Exhuming the Vestigial Antique Body in Walter Scott's Caledonia

Abstract

Walter Scott’s Scottish novels partake of the 18th-century Romantic wish to exhume the corporeal Antique body of Scotland―a body which is altogether nostalgically reconstructed as it is scarred by traces of the Roman conquest, and satirically deconstructed through a constant tension between the author's attraction for the Romans’ cultural and linguistic grandeur and his repulsion for their unbridled imperialism. Scott's novels mock the regressively naive and eccentric Roman antiquarianism. He chooses to ascribe fanciful significance to the Antique body―debunked as "antique", in the sense of old, while articulating a more continuous relationship to the past. Guy Mannering and The Antiquary both express a shift from Roman Antiquity to Scottish modernity, which is also a move away from nationalism to focus on humanity. The strong, almost unconquerable body of the nation inherited from the Roman Empire seems to give way to the more perishable and fallible eroticised Scottish human body. Scotland's Roman model is eventually written off to be replaced by Scott’s “Caledoniad”, a Scottish national epic made up of a fragmented textual body, which Lovel, or Lord Geraldine, from The Antiquary is supposed to be clandestinely writing. Scott has helped create a new form of novel, which, like a patchwork, is made up of Scottish inventions, universal modernity, and fragments from the national past. The Romantic body of “Scott-land” and its vestiges have now been turned into a commodity which modern tourists, enthused by their reading of the Waverley novels, seek to rediscover in Scotland.

Keywords

• antiquarianism
• antique/ancient Body
• nostalgia/ satire
• romanticism
• Roman Empire
• patchwork