Scott’s Redgauntlet (1958)

Abstract

Redgauntlet is the novel in which Scott found the most adequate ‘objective correlative’ for his feelings about Scottish history and for that complex attitude toward the relation between tradition and progress which explains so much of the workings of his mind and imagination. In his earlier novels dealing with Scottish history he had explored the relation between heroism and prudence in periods of civil and religious conflict in which noble fanaticism or anachronistic romantic loyalties were challenged by a prudence which sympathized with, yet in the end rejected, outdated patterns of heroic action. His gaze was on the great transitional period in Scottish history, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when, against a background of violence and extremist views, there quietly emerged an unromantic commercial Scotland committed to the Hanoverian succession, to ever closer ties with England, to a ‘British’ rather than a ‘Scottish’ point of view. This for Scott was the wave of the future; this was where Scotland’s material interests lay. Yet the appeal of Scotland’s stormy and romantic past was insistent. Could one reconcile a passion for the picturesque violence of Scottish history and the traditions and rituals associated with Scotland’s former existence as an independent kingdom with a sober appraisal of the realities of the present situation? Scott’s best novels are projections of the dilemma involved in endeavoring to answer this question.