Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction by Ian Dennis
1999; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esc.1999.0011
ISSN1913-4835
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoESC 25, 1999 trends in the appreciation ofAusten from 1832-1996, and Bruce Stovel reviews criticism of her work for the same period. The Companion succeeds in its aim “to recover and illumi nate elements of her culture, so that her novels may speak the more lucidly to ours” (xii)—even though it does not address the question “Why do they make whipt syllabub?” (xi). MAUREEN GUNN / Carleton University Ian Dennis. Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction. London: Macmillan Press Inc., 1997. ix, 203. $49.49 cloth. If, as too many politicians discover the hard way, the personal is indeed the political, it should come as no surpriseto be told that nationalism is linked to desire and that a historical novelist’s desire for the nation is encoded in his or her characters’ erotic desire. While the standard critical approach to Scott’s historical fiction is to see the love affairs of his notoriously inept heroes as merely the context for the author’s more serious political concerns—Eliot’s bone thrown to the masses—the standard approach to less esteemed works—here Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs and Sydney Owenson’s Irish fiction—is conversely to deny canonicity because the ratio is reversed: the political is merely the setting for the central love plot and the transparent wish fulfillment ofwriterly desires. “Standard” views no longer hold sway, of course, as, for example, the more serious critical attention being paid to issues ofthe erotic filters into the study of historical narrative, as the hitherto marginal has come to assume a place ofcentrality, and as the purported line between popular and serious blurs or disappears. But old binaries die hard, and Ian Dennis is right to go to work here to disman tle some of our most treasured ones—serious versus popular fiction, public self versus private self, realistic versus romantic, novel versus romance—and to show how inadequately those simplistic reductions have served and how longstanding is the struggle to represent the real in historical fiction. Dennis’s primary aim is to offer new readings of key texts ofearly nineteenth-century historical fiction—Porter’s Scottish 212 REVIEWS Chiefs (1810), Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl (1806), five of Scott’s Waverley novels (1814-24), and James Fenimore Cooper’s Li onel Lincoln (1824) —in terms of their representations of and responses to the power ofnationalism. These texts allexemplify the paradigm that distinguishes the “National Tale”: set in a country struggling with oppression, each story presents a young male traveller falling in love with an indigenous woman, and shows their relationship and the protagonist’s struggles over identity working themselves out as the nation itself struggles to work out its own identity. The innovation of Dennis’s ap proach comes mainly from his insight into the centrality of the erotic plot of nationalism and especially in his application of the theory of René Girard in this context. “‘Nationalism,’” Dennis paraphrases Girard as stating, “was the result ofa ‘col lective fascination’ with an Other, a desire to be that Other, which, in its inevitable failure, took refuge in an attempt to make an absolute distinction between the national selfand the foreigner” (1). In “‘French Triangles,’” the major section ofthe book’s Introduction, Dennis then elucidates Girard’s theory as he will apply it to his own thesis. Like the rest of Dennis’s ele gantly written book, this section is lucid and fluid as it clearly sets out the terms of his argument and breaks down, as he will do throughout, some of the binaries ofcritical discourse as, for example, when he introduces the notion of many marriages as the product of triangulated desire. The body of the text follows a perceived progression, be ginning with Porter’s projection of “Scotland the ‘Brave,’”— epitomized in Wallace the sublime—as the object ofseemingly unmitigated desireon the part ofthe writeron behalfofreaders. Such a “transparent operation” of desire, which “has helped give romance [and Porter] a bad name” (18), operates in terms of binaries that present a simple world where revenge is sweet and Scotland rules. Dennis argues that, while it is hidden even from the author, Porter’s mediator is England and the...
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