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

where the victorious Ivanhoe awards the crown to the fair Rowena. In Chesnutt’s novel, the Queen of Love and Beauty is also named Rowena, but she is dark: In fact, she is a mulatta passing for white. As another character later remarks, “She should have been named Rebecca instead of Rowena” (p. 92). In Chesnutt’s novel, Rowena’s rival is not a person, but a racial “other” incorporated within the romantic heroine herself. Ivanhoe’s romantic triangle is dissolved into an image of racial ambiguity, a mirror of his own ambivalence. Unsurprisingly, Chesnutt’s “black” Rowena dies in tragic circumstances. In Scott’s novel, the hero begins as a figure for cultural crossing—he has left his Saxon household to follow the Norman king—but the question of whether he is capable of making a second crossing, this time into an ostracized racial group, hangs over the novel until the very end. On the last page, describing Ivanhoe’s marriage to Rowena, Scott refuses to inquire “whether the recollection of Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity did not recur to his mind more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether have approved.” If Scott is reluctant, generations of readers have not been so coy. It is a cliché of Ivanhoe’s reception that the reader will inevitably wish the hero to have chosen the dark and inspiring Rebecca over her bland, blond rival.
    As Chesnutt’s revisionary novel makes clear, Ivanhoe, fairly or not, has been put to use as a racist text. The American historical novelist Thomas Dixon based his reconstruction trilogy on a white supremacist reading of Ivanhoe —beginningwith A Leopard’s Spots (1902). Likewise, the Ku Klux Klan’s very name echoes the romantic “clans” of Scott’s fiction. The concluding chapters of Ivanhoe, which focus on the rituals of the Templar Knights, are especially haunting for the American reader. A secretive order of Christian militant men, dressed in white, take a dark-complexioned woman as prisoner, then conduct an extra-legal show trial at which she is condemned to burn at the stake. Rebecca is, of course, a Jew, and is saved at the last, so Scott could not have known in writing Ivanhoe that he was producing the iconography—the hooded white garb, the Masonic rituals, the burning cross—for the vilest and most feared racist organization in modern America.
    But the Klan were poor readers of Ivanhoe. The reason that the inevitable marriage that concludes Scott’s romance has often seemed less than satisfying to readers is that it takes place outside the erotic space of the novel. As the union of two Saxons, Ivanhoe’s marrying Rowena is anomalous to the novel’s deep investment in the mixture of races, cultures, and languages. Scott’s assertion that the marriage marked a “pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races” (p. 461) makes no sense, biologically or symbolically, since Ivanhoe and Rowena belong to the same race and are, in most respects, undifferentiated. Ironically, the greatest proponents of racial purity in the novel are not the Templar Knights or the Norman rulers but Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, who takes a eugenic approach to the cause of Saxon restoration. He enforces his ideological commitment to Saxon purity even at the expense of his own son, whom he doesn’t consider sufficiently well born for Rowena. That said, Cedric’s nationalism is as much about policing English sexuality as it is about race. He blames the decline of Saxon culture on the Circe-like enchantment of “Norman arts”: “We became enervated by Norman arts long ere we fell under Norman arms. Far better was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror!” (p. 211). The Saxon way of life, Cedric argues, was not lost on the battlefield, but at the dinner table and in the dressing room, where Norman “luxury” imported its