5.1 Marco Institucional
5.1.1. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores
When Scott’s intention is to create a particularly aesthetic moment or encounter, he emphasizes the nobility and dignity of ‘savage’ Highland
masculinity. This is visible from his earliest novel, Waverley (1814), where young officer Edward Waverley, while exploring the Highland way of life, is
drawn into participating in the Jacobite uprising of 1745. In Waverley’s first meeting with Highland chieftain Fergus MacIvor, he is ‘struck by the peculiar grace and dignity of the chieftain’s figure. Above the middle size and finely
43 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, p.114
proportioned, the Highland dress, which he wore in its simplest mode, set off his person to great advantage. His countenance was decidedly Scotch, with all
the peculiarities of the Northern physiognomy.’44 Fergus is summarized as a ‘bold,ambitious, ardent yet artful and politic character’.45 Here Scott draws on
the rhetoric of early descriptions of Native American life and character,
perhaps echoing Scottish Enlightenment historian William Robertson’s
account in The History of America. Scott held Robertson’s History in his library at Abbotsford and refers to him, among other Enlightenment figures, in Guy Mannering. Robertson states that the most notable qualities of the Native people of America are ‘a fearless courage, great strength and agility of
body, and crafty policy.’46 The notion of subtlety and craft recurs often in the
discourses surrounding Native peoples, indicating a certain unknown
quantity, a tactical approach which is a challenge for the observer to identify. The scheming and political manoeuvring of Fergus, and the evasive, almost supernatural physical prowess of Rob Roy, speak to this sense of something which is not easily objectified and understood. This dilemma represents the problem of ethnographic analysis, which must both describe
certain bodies and practices as foreign, ‘natural’ and intuitive, and yet
construct them as identifiable artefacts of study. Michel de Certeau formulates
this controversy in terms of a frontier, ‘The frontier thus no longer separates
two hierarchized bodies of knowledge […] rather it sets off practices articulated by discourse from those that are not (yet) articulated by it.’47 A
44 Scott, Waverley, p.96. 45 Ibid, p.100.
46 William Robertson, The History of America, 8 vols (London: Strahan, Cadell, Davies,
Balfour, 1803), vol. iv, p.215.
47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
frontier, physical, linguistic or cultural, is the ‘not yet’ of theory, its practices
and images in the course of being formulated into artefacts and objects. Scott dramatizes this push and pull of theory and traditional or folk practices, and at every moment when this tension is felt, a frontier emerges. This image of a receding frontier associated with ordinary speech and ‘reflex’ practices is one of Scott’s major contributions to the form of the historical novel in North America as I shall demonstrate through a discussion of Fenimore Cooper’s
writing below.
Yet anthropological discourse and the aesthetics of savage bodies are
not merely the author’s tool in portraying traditional Highland life, but
strategies which are used by his Highland characters themselves. At their first meeting, Fergus does not advance to meet Waverley with a retinue of
Highland fighting men, as his clansman Evan Dhu has led the Englishman to
expect; instead he arrives with only one retainer, ‘cautious of exhibiting
external marks of dignity, unless at the time and in the manner when they
were most likely to produce an imposing effect.’48 Flora MacIvor also seeks to
affect Waverley with a carefully orchestrated Romantic performance on the harp beneath a Highland waterfall, an act calculated for political rather than personal ends, and where an aesthetic self-romanticization is used tactically.
Edward Waverley is perhaps Scott’s only protagonist to truly cross a cultural frontier and ‘go native’, by participating in the Jacobite uprising of
1745. Waverley offers marriage to a Jacobite Highland woman, swears fealty to Charles Edward Stuart and wears the Highland dress. Yet it is difficult to fathom how much is a Romantic performance and how much is genuine
48 Scott, Waverley, p.95.
political sympathy on his part. His encounters at the frontiers of war and the British periphery provide an opportunity to throw off the fantasy of his early literary attachments and enter a new maturity, through adopting the
pragmatic role of mediator between cultural and political positions. It is only the violent death of Fergus at the hands of the State which represents a less moderate British response to dissension, the punishment for high treason under English law being hanging, drawing and quartering. In this moment Scott offers a stronger anti-colonial perspective than elsewhere in the early
Waverley novels: in Fergus’s words, the law of high treason places the English
on a level with ‘a nation of cannibals’.49 Scott allows a Highlander to turn an
ethnographic representation against the British state, characterizing it in terms of the violent consumption and assimilation usually attributed to
‘savage’ peoples.
