Walter Scott, ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ (1819)

[After a bit of a haitus, I’m back to Scott blogging. Previously within this very Notebook: 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.]

We’re in the Scottish borders, in the first decade of the eighteenth-century. The ancient and noble family of Ravenswood has fallen on hard times, financially, and the Master of Ravenswood, by supporting the claim of James in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 — the exiled James becomes the Jacobite pretender to the throne, the focus of the later 1715 rebellion, as his son Charles was for the 1745 (Bride of Lammermoor is set before and after the Act of Union of 1707) — has been politically marginalised and disgraced. A canny, somewhat devious lawyer, Sir William Ashton, is able to use Ravenswood’s debts against him to seize Ravenswood Castle, and make it his own. The Ravenswoods are left only with Wolf’s Crag, ‘a lonely and sea-beaten tower, which, situated on the bleak shores between St. Abb’s Head and the village of Eyemouth, looked out on the lonely and boisterous German Ocean’ [2]. Bankrupt, his possessions all having been sold, most of his followers having abandoned him, the Master of Ravenswood dies in fury, raging against Ashton. His adult son Edgar, now himself Master of Ravenswood, hosts a funeral banquet at Wolf’s Crag at which he swears to avenge his father. He dismisses everyone from the wake:

Accepting their adieus with an air of contempt which he could scarce conceal, Ravenswood at length beheld his ruinous habitation cleared of this confluence of riotous guests, and returned to the deserted hall, which now appeared doubly lonely from the cessation of that clamour to which it had so lately echoed. But its space was peopled by phantoms which the imagination of the young heir conjured up before him — the tarnished honour and degraded fortunes of his house, the destruction of his own hopes, and the triumph of that family by whom they had been ruined. To a mind naturally of a gloomy cast here was ample room for meditation, and the musings of young Ravenswood were deep and unwitnessed.

The peasant who shows the ruins of the tower, which still crown the beetling cliff and behold the war of the waves, though no more tenanted saved by the sea-mew and cormorant, even yet affirms that on this fatal night the Master of Ravenswood, by the bitter exclamations of his despair, evoked some evil fiend, under whose malignant influence the future tissue of incidents was woven. Alas! what fiend can suggest more desperate counsels than those adopted under the guidance of our own violent and unresisted passions?

That’s the set-up. His family’s former castle is now in the possession of his enemy, against whom Ravenswood has sworn revenge. But then there’s a change of direction. Sir William has a beautiful young daughter, Lucy, with whom Ravenswood falls in love. There is a rather studied set of contrasts here: Ravenswood is dark (he has, says another character, a Spanish look): ‘a mind naturally of a gloomy and brooding cast’, black as the raven after which he is named: handsome, distinguished, brave, and so on, but dark, and dressed in black (‘the dark cloth intimated the rank of the wearer, though concealed in part by a large and loose cloak of a dark brown colour. A montero cap and a black feather drooped over the wearer’s brow, and partly concealed his features, which were dark, regular, and full of majestic, though somewhat sullen, expression’ [5]) — Lucy (‘light’) is white, her voice ‘silvery’ [3], her complexion pale, hair blonde, and dressed in white — ultimately in the bridal white of the story’s denouement. Ravenswood is hard, Lucy soft. I’ll come back to this.

Anyway: there seems no chance that these two, from their Montague-Capulet opposing families, could ever come happily together. But then a plot contrivance: Sir William Ashton and Lucy are out walking when they are suddenly attacked by a huge, violent, murderous bull. Ravenswood, who happens to be out at the same time, shoots the bull and saves their lives. This earns Sir William’s gratitude, and, since Lucy is in love with the brooding, handsome, heroic Ravenswood, as he with her, the two are on track to marriage. At this point in the novel a happy ending opens to possibility. Not that it’s all smooth-running. Ravenswood, though in love with the toothsome Lucy, has doubts: does this mean betraying his vow of vengeance? And is it right for him, a nobleman, to marry the daughter of a plebian (as he considers Sir William)? Ravenswood, and another aristocratic character The Marquis of A — — (Aberdeen, maybe: though Aberdeen was an earldom, not a marquisate) — who takes the ruined Ravenswood under his wing and promises to restore his fortunes, via an appeal in the House of Lords, in London, to return his property to him — are Tories and closet Jacobites; the Ashtons are Whigs and Presbyterians. Can love cross such differences? From Ashton’s perspective, marrying his daughter to a nobleman not only elevates his family’s status, it makes the Ashton’s claim to the estate more secure. And the two young lovers have sworn their undying affection for one another: Ravenswood breaks a gold coin in half, and each wears their piece on a chain around their necks (H G Wells tacitly references this romantic gesture in Kipps (1905), although in that novel it’s a sixpence).

Now that the breach between the families has been, it seems, healed, Ashton invites Ravenswood to come and stay at Ravenswood castle, an invitation Ravenwood accepts. His serving-man Caleb begs him not to leave Wolf’s Crag, reminding him of the ancient prophecy, spoken by Thomas the Rhymer centuries before:

When the last Laird of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride,
And woo a dead maiden to be his bride,
He shall stable his steed in the Kelpie’s flow,
And his name shall be lost for evermoe!

Ravenswood is having none of this.

“I know the Kelpie’s flow well enough,” said the Master; “I suppose, at least, you mean the quicksand betwixt this tower and Wolf’s Hope; but why any man in his senses should stable a steed there — — ”

“Oh, ever speer ony thing about that, sir — God forbid we should ken what the prophecy means — but just bide you at hame, and let the strangers ride to Ravenswood by themselves. We have done eneugh for them; and to do mair would be mair against the credit of the family than in its favour.”

