The Collapse of “Romance”

The reference to the "Black Watch" or "sidier dhu" is not the only analogy in The Partisan Leader to the imaginative landscape and history of the Scottish Highlands as it had been popularized by Walter Scott. The influence of Scott on the novel is obvious also in the description of Douglas's camp in the Devil's Backbone area. Boasting a waterfall and a narrow gorge that is referred to as a "glen" (295), the landscape closely agrees to the patterns according to which "the Author of Waverley" and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers used to describe the Scottish Highlands.

Beverley Tucker's absorption with the concept of "chivalry" and his emphasis on the

"mountaineers" as a separate social type are as reminiscent of Walter Scott's

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narratives as the pseudo-archaic neologism "southron" (240; 261).¹⁴ The hero's name Douglas, of course, is another connection to both Scottish tradition and Scott's fiction.¹⁵ Pointing out the similarities between Scott's and Tucker's fictions, Arthur Wrobel argued that Tucker "adapted the realistic formulas popularized by Sir Walter Scott."¹⁶ On the basis of a diametrically opposed understanding of Scott, Ritchie Watson deals with The Partisan Leader as one of the primary examples for the "Walter Scott syndrome" in antebellum fiction.¹⁷ Contradicting both Wrobel, who considers Tucker a thwarted follower of Scott's "realism," and Watson, who considers him a victim of Scott's "romanticism," it can be argued that the correspondences between Tucker's Partisan Leader and the novels of Scott only serve to underline important differences between the two authors. Indeed, it is possible to describe The Partisan Leader as a thorough perversion of the Scott scheme of historical fiction, in terms of both narrative technique and ideological import.

The common denominator of Scott's writings, produced in the context of Scotland's merging into an expanding British empire, is in the strategy of remembering Scotland's regional past in order to promote its national integration. Emphasizing the inevitable necessity of change and insulating the present against a consummated past, Scott managed to dissociate the ethos of regional history from its political implications and thus turned the symbols of Scotland's national and cultural independence into the hallmarks of a new British imperial mythology. He promoted the national integration of Scotland and achieved the conciliation of past and present through replacing the political history of his native region by an ostentatiously fictional "romance" with whom the nation could identify.

Carefully balancing affirmation and ironization by stressing the subjectivity of all viewpoints, Scott followed a strategy that is sometimes quite similar to Kennedy's in Swallow Barn. However, if there was a tendency in antebellum southern literature to use Scott's paradigms for the negotiation of section and nation, past and present––a tendency that was to result in the genre of the "Revolutionary romance"––there are good reasons why the effort was bound to fail. Scott proceeded from the fait accompli of a political centralization that had become irreversible in 1746 at the latest. In the United States, on the other hand, a comparable situation was given only after the Civil War. While Scott's fictions assumed the political center as a given, the novels produced

14 On the appropriation of the term "Southron" and other archaisms invented by Walter Scott in antebellum southern oratory and literature, see Osterweis 47.

15 James Douglas, the dispossessed owner of Douglas Castle, is the leader of Scottish rebels in Scott's novel Castle Dangerous (1832), and the legendary medieval hero Douglas appears in The Abbot (1820).

16 Wrobel, "'Romantic Realism'"; quote: 325.

17 R. D. Watson, "Antebellum Southern Fiction and the Walter Scott Syndrome," The Cavalier

in the antebellum South were still trying to negotiate the location of that center.

Certainly, this endeavor was conceived as a quest for national identity. Yet, while Scott rewrote regional history from a national perspective, the historical "romances"

produced by Caruthers, Kennedy and Simms shared a tendency to rewrite national history from a regional perspective. Furthermore, while Scott continuously emphasized the difference of history, "romance" and the present (the pastness of the past) there was an increasing tendency in southern literature to construe the subjective negotiation of past and present as an objective mediation, forging an absolute history that seemed to contain the present (a past that was to persist).

