Walter Scott, ‘Ivanhoe’ (1819)
[Also in this very Notebook: The Bride of Lammermoor (1819); A Legend of Montrose (1819); Kenilworth (1821); The Pirate (1821/22); The Fortunes of Nigel (1822); Peveril of the Peak (1823); Quentin Durward (1823); St Ronan’s Well (1823); Redgauntlet (1824); The Betrothed (1825); The Talisman (1825); Woodstock (1826); The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827); The Highland Widow (1827); The Fair Maid of Perth (1828); Anne of Geierstein (1829); Count Robert of Paris (1831); Castle Dangerous (1831); The Siege of Malta (1831/2008). These posts are lengthy and full of plot-spoilers.]
I don’t know how widely read Ivanhoe is these days, but it is, no question, a thoroughly current novel. Its influence is everywhere. It reads as a string of dramatic and representational clichés, but only because this is the text that established these scenes, these moments, that have been so widely reused — in a thousand movies and TV shows, a million historical novels. This sets the template for historical adventure in Merrie England, as King Richard the Lionheart has been imprisoned in Europe on his way back from the crusades, and his wicked brother, Prince John, is on the throne. Scott paints society as divided, the recently-conquering Normans the ruling class, the defeated Saxons resentfully below. Stephen Fry’s explanation about how, in English usage, the names of animals differs from the names of the meat the animals supply to table (pig/swine as opposed to pork, cow versus beef, sheep versus mutton and so on) because it was Saxon peasants who tended the animals, and French-speaking Normans who ate them, so the names of the animals are English and the meat are French — It is lifted from chapter 1 of this novel, where it is set out in exactly those words. Here is an elaborate portrayal of chivalric tournament, at Ashby de la Zouch (it occupies chapters 7 through 14), the inspiration for the Eglintoun Tournament of 1839 (and thereafter many others in life and fiction). Scott’s is the first novel of Robin Hood, identified by Scott (for the first time) as Robin of Loxley. The scene from the archery competition, where Robin’s rival hits the middle of the bullseye with his arrow and Robin then splits that arrow with his own? It’s from this novel. The wicked nobleman — here a Norman called Front-de-Boeuf rather than the Sheriff of Nottingham — who has evil designs upon the beautiful young Saxon maiden (here Rowena) and is thwarted at the last moment? It’s here. The life of the Merry Men, living in the greenwood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor? Here. The reveal by which a mysterious travelling knight, the ‘Black Knight’, also called ‘the Knight of the Fetterlock’, is actually King Richard himself, in disguise? Ici. The scene in Boorman’s Excalibur (1980), where Guinevere, accused of adultery and liable to be executed, asks for trial by combat: her powerful accuser waits in the lists to joust the queen’s champion, but nobody is prepared to step-up and fight against such an antagonist, in such a cause? And at the last minute a knight rides up — Lancelot — and defeats the accuser, even though he (Lancelot) is wounded and exhausted? That’s exactly what happens in the novels penultimate chapter, except that the accused is the Jewish Rebecca, and her champion, arriving in the nick of time, is the (injured, exhausted) Ivanhoe. I’ll come back to this scene,
Scott’s Gladiator (2000) is, obviously, set in Ancient Rome rather than medieval England, but it reinhabits many of these tropes, like many other such movies: the mighty warrior in disguise, the unjust ruler, the fighting outlaws. And in another sense there’s a parallel. Gladiator is, as its date suggests, a kind of postmodernist movie, not in terms of metafictional game-play, irony, or anything like that — is representation is rather painfully earnest, its visual aesthetic old-school 19th-century painting — but in a particular sense. The movie opens with a real war, fought for real stakes, in the forests of Germany. This is then replaced by the simulacrum of war, in the gladiatorial arena, and Maximus must pass from reality to the copy. Indeed the movie captures the precession of simulacra, wherein this Baudrillardian state of affairs, this imitation war, is shown to be more politically effectual and meaningful than ‘actual’ war: ‘Rome is the mob, win their hearts and you win Rome’ and so on.
