Does Anybody Read Sir Walter Scott Anymore?
Few experienced English teachers will non have encountered such a query, usually posited in a confrontational tone, during meetings with parents or alumni; I accept attempted to reply to some grade of this challenge at iii different schools. The citation of Ivanhoe in a word of curriculum flags an attitude mutual among a political party of educated but nonacademic adults, a rather narrow version of the traditionalist stance in the "catechism" debate: The ability to remember and write with sophistication results largely from reading particular 18th- and 19th-century British novels. (Studying grammar systematically helps, too, they would allow.) While the particular text adduced is not always Sir Walter Scott's romance (substitute Vanity Off-white, for instance) Ivanhoe is and so oftentimes named that it might aptly serve every bit the escutcheon for champions of this outlook.
Prompted by the coincidence last spring of nonetheless another claiming from a parent and the appearance of a slow made-for-television pic of Ivanhoe, I decided to reread the book. Like Cedric the Saxon, begetter of its eponymous hero, Ivanhoe is wearisome, thick, single-minded, and blowsy. The novel is not so bad that a xv- or 16-twelvemonth-old enamored of fantasy or adventure and unconcerned with style could not detect it enjoyable, and as a reflection of literary romanticism, information technology makes a revealing study. As a instruction text for high school students, all the same, it resembles a adapt of chain mail--difficult to penetrate, yet full of holes.
Defenders of Ivanhoe sometimes suggest that they learned from the volume to appreciate a compelling and well-managed plot. The activeness, focused on the efforts of Saxon nobles in 12th-century England to maintain pride and position and to resist exploitation in the confront of the Norman conquest, is unarguably complicated, with a large cast of characters and frequently shifting venues. In a narrow sense, Scott wins his boxing with plot--he eventually weaves its many threads into a patchy tapestry, less Bayeux than blarney--but necessity and plausibility are mortally wounded in the fray. Even the author must have flushed with embarrassment to concoct the premonition calling Wilfred of Ivanhoe to battle at a crucial moment ("Accept you lot never," he asks, "felt an anticipation of approaching evil, for which you in vain attempted to assign a crusade?"), or the miracle cure enabling him to take up artillery and fight. Lanced merely a week before and bedridden, his only promise, apparently, the ministrations of the Jewess Rebecca, the hero makes this report on his health: "Information technology is better than my fondest promise could accept predictable; either my wound has been slighter than the effusion of blood led me to suppose, or this balsam hath wrought a wonderful cure upon it."
Scott once fifty-fifty acknowledges that he has violated his ain better judgment in plot design. Happier proving his manhood with a cup in the keen hall than with a lance in the jousting listing or field of combat, the noble Athelstane of Coningsburgh, scion of the great Alfred himself, deserves, by the logic of the plot, to dice, and die he does--for a while. At Athelstane's wake, yet, Scott causes the blue-blooded drunkard to reappear. Scott really offers a footnote of apology ("The resuscitation of Athelstane ... was a tour de force, to which the Author was compelled to take recourse past the vehement entreaties of his friend and printer, who was inconsolable on the Saxon being conveyed to the tomb"), but resurrecting his plot's credibility later such episodes proves a feat beyond the prowess of the writer.
Some who fly the pennon of Ivanhoe have claimed that in his depiction of grapheme Scott offers a microcosm of human experience. To practice so would indeed be a sign of great storytelling. In this regard, the author strives to emulate Homer and Shakespeare, ii of the writers quoted in his chapter epigraphs; he certainly tin't be faulted for his models. Scott creates a cast that embraces all social classes--esne, yeoman, noble, royalty. If even ane of these figures were a circular representation of a conceivable human existence, his achievement would be impressive.
Sir Walter Scott never met a stock graphic symbol he didn't like: the faithful retainer (loyal, lumpish Gurth); the clever Fool (Wamba); the unshakably pure and cute heroine (the Saxon and Jewish counterparts Rowena and Rebecca); the dastardly villain (the arrogant, corrupt Bois-Guilbert and De Bracy, amid others). Imagine the most shallow, ridiculous, and ugly stereotypes, and you volition know Scott's French (the invariably "night" and "luxurious" Normans) and his Jews (Rebecca's male parent Isaac, almost notably).
| The 'it worked for me therefore it must be right for everyone' argument reflects a cocky-deluding nostalgia. |  |
In fairness to Scott, his Rebecca is deeply principled and intelligent--not simply "Jewish" and in fact most human. In one of the book's most intriguing passages, Scott puts in her oral cavity an articulate denunciation of the values at the core of his romance: Is "glory" a sufficient reward, she asks Ivanhoe, "for a life spent miserably that ye may brand others miserable? Or is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic beloved, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are then wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?"
The final word in this debate, however, belongs to the hero, Rebecca ultimately conceding that "information technology ill beseemeth the Jewish damsel to speak of battle or of war." In the stop, though showing that Ivanhoe in his center of hearts loves Rebecca more securely than he does the less interesting Rowena, Scott refuses to throw downward the gauntlet at convention: The Saxon hero marries the Saxon heroine, and Rebecca devotes herself to thoughts of sky and "works of kindness to men."
Other characters of psychological complexity Scott relegates to secondary roles: Waldemar Fitzurse, the retainer of Prince John (after King John, he of Magna Carta fame), who recognizes the stupidity and corruption of his main, nevertheless continues to serve him; the witchlike Saxon princess Ulrica, who, in despair, had get a concubine to the Normans during her youth and at present lives in self-hatred. Such figures, the author perhaps feared, might steal the spotlight from characters fighting a conspicuously delineated boxing of good and evil.
