“Fanciful Devotion”: Ritualization in Scott’s Old Mortality

“Fanciful Devotion”: Ritualization in Scott’s Old Mortality George A. Drake (bio) George A. Drake Central Washington University George A. Drake George A. Drake is Associate Professor and Department Chair at Central Washington University. He has published articles on Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Sir Walter Scott and is working on a book on historical space in the eighteenth-century novel. Footnotes 1. See, for example, Beth Dickson, “Sir Walter Scott and the Limits of Toleration,” Scottish Literary Journal 18.2 (1991): 46–62 and Ross MacKay, “The Scattered Ruins of Evidence: Non-Eventworthy History in Old Mortality and The Brownie of Bodsbeck,” Studies in Hogg and his World 12 (2001): 56–79. 2. Sir Walter Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel (Edinburgh: Oxford UP, 1925) ix. 3. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” The Invention of Tradition, ed Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 15–41. 4. Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, ed. Douglas Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1993) 9, 14. Hereafter cited in the text as Old Mortality. 5. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 74. 6. See John B. Humma, “Narrative Framing Apparatus of Scott’s Old Mortality,” Studies in the Novel 12 (1980): 301–15. Humma argues that Old Mortality’s role in the narrative “extends beyond the chapter into the very structure and central theme of the novel” (308) and that the introductory materials (including Cleishbotham’s general introduction to the Tales of My Landlord and Scott’s Magnum Opus introduction) are a fundamental rhetorical strategy in establishing the historicity and authority of the material. 7. See Peter D. Garside, “ Old Mortality’s Silent Minority” Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw (New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall, 1996) 149–50. 8. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975) 166. 9. Scott’s Magnum Opus introduction of 1830 reports that the historical Old Mortality, Robert Paterson, abandoned his wife and five children altogether. The Magnum Opus introduction can be found in Sir Walter Scott, Old Mortality, ed. Angus Calder (London: Penguin Classics, 1985). 10. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 120–24. 11. Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland Since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997) 16. 12. Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984) 119. 13. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (1976; Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981) 2: 796. 14. Daniel Whitmore observes that her “literalist faith in an archaic ritual…contributes directly to the social polarization that sets the stage for revolution.” “Bibliolatry and the Rule of the World: A Study of Scott’s Old Mortality,” Philological Quarterly 65 (1986): 246. 15. David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979) 70. 16. Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913) 175. 17. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, ed., John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991) 117. 18. See Trevor-Roper for a history of this invented tradition. 19. The term “imagined community” comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 20. Andrew D. Krull’s nuanced reading of this scene discusses its affective dimension at length. Krull, “Spectacles of Disaffection: Politics, Ethics, and Sentiment in Walter Scott’s Old Mortality,” ELH 73 (2006): 695–727. 21. Eighteenth-century satires directed at religious enthusiasm frequently targeted women in men’s roles. In the anti-Methodist satire The Spiritual Quixote (1773), for example, Richard Graves reserves his most acerbic satire for a group of enthusiasts who not only paired “higgledy-piggledy,” but for whom “it sometimes happened, that the men wore petticoats, and the women wore breeches.” Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote (London: Oxford UP, 1967) 241. 22. James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 46. 23. Douglas Mack, explanatory...

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