Ivanhoe does this in reverse. It’s a story in three parts. The first, cognate with the first volume of the original three-volume publication, is mostly occupied with the elaborate tournament, at which knights — including Ivanhoe, and our disguised King Richard and Robin Hood — take part. Volume two upgrades this, as it were, to real war, as the Saxons attack the forces of the wicked Baron Front-de-Boeuf and besiege his castle. The third act takes the story in a different direction: Front-de-Boeuf is dead, and Richard reveals himself and readies to retake the throne from his brother. This final section is threaded the trial of the beautiful Jewess (as Scott repeatedly calls her) Rebecca: the daughter of Isaac of York, a wealthy moneylender, she has been practicing healing arts for the benefit of the general population. This, though, leads to her being accused of witchcraft and tried in a sort of show-trial by the Knights Templar, a crooked simulacrum of justice. She is to be tortured to death, and throws herself upon the logic of trial by combat. The Norman Baron Bois-Guilbert will be the opponent; and he — a mighty warrior, though a wicked confederate of John — will surely defeat any knight foolish enough to come forward as Rebecca’s champion. The twist is that Bois-Guilbert has the hots for the toothsome Rebecca, and doesn’t want to be the means by which she is killed (for if her champion is defeated, or if no champion presents himself, she will be executed). He comes to her prison cell and offers to run away with her, to leave the country and start again. But she would rather die than become Bois-Guilbert’s lover, and haughtily repudiates his offer. Off goes Bois-Guilbert, angry, ready to fight in the tourney even if it means her death. Ivanhoe was severely wounded at the original tournament, but recovers with extraordinary rapidity — because of a healing salve Rebecca puts on the wound — and rides all day and night to present himself as her champion.
The shape of this is interesting. The stress of the early sections of the novel is of the profound social division of English society: the Normans are in charge, following their successful invasion, but all the Norman Barons included in the novel are bad people: oppressors, criminals, proud, violent, full of disdain for the aboriginal Saxon population (Baron Front-de-Boeuf boasts of killing large numbers of ‘Saxon porkers’: ‘they were the foes of my country, and of my lineage, and of my liege lord,’ he says blithely. Of course he massacred them!) The Saxons are mostly downtrodden, or literal slaves — famously Scott invented a tradition by which bondsmen were obliged to wear a metal collar around their neck — except for a few wealthier figures. Cedric of Rotherwood, a Saxon noble, disinherits his son (the novel’s hero, Ivanhoe) for supporting the Norman King Richard, but also because Ivanhoe has fallen in love with the Saxon Lady Rowena, and hopes to marry her. This angers Cedric, who wants Rowena, as one of the last descendants of the original Saxon line of royalty, to marry the gluttonous but good-hearted Lord Athelstane. Cedric hopes to overthrow the Norman monarchy and place Athelstane on the throne, and a marriage to Rowena would strengthen his claim to the throne. Anyway, Ivanhoe banished, goes off to the holy land with Richard where he distinguishes himself at the Siege of Acre. He returns to England in disguise. The point is that the Saxon characters are, by and large, virtuous, and the Norman overlords, by and large, wicked — the exception is Richard who, though a Norman, sides with the Saxons (though he is in disguise) during the assault on Front-de-Boeuf’s Torquilstone Castle. It’s a remarkable second act, in several ways: the attack is because wicked Front-de-Boeuf has kidnapped Cedric, Athelstane and the Lady Rowena, as well as the Jewess Rebecca, and is imprisoning them at his castle. But the shift from elaborately laid-out hostility between Norman and Saxon, to what is tantamount to an act of civil war, speaks to a stepping-up of violence. It has no consequences, even though the castle is burned to the ground and Front-de-Boeuf killed. Instead, in the final act, when Richard reveals his true identity, the novel shifts political focus. Now, instead of ‘Saxon’ and ‘Norman’, Richard talks of Englishman. Indeed, this starts even before the castle siege:
“Well said, stout yeoman,” answered the Black Knight [that is, King Richard]; “and if I be thought worthy to have a charge in these matters, and can find among these brave men as many as are willing to follow a true English knight, for so I may surely call myself, I am ready, with such skill as my experience has taught me, to lead them to the attack of these walls.” [31]
“There is my hand upon it,” said Locksley; “and I will call it the hand of a true Englishman, though an outlaw for the present.” [33]
“Thou bearest an English heart, Locksley,” said the Black Knight, “and well dost judge thou art the more bound to obey my behest — I am Richard of England!” [40]
“Fear not, Wilfred,” he said, “to address Richard Plantagenet as himself, since thou seest him in the company of true English hearts, although it may be they have been urged a few steps aside by warm English blood.” [41]
This is a sort of synthesis, a union of Norman and Saxon that looks to the future of both peoples as ‘Englishmen’. Athelstan, Cedric’s hope for the restoration of the Saxon monarchy, is killed during the siege of Torquilstone Castle — except that he isn’t, actually, and returns to life at his own wake and funeral feast, in a splendidly bizarre twist (the Templar Knight who cut him down with a sword during the battle only actually hit with the flat of his blade, and the stunned Athelstane was afterwards imprisoned by some priests, for rather baffling reasons) — but, reappearing, he immediately swears allegiance to King Richard, putting an end to Cedric’s hopes. He also lets Rowena, who he knows does not love him, go, leaving her free to marry Ivanhoe — which she does. Cedric himself eventually gives up his Saxon nationalism, won-over by ‘the personal attention of King Richard’, his charm and courage, becoming as it were a New Englishman.