One parent who urged a return to Ivanhoe in the English curriculum advocated the book equally a model for manner. With Scott's prose in front of them, he argued, students could learn to write complex sentences. Maybe he had in mind expository passages such equally the following:
"Desolate, even so, as information technology was, this was the apartment of the castle which had been judged most plumbing fixtures for the adaptation of the Saxon heiress; and here she was left to meditate upon her fate, until the actors in this nefarious drama had arranged the several parts which each of them was to perform. This had been settled in a council held past Front-de-Boeuf, De Bracy, and the Templar, in which, subsequently a long and warm argue concerning the several advantages which each insisted deriving from his peculiar share in this audacious enterprise, they had at length determined the fate of their unhappy prisoners."
As stiff and clunky as a rusty ball-and-chain, it is this kind of writing, in fact, that gives complex sentences a bad proper name. The notion that young people learn to write well by reading great authors is, of course, a fundamental premise of any audio English curriculum--and happily, in most schools students yet study Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Woolf. Indeed, even in the likes of Toni Morrison, say, or Richard Rodriguez, writers of the sort who, Scott's proponents might experience, have supplanted their favorite, ane may occasionally run into a passage of stylistic grace and sophistication.
Wherein, then, lies the entreatment of Ivanhoe to those who think the book fondly? The respond has to do partly with processes of instruction, with learning to read and the nature of young people'southward introduction to serious literature. With its obvious symbolism and heavy-handed irony, Scott'due south romance allows an inexperienced reader--one perhaps engaging a substantial literary narrative for the first time--to feel intellectually sophisticated in the presence of fine art and apparent complexity. The book'due south pasteboard historical properties creates an illusion of depth. The unambiguous nature of the story'southward characters and moral conflict invites the audience to take sides and to exult when the right knights and their dauntless ladies prevail. I wonder how many of Ivanhoe'due south champions accept reread the novel equally adults.
| | The novel itself offers an instructive resolution for teachers, for parents, and for students as they make judgments about the books young people volition exist asked to read. |
Books that are cleverly simplistic, in fact, often brand effective didactics texts; such novels equally Siddhartha, Fauna Farm, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo'due south Nest are much beloved of high schoolhouse students. If works like these excite students (I don't retrieve Ivanhoe will whatsoever longer, if it ever did) and lead them to enthusiastic exploration of subtler literature, then they may deserve a place on schoolhouse reading lists despite their deficiencies.
One cannot help detecting in the challenge of those who comport the Ivanhoe escutcheon, even so, a political agenda also. The it-worked-for-me-therefore-it-must-be-right-for-everyone argument reflects a self-deluding nostalgia based in resentment not just of educational only of social modify. In both form and content, Ivanhoe symbolizes this outlook with peculiar appropriateness.
The volume'due south subtitle, "A Romance," not only denotes the genre in which Scott labors simply likewise implicitly identifies a ready of aesthetic perspectives from which the name of the literary movement Scott follows is derived. Every bit one of its defining impulses, romanticism is radically retrospective, questing for insight from the by--beyond exploitation of nature, beyond mechanical explanations of the universe, across rationalistic views of man feel. Many romantic writers purposefully adopt a form that is medieval in origin: the symbolic adventure narrative called romance. Transformed, elements of this genre get powerful tools in the hands of writers like Coleridge and Hawthorne. While defective such artists' depth of vision, Scott shares with them the romantic style of seeing.
Those who cite Ivanhoe while advocating a return to the by in English curricula, and so, are advancing an old book that is itself retrospective in form. Simply Scott's romance as well looks astern in its subject area affair: The plot is set 600 years in the past, and within that fourth dimension frame, the book'due south central characters yearn for a gold age in the even more afar past. The thematic premise of Ivanhoe is the idea that the past--not just the pre-Industrial Revolution past but the pre-Norman by, the world of Saxon England--was improve than the present. From the vantage point of quadruple regression, readers with a boxing-ax to grind might easily find in the text an allegory for late-20th-century concerns: The Normans are the canon-sackers and multiculturalists, the grammer-busters, the destroyers of tradition; the doomed Saxons are the keepers of archetype literature, the guardians of the language, the preservers of a purer past. But in reality the days of yore are only gilt by the dim light of selective memory; like the Cedric and Athelstane, Ivanhoe's modern-day champions base their position on emotion recollected in senility.
Nonetheless the novel itself offers an instructive resolution for teachers, for parents, and for students as they brand judgments nearly the books young people will be asked to read. In the optics of his staunchly Saxon male parent, Ivanhoe has betrayed his family, his race, and his nation by post-obit the Norman king Richard Coeur-de-Panthera leo. Simply Richard and Ivanhoe, having alike learned to judge men not by the colour of their cuirass simply past the content of their graphic symbol, salvage the twenty-four hour period for Cedric, Rowena, and England. The bad Normans and lazy Saxons are punished (near of them, anyhow), and the proficient Saxon and the expert Norman seek out and draw from the best in one another. With tolerance and compromise, schools and their constituencies can carve a path to a hereafter in which all students will read and write with confidence and fluency.
Except that, alas, Richard died prematurely, as Scott reminds us, and with him "perished all the projects which his ambition and his generosity had formed."
A version of this article appeared in the November 26, 1997 edition of Teaching Week as Why Don't Students at This School Read Ivanhoe Anymore?
Source: https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-why-dont-students-at-this-school-read-ivanhoe-anymore/1997/11
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