Ivanhoe Read online

  “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.

  As an object of desire in the novel who chooses exile over those who might love her, Rebecca resembles no one in the novel more strikingly than King Richard, who is likewise the object of Ivanhoe’s (and England’s) frustrated love. Richard tantalizingly comes within the precincts of his kingdom, but remotely, in disguise. And when he reveals himself, it is only a temporary emergence from his preferred elusive career as a knight errant. Although the novel ends at a moment of promise for Richard’s reign, Scott has already informed us that he will fail as king, and die on some foolish military adventure in Belgium. Rebecca might belong to an ostracized community, and Richard be merely “brilliant, but useless” (p. 424), but in terms of the generative energies of the novel itself, they are equals. Their remoteness, their unavailability, governs it all. Only Richard’s neglect has allowed the political ambitions of his brother John, and the resistant romantic nationalism of the Saxon Cedric, to flourish. Only Richard’s failure in Palestine has brought Ivanhoe home at all. And it is Rebecca who produces the final showdown between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, the former ready to desert Rowena even at the very moment of their betrothal. In riding, half-dead, to Templestowe to rescue Rebecca, Ivanhoe shows us that the impediments to his union with Rowena have never been important. It is the impossible union with Rebecca that drives him, and with it the real action of the novel.

  But Rebecca, like Richard, is a love object who will not be loved, an exile who will soon return to exile. Thus the central love objects of the novel are never properly integrated into the national community, leaving the prospects for the emergent Anglo-Norman civilization meager and almost uninteresting. Without Christian chivalry and its magnificent opposite, Jewish martyrdom, Scott’s England is left in a muddle, and it is no wonder that he does not extend the novel to describe its bleak return to what Rebecca calls “a land of war and blood, surrounded by hostile neighbours, and distracted by internal factions” (p. 462). This is the pessimistic counterpoint to the progressive theme of cultural mixture in the novel, and one that seems particularly relevant to the time of Scott’s writing, when Britain’s devastating war against Napoleon had only just concluded, and citizens protesting for political reform lay dead in the town squares of the north at the hands of their countrymen.

  Unlike the magnanimous Rebecca, however, Rowena’s more dangerous rival never quits the scene. Ivanhoe’s true love object is chivalry itself, his knightly career, of which Richard is merely the earthly embodiment. Rebecca recognizes the unhealthy grip of chivalric ideology on Ivanhoe’s imagination and, in terms that seem uncannily to anticipate Mark Twain, does her best to disabuse him: “Is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are so wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?” (p. 293). As Cervantes makes plain in his grand satire of chivalry, Don Quixote (1605), knight-errantry was always more a literary phenomenon than an historical one, and Rebecca perceives that Ivanhoe’s self-image is essentially poetic, not a thing of the world. In mockingly pointing this out, Rebecca casts an ironic light on the generic complexities of Scott’s own project, where history lays perpetual siege to the glitter of romance, in fact to literature itself. Scott’s novel might have spawned a global fad for jousting and knights-errant, but his historical critique of chivalry is sincere.

  In his essay “Chivalry,” written just prior to Ivanhoe for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scott shows that he has far fewer illusions about the romance of chivalry than generations of his readers. Because “every institution becomes deteriorated and degraded” by our animal passions, he argues, the chivalric knights of the Middle Ages stood little chance of fulfilling their lofty union of chastity and righteous militarism: “the devotion of the knights often degenerated into superstition,—their love into licentious-ness, —their spirit of loyalty or of freedom into tyranny and turmoil, —their generosity and gallantry into harebrained madness and absurdity” (Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 6, p. 166). Chivalry, in Ivanhoe, is a form of male self-love that draws its avatars into aggressively homo-social communities such as the Templar Knights or, in the individual case of Ivanhoe, renders him unable properly to love his family, his home, or (we can guess) his wife, preferring instead the wandering life with his fellow narcissist knights. As Wamba the jester is fond of saying, knightly valour is ever the companion of the fool. Even Ivanhoe’s fascination with Rebecca can be read as an extension of self-defeating chivalric desire, of his inability to settle down. The Crusades introduced the exotic, dark-complexioned heroine to the West, and the homeward-returning knights of Ivanhoe have still not left Palestine as a dreamland of desire. According to the orientalist logic of the chivalric romance, Rowena cannot but seem disappointing to Ivanhoe after the seductions of the East, hence the perfunctoriness of his pursuit of her. Rowena might be the blond queen of Ashby, but Rebecca, for both Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, is Jerusalem itself: the irresistible but unreachable goal of the chivalric quest for whom they end up fighting each other rather than the Saracens. It would be wrong to simply equate Ivanhoe with Bois-Guilbert, however. While Ivanhoe’s desperate ride to Templestowe reinforces his militant Christian identity, Bois-Guilbert effectively renounces his knighthood on the field there. He has attempted to break out of chivalric self-love through his passion for Rebecca, and her refusing him that exit for
ces a kind of libidinal implosion: “yonder girl hath wellnigh unmanned me” (pp. 401-402). To this extent then, it is Bois-Guilbert, not the hometown boy Wilfred, who most represents the condition of England, which, like a spurned suitor, is suffering under a king who does not return the violent love of his people.

  King Richard’s reign is more than the setting of Ivanhoe. It is, in important respects, its subject. The early nineteenth century—with its museums and new academic formations—effectively invented History, and Scott was the first writer successfully to commercialize the new nostalgia. The great majority of his nearly thirty novels, beginning with Waverley in 1814, are excursions into the Scottish, English, and European past, and his enormous popularity established the historical novel as a literary genre. For the reader, this places a special importance on understanding at least the basic lineaments of the period setting. The action of the novel takes place in the summer of 1194, with King Richard still a prisoner of Leopold, duke of Austria, his erstwhile ally on the failed Third Crusade. More than a century has passed since the Norman Conquest of Britain was secured at the Battle of Hastings, and the Saxons—in Scott’s time the great colonizers of the world—find themselves a colonial outpost of the Franco-Roman commonwealth of Europe. The thirty-year reign of the great Plantagenet king Henry II had brought stability and the rudiments of rule of law to the unconsolidated British Isles, but as a Frenchman, and the ruler of considerable domains in France and elsewhere, Henry spent less than a third of his reign in England. His son Richard, called Lion-Heart, is even less attached to his island dominion. The historical Richard spoke only French and spent but a few months of his ten-year reign on English soil. He joined the Third Crusade to Jerusalem almost immediately after his accession to the crown in 1189, and was ultimately killed a decade later in Belgium, fighting one of innumerable internecine skirmishes among the Plantagenet rulers of western Europe. His last thoughts were not of England, his neglected kingdom, but of the archer who had inadvertently killed him and whom he wished to pardon. This in a nutshell is Richard, for whom the rites of chivalry meant so much more than the duties of kingship. Even his death is a personal affair between warriors, not a matter of state. It is almost fitting that the unfortunate archer was flayed alive, to show how little the fantasies of chivalric beneficence extended into twelfth-century reality. Scott, of course, rehabilitates Richard to a great extent. He bestows on him at least the desire to be a better king, but this is no less a romantic fiction of Ivanhoe than his carousing with Friar Tuck or speaking fluent Saxon.