It is, we might think, a strange path to unity. The Saxon attack on Torquilstone Castle is, by any metric, a revolt against Norman authority, and the killing of Front-de-Boeuf, a close associate of King John and major power in the land, a significant event. But the novel sweeps past it, to the ‘Richard is back, and we’re all English now’ conclusion. The actual historical period about which Scott is writing was full of upheaval and revolt of course: Richard and his brothers, excepting only John (who thereby earned his Dad’s gratitude, and the gift of rich lands) rebelled against their father, Henry II, 1173–74; John rebelled against Richard; the Barons rebelled against John after Richard’s death (whence Magna Carta); John’s heir, Henry III, coming to the throne at the age of nine, faced widespread civil war. But that’s not the world Scott builds in his novel. In Ivanhoe the Normans, united alongside wicked John, hold the country in a tight grip, ruthlessly upholding their own power. Robin Hood and his men, opposing this tyranny, are not in outright rebellion, but hiding in the greenwood, making guerrilla raids on wealthy Normans but otherwise a hidden presence (until the attack on Torquilstone Castle that is).
Ian Duncan notes the political context out of which Scott wrote Ivanhoe: the economic depression and social unrest following the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Peterloo massacre of 1818, the severity of reaction undertaken by the Tory authorities, ‘radical reform agitation and government repression’:
Scott supported the most draconian measures of the government. He supported the ‘judicious’ conduct of the Manchester officials [at Peterloo], wrote a series of anti-Radical pamphlets (The Visionary, December 1819) and started organising a loyalist militia in his district of the Borders. [He was] fearful of ‘a bloody and remorseless struggle between property and the populace’ as the year drew to its close.
Yet, as Duncan notes, Ivanhoe is ‘much more relaxed and generous’ in the way it ‘participates in this political climate’ than ‘the fierce prognostications to be found in Scott’s correspondence.’ He draws on Marilyn Butler’s reading of the novel:
Paradoxically Ivanhoe (1820), his first novel to take up a medieval theme, is thematically his most contemporaneous novel to date. Its plot turns on class warfare, the hostility between a ruling caste, the Normans, and the common people — who are no mere rabble, but have an egalitarian tradition which goes back into their Saxon past. In taking up this theme Scott must have been deliberately drawing on a live controversy … Ivanhoe draws on a favourite topic of radicals, revivified since Burke had claimed that England’s past was an organic, seamless whole. Whig and radical historians of the 1780s and 1790s, the age of Burke — John Millar, Tom Paine and Joseph Ritson, who as a ballad-collector could claim to be retrieving the viewpoint of the populace — had variously gone out of their way to show that aristocratic government was not necessarily validated by historic tradition. The real England, that is Anglo-Saxon England, had been a freer, more popular society; the Normans who overran it in 1066 brought in the Continental concept of hereditary kings and peers, and imposed upon the people legal and clerical systems designed cynically to perpetuate their own power. … Against this background, it is surely significant that with Ivanhoe Scott both takes up the ‘radical’ theme and avoids recourse to the most obvious conservative tactic — the romanticizing of his Plantagenets and Normans. His hero and heroine are Saxons (though unusually aristocratic ones). One of his Norman barons is the thug Front de Boeuf. Another, Bois-Guilbert, belongs to the Templars, a knightly and religious order, so that he represents the Norman hierarchical concept both in secular and spiritual life; Bois-Guilbert’s principal aspiration during much of the action is to rape Rebecca. He oppresses both the Saxon lower orders and the vulnerable minority, the Jews.
