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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 cliche; 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-
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WALTER SCOTT
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-
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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.
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WALTER SCOTT
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
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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.
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WALTER SCOTT
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
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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 licentiousness, – 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
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WALTER SCOTT
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 forces 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 FrancoRoman commonwealth of Europe. The thirty-year reign of the
great Plantagenet king Henry II had brought stability and the ru-
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diments 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.
Richard’s prolonged absence from England in the 1190s created a vacuum of power and a return to the political instability
of a half century before, when the first family of Norman kings
had exhausted themselves fighting a two-front war against the
local population and ambitious French barons. In Ivanhoe, the
ambitious rival is Richard’s own brother, John, and the embers of
Saxon resistance flare once more in the shape of Ivanhoe’s father,
Cedric, the arch-nostalgist who dreams of a return to Pre-Norman days and the renewal, through the union of his noble cousin
Athelstane with Rowena, of the ancient line of King Alfred. But
if Cedric thinks in terms of ancient blood, he lives in a modern
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WALTER SCOTT
world of money. The Norman barons – those for whom the Crusades were a folly – have shown, in the absence of the King, an
insatiable appetite for taxes and the extra-legal appropriation of
Saxon land. Their self-aggrandizement is further funded, in turn,
by the Jewish moneylenders, represented in Scott’s novel by Rebecca’s father, Isaac. Almost everyone in the novel, from Ivanhoe
to Robin Hood to Prince John himself, is indebted to Isaac, whose
tense and ambivalent relationship with his clients is modeled on
Shakespeare’s Shylock. Like Shylock, Isaac’s representation as a
gross anti-Semitic stereotype is mitigated by Scott’s evident sympathy for his suffering at the hands of Christians and, more importantly, his deep love for his daughter. It is striking that the
Jews of the novel fund both the hero’s appearance at the Ashby
tournament (as well as John’s production of the event itself) and
heal his wounds after it. Ivanhoe’s career, we must infer, is not
self-sustaining, and the chivalric ethos of beneficence and charity no substitute for responsible government. England’s condition, as a leaderless state without standard currency or centralized system of credit, is, as Scott puts it, “sufficiently miserable”
(p. 84). While the knights defend their honor and prose on about
the purity of their souls, it is the Jews who hold the world of
Ivanhoe together. We fear for England at the novel’s conclusion
when Rebecca announces that she and her father are to leave the
country. By sending Isaac and Rebecca away to Moorish Spain,
Scott presages the disastrous expulsion of the Jews from England
a century later.
Such is the broad historical backdrop to the novel. But the
subtitle of Ivanhoe describes it as a “romance” not a “history,”
and Scott certainly plays fast and loose with historical detail. The
most striking image of the opening chapter, Gurth’s iron collar declaring him to be a serf of Cedric’s, is simply made up, and
the novel’s most famous scene, the tournament at Ashby, has no
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