Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

From the beginning,
Ivanhoe
was distinguished by its huge readership and cult appeal. It sold 10,000 copies in its first two weeks, an unheard-of rate in 1819. That same year, a stage version opened in New York, and later Rossini composed
Ivanhoe,
the opera. Walter Scott had begun his literary career two decades earlier as a collector of Scottish ballads. He then turned his hand to poetry, specializing in grand romantic vistas and heroic themes from Scottish history. “The Lady of the Lake” (1810) made his name and fortune (which he later lost). But then along came Lord Byron. Almost overnight,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
made Scott’s narrative poetry seem provincial and old hat. Making a virtue of necessity, Scott turned to fiction, with spectacular results.
Waverley
(1814), which looked back to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Scots rebellion of 1745, was something altogether new to the British reader: the recreation of an entire historical canvas, populated by romantic but credible characters, acting out Britain’s painful emergence from its tribal past into modernity and nationhood. Variations on these themes inspired a further sequence of highly successful “Scottish” novels until in 1819, the ever-restless Scott felt the Caledonian well had run dry, and he ventured a new tale removed in both time and place: the England of the Middle Ages. The result was a book that can lay claim to being the most widely read novel of the nineteenth century, and among the most popular of all time.

Ivanhoe
maintains a strong readership today, when the rest of Scott’s extraordinary literary output has sunk into obscurity, but it has never been a great critical success. The Scott purists wish he had never traveled south to England at all, and his compatriot David Daiches typifies the twentieth-century scholarly opinion of the novel: “Ivanhoe, though it has qualities of its own, is much more superficial than any of the Scottish novels, and is written throughout on a much lower plane. Scott did not, in fact, know the Middle Ages well and he had little understanding of its social or religious life” (“Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist,” p. 46; see “For Further Reading”). Since the 1980s, critics have turned back to
Ivanhoe
as an important thesis on British nationalism, and for its racial and sexual themes, but whatever the vicissitudes of its reputation among literary scholars, the novel always has enjoyed a cultural afterlife that much exceeded its scope and pretensions as literature.
Ivanhoe
single-handedly revived the age of chivalry in the Western popular imagination, and produced a cult of medieval rites and manners that persists into our own age, with its “Dungeons and Dragons” and
Lord of the Rings.
As for its cultural politics, the impact of
Ivanhoe
has been felt most deeply and controversially not in Britain, but in the United States.

“I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter,” wrote Mark Twain to a friend in 1903
(Letters,
p. 738). Scott loomed large for Twain the writer, who lamented the impact of his “wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence’” on American literature. But far more serious for Twain was the enduring
cultural
impression made by Scott’s
Ivanhoe
on the American South. The antebellum South was an essentially feudal system of rank and caste, and its white ruling class found in Scott’s romantic tale of chivalrous knights, powerful land-owning barons, and loyal serfs a glorious mirror image of itself. For Twain, whatever impetus toward modernization had existed toward “liberty, humanity, and progress” in the South was effectively smothered by the popularity of Scott, whose novels “set the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” The Scott “disease,” he went so far as to say, had caused the Civil War
(Mississippi Writings,
pp. 500-501).
Ivanhoe
became, arguably, even more necessary to the South after that war was lost. Scott’s title character spends much of the novel in disguise, and achieves his greatest triumph in the character of “The Disinherited Knight.” He is named for his estate—he is Wilfred of Ivanhoe—but does not or cannot claim it. Ivanhoe the place is never visited and barely mentioned, as if forgotten. The novel’s title thus points to a glaring absence in the world of the novel, both spiritual and material. England has been conquered, and the spoils have gone to the victorious Normans. As his chivalric pseudonym suggests, Ivanhoe the man is a complex figure representing both inherited nobility and loss, a romantic composite uniquely designed to appeal to the defeated Confederate sensibility.