Scott therefore allows much of the criticism which had been directed against feudal institutions by radicals, incorporating it within his fable. But he also preaches compromise and reconciliation. Ivanhoe has taken on the characteristics of a Norman knight, and clearly believes in reforming the system from within rather than in attacking it from without. Scott makes the head of his Norman hierarchy, Richard, enough of a true knight to suggest that the nation can and will rally behind him. That conclusion is foreseeable in a Tory writer. What could not have been anticipated is the amount of human suffering Scott depicts within a medieval and legitimist society. His representation could be seen as almost cynical — a world bonded neither by religious ardour nor by chivalric dedication, but by guile and brute force. [Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (OUP 1985), 149–50]
It is certainly true that the Normans are, pretty much with the exception of Richard himself, villains and monsters, and that the novel punishes them all with death or banishment, save only John. The novel’s final chapter reports that ‘Maurice de Bracy escaped beyond seas, and went into the service of Philip of France; while Philip de Malvoisin, and his brother Albert, the Preceptor of Templestowe, were executed, although Waldemar Fitzurse, the soul of the conspiracy, escaped with banishment; and Prince John, for whose behoof it was undertaken, was not even censured by his good-natured brother. No one, however, pitied the fate of the two Malvoisins, who only suffered the death which they had both well deserved, by many acts of falsehood, cruelty, and oppression.’ The two biggest villains, Front de Boeuf and Bois-Guilbert, die in the course of the story.
But this is in itself interesting. I wrote about the death of Front de Boeuf in this post: he dies at the hand of Ulrica, a Saxon crone. Years before Front de Boeuf had killed Ulrica’s father and brothers, and raped Ulrica herself. Now she appears at the siege of Torquilstone and sets fire to his castle, trapping him in his chambers where he burns to death. At the last she invokes her Saxon, pagan gods: Mista, Skogula and Zernebock. If you read that post you’ll discover that the first two of these are Valkyries, and the last ‘the Black God’, the devil (‘Diabolo’). Zernebock is also invoked by Athelstane, at the end of the novel. Scott had included this diabolic entity in Harold The Dauntless (1817), his last long-poem, where ‘Zernebock’ is invoked, correctly as a Baltic deity. In Ivanhoe he seems to have shifted to become a Saxon one. The savagery of Ulrica’s revenge matches the savagery and violence of Front de Boeuf’s Norman pride. And rape is twice more brought-in by Scott: first in chapter 23, when Maurice de Bracy, a ‘Free Companion’ (that is, mercenary) of Front-de-Bœuf, pressures Rowena during her captivity of Torquilstone, threatening her that unless she yields to him he will kill Ivanhoe (whom Rowena loves, and who is also imprisoned in the castle, and severely wounded). Then in chapter 24, Rebecca, also imprisoned at Torquilstone, is warned by Ulrica that Front-de-Boeuf will rape her (‘such usage shalt thou have as was once thought good enough for a noble Saxon maiden’), and immediately afterwards Bois-Guilbert actually does try to rape her. She rejects him and threatens to jump off the castle to her death if he comes near her.
‘It was a matter of public knowledge,’ Scott’s narratorial voice interjects, ‘that after the conquest of King William, his Norman followers, elated by so great a victory, acknowledged no law but their own wicked pleasure, and not only despoiled the conquered Saxons of their lands and their goods, but invaded the honour of their wives and of their daughters with the most unbridled license.’ [Ivanhoe 23]
After his attempted rape is thwarted, Bois-Guilbert tries to seduce Rebecca. Several times in the story that follows, he urges her to elope with him, until, driven to fury by repeated refusals, he agrees to fight against her champion (if one should appear) in the lists, even though his victory — which seems certain — would mean her to death. This is the final scene of the novel, and it leads to a striking conclusion. Ivanhoe arrives at the tournament in the nick of time to fight as Rebecca’s champion — but he is exhausted after riding all night and all day, and is besides still recovering from the great wound he received at tournament at Ashby de la Zouch. There seems to be no chance that he can defeat the powerful Bois-Gilbert. Even at this late stage, Bois-Gilbert urges Rebecca to run away with him; but she yet again rejects his advances.