Ravenswood goes, though.

Ravenswood and Lucy are sworn to one another, but Lucy is worried that her mother, the haughty and scheming Lady Ashton, will not approve their match. Nor does she: Lady Ashton has her sights on a more politically advantageous marriage than the penniless, though aristocratic, Ravenswood: a certain Francis, Laird of Bucklaw, rich and eligible.

When the Marquis of A — — sends Ravenswood to France for some months on a kind of diplomatic mission, Lady Ashton gets to work. She intercepts Ravenswood’s letters and prevents Lucy writing to him. She works her iron will upon the soft and pliable girl, pressing her to abandon Ravenswood and instead marry Bucklaw. When Lucy resists, her mother spreads the rumour that Ravenswood has married a nobelwoman in France, and urges his non-return as evidence (in fact, Ravenswood has fallen ill, which is why he hasn’t come back as expected). Lucy, who resists as long as she can, finally agrees to throw-over Ravenswood’s suit if he doesn’t contact her by Saint Jude’s Day. He does not, and so the wedding with Bucklaw goes ahead.

On the day before the wedding Ravenswood returns, sees that she is now planning on marrying his rival, haughtily repudiates her and storms off. Broken-hearted Lucy goes through with the wedding, but, as everyone is dancing in the castle below, she goes up to the bridal chamber, and stabs Bucklaw — he is wounded but not killed. After this, Lucy descends into insanity and quickly dies — of what is not made clear, but presumably of a broken heart. Bucklaw recovers, but refuses to discuss what happened to him. Ravenswood reappears at Lucy’s funeral, where Lucy’s older brother, who blames him, challenges him to a duel. Edgar, despairing, agrees. In keeping with the prophecy, he does not make it to the duelling ground, instead riding into the quicksand and drowning.

The Bride of Lammermoor was Edgar Allan Poe’s favorite Scott novel: ‘that purest and most enthralling of fictions’ he said. You can see what appealed to him — the ravens, the beautiful morbid woman, stabbing her betrothed, going mad and expiring, the melodramatic tragedy, the hero drowning in quicksand, the hint of the supernatural — ancient prophesies, spectral presences.

But here’s the thing: the summary I have just provided doesn’t in the least capture the shape of the novel as it actually is. Most of what I have described happens in the last couple of chapters (of 35) — maybe the last tenth of the whole novel. Most of the book is not this denouement, although the denouement is what people think of when they think of The Bride of Lammermoor. When Donizetti’s reworked the novel into his opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) — a huge hit, of course, and still part of the repertoire — he (or his librettist, Salvadore Cammarano) concentrated only on the end. The opera considerably simplifies things, replaces the scheming Lady Ashton with Lucia’s older brother, Lord Enricio, as the impediment for Lucia and Edgardo, and opens the drama right before Lucia’s wedding to Arturo.

But this is not the novel we actually read. Andrew Hook notes this mismatch:

That Poe should have regarded The Bride of Lammermoor as his favourite Scott novel well suggests why, in the prevailing critical climate, this particular Waverley novel deserves special attention. On the face of it, The Bride is one of the more egregiously romantic of Scott’s productions. Its action and plot suggest nothing more readily than a ballad. It is a tale of high passion and thwarted love, of superstitious legend and witches’ prophecies, a tale whose hero drowns in a quicksand and whose heroine is brought to madness and death .. [But] a rehearsal of the Gothic extravaganza which is the plot of The Bride in no way corresponds to one’s experience of reading the book. And the reason is clear enough. The Bride of Lammermoor is in no simple sense a romance at all; like all of the Waverley novels it is an historical romance. [Andrew D. Hook, ‘The Bride of Lammermoor: A Reexamination’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 22:2 (Sep., 1967), 111–12]

I’d go further, or in a different direction, but it is worth dwelling on Hook’s point for a moment:

In his ‘Essay on Romance’ (1824), Scott defines Romance as ‘a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents.’ The Novel, on the other hand, is ‘a fictitious narrative, differing from the Romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society.’ And he goes on to say that some compositions will fit neither of these definitions, but will ‘partake of the nature of both.’ Preeminently, the historical romance, as Scott created it, so partakes. Hence the density of historical and social particularity with which Scott surrounds the ballad-like action of The Bride; ‘the ordinary train of human events’ is allowed just as much emphasis as the ‘marvellous and uncommon.’

Hook identifies an uncomfortableness in Scott with the Gothic elements of his story, and attempts — in the novel, and in the paratextual material (the notes, the introduction written for the 1831 Magnus Opus edition) — to distance the telling from this. I’d put it a different way: Scott is interested in modes of representation, but although his main business is of course words, the novel interrogates this through images.

The first chapter of The Bride of Lammermoor does not mention Ravenswood or Lucy, but instead concerns a humble painter, Peter Tinto. He lives in a Lanarkshire village (‘Langdirdum’: dirdum being Scots for ‘blame, scolding, uproar or fuss’) and paints inn-signs and occasional portraits of local figures. But he has ambitions to be more, and moves to London to pursue a career as a ‘proper’ artist. He fails in this regard. His story is related by Peter Pattieson, the notional narrator of the whole novel (there’s an extra layer, in that Pattieson’s text has, supposedly, been edited by another of Scott’s sock-puppet identities, Jedediah Cleishbotham). The tone in this opening chapter is comic, although poor old Pinto’s meagre artistic talent and lack of connections leads to him dying in a London garret. Pattieson visits Tinto in his last days and the two discuss the parallels between their two preferred artistic modes.