If Ivanhoe’s fall from land-owning scion to homeless errant knight elicited a fragrant bitterness for the southern reader, no less intoxicating was the situation of his heart, torn between the blond, blue-eyed Saxon princess, Rowena, and the exotic Jew, Rebecca. It is one of literature’s most intriguing love triangles. Much controversy surrounds Scott’s representation of Jews in
Ivanhoe,
but one suggestive means of understanding the intense and destabilizing desires Rebecca inspires is as a figure for the white man’s attraction for and resistance to the prospect of racial mixture. This is certainly how the late-nineteenth-century African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt interpreted Ivanhoe’s dilemma. For Chesnutt, Scott was “the literary idol of the South,” and Chesnutt’s novel,
The House Behind the Cedars
(1900), contains a fascinating revision of one of
Ivanhoe’s
central episodes, the tournament at Ashby where the victorious Ivanhoe awards the crown to the fair Rowena. In Chesnutt’s novel, the Queen of Love and Beauty is also named Rowena, but she is dark: In fact, she is a mulatta passing for white. As another character later remarks, “She should have been named Rebecca instead of Rowena” (p. 92). In Chesnutt’s novel, Rowena’s rival is not a person, but a racial “other” incorporated within the romantic heroine herself. Ivanhoe’s romantic triangle is dissolved into an image of racial ambiguity, a mirror of his own ambivalence. Unsurprisingly, Chesnutt’s “black” Rowena dies in tragic circumstances. In Scott’s novel, the hero begins as a figure for cultural crossing—he has left his Saxon household to follow the Norman king—but the question of whether he is capable of making a second crossing, this time into an ostracized racial group, hangs over the novel until the very end. On the last page, describing Ivanhoe’s marriage to Rowena, Scott refuses to inquire “whether the recollection of Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity did not recur to his mind more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether have approved.” If Scott is reluctant, generations of readers have not been so coy. It is a cliché of
Ivanhoe’s
reception that the reader will inevitably wish the hero to have chosen the dark and inspiring Rebecca over her bland, blond rival.

As Chesnutt’s revisionary novel makes clear,
Ivanhoe,
fairly or not, has been put to use as a racist text. The American historical novelist Thomas Dixon based his reconstruction trilogy on a white supremacist reading of
Ivanhoe
—beginningwith
A Leopard’s Spots
(1902). Likewise, the Ku Klux Klan’s very name echoes the romantic “clans” of Scott’s fiction. The concluding chapters of
Ivanhoe,
which focus on the rituals of the Templar Knights, are especially haunting for the American reader. A secretive order of Christian militant men, dressed in white, take a dark-complexioned woman as prisoner, then conduct an extra-legal show trial at which she is condemned to burn at the stake. Rebecca is, of course, a Jew, and is saved at the last, so Scott could not have known in writing
Ivanhoe
that he was producing the iconography—the hooded white garb, the Masonic rituals, the burning cross—for the vilest and most feared racist organization in modern America.

But the Klan were poor readers of
Ivanhoe.
The reason that the inevitable marriage that concludes Scott’s romance has often seemed less than satisfying to readers is that it takes place outside the erotic space of the novel. As the union of two Saxons, Ivanhoe’s marrying Rowena is anomalous to the novel’s deep investment in the mixture of races, cultures, and languages. Scott’s assertion that the marriage marked a “pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races” (p. 461) makes no sense, biologically or symbolically, since Ivanhoe and Rowena belong to the same race and are, in most respects, undifferentiated. Ironically, the greatest proponents of racial purity in the novel are not the Templar Knights or the Norman rulers but Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, who takes a eugenic approach to the cause of Saxon restoration. He enforces his ideological commitment to Saxon purity even at the expense of his own son, whom he doesn’t consider sufficiently well born for Rowena. That said, Cedric’s nationalism is as much about policing English sexuality as it is about race. He blames the decline of Saxon culture on the Circe-like enchantment of “Norman arts”: “We became enervated by Norman arts long ere we fell under Norman arms. Far better was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror!” (p. 211). The Saxon way of life, Cedric argues, was not lost on the battlefield, but at the dinner table and in the dressing room, where Norman “luxury” imported its tantalizing customs and emasculated its fighting men. During the almost century-long sequence of wars against France that had just concluded when Scott wrote
Ivanhoe,
modern British masculinity was essentially constructed in opposition to perceived French “effeminacy.” His readers would thus have been well aware of “luxury” as a code-word for degraded French manhood, and taken delight in his sardonic descriptions of the “fripperies” of Norman dress.