Furious at the rejection, Bois-Guilbert readies himself for the joust that will condemn her to being burnt at the stake. Then, this:
The trumpets sounded, and the knights charged each other in full career. The wearied horse of Ivanhoe, and its no less exhausted rider, went down, as all had expected, before the well-aimed lance and vigorous steed of the Templar. This issue of the combat all had foreseen; but although the spear of Ivanhoe did but, in comparison, touch the shield of Bois-Guilbert, that champion, to the astonishment of all who beheld it reeled in his saddle, lost his stirrups, and fell in the lists.
Ivanhoe, extricating himself from his fallen horse, was soon on foot, hastening to mend his fortune with his sword; but his antagonist arose not. Wilfred, placing his foot on his breast, and the sword’s point to his throat, commanded him to yield him, or die on the spot. Bois-Guilbert returned no answer.
“Slay him not, Sir Knight,” cried the Grand Master, “unshriven and unabsolved — kill not body and soul! We allow him vanquished.”
He descended into the lists, and commanded them to unhelm the conquered champion. His eyes were closed — the dark red flush was still on his brow. As they looked on him in astonishment, the eyes opened — but they were fixed and glazed. The flush passed from his brow, and gave way to the pallid hue of death. Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions. [43]
Bois-Guilbert dies not from Ivanhoe’s lance, but because his own internal contradictions as a character, as a person, overwhelm him, a sort of spontaneous combustion of impossible opposites that blast him from within. It’s a striking, if implausible, denouement. I think Victor Hugo, a dedicated reader of Scott, worked something similar out of this moment into the end of Les Misérables (1862), when Javert having devoted his life to the law and the pursuit of Valjean, has his life spared by Valjean: impossibly caught between his strict belief in the law and the Valjean’s mercy, his character simply disintegrates and he dies — although Hugo at least has him jump in the Seine, rather than just expiring. Scott’s scene is more radical.
Ivanhoe is one of the novels Lukács mentions in his seminal analysis of the historical novel. Scott leads this analysis off, not because he was the first writer to set a novel in the past, but because, Lukács argues, he was the first to find a way of dramatizing historical process as such. By ‘historical process’ Lukács, as a Marxist, means dialectical materialism, and although Scott precedes Marx, and would, as a Tory, have repudiated him altogether, Lukács makes his case. ‘It is certain,’ he says, ‘that Scott had no knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy and had he come across it would probably not have understood a word.’ But, Lukács insists, ‘the fashionable philosophic-cum-philologic hunting down of individual “influences” is no more fruitful for the writing of history than the old philological hunting down of the effects of individual writers on one another. With Scott, in particular, it was the fashion to quote a long list of second and third-rate writers (Radcliffe, etc.), who were supposed to be important literary fore¬ runners of his. All of which brings us not a jot nearer to understanding what was new in Scott’s art, that is in his historical novel.’
