Sir Walter Scott has long been acknowledged as the first writer of historical fiction, and when he chose Scotland as a setting, he generally produced his best work. He introduced this approach in his first novel, Waverley (1814), when he sent his English hero into Scotland during the 1745–64 Jacobite rebellion, the second of its type in Scotland. Some in Scotland remained loyal to the exiled Stewart prince, Charles Edward, who wished to regain the throne for his father, James Francis, son of the banished James. James’s dual titles, VII for England and II for Scotland, helped set the framework for Scott’s later theme of questioned identity in Redgauntlet.

He again sends an Englishman, Darsie Latimer, into Scotland, this time some 20 years following the second attempt to overthrow the English Hanoverian monarchy in favor of the Stewart line. While Scott’s additional novel, Rob Roy (1817), had focused on the also factual original Stewart uprising of 1715, Redgauntlet proposes a fictional third revolution by Prince Charles Edward, thus challenging Scott in a new manner. He had few facts on which to base his fiction, other than the dreams of a nation to form a new identity.

When Darsie enters Scotland, a man who bears no “certain name,” Edward Hugh Redgauntlet, also dubbed the Laird of the Lakes and Herries of Birrenswork, kidnaps him. Redgauntlet holds Latimer hostage in hopes of promoting the prince’s cause in England, revealing to Darsie that he is actually his nephew, properly Sir Arthur Darsie Redgauntlet, a new identity he gains when crossing into a kind of no-man’s-land geographically located between England and Scotland, called the Solway.

As a tourist, Darsie enters Solway without taking seriously its history. He has also recently eschewed the practice of law, an act that will prove ironic. He soon suffers an odd suspension between reality and fantasy, when even his own identity is questioned. Redgauntlet is not the only individual in the novel with multiple names, and Darsie’s split identity as Englishman and Scotsman symbolizes Scotland’s struggle for a national identity separate from that of England, which has, in a real sense, had a new nationalism forced upon it by its Hanoverian rulers.

When Darsie’s friend, Alan Fairford, arrives to rescue him, the two men discover that even representatives of the law in the Solway suffer from split allegiances. On the one hand, they are bound to the Hanoverian system, while on the other, history dictates loyalty to Sir Hugh. As for Redgauntlet, he holds a tyrannical view of life, believing that only fate can dictate a man’s situation. Questions of identity become paramount. Even the book’s title somewhat concerned Scott’s publisher, who felt readers might expect the novel to be a tale of chivalry, when instead its focus on family history and connections took precedent over any single life gallantly lived.

Much has been made of the autobiographical elements in this particular novel. According to critic Kathryn Sutherland, in an 1806 letter Scott confessed that “I became a valiant Jacobite at the age of ten years old; and, ever since reason & reading came to my assistance, I have never quite got rid of the impression which the gallantry of Prince Charles made on my imagination.” As Sutherland discusses, Darsie represents several of Scott’s early acquaintances and even Scott himself, in his indulgence in romance fancy.

Fairford acts as a foil to Darsie and symbolizes Scott’s alter ego, one more grounded in logic, while his relationship with the character Saunders, a man whose overbearing manner suffocates Fairford, has been said to be similar to Scott’s strained dealings with his own father. In addition, the beautiful woman labeling herself “Green Mantle,” who later turns out to be Darsie’s own sister Lilias, may have represented an early love for Scott that proved to be another traumatic relationship.

Various schools of criticism find much of interest in the novel. When Fairford eventually marries Lilias, he weds a feminine version of his best friend, Darsie, of interest to psychoanalytic critics, who also investigate the various self-identity crises in the story. Scott’s telescoping of time and history attracts New Historicist critical comment, and the “Green Mantle” label for Lilias, suggesting fertility as well as an assumption of a leadership role, might interest feminist critics, who often find little to investigate in the flat characterizations of women populating most of Scott’s novels.

Darsie’s firsthand report of his captivity reflects often on the act of writing itself as a method by which he managed to focus his energies and claim independence from his captor. Almost an epistolary novel in the tradition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Scott’s work, like Richardson’s, focuses on a protagonist under the control of a representative of the law whose only recourse to freedom is that of self-expression. Redgauntlet represents one of the few occasions on which Scott utilizes a first-person point of view through letter and journal writing, a narrative structure that had gone out of fashion in the previous century.

Furthermore, as with his predecessor Tobias Smollett, Scott shapes a tale made up of multiple adventures with no overriding directed plot, perhaps in order to reflect more of what humans experience, although transformed from the everyday into a more imaginative world under the influence of Darsie’s imagination. The novel was not well received, perhaps due to its self-reflective nature and lack of a clearly defined hero, as Scott contemplated questions of self-identity, supported by multiple references to other fictions, such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Ultimately judged a novel of social realism, Redgauntlet presents a view of a new society, which, while flawed, allowed figures such as Alan Fairford to achieve a social status his father could not. The manuscript, missing two leaves, survives in the National Library of Scotland, while the novel remains readily available to students and readers.

Bibliography
Robertson, Fiona. Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Sutherland, Kathryn. Introduction to Redgauntlet, by Sir Walter Scott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, vii–xxiii.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 18th century scotland, 19th century novels, Alan Fairford, Analysis of Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, Darsie Latimer, epistolary novel, Feminist literary criticism, first-person narration, Green Mantle, Hanoverian monarchy, Historical Fiction, identity in literature, Jacobite rebellion, literary criticism Redgauntlet, national identity in literature, New Historicism, Prince Charles Edward, psychoanalytic criticism, Redgauntlet, Redgauntlet characters, Redgauntlet plot summary, Redgauntlet symbolism, Redgauntlet themes, Romantic literature, Scott and Jacobitism, Scottish historical novel, Scottish identity, Scottish literature, Scottish nationalism, Sir Walter Scott, sir walter scott biography, Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, Solway Firth, Walter Scott fiction, Walter Scott Redgauntlet analysis, Walter Scott’s narrative style, Waverley novels