“Your characters,” he said, “my dear Pattieson, make too much use of the gob box; they patter too much … there is nothing in whole pages but mere chat and dialogue … Peter, should these tales ever become public, whether you have not given us a page of talk for every single idea which two words might have communicated, while the posture, and manner, and incident, accurately drawn, and brought out by appropriate colouring, would have preserved all that was worthy of preservation, and saved these everlasting ‘said he’s’ and ‘said she’s,’ with which it has been your pleasure to encumber your pages.”

I replied, “That he confounded the operations of the pencil and the pen; that the serene and silent art, as painting has been called by one of our first living poets, necessarily appealed to the eye, because it had not the organs for addressing the ear; whereas poetry, or that species of composition which approached to it, lay under the necessity of doing absolutely the reverse, and addressed itself to the ear, for the purpose of exciting that interest which it could not attain through the medium of the eye.”

Dick was not a whit staggered by my argument, which he contended was founded on misrepresentation. “Description,” he said, “was to the author of a romance exactly what drawing and tinting were to a painter: words were his colours, and, if properly employed, they could not fail to place the scene which he wished to conjure up as effectually before the mind’s eye as the tablet or canvas presents it to the bodily organ. The same rules,” he contended, “applied to both, and an exuberance of dialogue, in the former case, was a verbose and laborious mode of composition which went to confound the proper art of fictitious narrative with that of the drama, a widely different species of composition, of which dialogue was the very essence, because all, excepting the language to be made use of, was presented to the eye by the dresses, and persons, and actions of the performers upon the stage. But as nothing,” said Dick, “can be more dull than a long narrative written upon the plan of a drama, so where you have approached most near to that species of composition, by indulging in prolonged scenes of mere conversation, the course of your story has become chill and constrained, and you have lost the power of arresting the attention and exciting the imagination, in which upon other occasions you may be considered as having succeeded tolerably well.” [1]

The premise of this chapter, as a set-up for the novel that follows, is that Tinto has drawn a picture, a scene from of the ‘Bride of Lammermoor’ story (a tale based on the real-life 17th-century story of Janet Dalrymple, daughter of James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount of Stair): ‘the light, admitted from the upper part of a high casement, fell upon a female figure of exquisite beauty, who, in an attitude of speechless terror, appeared to watch the issue of a debate betwixt two other persons. The one was a young man, in the Vandyke dress common to the time of Charles I., who, with an air of indignant pride, testified by the manner in which he raised his head and extended his arm, seemed to be urging a claim of right, rather than of favour, to a lady whose age, and some resemblance in their features, pointed her out as the mother of the younger female, and who appeared to listen with a mixture of displeasure and impatience.’ This he gives to Pattieson, together with various notes and source materials, urging him to write it up as a novel — the conceit being that the novel we then read is the elaboration of this image.

Still, Tinto is a bad artist: his horses — an in-demand subject for Scottish inn-signs — look like crocodiles, and, as Pattieson says with lumpish irony, ‘detraction, which always pursues merit with strides proportioned to its advancement, has indeed alleged that Dick once upon a time painted a horse with five legs, instead of four.’ So there is a question of truthfulness raised right at the beginning. I’d go further with the five-legged horse reference, throwaway reference though it is: Scott perhaps smuggling a lewd inference into the joke. The Bride of Lammermoor is a novel about love, and marriage, and sex and desire, and the climax involves a woman married to a man who stabs that man in the bridal chamber before the marriage is consummated — reversing the polarity, as it were, of the marital phallic penetration — and goes on to die at once a virgin and a bride. There’s a lot to do with swords, as markers of gentility and manliness, in the novel. Lucy’s younger brother, dressed in finery for the occasion of the wedding, was supposed to carry a dagger in his belt, as suitable to his younger age, but wants something bigger

Sir William Ashton, a man of peace and of form, censured his son Henry for having begirt himself with a military sword of preposterous length, belonging to his brother, Colonel Ashton.

“If you must have a weapon,” he said, “upon such a peaceful occasion, why did you not use the short poniard sent from Edinburgh on purpose?”

The boy vindicated himself by saying it was lost.

“You put it out of the way yourself, I suppose,” said his father, “out of ambition to wear that preposterous thing, which might have served Sir William Wallace. But never mind, get to horse now, and take care of your sister.” [34]

The lad wants to be a big man, and carry a big sword. In fact the poignard is not lost: Lucy has it, and uses it to stab Bucklaw.

When the actual narrative of The Bride of Lammermoor gets underway, in chapter 2, we hear no more about Dick Tinto. But paintings and portraits play a significant part in the story. Having acquired Ravenswood Castle, Ashton has also come into possession of all the armorial bearings and portraits, including a life-size picture of one of Ravenswood’s ancestors:

It was said by a constant tradition that a Malisius de Ravenswood had, in the 13th century, been deprived of his castle and lands by a powerful usurper, who had for a while enjoyed his spoils in quiet. At length, on the eve of a costly banquet, Ravenswood, who had watched his opportunity, introduced himself into the castle with a small band of faithful retainers. The serving of the expected feast was impatiently looked for by the guests, and clamorously demanded by the temporary master of the castle. Ravenswood, who had assumed the disguise of a sewer upon the occasion, answered, in a stern voice, “I bide my time”; and at the same moment a bull’s head, the ancient symbol of death, was placed upon the table. The explosion of the conspiracy took place upon the signal, and the usurper and his followers were put to death. [3]

The novel’s Ravenswood so closely resembles the portrait of Malisius de Ravenswood that when he first arrives at his lost ancestral castle, as Ashton’s guest, Sir Henry’s youngest son runs off in terror that the portrait has literally come to life, to exact vengeance.

