Walter Scott, Postcolonial Fiction, and U.S. New South Literature

transcript

Walter Scott, Postcolonial Theory,

and New South Literature

Peter SchmidtSwarthmore College

Originally published in Mississippi Quarterly 56.4 (Fall 2003): 545-54.Special Issue on Postcolonial Theory, the U.S. South, and New World Studies.

The importance of Sir Walter Scott’s fiction for U.S. Southern culture has hardly

gone unnoticed, from Mark Twain’s exasperated quip about the South’s “Sir Walter

disease,” or Charles Chesnutt’s ironic allusions to Ivanhoe in The House Behind the

Cedars, to C. Hugh Holman’s more recent examination of Scott’s influence on William

Gilmore Simms’ American Revolutionary romances, or Laura Doyle’s study of ideals of

race purity that initiates its analysis with Scott. William Faulkner once famously

suggested that Scott’s popularity below the Mason-Dixon line was caused by a “kinship

perhaps between the life of Scott’s Highlander and the life the Southerner led after

Reconstruction. They too were in the aftermath of a land that had been conquered and

devastated by people speaking its own language, which hasn’t happened too many times”

(Faulkner in the University 135). At this juncture in U.S. literary history, when

paradigms derived from colonial and postcolonial studies are challenging Puritan-

centered narratives of American identity, there has never been a better time to reexamine

Walter Scott’s legacy for U.S., especially Southern, fiction. For Scott is an indispensable

novelist for studying narratives of how conquered colonies or border states reclaim

nationhood, and if there was any region in which Scott’s influence can clearly be shown

to be dominant for a lengthy period that area is the U.S. South, both before and after the

Civil War. In this essay I focus, first, on an overview of the relevance of Scott’s fiction

to some current ideas central to colonial and postcolonial studies, with specific focus on

Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1820), and, second, on how underrecognized tensions in Scott’s

classic postcolonial novels may provide crucial insights into the cultural work of New

South fiction, which also often frames its project in thoroughly postcolonial terms. This

latter discussion will place particular emphasis on Thomas Dixon, who was explicit about

using Scott as a model for his historical romances.1 Despite a general sense that Scott was important to the South, the relevance of

Scott for understanding the post-Reconstruction New South has not received sustained

scholarly attention. Yet Scott arguably provides the most influential narrative paradigms

for both the white South’s understanding of its defeat and subjugation, and for the motifs

of the South’s postwar rebirth and reunion promoted in popular fiction that became

within a generation the dominant mode of understanding nineteenth-century American

history. Conversely, we cannot understand how dissenting voices conceived their

resistance to white New South ideology—authors like Mark Twain, Frances Harper,

Sutton Griggs, Charles W. Chesnutt, and perhaps Joel Chandler Harris—unless we

consider well the ways in which they too felt they had to engage and revise narrative

patterns inherited from Scott. The U.S. writers who tried to challenge emerging New

South ideology in fiction had to confront the dominant New South’s readings of

England’s most influential historical novelist.

For readers familiar with some of the central terms and debates of contemporary

postcolonial theory, from subaltern, contact zone, and creolization to the issue of how to

1 For the Twain reference, see Life on the Mississippi, “Enchantments and Enchanters” 242. A good discussion of Chesnutt’s linking Scott to his heroine’s delusions of whiteness in House Behind the Cedars is Cathy Boeckmann’s (161-62); see also her perceptive general comments on the relevance of Scott’s historical romance mode to Dixon’s fiction (92-93). I thank Scott Romine for reminding me of Faulkner’s comment on Scott’s Southern popularity, as well as for many other ways in which I have benefited from his essay on Dixon and Page, which I saw in draft form. As I hope will become clear, Faulkner’s insight well applies to the Waverly novels as a whole but cannot explain the popularity of Ivanhoe as an allegory for anti-Reconstruction rebellion; nor can the comment illuminate Scott’s interest in the way the history of the English language itself embeds the traces of colonial conflict and different linguistic influences.

understand the roles played by nativism vs. hybridity, Scott’s narrative voice is

experienced with a shock of recognition. Consider Ivanhoe’s description of the

“miserable” condition of the English nation one-half century after the Norman French

invasion, “prey to every species of subaltern oppression” (65). Scott’s synoptic opening

chapter of the novel provides us with an anatomy and a history of the Anglo-Saxons’

colonization:

Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the

Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by a common language and

mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of

triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat.

The power had been completely placed in the hands of the Norman

nobility, by the event of the battle of Hastings, and it had been used ...

with no moderate hand. The whole race of Saxon princes and nobles had

been extirpated or disinherited, with few or no exceptions; nor were the

numbers great who possessed land in the country of their fathers.... (16)

The only hope of the Saxons lies in isolated bands of renegades, including Robin Hood,

and in their disinherited king, Richard the First, who was imprisoned abroad but has

escaped and returned in disguise to join the rebellion. But as the novel’s Shakespearean

fool character comments, the subalterns may resent their oppression but have thoroughly

absorbed many of the prejudices and even the words of their conquerors. Their everyday

banter about food reflects a severe dichotomy between the raw and the cooked, the

uncivilized and civilized: a pig is called by its Saxon name, swine, when alive, but

becomes the Norman-French “pork” when cooked; ditto calf vs. veal and many other

examples (21).