Scott’s fascination with mixture extends to all aspects of the novel, including language. There is no better image of the “multiculturalism” of early Norman England, as conceived by Scott, than Ivanhoe and Richard’s horrified reaction to Athelstane’s animated appearance at his own funeral: “Ivanhoe crossed himself, repeating prayers in Saxon, Latin, or Norman-French, as they occurred to his memory, while Richard alternately said,
Benedicte,
and swore,
Mort de ma vie!’
(p. 436). Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew are likewise spoken in the novel. The master language of
Ivanhoe
itself, modern English, is a product of this historical moment, a ”mixed language” in which the linguistic distinctions between Saxon and Norman have ”disappeared” along with the deep cultural antagonisms in the aftermath of the Conquest. That the many languages and cultures should be ”completely mingled” is the endpoint of
Ivanhoe’s
historical trajectory, and the book travels back to a time when this amalgamation was as yet unachieved. Its heroes therefore are those who intuit and obey the imperative to cross over from their ”home” culture to a new order. What Cedric sees in his son as an act of betrayal, the reader perceives as a necessary, if perhaps over-enthusiastic embrace of the new post-Conquest order. But if Ivanhoe embarks on the exemplary crossing of the novel, from Saxon to Norman, it is far from the most imaginative or interesting. That distinction belongs to the illicit, cross-cultural desires of Rebecca for Ivanhoe and, most spectacularly, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert’s reckless passion for Rebecca.

Bois-Guilbert’s emotional signature is vacillation—“a man agitated by strong and contending passions” (p. 403)—but he never gives up his desire for Rebecca, and literally dies of her rejection. We admire Rebecca for her choice of religion (and celibacy) over her love for Ivanhoe, but Bois-Guilbert thrills us with his readiness to take the Jewess at any odds, giving up fame, religion, honor, and everything that has heretofore constituted his heroic, chivalric identity. He talks to her of returning to Palestine, to install her as queen of some new, supra-national Masonic order. Rebecca calls it a “dream ... an empty vision of the night” (p. 399), and she is probably right. But Bois-Guilbert is the only character capable of such imagining, and he is willing to make the most scandalous crossing of all, from Templar Christian Knight to Jew. In looking so far beyond the cultural boundaries of twelfth-century Europe, it is Bois-Guilbert who most belongs to Scott’s own global, post-enlightenment moment. “England—Europe—is not the world” (p. 398), he tells Rebecca. He calls conventional religion “nursery tales” and “bigotry” and instead makes a religion of himself and his own will, like a character in Byron or Dostoevsky. He is not a man of his age, and by the end his fellow knights cannot even look at him: “His general appearance was grand and commanding; but, looking at him with attention, men read that in his dark features, from which they willingly withdrew their eyes” (p. 447). Note Scott’s odd turn of phrase: not repulsion, but a “willing” withdrawal of the eyes. The knights refuse to “read” the futurity in Bois-Guilbert’s face, mistaking it for darkness. As with Milton’s Satan in
Paradise Lost,
villainy is not incompatible with lyricism in
Ivanhoe.
Bois-Guilbert might despise religion, but it is to him that Scott gives the most poetic theological reflection in the novel, when he speaks to Rebecca of the transfigurations of the body at death, “dispersed to the elements of which our strange forms are so mystically composed—not a relic left of that graceful frame, from which we could say this lived and moved!” (p. 399). Rebecca’s stoic faith has grandeur, but not such depths as Bois-Guilbert’s despair. The fact that he dies not from Ivanhoe’s lance but his own “contending passions” is a fantastic, even surreal moment in the text that has embarrassed and perplexed Scott’s readers, but in fact manifests beautifully the historical impossibility of the Templar Knight’s continuing presence in the book. It would do as well for him to have disappeared in a puff of smoke, and awakened on the streets of St. Petersburg in 1895, or Paris in 1968.