includes. She incorporates both the very familiar – inevitably, she discusses the Strathspey that Scott’s Edward Waverley performs for a curious English friend – and the still almost-entirely unread. Along with Scott, Hogg, and Ferrier, Stapleton looks at authors who have never made much of an impact on the canon, such as Rosina St. Clair and Felix M’Donogh. Like Ian Duncan in Scott’s Shadow, Stapleton places Scott in the context of a vibrantly prolific literary world, and her own work is, in many ways, all the richer for it. Her close attention to the 1814 novel The Saxon and the Gael (attributed to Christian Johnstone) is particularly welcome; Stapleton makes a convincing case for seeing the novel’s close focus on intra-Scottish cultural differences, which leaves no room for a ‘neutral’ English perspective, as offering an unusual and neglected approach to the fashionable topic of the Highlands. Likewise, her reading of Scott’s ball scene in which Waverley is decisively rejected by Flora Maclvor resonates effectively with a later discussion of a superficially similar scene in David Carey’s now-forgotten 1820 romance Lochiel; or, The Field of Culloden.

However, the range of material that Stapleton is taking on in two relatively short chapters can also lead to some sketchiness in her argument. Despite acknowledging in a footnote the uncertainty about the attribution of The Saxon and the Gael, Stapleton never clearly explains her grounds for being so confident about Johnstone’s authorship. That could simply be an oversight, but there are also points at which the book would have benefitted from a more detailed exploration of some of the works it discusses. A short discussion of the sword dance in Scott’s Pirate (1822) touches on some large questions about dance as a form of social control, as Stapleton argues that the highly choreographed display ‘models how women should literally toe the line’ (p. 167). Yet the sword dance is culturally so far removed from the polite world of assembly balls that is Stapleton’s main focus in this section of the book that the juxtaposition is a little jarring. In her epilogue, Stapleton argues that in the...