From such passages it appears that Scott’s novel works primarily through tracing

how binary oppositions run through every aspect of Saxon and Norman life, ironically

uniting while they also separate. As Scott’s best interpreter, Georg Lukács, long ago

pointed out, the plots of Scott’s novels are always dialectical, with his heroes embodying

the mixed virtues of the “middle way,” a sometimes calculated and at other times

involuntary synthesis between opposing forces that threaten the society’s social cohesion.

Through the hero’s struggles and moral choices, what could rend the society apart

becomes instead the means for a new phase of its growth. And this social transformation

always occurs via a redistribution of power in the public sphere and new alliances in the

private sphere, especially through marriage.

It is [Scott’s heroes’] task to bring the extremes whose struggle fills the

novel, whose clash expresses artistically a great crisis in society, into

contact with one another. ...Scott always chose as his principal figures

such as may, through character and fortune, enter into human contact with

both camps. (36)

Candidates for such mediating figures in Ivanhoe are many, and this is indeed one

of the novel’s strengths. Certainly Robin Hood plays such a role, but the principle role

models are aristocratic. In the case of the male heroes, they possess not just cultural but

physical qualities that make them fated to be instruments of historical progress—many

are of “mixed” blood, race, and/or cultural lineage, half-Saxon and half-Norman. In

Ivanhoe, King Richard is Saxon on his mother’s side and Norman on his father’s and has

to earn the respect of some of the novel’s elders. As for “the younger race,” as Scott puts

it, “to the great disquiet of the seniors, [they] had, like Ivanhoe, broken down many of the

barriers which had separated for half a century the Norman victors from the vanquished

Saxons” (371).

In the first chapter of Ivanhoe Scott stresses that the very language in which he

writes is a living example of the cultural mixture and the confounding of binary

oppositions that is also enacted by his novel’s plot. Scott emphasizes English itself as

inherently a creole language arising in a colonial contact zone. Note in particular the

slippage between “dialect” and “our English language” in the following key passage:

“the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those inferior beings by

whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect,

compounded betwixt the French and Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render

themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees

the structure of our present English language” (17).

The role of Jews in Ivanhoe, especially Isaac and his daughter Rebecca,

complicate both the Saxon/Norman binary that sets the novel in motion and the narratives

of heroic mixture by which Scott attempts to achieve closure. In general, the Jews are

cast as the text’s immutable Others, eternally to be outside of any “English” social

configuration. “The leopard will not change his spots,” Friar Tuck says at one point,

changing the meaning of Jeremiah 13:23, “and a Jew he will continue to be” (282). After

healing Ivanhoe, Rebecca is charged with sorcery and threatened with being burnt at the

stake unless a knight will redeem her by combat. This trial by combat episode is meant

to be the grand climax of Ivanhoe, but today it reads with a strange mixture of camp and

anti-climax, not high drama. One curious element in how Scott represents Rebecca’s

threatened fate is that he imports Africans to be in charge of Rebecca’s would-be funeral

pyre. His descriptions of them underline Rebecca’s own racial apartness from either

Saxon or Norman. Clichés about blackness that became familiar in minstrel

performances, popular imagery, and story-telling in the U.S. in the latter part of the

nineteenth century were evidently well enough known in 1820 for Scott to exploit their

effects to add both comedy and “horror” to his execution scene:

Beside this deadly apparatus stood four black slaves, whose colour and

African features, then so little known in England, appalled the multitude,

who gazed on them as on demons.... [W]hen, in speech with each other,

they expanded their blabber lips, and shewed their white fangs, as if they

grinned at the thoughts of the expected tragedy, the startled commons

could scarcely help believing that they were actually the familiar spirits

with whom the witch [Rebecca] had convened.... (382-83)

Lurid associations linking Rebecca’s powers to the Devil here morph into a portrait of

blackness defined primarily via early nineteenth-century racist discourse generated by the

slave trade and colonialism. Given such innuendo, it is hardly surprising that the Jewish

characters absent themselves from the Anglo-Norman union concluding Ivanhoe and opt

instead for exile in Muslim Spain.

Yet the role of the Jews in Ivanhoe is more complicated. They are lightning rods

of sympathy as well as antipathy, both for key characters and for the narrator. As well as

revealing cowardice and avarice, Isaac is given speeches meant to be as eloquent as

Shylock’s exposing the hypocrisy of both Saxon and Norman societies. Isaac also praises

Ivanhoe as a character who, familiar with being an exile in his own land, has compassion

for “the exile of Jacob” and his descendants (336). Rebecca too evokes admiration for

her strength of character under duress and her eloquent descriptions of the pain of exile.

