Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels (review)

Abstract

290 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:3 Bruce Beiderwell. Power andPunishment in Scott's Novels. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xiii + 156pp. US$30.00. ISBN 0-8203-13513 . When Janet Adam Smith wrote an essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Redgauntlet to mark the Scott bicentenary in 1971, she subtitled it "The Man ofLaw's Tale," an epithet that could be applied to almost any of the Waverley novels, given the frequent presence of lawyers or of plot strategies that tum on issues of legality orjustice. Scott was, of course, born to the law—the son of a Writer-to-the-Signet, apprenticed as a solicitor at the age of fourteen, subsequently an advocate, then Clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and Sheriff, or chief magistrate, of the county of Selkirk. While a number of lawyers have written interestingly about legal points in Scott's fiction and most literary critics make passing reference to the law in discussing the Waverley novels, there has been no fullscale attempt to examine both the thematic and narratological dimensions of this topic until the publication of Bruce Beiderwell's thoughtful and informative survey. The great strengths of Beiderwell's study derive from his responsiveness to alt aspects of Scott's own fascination with the law together with his detailed knowledge of the legal debates that were current at the time the Waverley novels were being composed— an especially "active and vital period in the history of criminal law reform" (p. vii). Beiderwell's focus is not on the law of property or equity—the area that occupied Scott's day-to-day attention in the division of the Court of Session in which he served as Clerk— but on penal questions and on the criminal law seen in relation to larger issues of justice and power. Beiderwell has a learned but deft way of presenting key aspects of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century philosophical and legal debate about crime and its punishment, so that Scott's fiction is situated within the context of familiar texts by Hobbes and Locke on the one hand and of less familiar writings by Gilbert Stuart or Cesare Beccaria on the other. Readers with a mainly literary background are put comfortably in possession of the necessary theoretical and philosophical material without being subjected to any gratuitous display of the monograph writer's superior learning. With little time or space wasted, Beiderwell is able to show how, for example, understanding of Waverley is enhanced by setting it not only against Locke's Second Treatise but also against the views of William Paley and Martin Madan or the efforts of Samuel Romilly to enact some of Bentham's thinking in legislative form. The Heart of Midlothian is similarly illuminated by reference to Hegel and Kant, as well as to various Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, the necessary citations being managed with incisiveness and economy, not to mention a sharp-eyed ability to discriminate the genuinely pertinent from the merely impressive. In selecting examples for detailed study Beiderwell draws attention to two distinct groups: early novels whose narrative mode is essentially realistic—Waverley, Old Mortality , Rob Roy, and The Heart ofMidlothian—and a series of texts from the 1 820s whose dominant mode is that of romance—Ivanhoe, The Talisman, and, more controversially, Redgauntlet. He sees the early group as reflecting Scott's attempts to grapple directly with the kind of philosophical and practical issues that occupied the attention of legal reformers in the preceding decades and in his own day. The later novels, on the other hand, are seen as exhibiting a different kind of impulse, what Beiderwell characterizes as "a profound desire to make fiction correspond to wishes" (p. ix). It is in the discussion of this second group that the study is at its most innovative, demonstrating how concerns familiar from the early novels—the social containment of wrongdoing, the relationship between punishment, deterrence, and retribution, the difficulty of vindicating innocence—are translated into romance terms, enabling the man of law as narrator to deploy poetic justice to transcend the clumsier and less effective workings of that ordinary REVIEWS 291 human justice which expresses...