Radical Fathers and Moderate Sons

Abstract

The use of love stories to articulate national or political themes produces difficulties, as I have noted, for ideological programs of the sort that tend to resolve themselves into a structure of binary oppositions. At the same time, the love story seems to present a useful opportunity to writers interested in federal, conciliatory or at any rate more complicated forms of relationship. The problem, or advantage, seems to be related to specific qualities of sexual desire. Sexual desire — even more obviously than other kinds of desire — is not a stable quantity, least of all in the hands of a novelist sensitive to its triangular tendencies. Scott’s fiction, for example, complicates the connection between any individual hero and heroine with a proliferation of doubles, rivals, capriciously changing objects of attraction, problematic and partial satisfactions and, even more prominently, shifting and untrustworthy indicators of gender. Moreover, a confusion of sexual roles and genders, ultimately generated by the tendency of desires to imitate other desires, is not an isolated effect but emerges as an aspect of a larger vision. As Daniel Cottom expresses it, every kind of ‘borderline’ in Scott becomes ‘obscure’ and ‘threatened’, and this includes the borders between reason and superstition, between individuals, nations, classes and generations.1 KeywordsSexual DesireLove StoryWilful IgnorancePaternal AuthorityRadical FatherThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.