This exilic motif in Ivanhoe comes to a climax during Rebecca’s extended trial and her

defense by combat: when the text’s hero Ivanhoe becomes her champion during the last

chapters of the novel, this drama displaces from the center of the narrative the more

proper story of the romance between Ivanhoe and the Saxon heroine, Rowena. Rebecca’s

increasing dominance as the novel moves to its conclusion—a matter of her eloquence, it

should be stressed, not just her victimization—creates a significant tension with the main

purpose of Scott’s narrative, which is to provide the means for synthesizing Saxon and

Norman, not Saxon and Jew.2

The “voluntary” Jewish exodus that shapes the ending of Ivanhoe confirms a

crucial shift in the novel’s use of the word “race.” Primarily deployed in reference to

Saxons and Normans as two hostile “races” separated by blood as well as by culture, as

the novel moves toward its climactic synthesis of Norman and Saxon Scott’s use of

“race” shifts to mark one form of identity that cannot be blended. It is true that many

elements of Norman and Saxon culture are also excluded from the mix that brings into

birth modern English culture, most notably isolationist Saxon elements (as personified by

Cedric, among others), or Norman traits (personified by the villain Brian de Bois-Gilbert,

for instance) that are simultaneously too domineering and too lustful toward sexual

mixture with cultural Others whether Jewish or Saxon. Rowena’s marriage to Ivanhoe is

read typologically by Scott’s narrator as uniting two different races that hereafter can be

understood as two different cultures and classes:

the attendance of the high-born Normans, as well as Saxons, joined with

the universal jubilee of the lower orders, ... marked the marriage of two

individuals as a type of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races,

2 For more on the genesis of Scott’s Jewish characters in Ivanhoe, including the possibility that the inspiration for Rebecca was part of the Jewish community in New York City (!), see Tulloch 405. Laura Doyle’s Bordering on the Body makes a number of excellent generalizations about the ties between Romanticism and early nineteenth-century race theories and the importance of theories of kinship patriarchy to the analysis of race discourse. But she seriously misreads the ending of Ivanhoe when she claims that “Rowena’s instrumental in-group sexuality is juxtaposed against the powerfully attractive yet taboo out-group sexuality of Rebecca, ‘the Jewess’” (42). This generalization may hold for the middle of the novel, and especially for Rowena’s father’s views, but it is not an accurate description of the novel’s concluding marriage. Rowena’s union with Ivanhoe is not “in-group” or “endogamous,” given Ivanhoe’s ties to both the Saxons and the Normans; Scott takes great pains to emphasize that it is at least somewhat exogamous, involving an expansion of kin ties. Of course, such a union is hardly as exogamous as an Ivanhoe/Rebecca marriage would be.

which, since that period, have been so completely mingled, that the

distinction has become utterly invisible. (398)

The story of Ivanhoe, then, is in general the story of how races become ethnicities, which

then become simply intermingled family lineages and customs. The Jewish Otherness

that contrasts with this Saxon/Norman synthesis, however, becomes increasingly marked

as the novel progresses—not just as a different history but as a different blood, race, even

species. Most pointedly, this is done via Friar Tuck’s metaphor of the leopard’s spots.

Unlike Norman or Saxon traits and cultural memories that may and must be modified in

the new union, Jewish Otherness for Scott appears intransigent and divinely decreed:

they cannot be English, and even if they were incorporated into a new English state, as

Rowena and Ivanhoe offer to do, they will remain alien and, the novel suggests,

potentially dangerous.

Yet the final irony emphasized by Ivanhoe’s brilliant concluding chapter is that,

although exiled, Rebecca remains deeply internalized within Rowena’s and Ivanhoe’s

memories. Further, she becomes not just a vision of the strengths of Jewish character

(though she is certainly that), but of the strengths of the Saxon race that allowed it to

endure its own form of exile. Deep within Saxon cultural identity until it becomes

“invisible” must always be the memory of exclusion, and paradoxically the figure who

gives most eloquent voice to that memory is not Saxon but Jewish.

Scott’s analysis of colonialism in the Waverly novels, including Ivanhoe, was so

influential in the nineteenth century that it became a central feature of the novel in

English, a primary way in which it figured historical memory, cultural progress, and

England’s supposed destiny as an imperial empire. Let us turn now to the U.S. South and

ask why, of all regions in the country, this one would respond most strongly to Scott’s

historical vision. Scott’s influence on antebellum Southern writing, especially William

Gilmore Simm’s historical romances about the South’s role in the Revolutionary war, has

been attentively studied by historians such as C. Hugh Holman, who has found the

South’s receptivity to Scott an example of the primary difference between the Southern

and Northern U.S. In The Immoderate Past Holman argued that the South’s imagination

is primarily historical and dialectical, whereas the North’s is primarily typological and

ahistorical because it is grounded in the Puritan intellectual legacy. Yet, as I suggested

earlier, the importance of Scott to the New South fiction has not been studied closely

enough.

The postwar U.S. novelist with the most ambitious and successful agenda to adopt

Scott’s borderland novels to U.S. history is—unfortunately—Thomas Dixon.3 Dixon’s

Reconstruction trilogy (The Leopard’s Spots, 1902; The Clansman; and The Traitor,

1907) is easy to interpret as unintentionally bad Scott, with chivalric trappings, stilted

dialogue, melodramatic reversals, and a predictable mix of romance and martial epic

plots. But such an approach trivializes Dixon’s massive cultural impact, which means

that it trivializes rather than squarely faces Dixon’s appeals to racism. Dixon was so

influential not because of his subtlety but because of his audaciousness: he knew that

with some crucial revisions (more on that in a moment) Scott’s formulas for describing

oppression and cultural rebirth in medieval England or eighteenth century Scotland

would be well suited for whites trying to come to terms with the cataclysms of the Civil

War and Reconstruction. In order to be truly critical of Dixon’s racist interpretation of

