Take blog post, add water

Among other things, the (eternally) ongoing introduction to Book Two lays out why evangelical novelists adopted the historical novel but wound up repudiating Sir Walter Scott--and why Catholic novelists, by contrast, found Scott's example far more palatable.  Early on, I decided that the most logical way of approaching this subject was to show readers how Scott worked with a pet evangelical motif: a variant on Augustine's Tolle, lege.  Evangelical historical novels about the Reformation almost always dramatize the protagonist's very first encounter with a vernacular Bible; Scott, as it happens, does the same thing in The Monastery (1820), his novel about the Scottish Reformation. 

Amazing! Didn't I write a blog post on that very subject?  Why, yes, I did.  I'll just take that blog post and...

...throw it out.  Well, except for the long quotation.  (This being me, I'm of course writing about a Scott novel that most people go miles out of their way to avoid.) 

To be more precise, although I've kept several basic points (e.g., Scott's implicit critique of private judgement, his interest in tradition, his rejection of the evangelical "godly child"), I've had to reword or recontextualize all of them.  In fact, looking back at the original post, what strikes me is that I didn't spend any time discussing the most bizarre thing about Mary Avenel's introduction to the Bible: Scott's actual take on the Tolle, lege.  Mary, in a moment of despair, admits that she's in need of divine assistance but has no way of speaking to God.  And so the White Lady of Avenel rides to Mary's rescue, even though the spirit in question admits that she's exiled from the path of righteousness ("Could Spirits shed/Tears for their lot, it were my lot to weep,/Shewing the road which I shall never tread,/Though my foot points it").  Let's recap: In Mary's short-lived dark night of the soul--let's call it a dark five minutes of the soul--the voice that comes to her aid is...a spirit forever barred from Heaven? Who shows Mary where the Bible is?

Seriously.  What? 

(Then again, "what?" seems to be the most frequent critical response to the White Lady, so I'm keeping decent company.) 

To step back for a moment: the original blog post worked very well as a public notebook entry.  The "publicity" meant that I had to write something other than random jottings; a year later, the faint whisper of an argument there helped me begin to organize the relevant section in my introduction.  Nevertheless, returning to the post after a year revealed how much wasn't there--for example, the real significance of the quotation's context, or the relationship between the White Lady's role here and Captain Clutterbuck's in the frame narrative.  (Short version: a Benedictine monk and his uncle "write up" the novel from a collection of disparate sixteenth-century manuscripts; the Benedictine passes it on to Captain Clutterbuck, assuring him that they have written nothing that might aggravate Protestant readers; Captain Clutterbuck passes it on to the final "editor."  Scott is parodying the Gothic "found manuscript" convention.)  And, of course, I didn't bounce the original post off what scholarship exists on The Monastery (did I mention that most literary historians cringe when this novel comes up in polite conversation?).  Even the most detailed posts I've written here, I think, are at best very rough drafts.      

Comments

[Bourgeois Nerd]

I seriously can't read "Captain Clutterbuck" without thinking "Captain Clusterfuck" for at least a nanosecond. Maybe it's because you just got done saying the book he's in is Not Very Good. Or maybe I'm just a vulgar philistine.