Prior to this visit Ashton has replaced the alarming portrait of Ravenswood’s ancestor with pictures of his own family, and canvases indicative of his bourgeois tastes (the image at the head of this post illustrates this scene).

New alterations impressed upon Ravenswood the superior wealth of the present inhabitants of the castle. The mouldering tapestry, which, in his father’s time, had half covered the walls of this stately apartment, and half streamed from them in tatters, had given place to a complete finishing of wainscot, the cornice of which, as well as the frames of the various compartments, were ornamented with festoons of flowers and with birds, which, though carved in oak, seemed, such was the art of the chisel, actually to swell their throats and flutter their wings. Several old family portraits of armed heroes of the house of Ravenswood, together with a suit or two of old armour and some military weapons, had given place to those of King William and Queen Mary, or Sir Thomas Hope and Lord Stair, two distinguished Scottish lawyers. The pictures of the Lord Keeper’s father and mother were also to be seen; the latter, sour, shrewish, and solemn, in her black hood and close pinners, with a book of devotion in her hand; the former, exhibiting beneath a black silk Geneva cowl, or skull-cap, which sate as close to the head as if it had been shaven, a pinched, peevish, Puritanical set of features, terminating in a hungry, reddish, peaked beard, forming on the whole a countenance in the expression of which the hypocrite seemed to contend with the miser and the knave. “And it is to make room for such scarecrows as these,” thought Ravenswood, “that my ancestors have been torn down from the walls which they erected!” he looked at them again, and, as he looked, the recollection of Lucy Ashton, for she had not entered the apartment with them, seemed less lively in his imagination.

There were also two or three Dutch drolleries, as the pictures of Ostade and Teniers were then termed, with one good painting of the Italian school. There was, besides, a noble full-length of the Lord Keeper in his robes of office, placed beside his lady in silk and ermine, a haughty beauty, bearing in her looks all the pride of the house of Douglas, from which she was descended. The painter, notwithstanding his skill, overcome by the reality, or, perhaps, from a suppressed sense of humour, had not been able to give the husband on the canvas that air of awful rule and right supremacy which indicates the full possession of domestic authority. It was obvious at the first glance that, despite mace and gold frogs, the Lord Keeper was somewhat henpecked. [18]

Truth in painting reveals the henpecked husband, the dominating wife. But, interestingly, these portraits overwrite Ravenswood’s memory of Lucy, in her absence: ‘the recollection of Lucy Ashton seemed less lively in his imagination.’

Along with paintings, the novel does quite a lot with mirrors. This is partly about mimesis: accurate reflections of reality or, on the contrary, versions of ‘a face in a broken mirror’ [4]. This is also about hardness and softness. Ravenswood, who is hard, worries that Lucy, in her softness and pliability, will abandoned her promise to marry him. She reassures him:

His soul was of an higher, prouder character than those with whom she had hitherto mixed in intercourse; his ideas were more fierce and free; and he contemned many of the opinions which had been inculcated upon her as chiefly demanding her veneration. On the other hand, Ravenswood saw in Lucy a soft and flexible character, which, in his eyes at least, seemed too susceptible of being moulded to any form by those with whom she lived. He felt that his own temper required a partner of a more independent spirit, who could set sail with him on his course of life, resolved as himself to dare indifferently the storm and the favouring breeze. But Lucy was so beautiful, so devoutly attached to him, of a temper so exquisitely soft and kind, that, while he could have wished it were possible to inspire her with a greater degree of firmness and resolution, and while he sometimes became impatient of the extreme fear which she expressed of their attachment being prematurely discovered, he felt that the softness of a mind, amounting almost to feebleness, rendered her even dearer to him, as a being who had voluntarily clung to him for protection, and made him the arbiter of her fate for weal or woe. … But they stood pledged to each other; and Lucy only feared that her lover’s pride might one day teach him to regret his attachment; Ravenswood, that a mind so ductile as Lucy’s might, in absence or difficulties, be induced, by the entreaties or influence of those around her, to renounce the engagement she had formed.

“Do not fear it,” said Lucy, when upon one occasion a hint of such suspicion escaped her lover; “the mirrors which receive the reflection of all successive objects are framed of hard materials like glass or steel; the softer substances, when they receive an impression, retain it undefaced.”

“This is poetry, Lucy,” said Ravenswood; “and in poetry there is always fallacy, and sometimes fiction.”

“Believe me, then, once more, in honest prose,” said Lucy, “that, though I will never wed man without the consent of my parents, yet neither force nor persuasion shall dispose of my hand till you renounce the right I have given you to it.” [21]

This is a little tricky to parse. Lucy’s argument seems to be that the hard material of the mirror, by bouncing back the image, loses it; which is to say, that mirrors themselves are empty, vacant — where ‘softer substances’ (like what, though? ) absorb what they perceive, and are therefore ‘truer’. What this whole passage does, though, is record their mutual incompatibility. Lucy loves and desires Ravenswood, but is scared of him, and knows herself ill-suited to him. Ravenswood knows that Lucy is not the partner he ought to have, not the person best suited for him to be with, except — ‘But Lucy was so beautiful…’ Visual appearance trumps character; good-looking trumps good-character. The desire of the eye, not the heart,

After Ravenswood’s father was ejected from Ravenswood, his various servants and followers had to depart as well. An exception was made for one retainer in particular: Old Alice, on account of her extreme old age and blindness, who is permitted by Sir Henry to remain living in her cottage in Ravenswood Castle grounds. At various junctures in the story, characters visit Alice, who is still loyal to the Ravenswood clan despite the kindness of Ashton. When young Ravenswood first visits the castle, he calls on Alice, in company with Lucy. The old woman recognises him despite the fact that she cannot see.