3 For good work on Dixon, see Joel Williamson, Nina Silber, Walter Benn Michaels (both “The Souls of White Folk” and Our America), Cathy Boeckmann, and Scott Romine. Excellent work has been done on the ideological innovations of D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915), based on Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905), most notably by Michael Rogin, Clyde Taylor, and Charles Bernardi, who do not ignore earlier formal analysis of Griffith’s cinematic techniques so much as take them to an entirely different level. For an astute discussion of Dixon’s complex response to Stowe, especially his “elaboration” of Stowe’s understanding of Simon Legree’s villainy rather than a simple refutation of it, see Romine, who also suggests that Thomas Nelson Page and a trilogy of historical novels by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz were other influences on Dixon. I would add Albion Tourgée to any list of novelists Dixon’s trilogy aims to refute. Other earlier imitators of Scott’s medievalism whom Dixon would have known include the novelists Charles Major (When Knighthood Was in Flower, second edition 1898) and F. Marion Campbell (Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second Crusade, 1898).

American history, we must first take it seriously, which means to take his narratives

complexly. Dixon could not have been more open about his debt to Scott, for he praised Scott

(along with Shakespeare and Dickens) as models who could teach contemporary

novelists to avoid the “putrefaction” and pessimism of the Naturalist school of fiction

(Cook 55). Dixon titled the first novel of his trilogy after the famous Biblical phrase used

in Ivanhoe, “the leopard will not change his spots.” We will look more closely at

Dixon’s revision of the meaning of this phrase in a moment, but for now we can stress

that Dixon transposed Scott’s reference to Jewish blood to black blood and took Friar

Tuck’s warning to signify the racial elements that cannot participate in national reunion

unless playing a carefully circumscribed role as an internal alien. But in alluding to

Ivanhoe so directly at the start of his Reconstruction trilogy, Dixon signified that his

ambition was nothing less than to use Scott’s resolution of the struggle of the Saxons

against the Normans as a paradigm for understanding both the American Civil War and

the continuation of that war by other means known as Reconstruction.

In effect, Dixon’s Reconstruction trilogy equates Scott’s birth of the English

nation with the rebirth of the American one. Dixon adapts Ivanhoe in order to show how

the white North and the white South may finally be reconciled. The invading Normans

are the arrogant Northerners, the Southerners the stalwart Saxons, the dangerous but

necessary Jews become the blacks, the plot revolves around heroes in eclipse, threatened

rapes, set-piece battles, epic debates and historical summaries, unjust trials, villains

whose lusts are compulsively detailed, and medieval trappings and combat trials which

signify not nostalgia so much as an aggressive and revisionary modernism that sheathes

itself under the guise of rediscovering lost values. As Nina Silber, building on Jackson

Lears’ work, has well argued, Dixon’s fascination with icons of premodern manliness is

part of a larger U.S. cultural crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century about gender

roles and combating the perceived feminization of Anglo-Saxon men by high capitalist

culture. Southern whites’ double experience of defeat—first in the war and then during

Reconstruction—fueled Dixon’s drive to create popular melodramas of beset white

manhood triumphant.

Like Scott, Dixon juxtaposes famous historical figures and unknown, semi-

historical or nonhistorical heroes. But his depictions of proper manhood are more

complex than simple hero worship, and here too he learns from Scott. True manhood for

Dixon involves not just physical and/or mental power, but restraint and self-control.

Historical characters, such as Abraham Lincoln or Thaddeus Stevens, play minor but

crucial roles in the narratives, in Dixon sometimes being transparently disguised under

pseudonyms, while (again, as in Scott) it is the fictional leaders who are the central

protagonists. In all cases Dixon’s heroes, like Scott’s, learn self-government while his

villains do not. Examples of Dixon’s attempts to interweave fictional exemplars among

his historical characters are Philip Stoneman and the Camerons in The Clansman; both

represent Dixon’s attempts to synthesize premodern and modern virtues into a heroic

model of Anglo-Saxon heroism.

Dixon also attempted to copy other Scott-like characteristics that Lukács also

identified, including

• Scott’s dramatic compression of events (Dixon accomplished this much more

successfully than Thomas Nelson Page)

• in Scott’s plots the split of a nation into warring parties always runs through the

center of the closest human relationships

• the motif of the hero in hiding or disgrace, who comes on the scene after the

causes of the historical crises have been explained in order to resolve it

• Scott’s general disdain for the masses and admiration for strong leaders

• the continual specter of the hero’s clan becoming enslaved in their “own” land

• the use of marriage among the young and recantation among certain warring

elders as the resolution to the central historical conflict

• Scott’s narrative of nationhood, in which the crucial crisis in a nation’s

development is successfully passed only via a ruthless cultural dialectic that Lukács,

borrowing from Hegel, described as a “depreciation, demolition and destruction of the

preceding mode of reality” (Lukács 39).

In the space remaining in this essay, I would like to dwell a little more thoroughly

on three of Dixon’s most significant borrowings: 1) his use of Ivanhoe to figure both

Reconstruction vs. the proper form of reconciliation between white Northerners and

Southerners; 2) his use of the Waverly novels’ basic structure to represent the American

South as Scotland, a nation’s cultural Other that is simultaneously its heroic center; and

3) the ways in which Dixon revealingly misinterprets Scott.

