Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

the novel: “Ivanhoe, though it has qualities of its own, is much more superficial than any of the Scottish novels, and is written throughout on a much lower plane. Scott did not, in fact, know the Middle Ages well and he had little understanding of its social or religious life” (“Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist,” p. 46; see “For Further Reading”). Since the 1980s, critics have turned back to Ivanhoe as an important thesis on British nationalism, and for its racial and sexual themes, but whatever the vicissitudes of its reputation among literary scholars, the novel always has enjoyed a cultural afterlife that much exceeded its scope and pretensions as literature. Ivanhoe single-handedly revived the age of chivalry in the Western popular imagination, and produced a cult of medieval rites and manners that persists into our own age, with its “Dungeons and Dragons” and Lord of the Rings. As for its cultural politics, the impact of Ivanhoe has been felt most deeply and controversially not in Britain, but in the United States.
    “I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter,” wrote Mark Twain to a friend in 1903 (Letters, p. 738). Scott loomed large for Twain the writer, who lamented the impact of his “wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence’” on American literature. But far more serious for Twain was the enduring cultural impression made by Scott’s Ivanhoe on the American South. The antebellum South was an essentially feudal system of rank and caste, and its white ruling class found in Scott’s romantic tale of chivalrous knights, powerful land-owning barons, and loyal serfs a glorious mirror image of itself. For Twain, whatever impetus toward modernization had existed toward “liberty, humanity, and progress” in the South was effectively smothered by the popularity of Scott, whose novels “set the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” The Scott “disease,” he went so far as to say, had caused the Civil War (Mississippi Writings, pp. 500-501). Ivanhoe became, arguably, even more necessary to the South after that war was lost. Scott’s title character spends much of the novel in disguise, and achieves his greatest triumph in the character of “The Disinherited Knight.” He is named for his estate—he is Wilfred of Ivanhoe—but does not or cannot claim it. Ivanhoe the place is never visited and barely mentioned, as if forgotten. The novel’s title thus points to a glaring absence in the world of the novel, both spiritual and material. England has been conquered, and the spoils have gone to the victorious Normans. As his chivalric pseudonym suggests, Ivanhoe the man is a complex figure representing both inherited nobility and loss, a romantic composite uniquely designed to appeal to the defeated Confederate sensibility.
    If Ivanhoe’s fall from land-owning scion to homeless errant knight elicited a fragrant bitterness for the southern reader, no less intoxicating was the situation of his heart, torn between the blond, blue-eyed Saxon princess, Rowena, and the exotic Jew, Rebecca. It is one of literature’s most intriguing love triangles. Much controversy surrounds Scott’s representation of Jews in Ivanhoe, but one suggestive means of understanding the intense and destabilizing desires Rebecca inspires is as a figure for the white man’s attraction for and resistance to the prospect of racial mixture. This is certainly how the late-nineteenth-century African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt interpreted Ivanhoe’s dilemma. For Chesnutt, Scott was “the literary idol of the South,” and Chesnutt’s novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), contains a fascinating revision of one of Ivanhoe’s central episodes, the tournament at Ashby