At the arrival of her visitors she turned her head towards them. “I hear your step, Miss Ashton,” she said, “but the gentleman who attends you is not my lord, your father.”

“And why should you think so, Alice?” said Lucy; “or how is it possible for you to judge so accurately by the sound of a step, on this firm earth, and in the open air?”

“My hearing, my child, has been sharpened by my blindness, and I can now draw conclusions from the slightest sounds, which formerly reached my ears as unheeded as they now approach yours. … it is the hasty and determined step of youth that I now hear, and — could I give credit to so strange a thought — I should say is was the step of a Ravenswood.”

“This is indeed,” said Ravenswood, “an acuteness of organ which I could not have credited had I not witnessed it. I am indeed the Master of Ravenswood, Alice, — the son of your old master.”

“You!” said the old woman, with almost a scream of surprise — “you the Master of Ravenswood — here — in this place, and thus accompanied! I cannot believe it. Let me pass my old hand over your face, that my touch may bear witness to my ears.” [19]

Alice, like Caleb, warns Ravenswood away from anything to do with the Ashtons, or Lucy, again on account of the prophecy, and her certainty that doom will follow any plighting of troth. Ravenswood does not heed this warning.

Later in the novel, as Lady Ashton’s machinations intensify, Ravenswood is obliged to leave Ravenswood Castle, to make room for his rival in love, Bucklaw, who is visiting. He rides to a nearby inn (he is waiting for the Marquis of A — — , who is now staying at Ravenswood Castle, and who requires a meeting with him). On the way, leaving the estate, he passes Alice’s cottage, and a nearby well with superstitious associations. ‘“Old saws speak truth,” he said to himself, “and the Mermaiden’s Well has indeed witnessed the last act of rashness of the heir of Ravenswood. Alice spoke well,” he continued, “and I am in the situation which she foretold; or rather, I am more deeply dishonoured — not the dependant and ally of the destroyer of my father’s house, as the old sibyl presaged, but the degraded wretch who has aspired to hold that subordinate character, and has been rejected with disdain.”’ Then this:

We are bound to tell the tale as we have received it; and, considering the distance of the time, and propensity of those through whose mouths it has passed to the marvellous, this could not be called a Scottish story unless it manifested a tinge of Scottish superstition. As Ravenswood approached the solitary fountain, he is said to have met with the following singular adventure: His horse, which was moving slowly forward, suddenly interrupted its steady and composed pace, snorted, reared, and, though urged by the spur, refused to proceed, as if some object of terror had suddenly presented itself. On looking to the fountain, Ravenswood discerned a female figure, dressed in a white, or rather greyish, mantle, placed on the very spot on which Lucy Ashton had reclined while listening to the fatal tale of love. His immediate impression was that she had conjectured by which path he would traverse the park on his departure, and placed herself at this well-known and sequestered place of rendezvous, to indulge her own sorrow and his parting interview. In this belief he jumped from his horse, and, making its bridle fast to a tree, walked hastily towards the fountain, pronouncing eagerly, yet under his breath, the words, “Miss Ashton! — Lucy!”

The figure turned as he addressed it, and displayed to his wondering eyes the features, not of Lucy Ashton, but of old blind Alice. The singularity of her dress, which rather resembled a shroud than the garment of a living woman; the appearance of her person, larger, as it struck him, than it usually seemed to be; above all, the strange circumstance of a blind, infirm, and decrepit person being found alone and at a distance from her habitation (considerable, if her infirmities be taken into account), combined to impress him with a feeling of wonder approaching to fear. As he approached, she arose slowly from her seat, held her shrivelled hand up as if to prevent his coming more near, and her withered lips moved fast, although no sound issued from them. Ravenswood stopped; and as, after a moment’s pause, he again advanced towards her, Alice, or her apparition, moved or glided backwards towards the thicket, still keeping her face turned towards him. The trees soon hid the form from his sight; and, yielding to the strong and terrific impression that the being which he had seen was not of this world, the Master of Ravenswood remained rooted to the ground whereon he had stood when he caught his last view of her. At length, summoning up his courage, he advanced to the spot on which the figure had seemed to be seated; but neither was there pressure of the grass nor any other circumstance to induce him to believe that what he had seen was real and substantial. [23]

‘We are bound to tell the tale as we have received it’ is a disclaimer: although we may wonder how ‘we’ (Pattieson, Cleishbotham, Scott) do receive things, actually: as hard, or soft? A mirror, as twere, held up to nature, or something softer, more retentive, more distorting? Ravenswood thinks he sees a beautiful young woman — Lucy Ashton, his intended, now being pried from his embrace by the work of her mother, destined to marry another man and die — but in fact he sees the ghost of an old, blind woman. This apparition glides backward away from him as he approaches. After this encounter he goes straight to Alice’s cottage and finds her dead body laid out, and three local crones dressing it for burial, who cackle, and prophesy Ravenswood’s death. These ‘weird sisters’ — a footnote tells us that one was later burned as a witch at Edinburgh — is one of several explicit Shakespearian moments: another follows immediately, when Ravenswood seeks out the gravedigger to ensure that Alice gets a decent burial: a scene straight out of Hamlet — it provides the title-page illustration of the Magnum Opus volume.

I’m a little distracted by just how long Ravenswood’s neck seems to be in this illustration. Like a llama.