Philip Stoneman’s unjust trial for murder in The Clansman is one obvious way in

which Dixon adopts the narrative binaries and crossings of Ivanhoe, with Federal forces

being cast in the role of the arrogant Norman invaders. Yet Philip of course is not

Southern but the son of one of the chief Northern villains; he has befriended many of the

Southerners his father seeks to rule. Here is just one of many examples in The Clansman

of the Scottian motif in which interpersonal relationships reproduce in microcosm the

central social conflicts of the society. In both Ivanhoe and The Clansman marriage

should be healthily exogamous rather than endogamous—that is, it crosses old clan

boundaries and revises and balances differences between two dominant social groups as

they join to create a new phase of their history.

Dixon’s most influential use of Scott was demonically clever: he linked white

resistance against Reconstruction to Ivanhoe’s central motif, Saxon resistance against the

Norman invaders. Yet Dixon pushed Scott’s binary oppositions even further and cast

Reconstruction as a battle between civilization and barbarism, invaders and usurpers vs.

honorable defenders of the Southern homeland who resisted subaltern oppression with

noble endurance. Dixon’s adaptation of Ivanhoe in his Reconstruction trilogy, especially

The Clansman, suggests that American civilization was not truly born until the death of

slavery and the reconciliation of Northern and Southern whites under a single modern

economic and political system after the rise of white dominance in the New South.

Dixon’s Reconstruction novels also adapt Scott’s Waverly novels as a whole to

explore the relevance to Southern and U.S. history of Scott’s quintessential colonial

theme, the Scotland of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its struggle with the

British crown. (Ivanhoe is exceptional among Scott’s early novels for its medieval and

English focus.) Here again Dixon’s reinterpretation of Scott was quite shrewd, if judged

solely from the perspective of what makes effective propaganda. For an author as

concerned as Dixon was to give heroic and historical stature to Southern whiteness, it

made sense for him to be quite explicit about borrowing plot motifs and imagery from the

novelist most celebrated for epic sagas of the Scots and the Anglo-Saxons. The

Clansman, it might be noted, is dedicated to Dixon’s uncle, who is identified as “A

Scotch-Irish Leader of the South,” and the Ku Klux Klan are depicted as the

“reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland” (The Clansman, “To the Reader”).

Dixon well knew that Southerners, despite their pride, stood in uneasy and

somewhat marginal status to the Yankee North. From the beginnings of American

history, the South had frequently been cast as America’s Other, a region apart, with a

different economy and a more defined class system, regardless of the central roles the

South played in forcing the collapse of British resistance during the Revolution and then

in writing the Constitution afterwards. Scotland’s heroic resistance to the British and

then its eventual union, as depicted in Scott’s fiction, gave Dixon the perfect frame he

sought for portraying first the white South’s “heroic” resistance and then its postwar

reunion with the white North. At the climax of The Clansman, the KKK points the way

towards this new understanding of a newly born American empire. Dixon describes his

hero Ben Cameron in ways that explicitly invoke and then surpass Scott: “His race had

defied the Crown of Great Britain a hundred years from the caves and wilds of Scotland

and Ireland taught the English people how to slay a king and build a commonweath, and,

driven into exile into the wilderness of America, led our Revolution, peopled the hills of

the South, and conquered the West” (342).

Although Dixon wanted to revise depictions of the U.S. South as the nation’s

Other, Dixon’s novels also make dramatic use of familiar tropes that orientalize and

femininize the South, casting it as either a romantic or a demonic premodern world full of

terror, unjust tyrannies, and sensual delights—as Nina Silber well noticed. Strong

women who represent Anglo-Saxon ideals are inevitably subject to captivity narratives in

which they must be rescued and revenged by white males, while other female figures are

either problematic heroines or villains precisely to the degree that they abuse power over

men: negative female characters are too “masculine”; his male villains, though they

appear steely, prove “feminine” and undisciplined. In the end, Dixon’s trilogy suggests

that America can only regain its moral center regarding both gender roles and racial

destiny by becoming infused with the South’s pure and heroic strain of Anglo-Saxonism,

as expressed by its best heroes and heroines. Dixon adopts orientalizing motifs as a way

of positioning the South as a borderlands region where white Americans may rediscover

primordial strengths and heal their internal divisions and doubts. (Other contemporaries,

including the Southerner Owen Wister, used the West or other regions outside the U.S. as

their Scottian frontier.) Orientalist discourse in the name of Anglo-Saxonism may feel

like a contradiction. But of course orientalism always has as its telos the testing and

recovery of white Western heroism, so Dixon’s novels are hardly anomalous in this

regard.4

The gender dynamics of Dixon’s fiction, like Scott’s, proves central to their

iconography of race and empire. Dixon depicted the white South’s mixture of violence

and paternalism in race matters as the perfect solution to America’s race problem, the

problem that had almost destroyed the country once and would have to be solved if the

U.S. were to continue to expand its domain as other previous great civilizations had done.