Paradoxically, Scott’s greatness is closely linked with his often narrow conservatism. He seeks the “middle way” between the extremes and endeavours to demonstrate artistically the historical reality of this way by means of his portrayal of the great crises in English his¬ tory. This basic tendency finds immediate expression in the way he constructs his plot and selects his central figure. The “hero” of a Scott novel is always a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman. He generally possesses a certain, though never outstanding, degree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity for self-sacrifice, but which never grows into a sweeping human passion, is never the enraptured devotion to a great cause. Not only are the Waverleys, Mortons, Osbaldistons and so on correct, decent, average representatives of the English petty aristocracy of this kind, but so, too, is Ivanhoe, the “romantic” knight of the Middle Ages. [Lukács 33]
Scott’s ‘middling’ characters waver (hence the name: Waverley) between an older, feudal and aristocratic social model — in the first novel of the series, the Romantic, warrior world of the Highlanders which is exciting and heroic, but also outmoded and doomed — and a newer, modern logic of bourgeois social existence. Scott stages this not just as a conflict between past and present for the future, but, Lukács insists, as a dialectic: out of the struggle between older, aristocratic thesis and newer bourgeois antithesis arises a newer synthesis: not the triumph of the latter over the former — although that is, in the crudest terms, the result of the 1745 rebellion, militarily — but a combination of the romantic heritage of the Scots as honour-bound, heroic, connected to the countryside, the lochs and glens and mountains, rather than the cities, with the forward-moving version of Scotland as a congeries of bourgeois virtues: practical-minded, shrewd, honest, hard-working, dependable and so on. The two combine, at least in Scott’s version of what Scotland means, going forward, in the 19th-century
Lukács warns ‘Western, nondialectical or middle-class readers’ against ‘project[ing] their own moralizing habits into a dialectical thinking which is rather more complicated than that’ [7], although he sometimes seems to slip into that simplification himself. In Waverley, the dialectical historical progression sees the old feudal past in conflict with the bourgeois present to generate its future-oriented synthesis. But with Ivanhoe the chronological dynamic seems, un-Hegelianly, to be reversed. The older mode, Saxon England — as Butler notes above, more egalitarian, in a sense ‘democratic’ — has been superseded by a hierarchical and aristocratic regime under the Normans. In one of the least convincing argumentative shifts in his entire oeuvre, Lukács advises us to ignore this obviousness.
In Ivanhoe Scott portrays the central problem of medieval England, the opposition between the Saxons and Normans, in this way. He makes it very clear that this opposition is above all one between Saxon serfs and Norman feudal lords. But, in a true historical manner, he goes further than this opposition. He knows that a section of the Saxon nobility, though materially restricted and robbed of its political power, is still in possession of its aristocratic privileges and that this provides the ideological and political centre of the Saxons’ national resistance to the Normans. However, as a great portrayer of historical, national life Scott sees and shows with eminent plasticity how important sections of the Saxon nobility sink into apathy and inertia, how others again are only waiting for the opportunity to strike a compromise with the more moderate sections of the Norman nobility whose representative is Richard Coeur de Lion. Thus, when Belinsky quite rightly says that Ivanhoe, the hero of this novel and likewise an aristocratic adherent of this compromise, is overshadowed by the minor characters, this formal problem of the historical novel has a very clear historical-political and popular content. For although one of the figures who overshadows Ivanhoe is his father, the brave and ascetic Saxon nobleman, Cedric, the most important of these figures are the latter’s serfs, Gurth and Wamba, and above all the leader of the armed resistance to Norman rule, the legendary popular hero, Robin Hood. The interaction between “above” and “below”, the sum of which constitutes the totality of popular life, is thus manifested in the fact that, while on the whole the historical tendencies “above” receive a more distinct and generalized expression, we find the true heroism with which the historical antagonisms are fought out, with few exceptions, “below”. [Lukács, 49]
Yeah: no, actually. There’s no question but that the vices Scott is using his Norman characters to critique are aristocratic vices, and the Saxon characters to interpellate his readers into an aboriginal ‘Saxonness’ that is the true taproot of the British, or at least the English, inheritance. That this Saxonness is also a matter of Zernebock, gluttony and slavery does not detract from the fact that, for Scott, it is also, and more crucially: vigour, humour, the resistance to tyranny, strength, endurance, resurrection and potential.
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As for Ivanhoe, it seems to have been a name Scott invented, perhaps adapting the name of the Aylesbury village Ivinghoe. I’m really not sure about that (that is what Scott himself says in his 1829 author’s introduction: ‘the name of Ivanhoe was suggested by an old rhyme, but still). The most obvious thing about Ivanhoe, as a name, is that it’s a variant of Ivan — which is to say (as per the Baltic/Russian provenance of Zernebock, previously discussed): John. This leads us to wonder if the good Saxon ‘John’ isn’t brought into the story precisely to balance the bad Norman ‘John’ notionally on the throne.
