Handicraft versus Chivalry: Town Community and Historical Progress in the Later Novels of Walter Scott

Abstract

The article is devoted to two novels by Walter Scott in which the writer demonstrates his vision of the late Middle Ages having taken France and Scotland as bright examples. In these works, Scott, both at the level of the general concept, which reflects his understanding of historical progress, and at the level of the images of the novels and their narratives, reconstructs socio-political and moral-psychological role of the standoff between chivalry and town communities in the dynamic of the time. The novels convincingly show the peculiarity of the late stage of Scott’s creative work, when the narrative importance of the love-adventure knot in the plot increases, as does the role of real historical figures. In the after 1819 Scott’s novel, more obvious is the writer’s desire to embody his understanding of historical laws, based on a mixture of conservative and progressive assessments of the dynamics of history. He does it with the help of both the narrator’s comments and digressions, often constructed as a talk between a historian, an expert in the times under analysis, and a reader, and the central images of the novels. For the ideological and artistic wholeness of the works, the collective images of Liege and Perth, presented by means of a ‘general plan’ and bright individualized images of citizens, are fundamentally important. Colourful and at the same time super important for the historisophical idea of the novels are the images of the ‘outgoing class’ – chivalry: in each of them, the degree of ‘falling out’ of the dynamics of history is emphasized and becomes character-forming. At the same time, the article accentuates, especially in The Fair Maid of Perth, the author’s idea of changing not only economic but also moral leader in the late Middle Ages: the defining role is gradually passed on to the townspeople. In this respect, the image of Catharine Glover, the titular heroine, acts in the novel as the writer’s ‘Reasoner’. The article also traces the nature of the coexistence of romantic and adventurous (in relation to the novel about Perth – romantic and Gothic) and socio-psychological principles of creating the ‘image of the era’.