Written in the midst raging debates for and against the recent U.S. accession of Puerto

Rico and the Philippines, Dixon’s novels provided a blueprint for how Anglo-Saxons

could control and exploit colored peoples without being “polluted” by them. In Dixon’s

quasi-millennial vision, the New South’s rejoining the United States would, like the

cultural synthesis celebrated in Ivanhoe, spur the country to a new phase of its

development and a new phase of understanding its racial destiny. For Dixon, one of the

South’s greatest contributions to the new American empire—a contribution that would

erase the South’s great mistake about slavery—would be to supply expertise to the U.S.,

the new champion of the “Aryan race” (“To the Reader”), in the proper control necessary

for empire of the colored races at home and abroad. As Scott Romine has argued, at the

turn to the twentieth century “whiteness” was as important as the cotton boll as a

Southern export commodity—and both found a ready national market.5 A climactic 4 For more on the gender politics of orientalizing discourse in U.S. romance novels at the turn of the century, see in particular Nina Silber and Amy Kaplan, who focus particularly astutely on the career of Owen Wister. Inspirational for their cultural analysis, as for mine, is Nina Baym’s classic essay “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” and also the work of Jane Tompkins.

5 Walter Benn Michaels makes a significant error when he argues in Our America that Dixon was an anti-imperialist because he abhorred race mixture. Michaels is quite right to stress that Dixon’s imagination, unlike Page’s, was explicitly nationalist and statist; the maturity of Dixon’s heroes is always defined by submission to state authority, properly defined. But Dixon’s statism was not just concerned with healing the white nation; he was obsessed with empire, with the nation’s expansion. His statism is not static. Once victorious, the heroism of the Klan, the “Invisible Empire,” is to serve as a national model for a visible American empire with colonies: the New South will teach the nation as a whole how to realize its imperial destiny, which includes learning to control colored labor without becoming subordinate to it. For Michaels’ argument about Dixon’s anti-imperialism, see Our America 17-22 and 146n27. I should point out that although I am unpersuaded by Michaels’ claims that Dixon is simply anti-imperialist (or that any of

speech in The Leopard’s Spots runs as follows: “The young [post-Reconstruction] South

greets the new era and glories in its manhood. He joins his voice in the cheers of triumph

which are ushering in this all-conquering Saxon. Our old men dreamed of local

supremacy. We dream of the conquest of the globe. Threads of steel have knit state to

state. Steam and electricity have silently transformed the face of the earth, annihilated

time and space, and swept the ocean barriers from the path of man” (435). In The

Clansman, similarly, Dixon proposes a modern industrial and commercial empire as a

solution to the problems caused by inferior imperial models grounded in plantation slave

economies.

Just as Dixon sees himself as expanding upon and improving Scott, so his vision

of the American empire is meant to outdo its British model and rival. If Ben Cameron in

The Clansman is Dixon’s Robin Hood, and the KKK a rebel organization that, as in

Ivanhoe, must yield its authority to the new state, Phil Stoneman, the Northerner

converted to the romance of Southern heroism, becomes Dixon’s Ivanhoe, the scion of

the future. What Phil represents at the novel’s end is best embodied in his “Eagle and

Phoenix” cotton mills (yes, the name is symbolic). These mills unite Northern capital

and Southern labor while also, for Dixon, finding the proper middle economic way

between premodern agrarianism and the evils of unregulated, wage-slavery capitalism—a

synthesis and Scottian middle way achieved via a reassertion of true Southern

paternalism governing capitalism’s potential for disrupting the social fabric. Phil’s

Edenic dream of the South’s future is a kind of machine-in-the-garden utopia where the

only snake is the lingering “shadow” of a lurking black presence in the land (278-82).

But the eagle-and-phoenix emblem of the New South in The Clansman is also explicitly

international; the trope of Empire that Dixon applies both to the white South’s political

his novels take such a univocal position), I find suggestive and persuasive a number of Michaels’ key points, most notably that for Thomas Nelson Page the central social unit is the family and region, whereas for Dixon it is the nation-state.

and racial victory— “Within a few months this [KKK] Empire overspread a territory

larger than modern Europe” (342)—can also reasonably be applied to Phil’s vision of the

nation’s economic future. Just as Scott in Ivanhoe in 1820 did not need to invoke the

British Empire directly because it already gave resonance to his novel’s conclusion, so

Dixon hardly needed to be explicit about the global significance of new Anglo-Saxon

empire emergent in the U.S. We cannot fully understand Dixon’s appeal to Theodore

Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, two American presidents with very different

personalities and imperial visions, unless we understand the way in which Dixon updated

Scott to make his nationalist epics a model for the global and domestic ambitions of a

newly unified U.S. “Eagle and Phoenix” indeed.