Beyond Waverley and Rob Roy, Scott’s treatment of the Highlander
figure in The Heart of Midlothian (1818) takes a rather different form. The illegitimate son of George Staunton and Effie Deans, stolen at birth, becomes
another of Scott’s typical savages, ‘his dress a tattered plaid and philabeg, no shoes, no stockings, no hat or bonnet […] his hair, twisted and matted like the
glibbeof the ancient wild Irish.’50 The Irish connection is employed to signify a broad, shared Celtic culture which looks back to Ossian’s cultural project, and accordingly there is still dignity in the savage boy’s physical presence, ‘his
gesture free and noble, like that of all savages.’51 This figure appears to be truly
49 Ibid, p.348.
50 Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, ed. by Clare Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982), p.480.
outlawed and degenerate, being finally shipped off to America to perform slave labour on a Virginia plantation, where he organizes a rebellion against the plantation owner and flees to join a local tribe of Native people. This narrative transition finally joins up the Scottish Highlander with the Native American as embodiments of violence and dissent. Nevertheless, this linkage reveals that the savage does not merely represent the trace of a disappearing way of life, but a motif which connects dissent at home with rebellion in the colonies. This savage does not disappear with the advance of modernity but creates a bridge
to a new frontier, a ‘New’ World of opportunity for savage expression. Savagery is therefore temporalized by Scott in a variety of ways, both as a modern phenomenon and a past one, as an image of primitive local culture and of international, anti-colonial rebellion.
Scott’s often contradictory uses of the term ‘savage’, to mean both
violent, backward and morally degenerate as well as free, noble and vital, largely conform to the oscillation between savage virtues and vices typical of Renaissance and eighteenth-century ethnographies. While such accounts were founded on a basic negativism about the state of Native peoples, the
comparative analysis of ‘savage’ and European life enabled the ethnographic
writer to note both the vices and virtues of other societies relative to their own, thus opening a space for a degree of political critique of European societies and contrasting with the more racially inflected ethnographies which would appear in the late nineteenth century. 52Scott’s writing often draws on stock
portrayals of primitive life, which generalize the features of Native peoples and
52 Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), p.29, p.100. See also, Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielson, A History of Anthropology, 2nd edn (2001; repr. London: Pluto Press, 2013).
their cultures as they were recorded in early imperial ethnographies and travel accounts. Francis Osbaldistone describes the Highlander Dougal as he is reunited with Rob Roy as ‘resembling my idea of a very uncouth, wild and ugly
savage, adoring the idol of his tribe.’53We can contrast Scott’s most violent
savage figure from Midlothian with the sentimental comparison which Harry Bertram attributes to struggling artist Dudley in Guy Mannering, where in the
summer he is ‘free as a wild Indian, enjoying myself at liberty amidst the
grandest scenes of nature.’54 Scott stages colonial-style encounters between
cultures and between multiple centres and peripheries, where savage qualities can be transferred from the border to the industrial metropolis of Glasgow or even Enlightenment Edinburgh.
The image of the wild Indian at liberty reveals the vitality of Scott’s
savage bodies as both a resource for ethnographic analysis and a dynamic
literary aesthetic. Scott’s primitives are also a wild resource in another sense, as the Highlands would become a fertile reserve of labour for the colonies through the clearances and mass emigration. The motif of the native Highlander is not merely a visual spectacle in Waverley but connects to a particular way of moving in and appropriating an environment. This manner of movement is evident in the actions of the Highlander concealing Waverley from discovery by the British army who ‘crawled on all fours with the dexterity
of an Indian, availing himself of every bush and inequality to escape
observation.’55 The native knows his landscape intimately so that intruders
53 Scott, Rob Roy, p.258.
54 Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed. by Jane Milgate (London: Penguin, 2003), p.115. 55 Ibid, p.196.
will always be at a disadvantage. Rob Roy’s escape from British soldiers by
diving into a river provides another vision of Highland physical prowess, with the narrator comparing him to an otter escaping from hunters.56 What we
might call the naturalism of these practices of evasion is part of how they elude discursive analysis and capture, for they constitute what Certeau calls an
‘“intuitive” or “reflex” ability, which is almost invisible.’57Rob Roy’s licence
and extraordinary mobility reflect his independence from all forms of
authority and control. Jean-Jacques Rousseau points to this same quality in the savages of the state of nature:
The body of the savage being the only instrument he knows, he puts it to all sorts of uses of which our bodies, for lack of practice, are
incapable […] you will soon see the advantages of having all one’s forces constantly at one’s command, of being always prepared for any
eventuality, and of always being, so to speak, altogether complete in oneself.58
While Rousseau’s conception of man in the state of nature cannot be directly compared to the state of Native peoples described in the ethnography of the eighteenth-century, Scott’s savages appear to owe much to Rousseau’s analysis
of earliest man, as well as to other French Enlightenment conceptions of the noble savage from the work Voltaire and Montesquieu. Scott follows the lead of Enlightenment conceptions of savagery in depicting the vitality, mobility and organicism embodied in acts of evading the clutches of modernity and the civic state. Savage bodies are in a constant state of movement and response,
56 Scott, Rob Roy, p.381.
57 Certeau, p.69.
essential skills for navigating harsh environments and traditional hunting. Although these skills are disappearing into new mechanized practices and industrial environments, such historical transitions do not render Scott’s
savage figures obsolete, as Rob Roy survives at the end of the novel. This transformation of bodies and practices is central in Scott’s work as a mode of
figuring temporal transition, and the depiction of such bodies also forms an important quality of the mobile frontiers in his texts.