Walter Scott’s Portable Borderland : The Example of Anne of Geierstein (1829)

Abstract

Written as a sequel to Quentin Durward (1823), set in Medieval France in the late 1460s, Anne of Geierstein (1829) also strides beyond the Anglo-Scottish borders. The plot mostly takes place in France (in the Duchy of Burgundy), the Duchy of Lorraine (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) at the time of the Battle of Nancy in 1477, and in Switzerland. It takes up the largely unresolved conflict between King Louis XI of France, a proponent of centralized power, and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, an advocate of the old feudal system, to focus on the disastrous and eventually fatal campaign waged by Charles the Bold against the Swiss Confederates. It is a “confounded novel” (Journal : 591) which Scott very much struggled with because of both serious health and financial issues, but also because of his lack of knowledge of the cross-border geographical space in which the setting of his story was pitched. “I bothered myself with geography,” Scott wrote in his Journal (582), as he had never set foot in Switzerland. Considered as the father of the historical novel, he nonetheless paid great attention to space, with the border often being the main protagonist of his works. In an age of growing globalization, Anne of Geierstein raises the questions of the Scottish writer’s skill at realistically representing a borderland he had never been to, and above all of his legitimacy to do so at a time when travelling was no longer reserved to social and intellectual dites undertaking the Grand Tour, but was on the contrary popularised and made both easier and cheaper. This paper aims to prove that Scott’s approach to the concepts of spaces and borders paradoxically takes its full meaning in this very novel that pushed him out of his comfort zone, i.e. his familiar Scottish borderland. Thanks to his pseudo-ekphrastic writing and his use of intermedial resources such as drawings and paintings, Scott transposes the Swiss borderland from the real to the fictitious, from the visual to the textual in order to make it a truly intercultural and interlinguistic portable space, the locus of transnational sympathy.