Let us now change direction. Despite Dixon’s conviction that Scott provided the

best model for his narratives of subjugation and victory, a number of elements in Scott,

particularly Ivanhoe, were bound to prove troubling to him. For ultimately Scott’s vision

of the racial nation was incompatible with Dixon’s. As well as being eloquent defenders

against tyranny, Scott’s Jews are, as I have emphasized, associated with racial Otherness;

they are “spotted,” not Anglo-Norman, though also heroic. Influenced by Ivanhoe, Dixon

associated Jews with intelligence and heroism.6 But Dixon’s appropriation of the

6 Perhaps taking his cue from Scott, Dixon thought very highly of Jews as a whole and often either promoted their character traits as models for others, including blacks, or contrasted them with the venality and cowardice of those he sought to denounce. Hence in an article published in the same year as The Clansman on how blacks should follow Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta compromise” (rejecting political power in favor of self-help and strong work ethic within economic spheres acceptable to whites), Dixon praised Jews as “perhaps the greatest race of people God ever created” because they knew how to achieve success within the roles God and societies assigned them. And in a later piece denouncing certain elements of the KKK as lawless renegades, Dixon audaciously suggested that Anglo-Saxons could even be somewhat intimidated by the Jews, who had “achieved a noble civilization ... when our Germanic ancestors were still in the woods cracking coconuts and hickory nuts with monkeys” (1925; quoted in Cook 63, 154n32-33). Dixon’s coconuts and monkeys reference here is worth more comment than I have space for. I will just point out that Dixon’s rhetorical contrast between civilization and barbarism is so extreme and so fixated on clichés about Africa that he can’t help Africanizing Anglo-Saxons as soon as he imagines them in the “inferior” position in his binary. My thanks to Scott Romine for helping me interpret how Dixon’s valorization of the Jews helps fit in to his larger racial cosmogony.

Rebecca plot for The Clansman entered very dangerous territory for a white supremacist.

Dixon wanted to promote a narrative of whiteness that implied white racial traits would

transcend ethnic and cultural differences (such as “Northern” or “Southern”) allowing

whites to unify in their hour of need. But for readers who know Ivanhoe well, as many of

Dixon’s readers did, the clear parallels between Rebecca’s and Phil Stoneman’s trial and

rescue by heroic knights inevitably means that Dixon’s Northern hero may be associated

not just with Rebecca’s key character traits and martyrdom, but also with her identity as a

racial Other.

A dangerous ambiguity thus shadows Dixon’s appropriation of Scott’s plotlines

and rhetoric of racial Otherness. The good character qualities associated with Jews in

Ivanhoe, particularly Rebecca, Dixon transfers to his young white heroes and heroines,

both Northern and Southern, and these reveal themselves most strikingly when they are

unjustly imprisoned or threatened with rape. The negative qualities Scott gives the Jews,

particularly their untrustworthiness and cowardice under pressure—those aspects of their

identities that Scott most marks as racial rather than cultural—are reborn in Dixon’s

villains, particularly his blacks, who are also infected with the worst traits of the Norman

villains in Ivanhoe, lust and a taste for luxury. Yet Dixon’s complex regrafting of Scott’s

“Jewish” traits onto his own heroes and villains troubles his claims in The Clansman,

beginning with his “To the Reader” introduction, that his heroes embody pure types of

“Aryan” heroism at last coming to claim their national identity in the United States. We

may call this the leopard’s spots perplex: whiteness in formation contrasted with racial

Otherness inevitably becomes also spotted, that is, incorporating what it defines itself

against. Dixon’s mode of melodrama (which as a genre constantly pushes toward the

separation of opposites) has no way of coping with such paradoxes, other than to be silent

about them.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Dixon’s images of blackness are so compulsively

negative is that he felt he had to go out of his way to exorcise Scott’s mixed feelings of

admiration and repulsion for the Jews, an ambivalence that gives Ivanhoe much of its

power. Dixon must severely restrict Scott’s generous theme that the strength of a culture

lies in its ability to absorb different ethnicities. In the conclusion of Ivanhoe the

ethnocentrism of particular Saxon and Norman characters (such as Rowena’s father, or

the Norman villains) is explicitly rejected for the broader social vision held by the novel’s

primary heroes and heroine. In Dixon’s Reconstruction trilogy Dixon tries and fails to

make his adaptation of Scott’s cultural dialectic apply only to white Northerners and

Southerners. Eternally haunting Dixon’s novels, however, is the possibility that Scott’s

cultural dialectic could be adapted in a different way, shaping a narrative of U.S.

reunification that would find strength in mixed languages, ethnicities, and perhaps even

“races.”

If we turn to other novelists writing during the New South era whose perspectives

were different from Dixon and compare their works to Walter Scott’s, we may make

some intriguing discoveries about the variety of ways Scott might have been seen to be

relevant to a fiction writer who sought to engage with recent U.S. history. Mark Twain

may be the most obvious candidate to consider, but his case is complicated by the fact

that Twain despised Scott only a little less severely than he hated Scott’s first American

disciple, James Fenimore Cooper. In seeking to be as different a novelist from Scott and

Cooper as it was possible to be, Twain’s work from the beginning of his career to its end

satirized Scott’s Hegelian vision of historical progress, as well as his desire (see the

conclusion of Ivanhoe) to “point a moral, or adorn a TALE.” It is only a small

overstatement to say that one of the ways Twain defined himself as a novelist was always

to demonstrate wittily what he was not, and certainly a crucial enabling antithesis for

Twain was the author of the Waverly books. Remember that in the middle of the

Mississippi in Twain’s signature novel, Huckleberry Finn, lies a rotting steamboat hulk—

the Walter Scott.

Among other white New South authors whom we might consider vis à vis Scott,

Joel Chandler Harris presents a most interesting case. In general Harris’ temperament as

a writer could not be more different than Scott’s, except on the crucial matter of affection

for the underdog. Harris displayed little ambition for sweeping historical narratives,

abandoning what might have been his most interesting attempt, Qua, a history of a black-

Indian character during the American revolutionary period. Like Scott, he was drawn to

oral narratives and the issues they raised about the preservation of historical memory.

