Postcolonial Theory and Scottish Romanticism

Heather Stewart

English 601

March 2, 2012

Postcolonial Theory and Scottish Romanticism

            I have always felt a certain connection to Postcolonial theory – an attraction of sorts – ever since I read “Anthills of the Savannah” by Chinua Achebe. From there, I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and An Image of Africa, Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, Dabydeen’s “Turner,” … All of these texts touched some primal (chosen British Empirical term applied to the urges and desires of the noble savages of the colonized) part of me, alighted on some dark part of my heart and stirred me to feel guilt, sehnsucht, nostalgia, grief.

            This all may sound silly coming from a “white,” “privileged,” “American” girl. However, stereotypes are never so simple. My great grandmother was Native American (Chicasaw) and the rest of my family were first or second generation immigrants (my dad’s side of the family has an interesting history of piracy, war, and moving back and forth across the ocean to and from Scotland multiple times over the last few hundred years). Many of my family were colonized as “Other,” either in their home countries or when they came to America. My grandmother couldn’t speak a word of English (she spoke Russian) and was constantly tormented and lived in the “Russian ghetto” of Chicago for her childhood and young adult life. Her family had to leave Russia because their religion (Russian Orthodoxy) became illegal to practice in the province she was from. My grandfather (on my dad’s side) spent a good deal of time on Indian reservations in Oklahoma, and eventually ended up painting the scenes of alcoholism, poverty and destruction which resulted on the reservations – many of this paintings of the West were taken up by history books. Nobody knows why my Scottish side of the family kept moving back and forth between Scotland and Canada, Scotland and America. But I suspect it has something to do with economic conditions of English colonialism in Scotland.

            See: The history of land law around the time of unionization in Scotland. My basic understanding is that England controlled/gained control of Scottish commerce through strategic boycotting of trade with Scottish merchants and cow or sheepherders who challenged English authority and heavy taxation. This led many landholding Scottish nobility to have to sell off portions of their land in order to provide food for their villages and families. The English gentry were, of course, right there to buy up that land. This led to an inescapable debt cycle for the Lairds and their villagers: they had to sell of their land to feed themselves and their villagers because their cow/sheepherding/peat harvesting was boycotted or taxed so much as to not be lucrative. With the land they sold went the ability to independently produce wealth. Inevitably, the Lairds lost all land and went into great debt: they became nobility only through title. Many of them “sold out” by marrying wealthy, ambitious English of both noble and ignoble background who were desperate for the titles, lands and nobility of Old Scottish noble holdings. Thus, entire ancient Scottish lines were mixed with and subsumed by English families and culture. The borderlands especially were taken over by a heavy English influence, so that many towns even today do not even have Scottish accents or names. Historic castles, lands, and linneages became lost to time when the families were subsumed by English families, starved out of existence, or forced to migrate to America or out of Scotland to pursue hope of regaining economic independence.

            Further complicating Scottish English relations were class, dialect, ethnicity, political and religious differences. Scotland was seen by England for thousands of years, and even today, as “savage,” “rustic,” and “pagan.” Scots were seen as lower class rustic shepherds despite their highly developed education system (Edinburgh boasts the world’s oldest English Literature and Creative Writing programs). Their dialect, Scots, was described by many English writers (such as Wordsworth and the Romantics) as underdeveloped, primitive, warble, garble, - often relating it t animal sounds such as the grunts of swine (in reference to James Hogg in particular). In essence, Scots were completely dehumanized by the English. This was part of the Rhetoric justifying unionization of Scotland. To me this holds striking similarity to the justification for colonization.

            Yet, like many colonized areas, Scotland rebelled. We see historical characters like Rob Roy McGregor, William Wallace, Mary Queen of Scots; literary characters such as James and Henry Durie, Master Ravenswood, James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns rise in both literature and history surrounding the 400 years of the Fall of Scotland from self-sovereignty. Or, what I argue, is the colonization of Scotland.

            What I see as most problematic in modern conceptions of Postcolonial theory is that it at once claims to critique “Othering” and exclusivity/repression/silencing, but in its very mission statement does just that.  For example, “For the most part, postcolonial studies excludes literature that represents either British or American viewpoints and concentrates on writings from colonized cultures in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America, and other places that were once dominated by, but remained outside, the white, male, European cultural, political, and philosophical tradition… what post colonialism and postcolonial theorists do is to investigate what happens when two cultures clash and one of them, with its accessory ideology, empowers and deems itself superior to the other” (Bressler 200).  Through excluding “white, male, European” people, postcolonialism effectively silences an entire group of oppressed, dominated, people whose cultures were destroyed in the clash with the dominant ideology of Britain. In making a critical space for themselves, postcolonialists displace and alienate others. What place is there for Scots? Certainly not in the British cultural formation, at least during James Hogg’s time, since Scots were looked down upon as savages. What is so different about Scottish cultural destruction and subjugation than, say, African or Indian, other than the color of the Scots skin? Scots were executed for defiance, impoverished, starved, ridiculed, forced to serve and die en masse (over represented) in the British imperial military. Their literature, like Achebe argues about African Writings and culture, have historically been deemed “rubbish” by authorities on English cultural formation (like Wordsworth insulting Hogg, saying he wasn’t fit to carry the title of poet). The hegemonic English literary majority/cultural formation has, traditionally, alienated and excluded Scotland.

            This comparison between accepted Postcolonial text and the unacceptable Scottish texts is what brings me to the overlapping figure of the tragic rebel figure or “noble savage” which seems a Romanticized symptom or remnant of the subsumed or fragmented colonized culture. Rob Roy. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The African queen in Heart of Darkness. Mr. Biswas. George Colwan. James Hogg. William Wallace. Beloved. Okonkwo. What attracts us to these characters is their tragic defiance of “Fate,” the very existence of which at once empowers and calls into question the British empire’s “natural” superiority and the colonized culture’s “inevitable” Fall. We know these characters have (historically) and must (literally) fall. But their acts of defiance, of hopeless hope, create a space for the postcolonial subject to inject themselves (no matter what their race).

            This space is where I find the passion to study James Hogg, who imitates, challenges, defies, reappropriates the colonizing endeavors of Wordsworth’s English Romantic cultural formation (I know I overuse that highly pretentious phrase now. Tough. I like it). James Hogg, who complicates and redefines what it means to be Scottish, to be Romantic, to be colonized, to be at once part of the British empire and separate from it. Even now, Scotland is still colonized (in effect) but slowly being liberated (in name and law only). It is a period of cultural formation and continues to struggle with putting its national identity in place/ wholeness after cultural fragmentation. This was more so during Hogg’s time, which was within 100 years after unionization. The changes would have been most apparent during that time – and his novel dwells on the issues of being a colonized territory, the various clashes of culture, the fragmentation of identity which resulted in characters such as Robert Wringham (Calvinism as English influence).