What was I saying about bad artists? Anyway: there is one more episode, before the final denouement that everyone, from Donizetti onwards, thinks is the whole of The Bride of Lammermoor. After making arrangements for Alice’s burial, Ravenswood finally joins the Marquis of A — — at the inn. The Marquis of A — — promises he will restore Ravenswood’s fortunes, and invites him down to London, where his suit will be pressed (and afterwards sends him to France). In return Ravenswood invites the Marquis to Wolf’s Crag, to enjoy his hospitality. But Caleb rejects the thought of entertaining so eminent a nobleman — though Caleb (like a distorting mirror) boasts of the splendour and riches of the house, in fact it is bare, mired in penury, lacking all creature comforts, barely any furniture, no food. Ravenswood insists, and the Marquis declares himself unbothered by the pared-down state of what awaits, but Caleb can’t bear the thought of it. So he hatches a bizarre scheme to prevent the Marquis from being received as a guest. As Ravenswood, the Marquis and his entourage ride towards Wolf’s Crag, they see that it is on fire. “Take a horse, Master,” exclaimed the Marquis, greatly affected by this additional misfortune, so unexpectedly heaped upon his young protégé; “and haste forward, you knaves, to see what can be done to save the furniture, or to extinguish the fire — ride, you knaves, for your lives!” But Caleb intervenes, and persuades them not to approach the place, since its basement is full of gunpowder. In fact it isn’t true, but the Marquis believes it, since he himself was involved in smuggling the powder ashore, as part of a long plan towards (we assume: this isn’t spelled out) the 1715 Jacobite rising. Actually Caleb has sold off the gunpowder to buy provisions for his master, but the thought that Wolf’s Crag might be about to explode keeps everyone away. Actually the house is not burning: Caleb had placed a wagon full of straw in the courtyard and set fire to that — an elaborate and strange ruse to prevent the Marquis from seeing just how impoverished Ravenswood’s domicile is. From here, we go straight into the big tragic climax, an odd tonal shift, really.

So: as opposed to the filed-down, Gothic-tragic climax of The Bride of Lammermoor we have a novel-long narrative that functions as a meditation upon seeing, looking, visual representation — paintings, mirrors, physical appearance — and doubling. Death is the mirror of life, and though we see ourselves in that glass, darkly, we do not recognise ourselves. Ravenswood looks into the mirror of death, at Alice’s demise, and sees not a blind old woman but his beautiful young bride-to-be (or not). This misrecognition has a deeper logic to it, though: because his falling in love with Lucy, his decision to marry her, is also his death — and hers. We do see, the novel is saying; we just don’t realise what we see.

Eyes are everywhere in this novel. Wolf’s Crag, Ravenswood’s house, is ‘situated between St. Abb’s Head and the village of Eyemouth’ —positioning the protagonist between Abb[a], the (dead) father, the avenging of whom requires Ravenswood to destroy the Ashton family — as he does, involving himself in their tragic downfall — and the eyes and lips of the beautiful Lucy, love of whom complicates his situation. Lady Ashton’s predatory and dangerous nature is involved in her ability to see through people and things, to observe: ‘it was seen and ascertained that, in her most graceful courtesies and compliments, Lady Ashton no more lost sight of her object than the falcon in his airy wheel turns his quick eyes from his destined quarry’ [3]. The villainous Craigengelt is revealed by the way his ‘dark penetrating eyes’ lend ‘a shrewd but sinister cast to his countenance’, where the blither Bucklaw has ‘an open, resolute, and cheerful eye, to which careless and fearless freedom and inward daring gave fire and expression’. Ravenswood and Lucy fall in love ‘when their eyes encountered each other’ and ‘both blushed deeply, conscious of some strong internal emotion’. Lucy’s ‘beautiful blue eyes’; Ravenswood’s ‘keen dark eyes.’ Lucy’s eye is a clear window to her pure soul: ‘it was impossible to look at the clear blue eye of Lucy Ashton, and entertain the slightest permanent doubt concerning the sincerity of her disposition’ [20]. At the same time, blue eyes have their uncanny quality. Think of Sycorax, Caliban’s mother in The Tempest, described by Prospero as ‘this blue-eyed hag’ [The Tempest, 1.2.269]. Witches have blue-eyes in a parody of conventional feminine beauty, because they see clearly, past the obstructions of ordinary material reality, into magic. One of the three ‘weird sisters’ who attended the deathbed of Old Alice reappears at the end of the novel, recruited by Lady Ashton to poison Lucy’s mind against Ravenswood, and Scott reintroduces her with a Shakespearian allusion:

Dame Gourlay’s tales … assumed a darker and more mysterious character, and became such as, told by the midnight lamp, and enforced by the tremulous tone, the quivering and livid lip, the uplifted skinny forefinger, and the shaking head of the blue-eyed hag, might have appalled a less credulous imagination in an age more hard of belief. The old Sycorax saw her advantage, and gradually narrowed her magic circle around the devoted victim on whose spirit she practised. Her legends began to relate to the fortunes of the Ravenswood family, whose ancient grandeur and portentous authority credulity had graced with so many superstitious attributes. The story of the fatal fountain was narrated at full length, and with formidable additions, by the ancient sibyl. The prophecy, quoted by Caleb, concerning the dead bride who was to be won by the last of the Ravenswoods, had its own mysterious commentary; and the singular circumstance of the apparition seen by the Master of Ravenswood in the forest, having partly transpired through his hasty inquiries in the cottage of Old Alice, formed a theme for many exaggerations.

This has a direct impact upon Lucy’s agreeing to relinquish Ravenswood and marry Bucklaw. Blue eye watching blue eye.

Eyes, the novel says, are not always to be trusted. You are provided ocular proof that your house is on fire, and could explode at any moment; but actually it’s a kind of special-effect, a theatrical mirage, designed by your serving man. Ravenswood sees, as he thinks, a young woman, and believes it to be Lucy, only afterwards realising that it is an old woman — Alice — and in fact her ghost. Alice on the other hand, sees clearly because, not despite, lacking eyes.

