Ivanhoe maintains a strong readership today, when the rest of Scott’s extraordinary literary output has sunk into obscurity, but it has never been a great critical success. The Scott purists wish he had never traveled south to England at all, and his compatriot David Daiches typifies the twentieth-century scholarly opinion of the noveclass="underline" “Ivanhoe, though it has qualities of its own, is much more superficial than any of the Scottish novels, and is written throughout on a much lower plane. Scott did not, in fact, know the Middle Ages well and he had little understanding of its social or religious life” (“Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist,” p. 46; see “For Further Reading”). Since the 1980s, critics have turned back to Ivanhoe as an important thesis on British nationalism, and for its racial and sexual themes, but whatever the vicissitudes of its reputation among literary scholars, the novel always has enjoyed a cultural afterlife that much exceeded its scope and pretensions as literature. Ivanhoe single-handedly revived the age of chivalry in the Western popular imagination, and produced a cult of medieval rites and manners that persists into our own age, with its “Dungeons and Dragons” and Lord of the Rings. As for its cultural politics, the impact of Ivanhoe has been felt most deeply and controversially not in Britain, but in the United States.
“I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter,” wrote Mark Twain to a friend in 1903 (Letters, p. 738). Scott loomed large for Twain the writer, who lamented the impact of his “wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence’” on American literature. But far more serious for Twain was the enduring cultural impression made by Scott’s Ivanhoe on the American South. The antebellum South was an essentially feudal system of rank and caste, and its white ruling class found in Scott’s romantic tale of chivalrous knights, powerful land-owning barons, and loyal serfs a glorious mirror image of itself. For Twain, whatever impetus toward modernization had existed toward “liberty, humanity, and progress” in the South was effectively smothered by the popularity of Scott, whose novels “set the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” The Scott “disease,” he went so far as to say, had caused the Civil War (Mississippi Writings, pp. 500-501). Ivanhoe became, arguably, even more necessary to the South after that war was lost. Scott’s title character spends much of the novel in disguise, and achieves his greatest triumph in the character of “The Disinherited Knight.” He is named for his estate—he is Wilfred of Ivanhoe—but does not or cannot claim it. Ivanhoe the place is never visited and barely mentioned, as if forgotten. The novel’s title thus points to a glaring absence in the world of the novel, both spiritual and material. England has been conquered, and the spoils have gone to the victorious Normans. As his chivalric pseudonym suggests, Ivanhoe the man is a complex figure representing both inherited nobility and loss, a romantic composite uniquely designed to appeal to the defeated Confederate sensibility.
If Ivanhoe’s fall from land-owning scion to homeless errant knight elicited a fragrant bitterness for the southern reader, no less intoxicating was the situation of his heart, torn between the blond, blue-eyed Saxon princess, Rowena, and the exotic Jew, Rebecca. It is one of literature’s most intriguing love triangles. Much controversy surrounds Scott’s representation of Jews in Ivanhoe, but one suggestive means of understanding the intense and destabilizing desires Rebecca inspires is as a figure for the white man’s attraction for and resistance to the prospect of racial mixture. This is certainly how the late-nineteenth-century African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt interpreted Ivanhoe’s dilemma. For Chesnutt, Scott was “the literary idol of the South,” and Chesnutt’s novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), contains a fascinating revision of one of Ivanhoe’s central episodes, the tournament at Ashby where the victorious Ivanhoe awards the crown to the fair Rowena. In Chesnutt’s novel, the Queen of Love and Beauty is also named Rowena, but she is dark: In fact, she is a mulatta passing for white. As another character later remarks, “She should have been named Rebecca instead of Rowena” (p. 92). In Chesnutt’s novel, Rowena’s rival is not a person, but a racial “other” incorporated within the romantic heroine herself. Ivanhoe’s romantic triangle is dissolved into an image of racial ambiguity, a mirror of his own ambivalence. Unsurprisingly, Chesnutt’s “black” Rowena dies in tragic circumstances. In Scott’s novel, the hero begins as a figure for cultural crossing—he has left his Saxon household to follow the Norman king—but the question of whether he is capable of making a second crossing, this time into an ostracized racial group, hangs over the novel until the very end. On the last page, describing Ivanhoe’s marriage to Rowena, Scott refuses to inquire “whether the recollection of Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity did not recur to his mind more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether have approved.” If Scott is reluctant, generations of readers have not been so coy. It is a cliché of Ivanhoe’s reception that the reader will inevitably wish the hero to have chosen the dark and inspiring Rebecca over her bland, blond rival.
As Chesnutt’s revisionary novel makes clear, Ivanhoe, fairly or not, has been put to use as a racist text. The American historical novelist Thomas Dixon based his reconstruction trilogy on a white supremacist reading of Ivanhoe—beginningwith A Leopard’s Spots (1902). Likewise, the Ku Klux Klan’s very name echoes the romantic “clans” of Scott’s fiction. The concluding chapters of Ivanhoe, which focus on the rituals of the Templar Knights, are especially haunting for the American reader. A secretive order of Christian militant men, dressed in white, take a dark-complexioned woman as prisoner, then conduct an extra-legal show trial at which she is condemned to burn at the stake. Rebecca is, of course, a Jew, and is saved at the last, so Scott could not have known in writing Ivanhoe that he was producing the iconography—the hooded white garb, the Masonic rituals, the burning cross—for the vilest and most feared racist organization in modern America.
But the Klan were poor readers of Ivanhoe. The reason that the inevitable marriage that concludes Scott’s romance has often seemed less than satisfying to readers is that it takes place outside the erotic space of the novel. As the union of two Saxons, Ivanhoe’s marrying Rowena is anomalous to the novel’s deep investment in the mixture of races, cultures, and languages. Scott’s assertion that the marriage marked a “pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races” (p. 461) makes no sense, biologically or symbolically, since Ivanhoe and Rowena belong to the same race and are, in most respects, undifferentiated. Ironically, the greatest proponents of racial purity in the novel are not the Templar Knights or the Norman rulers but Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, who takes a eugenic approach to the cause of Saxon restoration. He enforces his ideological commitment to Saxon purity even at the expense of his own son, whom he doesn’t consider sufficiently well born for Rowena. That said, Cedric’s nationalism is as much about policing English sexuality as it is about race. He blames the decline of Saxon culture on the Circe-like enchantment of “Norman arts”: “We became enervated by Norman arts long ere we fell under Norman arms. Far better was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror!” (p. 211). The Saxon way of life, Cedric argues, was not lost on the battlefield, but at the dinner table and in the dressing room, where Norman “luxury” imported its tantalizing customs and emasculated its fighting men. During the almost century-long sequence of wars against France that had just concluded when Scott wrote Ivanhoe, modern British masculinity was essentially constructed in opposition to perceived French “effeminacy.” His readers would thus have been well aware of “luxury” as a code-word for degraded French manhood, and taken delight in his sardonic descriptions of the “fripperies” of Norman dress.