In this paper I will argue that in the work of Walter Scott, travel achieves different purposes depending on the traveler's national identity and his destination. Thus, if the English traveler into Scotland confirms his identity as a post-Enlightenment colonizer, his authority is destabilized by his Scottish companion, a traveler whose primary function remains that of a travelee. It is possible to detect in Scott, between Waverley and Rob Roy on the one hand and Redgauntlet on the other, a growing concern for the predicament of the Anglicized Scot, or the would-be tourist turned wanderer.
In much Gothic fiction written in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the protagonists, male and female, leave their home country for foreign experiences ranging from cruel catholicism to unlicensed sexuality to oppressive feudalism. Other countries thus absorb all that is alien to the modern English nation, the more so because at the end of their stories a large majority of heroes and heroines gladly returns to a protestant, chaste, and middle-class democracy. They and their readers have learned that their English identity is fragmented and conflicted, or that, In Homi Bhabha's terms, its "pedagogical" articulation, of which "the people" are the object, does not obviate the need for a subjective, "performative" articulation. However, they have also learned that they will indeed engage "the performative," that their identity is a national one, whose construction requires a certain amount of tourism.
Scott's so-called "Scottish" fiction is largely Gothic in structure. Its typical hero is a young Englishman who embarks on a Highland Tour (increasingly popular after Culloden) only to retreat to respectable English landownership. Waverley's eponymous hero joins the Jacobite rising of 1745, and thus the fight for Scottish independence, but he learns to dissociate himself from the "rebels" and sinks to "whistling a pibroch, dancing a strathspey, and singing a Highland song" for an English acquaintance who thereupon is "seized with a tartan fever." Clearly, Waverley visits Scotland because he must perform the English nation; he returns an accomplished tourist bringing as a souvenir "a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus MacIvor and Waverley in their Highland dress." Waverley and his successors, such as Rob Roy's Frank Osbaldistone, display a remarkable similarity to the traveler Mary Louise Pratt calls "the experiential non-hero." This sentimental subject travels seemingly to interact with the native population, to offer equal (cultural) exchange, but in reality he embodies private enterprise: his passivity--the famous passivity of the Waverley hero--masks (imperfectly) his identity as an exponent of English expansionism, as a conqueror in search of surplus. Thus, Scott's novels address English nationalism in the context of English imperialism, which means that he complicates the Gothic. Scott was, after all, a Scot.
Colonies, "other" though they may seem, are not "other" nations, which may be disavowed--they obtrude as part of the empire. To manage the colonized, Bhabha suggests, the colonizer develops "colonial mimicry," or "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite." A mimic man, that is, both buttresses and threatens English authority, through minimal deviations from the "norm(al)." In Scott, the imitator's part falls most frequently to Lowland Scots, aspiring travelers who speak their native language as a (visible and audible) sign of their difference. Thus, although characters such as Rob Roy's Andrew Fairservice and Bailie Nicol Jarvie travel to the Highlands for the same reason as the English--to dominate occasionally noble, but mostly unredeemed, savages--their broad Scots allows the English (reader) also to romanticize, and brutalize, them. At the same time, Scots-speaking "Englishmen" deauthorize "authentic" Englishmen. Andrew and the Bailie replay in the comic mode the would-be grand gestures of Frank and his father.
If Waverley and Rob Roy do challenge imperial Englishness, the emphasis is on reconciliation. In Redgauntlet, however, Scott's focus shifts from the English traveler to the Scottish one. While a child, Darsie Latimer has been sent to live in Edinburgh, a banishment which, predictably, makes him feel all the more English. As a young adult, he travels, not to Scotland, therefore, but to England, where the proud Englishman learns he is a Scot. Very English politically--there is no doubt whatsoever that he will refuse to join a third (fictional) Jacobite rising--he ends the novel a wanderer, much like Charles Edward whose banner he spurned. "Almost the same but not white," Darsie deauthorizes Englishness much more openly than previous mimic men, but he also suffers the consequences: forbidden to be a tourist, but conditioned to travel, he cannot replace the identity he has lost. The souvenir a genuine Waverley hero would have recovered--the sword used by Darsie's father in the Forty-five--Hugh Redgauntlet sends to the bottom of the sea.
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