The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

On Scott's Motherless Heroines: A Study by a Father

I.

It is a curious fact that the heroines of the Waverley novels have no mothers. Their mothers die either in giving them birth or soon after. At the most they do not survive the first few chapters. Consequently the heroine lives alone with her father, or if the father be dead also, with an uncle or guardian. She may possibly have one sister or one brother; usually she has neither. A mother she never has, accept in the melancholy instance of Lady Ashton whose mother drover her mad. We have never seen this fact remarked upon before, so we will support our statement in detail. The Parents' Review seems to us a very approporiate place in which to record our observation.

Rose Bradwardine (Waverley), an only daughter, keeps her father's house. Flora McIvor does the same for her brother. Julia Mannering and Lucy Bertram (Guy Mannering), Isabella Wardour (Antiquary), and Diana Vernon (Rob Roy), have fathers only. Edith Bellenden (Old Mortality) owns a grandmother. David Deans (Heart of Midlothian) is twice a widower before the tale begins. Isabel Vere (Black Dwarf) lost her mother in childhood. Rowena (Ivanhoe) is an orphan with a guardian, and Rebecca lives with her father. The Lady of Avenel (Monastery), already a widow, dies in chapter viii. leaving an orphan daughter, Mary Avenel. Catherine Seyton (Abbot), Amy Robsart (Kenilworth), Minna and Brenda Troil (Pirate), Margaret Ramsey (Nigel), Alice Lee (Woodstock), Alice Bridegenorth (Peveril), Catharine Glover (Fair Maid of Perth), all have fathers but not mothers. Isabella of Croye (Quentin Durward) has a relative as a chaperone, Clara Mowbray (St. Ronan's Well) lives with her brother, Lilias Redgauntlet with her uncle. Evelyn Berenger (Betrothed) loses her father and takes refuge with a maternal aunt. Edith Plantagenet (Talisman) is far from home and in the court of Queen Berengaria. Anne of Geirstein has an uncle who take care of her for her father. The wife of Gideo Grey (Surgeon's Daughter) dies in childbirth. In Count Robert of Paris it is difficult to find the heroine, to say nothing of her parents. And in Castle Dangerous the Lady Augusts Berkley needed very much the mother she lacked. The exception to the rule is Lucy Ashton (Bride of Lammermoor). Lady Ashton, her mother, is a most powerful character. Her stern will dominates the weaker personality of her daughter and coerces her into marriage with Bucklaw. So the terrible tragedy is brought about; sad to say, it rests on historical foundation.

We have not yet mentioned Annot Lyle (Legend of Montrose). We hardly know whether to call her an exception or not, but her case stands curiously related to the point which we are discussing. She really is the daughter of Sir Duncan Campbell, Knight of Ardenvohr. In chapter xi. Lady Campbell appears for a very brief space. She is tall, faded, melancholy, and in mourning for her lost child. She mutters a few inaudible words, gives one deep sigh, and we see her and hear of her no more. When at the end of the tale the secret is revealed, Sir Duncan "discovers a daughter," and Annot "a father." Strange to say, Lady Campbell is forgotten. There is no suggestion that Annot also discovers a mother, or that the sorrowful mother receives back her long lost daughter. We are not sure that she was asked to Annot's expected wedding. Truly mothers are a superfluity in the Waverley novels. Scott's heroes were certainly sufficiently removed from any possibility of strained relations with their mothers-in-law, for none of them had any. We do hope that all the fair heroines who are happily married in the last chapters of their respective stories were not destined to early death, but were spared to bring up their daughters by approved methods and even to see their children's children. Why do we miss in Scott the romance of a mother's love for her daughter? The theme is approached only in the painful episonde of Madge Wildfire and her mother, and in the tragedy of Lammermoor. The relations of father and son, father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, sister and sister, are all turned to telling purposes; but the relationship of mother and daughter ends in early bereavement or dire tragedy. Why is this? To this question we have no satisfactory answer to give. It may be to some extent a matter of inadvertence. That a heroine should be motherless and more or less alone in the world supplied a certain element of the romance, and it may not have occurred to our author that he was so persistently repeating himself. Still Scott was a literary artist and such a supposition is small compliment to him; perhaps some readers of the Parents' Review can suggest a better explanation.

II.