Eyes as the trope of mimesis as such are, as it were, undermined, undone, in this novel. ‘The eyes are the organic prototype of philosophy,’ says Peter Sloterdijk. ‘Their enigma is that they not only can see but are also able to see themselves. This gives them a prominence among the body’s cognitive organs. A good part of philosophical thinking is actually only eye reflex, eye dialectic, seeing-oneself-see’ [Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (transl. Michael Eldred: 1987), 145]. An eye might see itself in a mirror, but The Bride of Lammermoor does not trust mirrors. The darkness of raven-haunted woodland (light thickens, as Shakespeare almost said, and the raven makes wing to th’ rooky wood), a realm where the light, ‘Lucy’, is occluded by the ash of the heroine’s surname, her white dress marked with dark blood, her sanity darkened by madness: it all comes together, ash, whiteness and blood-darkness, insanity, when Lucy is ‘discovered, something white in the corner of the great old-fashioned chimney of the apartment. Here they found the unfortunate girl seated, or rather couched like a hare upon its form — her head-gear dishevelled, her night-clothes torn and dabbled with blood, her eyes glazed, and her features convulsed into a wild paroxysm of insanity’ [34].

At the very beginning of his great study Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) Erich Auerbach characterises the clarity of Homer’s epic vision: ‘clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear — wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor — are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.’ Scott’s approach is more occluded, and indeed represents a deliberate and caucual complication of plain sight. That is, we could say, Gothic, in opposition to Epic. Eyes do not see clearly, and do not see themselves clearly — Ravenswood does not understand himself, or his love for Lucy, and she, despite her clear blue eyes, does not understand herself either. Vision, and its correlative painting, does not see, or sees slant: horses look like crocodiles, or have five legs — inn-signs do not photographically or panoptically reproduce the world in which they exist. Inn-signs belong to a different aesthetic mode: symbolic, visual shorthand, a kind of rebus for the way the world works. And that’s how Scott operates too. When Ravenswood woos Lucy by the mysterious haunted fountain in the grounds of Ravenswood Castle (‘a plentiful and pellucid fountain, which had been once covered in, screened and decorated with architectural ornaments of a Gothic character. But now the vault which had covered it being broken down and riven, and the Gothic font ruined and demolished, the stream burst forth from the recess of the earth in open day, and winded its way among the broken sculpture and moss-grown stones which lay in confusion around its source’) — the spot where he actually proposes marriage, ‘he gave his faith to her for ever, and received her troth in return’ — their time together is interrupted by Lucy’s brother:

As they arose to leave the fountain which had been witness of their mutual engagement, an arrow whistled through the air, and struck a raven perched on the sere branch of an old oak, near to where they had been seated. The bird fluttered a few yards and dropped at the feet of Lucy, whose dress was stained with some spots of its blood.

Miss Ashton was much alarmed, and Ravenswood, surprised and angry, looked everywhere for the marksman, who had given them a proof of his skill as little expected as desired. He was not long of discovering himself, being no other than Henry Ashton, who came running up with a crossbow in his hand.

“I knew I should startle you,” he said; “and do you know, you looked so busy that I hoped it would have fallen souse on your heads before you were aware of it. What was the Master saying to you, Lucy?” [20]

This shooting of the raven, in a wood, which falls at Ravenswood’s feet, by the brother of the woman he loves, the love that will lead to his prophesied doom, after being challenged by a duel by the brother of the woman he loves, is really too on-the-nose. Except that it’s not: it’s how Scott works. This little scene is a visual rebus for the inevitable doom of the story. It’s an inn-sign hanging outside the novel’s hostelry.

To quote a novelist rather different to Scott: whole sight; or all the rest is desolation. But, at the risk of stating the over-obvious, Scott is more concerned with the murkiness of life. In this he is taking his Shakespearean sources — it is the most patent and obvious of things to say about Shakespeare that he was fascinated by the disjunction between appearance and reality (‘there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’), but he was. Othello looks black, but is noble; Iago looks honest, but is diabolical. ‘I would like to see more clearly,’ Merleau-Ponty said, ‘but it seems to me that no one sees more clearly’ [Primacy of Perception (1964), 36].

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There’s a curious moment of misspeaking in chapter 22 of the novel. Ashton, hosting young Ravenswood, is complaisant with his wooing of Lucy. So far as he is concerned, the match is a good one: it will secure Ashton’s ownership of Ravenswood Castle (which is otherwise on dodgy legal grounds) and it is what his daughter, whom he loves, wants. But he knows that his wife, the intimidating Lady Ashton, disapproves, and that were she present she would block the union. But Lady Ashton is in England. Then he hears that the Marquis of A — — is coming, in his coach and six and all his equipage. As Ravenswood’s patron, Ashton hopes to impress him, and obtain his support for the marriage.

In a novel so worked with doubles, the chapter stages its scene as comedy. Asdton is watching from his castle ballustrade, anxiously anticipating the coach-and-six of the Marquis. But just as he sees that very equipage approach from the west road, he sees a second coach and six approaching from the east. Oh no! His wife is going to arrive at exactly the same time as the Marquis. ‘Sure enough, another coach and six, with four servants or outriders in attendance, was descending the hill from the eastward, at such a pace as made it doubtful which of the carriages thus approaching from different quarters would first reach the gate at the extremity of the avenue. The one coach was green, the other blue; and not the green and blue chariots in the circus of Rome or Constantinople excited more turmoil among the citizens than the double apparition occasioned in the mind of the Lord Keeper.’ The story dwells on Ashton’s flustered discombobulation:

We all remember the terrible exclamation of the dying profligate, when a friend, to destroy what he supposed the hypochondriac idea of a spectre appearing in a certain shape at a given hour, placed before him a person dressed up in the manner he described. “Mon Dieu!” said the expiring sinner, who, it seems, saw both the real and polygraphic apparition, “il y en a deux!” The surprise of the Lord Keeper was scarcely less unpleasing at the duplication of the expected arrival; his mind misgave him strangely.