And actually there’s a third quantity: not just Saxon and Norman but Jew. The novel introduces Isaac the Jew as a moneylender early on, but it is Rebecca, his daughter, who comes almost to dominate the final volume. She is beautiful, virtuous, put in a perilous situation such that the hero, Ivanhoe, can rescue her, as per the stricture of Romance — although, as I say, the actual rescue turns into a strange automortality, where the conflict within Bois de Gilbert destroys him.
There are three women in the novel: Ulrica, the old Saxon — still worshipping the pagan gods, dedicated to revenging herself upon the Normans: the past; Rowena, the rather bland Saxon maiden who will marry Ivanhoe and guarantee the future generations; and Rebecca, the tertium quid, who loves Ivanhoe but cannot marry him, and who ends the novel by leaving England with her father for a new life in Grenada. Ian Duncan notes that Rebecca figures in the novel as ‘the voice of a lost and sublimated Zion’ who ‘imagines a utopian, ecumenical expansion of her religion into a universal faith, invoking “the great Father who made both Jew and Gentile” and the more mysterious figure of “the Comforter”, properly the third person of the Trinity.’ [Duncan, xxv] Rebecca invokes this ‘Comforter’ — the Paraclete, promised by Jesus — when Bois de Gilbert begs her to run away with him, at the final tourney, or trial by combat:
“Bois-Guilbert,” answered the Jewess, “thou knowest not the heart of woman, or hast only conversed with those who are lost to her best feelings. I tell thee, proud Templar, that not in thy fiercest battles hast thou displayed more of thy vaunted courage, than has been shown by woman when called upon to suffer by affection or duty. I am myself a woman, tenderly nurtured, naturally fearful of danger, and impatient of pain — yet, when we enter those fatal lists, thou to fight and I to suffer, I feel the strong assurance within me, that my courage shall mount higher than thine. Farewell — I waste no more words on thee; the time that remains on earth to the daughter of Jacob must be otherwise spent — she must seek the Comforter, who may hide his face from his people, but who ever opens his ear to the cry of those who seek him in sincerity and in truth.” [39]
She mentions it again when saying farewell to Rowena at the very end of the book: Rowena, struck with the manner in which Rebecca uttered the last words. “O, remain with us,”’ begs Rowena, to which Rebecca replies; “No, lady,” answered Rebecca, the same calm melancholy reigning in her soft voice and beautiful features — “that — may not be. … He, to whom I dedicate my future life, will be my comforter, if I do His will.”
This constellates a third John, to add to Prince John the Norman, and Saxon Ivan = John(hoe): namely Saint John, from whose gospel and epistles the notion of the Paraclete exclusively derives.
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. [John 14:16–17]
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. [1 John 2:1]
‘Advocate’ is Παράκλητον, and in Hebrew מְנַחֵם mənaḥḥēm ‘comforter’. It was conventional to identify this figure with the Holy Spirit, the tertium quid that fulfils God the Father and Christ the son in the trinity.
Duncan notes how invested contemporaries were in Rebecca as a character, and how often her role was rewritten so as to pair-off with Ivanhoe.
Reception history shows that readers have regretted the failure of an Ivanhoe-Rebecca liaison more than they have enjoyed the success of the Ivanhoe-Rowena one. A number of contemporary and operatic versions of Ivanhoe contrived the union of Wilfred and Rebecca, including George Soane’s The Hebrew (Drury Lane, March 1820) and the Deschamps and De Wailly Ivanhoe (with music by Rossini) that Scott himself saw in Paris. Posthumous revisions include not only Thackeray’s Rebecca and Rowena: a Romance upon Romance (1850) but also Thomas Plowman’s ‘travesty’, Ivanhoe Abroad: Ivanhoe Settled and Rebecca Righted (1878).
We could say that this reproduces, formally, the conflict within Bois-Guilbert’s person — he both wants to marry Rebecca and knows that he can never marry her, both desires her and wants her dead. Scott could not have married his hero to a Jew; but the story he has written wants to marry its hero to the Jew. In Soane’s play, Isaac of York was played by Edmund Kean, whose Shylock in 1814 had created a sensation (‘his opening at Drury Lane on 26 January 1814 as Shylock roused the audience to almost uncontrollable enthusiasm. Contemporaries recognized that Kean had brought dignity and humanity to his portrayal of the character. Jane Austen refers to his popularity in a letter to her sister Cassandra, 2 March 1814: “Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got” … His triumph was so great that he himself said on one occasion, “I could not feel the stage under me.”’ Rich enough after this success to own his own horse, Kean named it Shylock). In the last scene of The Hebrew, Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert fight,
Ivanhoe. Why dost thou droop thy sword?