We read with great pleasure a recent article in these pages in which reference is made to the heroines of the Waverley novels,* for it has been the fashion in some quarters to decry Scott's heroines. We have even heard it roundly declared that there is but one real heroine in the whole series. We have ourselves spent so many delightful hours in the company of Sir Walter's young folk, and we have such deep regard and affection for them, that we would protest against statements such as these, if we thought that they could be taken seriously. We grant at once that his heroes and heroines do not as a rule play the leading parts in his dramas. They are not intended to do so. The writer is a historian. His chief aim is to depict some of the most striking characters in history, or to present types of character, national or otherwise, of remarkable idiosyncrasy. Hence when Coeur de Lion, Louis XI., Charles the Bold, Oliver Cromwell, Balfour of Burley, or Queen Elizabeth, or Mary Stuart, come upon the stage, the most interesting young lovers must stand in the background, and their love affairs, however critical, must yield in interest to events which sway the destinies of nations. Likewise Dominie Sampson and Pleydell must divide attention with Miss Julia Mannering, and Peter Peebles and his lawsuit, and the enterprise of "Father Buonaventure" with Darsie Latimer's pursuit of the Green Mantle. Scott knew what he was about. But the young people have their parts, and great are the charm and grace which they add to the whole. More than this, it is they who do so much to make Scott such excellent reading for other young people to-day. This is very true of Scott's heroines. We should like to dwell on this.

* "On the Genius of Sir Walter Scott." Sept., 1903.

We ourselves were brought up on Sir Walter. We read the whole of the Waverley series in our school days or directly afterwards. There is very much in all these stories which is very attractive to boys. We read, we admit, with much skipping of prefatory and explanatory matter and of historical excursus, but we devoured with consuming interest and oft-repeated perusal those dramatic scenes which abound in them and which appeal so powerfully to a boy's imagination. What could one desire better than the Tournament in Ivanhoe and the assault on the castle of Front de Boeuf? We can hear now the axe of Richard ringing in thundering blows above the din of battle. What could be more thrilling than the taking of Dirk Hatteraick in the cave when "the hour had come and the man," or Rob Roy's midnight visit to the prison at Glasgow, or the ambush in the glen when Captain Thornton was taken and Bailie Nicol Jarvie hung suspended in mid-air, or Dugald Dalgetty's victorious struggle with the disguised Marquis of Argyle in his own dungeon, or Queen Mary's escape from Lochleven Castle, or the mysteries of Woodstock and the flight of Charles, or the scene in Anne of Geirstein where in the dead of night the bed on which Phillipson lies sinks to the subterranean chambers, where he finds himself in the presence of the dreaded Vehmegericht (a scene which made us afraid to sleep on our own bed without previous investigations)? While we read all this, how much besides we read and learned at the same time! We are speaking in this paper of Scott's heroines. Think what a noble type of womanhood they present. It may be that several are but slightly sketched and are drawn in a somewhat conventional manner. They are not all such distinct personalities as Jeanie Deans, or the Jewess Rebecca, or Diana Vernon, or Catherine Seyton or Alice Lee, but taking them individually and also collectively the student of Scott has a very beautiful ideal placed before him. Very pure, very brave, simple of heart, steadfast of purpose, loyal and loving, faithful and true is the woman Scott would have a man to love and worship. She may be as accomplished as Flora McIvor, as lively and mischievous as Catherine Seyton, as great a horsewoman and huntress as Diana Vernon, as decisive in action as Lady Peveril when she arrested Bridgenorth, as sublime of spirit as Rebecca when she stood on the verge of the parapet defying the Templar, or as inflexible of purpose and as heroic in her devotion as Jeanie Deans, the greatest heroine of them all, but the same true, tender womanhood is always there, and every man who has read Scott in his youth has cause to be thankful that he has looked upon an ideal so noble.

As youth passes away the charm of our author grows upon us. What we skipped before we now read with special interest. In the friend of our school-days we find the chosen companion of our manhood. As we read, or try to read, certain writing of to-day we feel that the old wine is better. In modern fiction we find so much self-consciousness, unhappiness and unrest, such a painful sense of strain and dissatisfaction, such flickering faith and ethical uncertainty, so much more of the cynical smartness than of spontaneous humour and genuine mirth--so much that is fantastic, impossible, and unconvincing, that we must be pardoned if with a sigh of relief we turn back to Sir Walter Scott, and if we find our recreation in making a study of his characters.

J. B. Hellier.
Leeds.

[There was a famous doctor, John B. Hellier, 1853-1924, obstetrician and gynecologist, who lived in Leeds and wrote a book in 1895 called "Infancy and infant-rearing." His son Frank, who became a dermatologist, was born in 1904. Could he have been the J. B. Hellier who wrote this?]

Typed by Rondalyno, June, 2024; Proofread by LNL, Jan. 2025