Editing Waverley (novel) (section)

==Themes and motifs==

===Tolerance===
Scott's work shows the influence of the 18th-century [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]]. He believed every human was basically decent regardless of class, religion, politics, or ancestry. Tolerance is a major theme in his historical works. The ''Waverley Novels'' express his belief in the need for social progress that does not reject the traditions of the past. "He was the first novelist to portray [[peasant]] characters sympathetically and realistically, and was equally just to [[merchants]], [[soldiers]], and even kings."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.goabroad.net/users/resourcefiles/2007/April/123/admingroup/14828613c4b8d11210605884.pdf 
|title=Sir Walter Scott, Scottish Novelist and Poet |date=17 August 2005 |publisher= Lucidcafé Library |access-date=22 June 2018 <!-- url shown on document is a dead link, http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/95aug/scott.html, so actual link used --> }}</ref>

According to L J Swingle, discussing the writers of the Romantic period:

<blockquote>This inquiry as to the distinctive natures of different things explains why particular mental orientations or crucial turns of thought in the literature of the period are frequently marked by some kind of "species" identification. Probably the most dramatic example occurs in ''Frankenstein'', when the title character -- after wavering between opposed truth-possibilities in a manner that recalls Scott's Edward Waverley -- finally finds himself (literally) in identification with his own species<ref>{{cite journal |url=http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/swingle.html
|last=Swingle |first= L J |year=1979 |title=The Poets, the Novelists, and the English Romantic Situation |journal=The Wordsworth Circle |volume=10 |issue=2 |pages=218–28|doi=10.1086/TWC24040916 |s2cid=166198555 }}</ref></blockquote>

===Heroines===
The literary critic Alexander Welsh suggests that Scott exhibits similar preoccupations within his own novels. The heroines of the ''Waverley'' series of novels have been divided into two types: the blonde and the brunette, along the lines of fairness and darkness that marks Shakespearean drama, but in a much more moderate form.<ref name="Welsh">Welsh, A. 1993. ''The Hero of the Waverley Novels''. Princeton: Princeton University Press</ref> Welsh writes:

<blockquote>The proper heroine of Scott is a blonde. Her role corresponds to that of the passive hero&nbsp;– whom, indeed, she marries at the end. She is eminently beautiful, and eminently prudent. Like the passive hero, she suffers in the thick of events but seldom moves them. The several dark heroines, no less beautiful, are less restrained from the pressure of their own feelings...They allow their feelings to dictate to their reason, and seem to symbolize passion itself.<ref name="Welsh"/></blockquote>

This is evident in ''Waverley''. Rose is eminently marriageable; Flora is eminently passionate. However, we should also note that Welsh is, first, establishing a typology, which in part is age-old, but is also reinforced throughout the Waverley Novels, second, that Scott, or his narrators, allow the female characters thoughts, feelings and passions that are often ignored or unacknowledged by the heroes, such as Waverley.

A different interpretation of character is provided by Merryn Williams.<ref>Williams, M. 1984. ''Women in the English Novel'', 1800-1900. London: Macmillan</ref> Recognising the passivity of the hero, she argues that Scott's women were thoroughly acceptable to nineteenth-century readers. They are&nbsp;– usually&nbsp;– morally stronger than men, but they do not defy them, and their self-sacrifice "to even the appearance of duty" has no limits. Thus, Flora will defy Waverley but not Fergus to any significant extent, and has some room to manoeuvre, even though limited, only after the latter's death.

Yet another view considers Flora to be the woman representing the past, while Rose symbolises a modern rational Scotland in the [[Acts of Union 1707|post-Union]] settlement.<ref name=EULWalterScott>{{Cite web |title=Walter Scott: Waverley |url=http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/waverley.html |publisher=Edinburgh University Library |date=19 December 2011 |access-date=25 June 2013 }}</ref>

===Humour===
The opening five chapters of ''Waverley'' are often thought to be dour and uninteresting, an impression in part due to Scott's own comments on them at the end of chapter five. However, [[John Buchan]] thought the novel a "riot of fun and eccentricity",<ref>Buchan, J. 1933. ''Sir Walter Scott''. London: Cassell</ref> seemingly a minority opinion. Scott does, however, attempt to be comic, or at least to follow the conventions of the [[picaresque]] novel. The comments on the relay of information via Dyers Weekly Letter, the self-explanatory name of the lawyer, Clippurse, Sir Everard's desire and courting of the youngest sister, Lady Emily, all point in this direction.<ref name="Hypertext"/><ref name=Curbet1999 />

Scott uses a common humorous reference to the [[Old Testament]] story that [[David]] and supporting malcontents took refuge from [[Saul the King|Saul]] in a cave near the town of [[Adullam]]. When the Jacobite army marches south through the North of England, they are greeted with distrust rather than the anticipated support from English Jacobites or [[Tories (British political party)|Tories]]. Eventually a few diehards or desperate individuals do join them, and the Baron of Bradwardine welcomes these recruits while remarking that they closely resemble David's followers at the [[Cave of Adullam]]; "''[[viz.|videlicet]]'',  every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, which the [[vulgate]] renders bitter of soul; and doubtless" he said "they will prove mighty men of their hands, and there is much need that they should, for I have seen many a sour look cast upon us."<ref>''Waverley'', chapter lvii, cite in: {{cite EB1911|wstitle=Adullam |volume=1 |page=218}}</ref>

===Fear of civil war===
The division in the Waverley family had been caused by the [[English Civil War]] of the mid-seventeenth century. Fear of civil war is ever-present in Waverley not just as subject matter or historical reality, but a primal fear as deep in Scott as in [[Shakespeare]] as manifested by various allusions throughout the novel and by direct references to ''[[Henry V (play)|Henry V]]'' and ''[[Henry VI, Part 1|Henry VI]]'' in chapter 71.<ref name="Hypertext">[https://web.archive.org/web/20060813090719/http://seneca.uab.cat/scott/ Waverley Hypertext Project]</ref><ref name=Curbet1999>{{cite journal |url=https://www.raco.cat/index.php/linksletters/article/viewFile/49938/189443 |title=Andrew MONNICKENDAM.The Waverley hypertext homepage. |last=Curbet |first=Joan |year=1999 |journal=Links & Letters |department=Reviews |pages=143–145 |access-date=23 June 2018}}</ref><!-- first ref does not connect, found article about the hypertext project in journal by someone from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, makes some of the points? --><ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QqNHVS7f2_oC |title=A Hypertextual Approach to Walter Scott's Waverley |last=Monnickendam |first=Andrew |isbn=978-8449011955 |year=1998 |publisher=Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona}}</ref><!-- cannot see the pages of this book on line -->

===Quixotism===
As Scott describes him, Edward Waverley is like [[Don Quixote]] in his manner of educating himself by much reading, but as "an unstructured education", and as Scott says in the novel "consisting of much curious, though ill-arranged and miscellaneous information."<ref name=Gaston1991>{{cite journal |url=http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics91/gaston.htm |last=Gaston |first=Patricia S |year=1991 |title=The Waverley Series and Don Quixote: Manuscripts Found and Lost. |journal=Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America |volume=11 |number=1 |pages=45–59}}</ref> Critics of Scott's novels did not see the influence of [[Miguel de Cervantes]] in the same way as Scott describes it.<ref name=Gaston1991 /> Scott further clarifies the degree of this similarity to Quixote in the novel, in his instructions to his readers that:

<blockquote>From the minuteness with which I have traced Waverley's pursuits, and the bias which they unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of Cervantes. But he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition. My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring.</blockquote>