Beverley Tucker's inversion of the time scheme of the historical novel, his writing about a past that is really a future, may be regarded as the logical conclusion of this movement away from the Scott pattern of fiction. The manipulation of the historical novel goes along with a virtual perversion of Scott's ideology. In fictions like Waverley and Rob Roy, Scott graphically described the conflict between the social system of the Highlands and the modern social, economic and political order as a doomed revolt against the decree of history that ends in the extermination of the old system. Beverley Tucker, however, transforms the "mountaineers" into a potent guerilla fighting against modernization and integration. As it were, he has the Highlands prevail against the invasion of the new order.

These inversions of narrative technique and ideological function result in a profound epistemological shift. While Scott tended to emphasize the fictionality of his narratives and to draw attention to the tension between "romance" and "real history,"

The Partisan Leader follows an inverse strategy of purported historicity. In fact, the narrative explicitly refuses to be classified as "romance." In the "Dedication" the narrator suspects that his commemoration of the deeds of the "high-spirited peasantry of Virginia" will be mistaken: "But the narrative, in which I have endeavored to preserve them, will, in after times, be classed among romances. Such is the fate of all men, whose deeds shame the vaunted achievements of those the world calls great" (xiv).

Tucker insists that the novel must not be regarded as a "romance" but that its vision should be translated into reality. Tucker aims at direct rather than symbolic action, he trusts in the use of force rather than in the pragmatic power of literary conventionality.

Repeatedly, the narrator points out that his tale is governed by facts and not by narrative conventions; thus he declares in connection with the heroine's looks: "Were I writing a novel, I should be bound . . . to give an exact account of Delia's whole exterior." In that case, the narrator explains, he would dwell on the heroine's beauty:

"But, in this true history, I am unfortunately bound down by facts, and I lament, that to

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the best of my recollection, I shall not have occasion to speak of a single female, in the progress of my narrative, whose beauty can be made a theme of just praise" (60).

The narrator's critique of conventionality also extends to the aesthetics of the

"picturesque." As he and Schwartz are climbing the Devil's Backbone, young Arthur is astonished at "the unromantic character of his matter-of-fact companion," who disdains the glorious sight. Being "of the romantic age when young men are taught to affect an enthusiasm for the beauties of nature, and to prate about . . . prospects in all the variety of the grand, the beautiful and the picturesque," Arthur wonders whether the mountaineer's indifference might be due to "the total absence of a faculty of which poets so much delight to speak" (25). This results in a discussion on the quality of views, in which Schwartz eventually prevails––partly because he is able to demonstrate that, in spite of his age, he simply has better eyes than young Arthur.

Taking a second look at the scenery, the latter begins "to suspect that Schwartz's ideas of the picturesque were not so far wrong" and eventually corrects "his preconceptions by the testimony of his own senses" (28). Besides showing that a young aristocrat actually can be taught a lesson by a "sturdy mountaineer" (32), the passage obviously is a plea for "realism"––a "realism" that utterly contradicts Simms's insistence on the

"truth" of "poetry" and the powers of the "imagination." Thus, Tucker's Partisan Leader seems to confirm and to contradict the traditional interpretation of antebellum southern literary history at the same time. For while there really are certain tendencies in antebellum southern fiction towards increasing sectionalization, these eventually led towards a form of assumed "realism" rather than towards the ideological apotheosis of

"romance."

We had no Hawthorne, no Melville, no Emily Dickinson. We had William Gilmore Simms.

––Allen Tate, "The Profession of Letters in the South" (1935)¹

My dear Hammond. Order me the ton of guano, and I will contrive to pay you, with all other debts in due season. I have, amidst all my troubles, that confidence in myself, in my own resources––i.e. within certain limits, which never permits me to succumb.

If you speak so strongly of guano, I will believe you. Something must be done here, to keep above water.

––Simms, letter to James H. Hammond, 15 Dec. 1852²

8.1 Sectional Controversy, the Panic of 1837, and the Crisis of