Home and Nation in The Heart of Midlothian

Abstract

Readers of The Heart of Midlothian-particularly those who read Walter Scott as a historical novelist-are often troubled by its fourth volume, with its quotidian worries about bridal trousseaux, cheese recipes, and house payments, and its apparent retreat from the political purposes that dominate the first three volumes. The real work of this novel, such readers claim, is done whenjeanie's pilgrimage to London ends, gaining pardon for her sister and a new rapprochement between England and Scotland; her establishment in the Firth of Clyde is merely extended opportunity to see her virtue rewarded. One of Scott's contemporaries wrote to him to indicate that he approves of the first three volumes of the H[eart] of Midlothian but totally condemns the fourth.' More recent critics have been only slightly less harsh. Ian Duncan claims that The Heart of Midlothian's 'fable of national regeneration' ends up, in fact, turning away from the political idea of the nation and concentrating upon the domestic and moral economy of a private estate whose virtue consists in its seclusion from a hopelessly chaotic external world.2 James Kerr claims that the fourth volume's scenes were written to create artificial world in which history has lost its sting.35 Avrom Fleishman, perhaps more gently, reads the fourth volume as misfocused and counters the claim that it is an unnecessary appendage by turning his attention to the peripheral portrait of Knockdunder's local government. Such readings treatJeanie's domestic life as uncomfortable surplus, a mere idyll, a divergence, or even a dodge on the part of the novel that cannot be integrated into a view of the Waverley novels as exploring the political foundations of Great Britain. These readings, however, accept the dichotomies of private and public, domestic and political, feminine enclosure and masculine