A Postcolonial Reading Of Scott's Rob Roy

Considered "the creator and a great master of the historical novel", Sir Walter Scott is one of the greatest British novelists and poets in the nineteenth-century. His novels have produced strong influence on later writers such as Pushkin in Russia, Victor Hugo and Balzac in France, and Fennimore Cooper in America.Most of Scott critics focus their attention on Scott's representative novels such as Ivanhoe and Waverley, while Rob Roy, published in January 1818, which also enjoyed a great success, is mostly ignored. Moreover, critics mainly study Scott's influence and analyze his novels from the perspectives of historicism and narratology, but ignore the sharp image contrast between Scotland and England in Scott's novels.Based on the postcolonial theory, this thesis focuses on the narrator's "otherization" of Scotland and his relationship with Scott the author. It reveals that in the narrator's eyes, the Scottish Highlands is a primitive world and Highlanders are uncivilized, savage people. Although the Lowlands is on the road to capitalism and civilization due to its close relationship with England, the narrator still sees it as the other because it retains Scottish features.After a close examination of the relationship between Francis the narrator and Scott the author, the present author concludes that Francis'seeing Scotland as the other and England as the self reveals Scott's belief that Scotland is in need of social progress. Reflected in the novel, Francis functions as the embodiment of the commercial ideologies to judge what he experiences.Later the reason for Scott's "otherizing" Scotland is discussed:as a native Scottish man, Scott wishes to present the real Scotland to British readers. However, as a British man, influenced by the dominant ideology and due to his satisfaction with the British progress, Scott's representation turns out to be going with the dominant political discourse and ideology, despite his conscious effort to represent the positive image of Scotland.It can be seen that Scott's attitude toward Scotland and England is complicated. Instead of being a pure Scottish nationalist, Scott is one of those eighteenth and nineteenth-century Scottish writers who developed a sense of Britishness in which Scotland plays a key part. Despite his patriotic feeling of his motherland, Scott agrees to its incorporation into the Great Britain.This thesis hopes to provide readers and researchers with a new perspective to Rob Roy and reevaluate Scott's attitude towards England and Scotland.