But Harris preferred to work on a small scale; he is a miniaturist in comparison to Scott.

His novel Gabriel Tolliver (1902), a history of Reconstruction and its aftermath,

however, is well worth considering from a Scottian framework. Harris’ titular hero is

very much cast in the Scott mold as defined by Lukács; that is, he is ambivalent, even

vacillating, never siding for long with any of the warring factions, and in the end it is

Gabriel’s averaging and moderating qualities which are shown to make him suitable to

assume public leadership in the New South at the novel’s end. But Harris could no more

imagine a vibrant public role for his hero than he could for himself, and therefore he

cannot engage with Scott as a predecessor with either Twain’s or Dixon’s hubris.

We must take very seriously the importance Walter Scott would have for black

writers such as Frances Harper or Sutton Griggs or Charles Chesnutt, all of whom urged

alternative interpretations of the New South consensus. They had no quarrel with Scott’s

vision that the novel was the best and most authoritative form for reinterpreting historical

conflicts to make them relevant for the present. Scott was one of their sources for their

representative heroes and their dialectical, even melodramatic plotting. Most

importantly, they turned to Scott’s focus on defining moments when under the influence

of a moderating and visionary hero or heroine, a nation’s violent internal struggle is

resolved by an empowering new moment of cultural synthesis. Harper and Chesnutt used

Scott’s model to urge a postwar vision of the United States that stressed equal rights,

multiracial democracy, power sharing, social restructuring, and the ways in which

defining historical moments must find a leader who arises out of anonymity to achieve

new stature within his or her community. (Harper’s black heroes and heroines in Iola

Leroy, particularly Iola herself, also give a powerful new meaning to the Scottian motif of

the protagonist in eclipse and exile.) Griggs appears (especially in his novel Imperium et

Imperio, 1899) to have taken a somewhat Twainian approach and emphasized the satiric

and tragic possibilities Scott’s narratives of nationhood.

Harper, Griggs, and Chesnutt would obviously have a more critical understanding

of the meaning of Scott’s “leopard’s spots” metaphor, and their commitment to

democracy and social change was far more radical than Scott’s. Yet their vision of the

natural aristocracy of the proper protagonist is profoundly congruent to Scott’s, as is their

commitment to fiction revising and refocusing historical meaning. Chesnutt’s essays on

race published in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1900 argue that racial purity is a

social fiction and that the energy behind Europe’s cultural development came from its

racial and ethnic heterogeneity. Such claims were profoundly attentive to new

developments in science and ethnography, in contrast to the pseudo-scientific clichés

justifying Jim Crow. But Chesnutt’s reasoning in these essays must be understood as a

deep response to Scott as well—particularly Scott’s portrait of the unstoppable dynamism

of cultural heterogeneity. Chesnutt’s novels are much less sanguine. In The House

Behind the Cedars, published the same year as the Transcript essays, Chesnutt explicitly

alludes to Ivanhoe as he ironically characterizes his heroine’s delusions of whiteness and

aristocracy. In The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel’s Dream, two later novels,

Chesnutt’s Scottian rebels-of-the-middle-way do not emerge victorious. Harper and

Chesnutt and Griggs have rightly been studied primarily in the context of black literature

and culture, or the dominant late nineteenth-century American cultural narratives they

critiqued. But it shows no disrespect to any of these contexts to argue that we cannot

gain a full appreciation of these writers’ ambition unless we treat them seriously as

historical novelists, which means considering their relation to Scott. The same could be

said of many other writers whose representations of the New South were influential and

controversial, including George Washington Cable, Pauline Hopkins, Ellen Glasgow, and

Walter Hines Page.

Some of the best new work in studies of the U.S. South no longer treats the region

as if it has a self-contained history and culture that counterpoints dominant U.S. national

narratives. Rather, these new approaches explore the ways in which “Southern”

difference plays a key constituent element in the national dialectic, and not always

defined as the antithetical part of that narrative. Such an approach proves especially

pertinent to the New South (post-Reconstruction) era, when, for better and for worse,

many U.S. authors published historical narratives of the postwar South that offered highly

influential visions linking national reunion with a newly expansionist global destiny. For

these reasons, the new studies of the U.S. South tend to have a pronounced transnational

perspective as well. Some of the postwar South’s most influential new voices justified

U.S. expansionism; Southerners were not nearly as anti-imperialist or homogeneous as

they have sometimes been portrayed. We must also consider the ways in which after

1898 the debates about how to “civilize” the new U.S. colonies in the tropics inevitably

replayed debates about how properly to “reconstruct” the postwar South. One paradox

that has received not nearly enough attention is this: the new discourses of U.S.

colonialism drew as heavily on the optimistic visions of nation-building that drove

Reconstruction as they did on the racial Realpolitik of the white supremacist New South.

A study of Walter Scott’s influence on fictions of the U.S. South is one small piece of

this larger puzzle—but a fascinating and variegated piece it is. For now Scott is modern

once again. His dramatizations of the paradoxes and erasures embedded in national

origin narratives have profound relevance for an era like ours that understands the global

and the local, the national and the transnational, to be inextricably interconnected and

conflicted.

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