Scott scholarship has been unable to trace this French ghost story, with its peculiar doubling, to its source; but the duplication of material and spectral presence — indeed, their superposition into a twinned doubleness — speaks to the logic of the novel. In the following chapter, Ravenswood sees the spectral version of Alice in immediate juxtaposition with the material body of Alice. The doubles in the novel are not simple mirrorings: one haunts the other.

After seeing his terrifying wife approaching at the same time as the anticipating nobleman, Ashton— as precedence requires — Ashton greets the Marquis first and, in introducing his daughter Lucy to the nobleman, perpetrates this notable slip of the tongue:

The manners of a man trained like Sir William Ashton are too much at his command to remain long disconcerted with the most adverse concurrence of circumstances. He received the Marquis, as he alighted from his equipage, with the usual compliments of welcome; and, as he ushered him into the great hall, expressed his hope that his journey had been pleasant. The Marquis was a tall, well-made man, with a thoughtful and intelligent countenance, and an eye in which the fire of ambition had for some years replaced the vivacity of youth; a bold, proud expression of countenance, yet chastened by habitual caution, and the desire which, as the head of a party, he necessarily entertained of acquiring popularity. He answered with courtesy the courteous inquiries of the Lord Keeper, and was formally presented to Miss Ashton, in the course of which ceremony the Lord Keeper gave the first symptom of what was chiefly occupying his mind, by introducing his daughter as “his wife, Lady Ashton.”

Lucy blushed; the Marquis looked surprised at the extremely juvenile appearance of his hostess, and the Lord Keeper with difficulty rallied himself so far as to explain. “I should have said my daughter, my lord— — ” [22]

For Freud, parapraxis like this, the ‘faulty service’ or ‘faulty performance’ (Fehlleistungen: ‘blunder’), is a way of revealing a truth that the conscious mind cannot acknowledge. Here, we might posit: Ashton’s taboo desire for his own daughter. We can see a kind of buried logic here: Ashton is scared of his fearsome wife. Lady Ashton is old, hard, rebarbative; Lucy is young, beautiful, soft, yielding. In the clear light of Auerbach’s epic mimesis there would be nothing here, but in the murk of Gothic’s subconscious mess of forbidden, incestuous desire the connection emerges. We could say: Ahton has obtained Ravenswood Castle, and Ravenswood’s estate; by marrying his daughter (‘my wife’) to Ravenswood, in one sense he would become Ravenswood, which is his real desire — not just in the legal sense of securing his possession and property, but in terms of the psychodynamic of libidinal desire. Of course, the actual Lady Ashton has also arrived, and she soon puts a stop to the marriage, evicting Ravenswood and turning Lucy from her betrothal.

Marriage is haunted by death. Our licit, proper lives are haunted by illicit desire. The Bride of Lammermoor acts out, in the sense of literalising, narrativising, the return of the repressed: you desire one man, but you repudiate him and marry another; your desire for that first man does not simply vanish away. It returns, on the occasion of your wedding, as an actual presence, accusing, unavoidable, and overwhelms you. Michael Wood:

In 1936 Freud wrote a letter to Romain Rolland, offering him a speculation about a particular memory as a 70th birthday gift. The memory concerned a trip Freud took to Athens with his brother, and his own ‘curious thought’ at the sight of the Acropolis: ‘So this all really does exist, just as we learned in school!’ Freud describes himself as two people, one making the comment and the other perceiving it:

and both were amazed, although not by the same thing. One of these persons behaved as though . . . he was obliged to believe in something the reality of which had until then seemed uncertain to him . . . But the other person was rightly surprised, because he had not known that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis and this landscape had ever been a matter of doubt.

Perhaps, Freud says, he was just registering the difference between knowing about something and seeing it with one’s own eyes, but he thinks ‘that would be a strange way of dressing up an uninteresting commonplace,’ and quickly moves on to develop an argument suggesting that his reaction was a disguised expression of a continuing disbelief not in the Acropolis, but in his own chances of getting there. But why didn’t he say just that? Why was his disbelief ‘doubly displaced’, as he puts it, shifted into the past and ‘away from my relation to the Acropolis to the Acropolis’ very existence’? He didn’t actually doubt the existence of the Acropolis in the past and he couldn’t doubt it in the present, since he was there; but his unmistakable feeling was that ‘there was something dubious and unreal about the situation.’

The Bride of Lammermoor’s Acropolis is sex, as such: the novel’s various doubles, the ‘il y en a deux!’ hauntings and repuplications, the mirrored perspectives of the practical and the fantasmic, articulate the tension between knowing something and really knowing something: to know in the sense of recognising something — this image of a horse on an inn-sign is a horse — and know in the Biblical sense, the dubious and unreal supplement of sex which, in this tale, is always approaching and never achieved. The horse possesses a fifth, phallic leg, that strikes us as comical, or representationally maladroit, but also as speaking to a buried truth than a simple, clear-vision four-legged horse cannot. Freud himself defined ‘psychoanalytic research’ as that which ‘seeks merely to uncover connections by tracing that which is manifest back to that which is hidden.’ And here we are.