Waverley, Freud, and Topographical Metaphor

Abstract

The platonic relation between Scott and Marx as historians of society has already been argued by one great critic; that between Scott and Freud as geographers of the self has been less definitively approached. I should like to contribute to the latter argument by establishing a congruence, both conceptual and metaphoric. I do not claim to be able to demonstrate a direct influence of Scott on Freud, though I do suggest an influence through the mainstream of European literature with which Freud was so familiar, and that he made such good use of. I do not offer psychoanalytic conclusions on either of the authors in question, nor do I offer a psychoanalytic account of the character who will suffer most from my attentions, Edward Waverley. Rather I pursue a connection between Scott and Freud through the structural metaphor that defines both Waverley and his fictive world, and joins his personal rites of passage to those of an age. In the telling congruence of this metaphor with some of Freud's imagery lies a clue to one part of Scott's imaginative achievement: as the creator of a historical fiction making inner sense for the nineteenth century of the ontogeny of the self in a changing world. To reconcile the gospels of Freud and Marx, or (to put it another way) to unite systematically the interiorities of character and its development with the externalities of social conflict and social evolution, would be to achieve something like a unified field theory for the history and structure of the self and that of society. It is arguable that with just such a synthesis Scott opened the century from which Marx and Freud emerged.