Sir Walter goes to war: Scott's treatment of conflict and identity in the early Waverley novels

Abstract

Summary In recent years there has been a crisis of the state manifested in simultaneous tendencies toward integration and secession. This, coupled with the damage inflicted on progressive aspirations by postmodernism and the collapse of socialist states, has created circumstances in which it is fruitful to re‐read writers of a broadly Romantic disposition who resisted or subverted the statist and meliorist leanings of the Enlightenment when they were at their strongest. Among such figures Sir Walter Scott occupies a singular position. Although he is less referred to in international relations literature than Burke or Clausewitz, his works, far more than those of any other major novelist of his generation, were saturated with references to war and civil conflict and their role in the formation of personal and national identities. The essay seeks to redress the balance by examining Scott's treatment of this theme in some of the earlier novels. The ironising of just war doctrine is noted, but rather more attention is given to the use of a series of dichotomies, including loyalty and betrayal, reality and representation, civility and lawlessness, to explore war in its social context. The distinctive way in which Scott romanticises war seeks, in Clausewitzean terms, to ward off the evident post‐Napoleonic possibility of absolute warfare by an admixture of friction. Real war, Scott comfortingly implies, may continue to play a part in modern life.