Brian. What light was that
Which shot across my face-I am withered-blasted;
I’ve sin’d against earth and heaven — I die —
Ivanhoe clasps Rebecca’s hand and Isaac then dies of happiness — something that doesn’t happen in the novel:
Isaac. Earth recedes — ah now
I feel the presence of another world;
The heaven’s unclasp their gates of burning light,
The seat of immortality’s unveil’d
Where the great mover beams mid’st angel hosts;
A sun ‘midst untold stars-Tis sweet to die.Isaac sinks into the arms of Ivanhoe: Rebecca kneels grasping her father’s hand: the Curtain slowly falls to a plaintive melody.
THE END
This shifts the centre of gravity of the story to Isaac. The union of Ivanhoe and Rebecca is hinted at, though not followed-through: instead
Thackeray’s novella is a sequel to Ivanhoe. Married with the virtuous and rather forbidding Rowena, Ivanhoe grows dissatisfied: mopes, can’t sleep, spends as much time as possible out hunting so as not to have to be with his wife. When Richard goes to war in France, Ivanhoe eagerly goes with him, and after Richard is killed Ivanhoe is stabbed in the back. Wamba, his servant, finds him. ‘As Wamba opened the dear knight’s corselet, he found a locket round his neck, in which there was some hair; not flaxen like that of my Lady Rowena, who was almost as fair as an Albino, but as black, Wamba thought, as the locks of the Jewish maiden whom the knight had rescued in the lists of Templestowe. A bit of Rowena’s hair was in Sir Wilfrid’s possession, too; but that was in his purse along with his seal of arms, and a couple of groats.’ With Ivanhoe dead, Rowena marries Athelstane. But in fact Ivanhoe is not dead: his body is discovered by two hermits, ‘prodigiously learned in the healing art; and had about them those precious elixirs which so often occur in romances, and with which patients are so miraculously restored … to withdraw the enormous dagger still sticking out of his back, to wash the wound with a portion of the precious elixir, and to pour a little of it down his throat’. Healing his wound takes six years, after which he wakes from what has been a kind of coma. He returns home dressed as a palmer, with a great long beard, and comes to his house to see Athelstane and Rowena happily married, with a child.
Thackeray’s Ivanhoe departs, like Enoch Arden, although not to die. The story goes on, with Thackerayan cynicism: Athelstane is killed in the Baronial wars and Rowena dies soon afterwards, but not before extracting a deathbed promise from Ivanhoe that he will never marry a Jewess (earlier in the story, Athelstane had laughingly told her, “Marry, thou never couldst forgive Ivanhoe the Jewess, Rowena!” “The odious hussy! don’t mention the name of the unbelieving creature,” exclaimed the lady’). Ivanhoe has various adventures killing Saracens, and ends up, of course, married to Rebecca, who conveniently converts to Christianity so that he does not violate his vow to Rowena. ‘Married I am sure they were, and adopted little Cedric [Rowena and Athelstane’s son]; but I don’t think they had any other children, or were subsequently very boisterously happy. Of some sort of happiness melancholy is a characteristic, and I think these were a solemn pair, and died rather early.’
Thackeray’s is a story about adultery, about the way sexual desire spills out from the bounds of propriety, of sanctified marriage, of nation and race. But, though it takes a burlesque form, it explores this idea with some insight and force. But it also excavates its theme from Scott’s novel where it lies, buried there: the one connecting to the one that generates a third thing, rather than remaining sealed up in its dyad: an outward urge, a transgressive vector. Bois-Guilbert’s death is the rebus for this: there’s his life, his reputation, his glory, his position, which he really, really wants — and there’s this other thing, this Jewish woman, who will mean the end of all those things, and whom he really, really wants. The short-circuit that destroys him is a short-circuit of desire.
