The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels by Ina Ferris

Abstract

Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). xii, 261. $34.50 (U.S.) Ina Ferris’s splendid book begins and ends with a lament: Sir Walter Scott, for about one hundred years the best known and most influential novelist in English, has been erased from literary history for most of this century. Banished by Forster, Leavis, and Watt from the grand scheme of the novel’s evolution, Scott remains absent from revisionist literary histories such as Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) and Clifford Siskin’s The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (1988). Ferris attempts to restore the Waverley novels to primacy, and by a method of argument that resembles Scott’s own: she depicts their pivotal position in the history of British culture; like the Wizard of the North, she presents historical analysis through a romance narrative. Ferris’s narrative has two plots: Scott’s novels succeed in bringing the novel, that outsider and orphan (if not just plain bastard) among literary genres, to a central position in the literary sphere; at the same time, they transform the novel from a female genre to one which men are fully authorized to read and write. These two plot curves are in fact two faces of the same phenomenon, since the literary establishment that legitimated the novel was dominated by men, as was the canon it produced. And the Waverley novels achieved both vali­ dations, of genre and of gender, by appropriating for the novel the authority of history — a literary form that was both high-culture and masculine. All of this has been known, but in general outlines: inertly and discon­ nectedly. What makes Ferris’s argument so compelling, in both senses of the word, is the precision with which she synthesizes historical facts, histor­ ical contexts, insights into Scott’s novels, literary and feminist theory, genre definition, and existing historical and literary analysis. In fact, many will want to read the book for its primary and secondary references alone. A generation ago a reclamation-project might have concentrated upon Scott’s artistic development, traced through the novels themselves and Scott’s evolv­ ing life and thought; in this age of cultural studies, Ferris focusses upon the reception of the Waverley novels, and especially upon their treatment in the literary reviews. The reviewers were men writing as to other men; led by the Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) and the Quarterly Review (founded in 1809), the reviews asserted, a little over-anxiously, their new claims to magisterial authority over, in their favourite phrase, “the republic of letters.” A rich and comic drama ensues when the masculine reviewers confront the female field of fiction. On the one hand, the novel is dismissed, and novel-writing and novel-reading became for reviewers a female trope for 113 ephemeral, mindless modernity; on the other hand, everyone read novels, and it was in the reviewers’ interests to notice novels — and thereby to grant them a place within their republic. The appearance of Waverley in 1814 ended the reviewers’ dilemma. The publication of Waverley, in fact, is held in freeze-frame for Part One of Ferris’s study, “Scott and the Status of the Novel.” Four chapters, half of the book, explicate the qualities within Waverley itself and in contemporary attitudes to fiction that made Scott’s novel seem so remarkably original. The second half of the book, Part Two, entitled “Defining the Historical Novel,” consists of four chapters considering the implications for both fiction and history of the kind of historical novel founded by Scott. In this second part, the violent debate over Old Mortality in 1817 is the corresponding central moment. A third critical moment, and a most ironic one, is the subject of Ferris’s final chapter: when Ivanhoe appeared in 1820, signalling a new turn in Scott’s fiction, reviewers felt called upon to produce a general assessment of the Waverley novels — and, influenced by Ivanhoe, defined Scott as a genius of romance in terms that class his novels with the very female romances that they had been credited with exploding...