| spelling |
ndltd-OhioLink-oai-etd.ohiolink.edu-osu12335982252021-08-03T05:55:05Z Inside and outside the nation : highland identity in nineteenth-century Britain McNeil, Kenneth Michael <p>My dissertation investigates the condition of Scottish Highland identity in nineteenth-century British culture and suggests a rethinking of British national identity formation. Highland identity was constructed as that of a strange yet alluring people altogether outside the nation who nevertheless came to represent the very essence of the nation. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the Scottish Highlands, largely ignored before then, became the subject of intense scrutiny and fascination for metropolitan Britons in Edinburgh and London. Highlanders were thought to be Britain's own home-grown Noble Savages, and their distinct romanticized culture figured prominently in many different cultural representations. Like the "wild" Indians of North America, to whom they often were compared, Highlanders were an exotic race of people whose primitive society placed them beyond civilized British society. The very alterity of the Highlander, however, was brought into the service of articulating British national identity in several important ways. The Highlands were introduced into British consciousness by Scottish cultural authorities in Edinburgh--the foremost of these was Walter Scott--to voice Scotland's own distinctive identity within the framework of British union. Highland "tribal" customs and traditions, manner of dress, literature, music, and landscape all continued to register as strange and exotic while remaining uniquely "British." I explore the making of this contradictory identity through an investigation of its representations in a wide variety of genres, including literature, historiography, military accounts, economic treatises, committee reports, letters, narrative painting, pageant plans, travelogues, and published and private diaries. The unique position of Highland culture and society, both inside and outside the nation, suggests new ways of thinking about British notions of alterity in the nation's imperial century.</p><p>My introduction provides an overview of my argument and explores the multiple cultural and critical locations my work occupies.</p><p>Chapter Two focuses on the cultural anxieties of Scottish <i>literati</i> in the face of Scottish marginalization within Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The anxiety of pro-Union Scots like Hugh Blair and Adam Ferguson that Scotland would become assimilated into an Anglicized Great Britain prompted them to promote a romantic Scottish Highland culture that asserted Scotland's difference from England. I explore this phenomenon through an analysis of the debates surrounding James Macpherson's "translations" of Ossian and the Scott-orchestrated pageantry attending George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822. At stake in the Ossian debates were the '"racial" origins of Scotland. The popularity of Ossian and Macpherson's ideas determined that Scotland would be thought of as a Celtic not a Saxon nation. Yet, by voicing Scotland's "Celtic" heart through translation, Macpherson also paradoxically reinforced Highland difference. Scott's "Celtification" of Scottish identity through his use of "Highland" symbols and rituals during the king's visit ensured that Highland identity would come to represent Scottish identity while fostering the links with Highland traditions and the British monarchy.</p><p>Chapter Three investigates the importance of Highland violence in British historiography in the early nineteenth century, exemplified by Scott's <i>Tales of a Grandfather.</i> Scott's long work unfolds the specific history of Scotland up to the achievement of Union and the demise of Jacobitism in the mid-eighteenth century. It also relates the universal development of "civilization" in Great Britain. In the <i>Tales,</i> Scott paradoxically configures Highland savagery as the ahistorical characteristic of a primitive tribal people and as the historical agent of Jacobitism in the eighteenth century. The failure of Highland society to advance until the end of the eighteenth century and the destruction of Jacobitism reveal tensions and ruptures which destabilize the Enlightenment theory of progress upon which Scott bases his understanding of "history."</p><p>Chapter Four analyzes representations of the idealized Highland warrior. In Scott's <i>Waverley,</i> Evan Dhu, loyal lieutenant to his chieftain and born and raised in the Highlands, is the prototype of the Highland warrior who is hardy, intrepid, fearless and absolutely loyal to his superior. His Highland chieftain, Fergus MacIvor, reveals his non-Highland upbringing in the atypicality of his behavior. Though <i>Waverley</i> is set during the last Jacobite uprising in 1745, I read the novel in the context of the great national struggle of Scott's own time: Britain's long war with Napoleonic France. Scott was an ardent war "hawk" and followed closely the triumphs of Scottish Highland regiments in the Peninsula and on the continent. <i>Waverley</i> serves the nationalist aims of British war advocates of Scott's own time by providing a Highland model for an ideal war hero in opposition the "effeminate" French.</p><p>Chapter Five investigates the relationship between depictions of the general "martial" character of Highland society and of "martial races" of the East in British military discourse after the Indian Rebellion. Martial race theory exactly reproduces earlier descriptions of the Highland warrior-soldier. Ironically, however, Victorian narratives of the Indian Rebellion depict the exotic Highlander (whose kilted "feminine" garb was thought to incite panic on sight among native resisters) in the service of counter-insurgency. The fanaticism of the East is met with the "Gaelic fury" of the West. Juxtaposing representations of the martial race subject, which saw their earliest beginnings in military writing after the rebellion, reveals irresolvable tensions and ruptures underlying the logic of colonial alterity in the very kind of texts where such logic needs to be reinforced aggressively.</p><p>Picturesque depictions of the Highlands emphasized their position on the margins of the British nation, both spatially and culturally. A journey to the Highlands from London or even Edinburgh was a journey to a wild, exotic, distant land; yet the popularity of Ossian's poems and Scott's fiction made many Highland places quite familiar to readers. Chapter Six explores travelogues and depictions of the strange-yet-familiar Highland landscape. The shift from travelogues which see the Highlands as alien to those which see them as simultaneously alien and familiar is also a gendered one. Early travelogues that saw the Highlands only in aesthetic terms, as a landscape, were also largely written by men. Later women travelogues like Dorothy Wordsworth's in 1803 and Anne Grant's in 1811 depict the Highlands as wild and sublime yet also as the location of ideal domestic relations. This dichotomy is highlighted by Queen Victoria's autobiography of her life in the Highlands. Victoria depicts her Highland life as one in which she is freed from the constraints of her role as sovereign and is able to fulfill ideally her roles as wife and mother. Victoria's travelogue made the wild Highlands a part of the image of the British monarchy while representing the royal family as an ideal middle-class family.</p> 1998 English text The Ohio State University / OhioLINK http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1233598225 http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1233598225 unrestricted This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.
|
