Scott’s fascination with mixture extends to all aspects of the novel, including language. There is no better image of the “multiculturalism” of early Norman England, as conceived by Scott, than Ivanhoe and Richard’s horrified reaction to Athelstane’s animated appearance at his own funeraclass="underline" “Ivanhoe crossed himself, repeating prayers in Saxon, Latin, or Norman-French, as they occurred to his memory, while Richard alternately said, Benedicte, and swore, Mort de ma vie!’ (p. 436). Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew are likewise spoken in the novel. The master language of Ivanhoe itself, modern English, is a product of this historical moment, a ”mixed language” in which the linguistic distinctions between Saxon and Norman have ”disappeared” along with the deep cultural antagonisms in the aftermath of the Conquest. That the many languages and cultures should be ”completely mingled” is the endpoint of Ivanhoe’s historical trajectory, and the book travels back to a time when this amalgamation was as yet unachieved. Its heroes therefore are those who intuit and obey the imperative to cross over from their ”home” culture to a new order. What Cedric sees in his son as an act of betrayal, the reader perceives as a necessary, if perhaps over-enthusiastic embrace of the new post-Conquest order. But if Ivanhoe embarks on the exemplary crossing of the novel, from Saxon to Norman, it is far from the most imaginative or interesting. That distinction belongs to the illicit, cross-cultural desires of Rebecca for Ivanhoe and, most spectacularly, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert’s reckless passion for Rebecca.
Bois-Guilbert’s emotional signature is vacillation—“a man agitated by strong and contending passions” (p. 403)—but he never gives up his desire for Rebecca, and literally dies of her rejection. We admire Rebecca for her choice of religion (and celibacy) over her love for Ivanhoe, but Bois-Guilbert thrills us with his readiness to take the Jewess at any odds, giving up fame, religion, honor, and everything that has heretofore constituted his heroic, chivalric identity. He talks to her of returning to Palestine, to install her as queen of some new, supra-national Masonic order. Rebecca calls it a “dream … an empty vision of the night” (p. 399), and she is probably right. But Bois-Guilbert is the only character capable of such imagining, and he is willing to make the most scandalous crossing of all, from Templar Christian Knight to Jew. In looking so far beyond the cultural boundaries of twelfth-century Europe, it is Bois-Guilbert who most belongs to Scott’s own global, post-enlightenment moment. “England—Europe—is not the world” (p. 398), he tells Rebecca. He calls conventional religion “nursery tales” and “bigotry” and instead makes a religion of himself and his own will, like a character in Byron or Dostoevsky. He is not a man of his age, and by the end his fellow knights cannot even look at him: “His general appearance was grand and commanding; but, looking at him with attention, men read that in his dark features, from which they willingly withdrew their eyes” (p. 447). Note Scott’s odd turn of phrase: not repulsion, but a “willing” withdrawal of the eyes. The knights refuse to “read” the futurity in Bois-Guilbert’s face, mistaking it for darkness. As with Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, villainy is not incompatible with lyricism in Ivanhoe. Bois-Guilbert might despise religion, but it is to him that Scott gives the most poetic theological reflection in the novel, when he speaks to Rebecca of the transfigurations of the body at death, “dispersed to the elements of which our strange forms are so mystically composed—not a relic left of that graceful frame, from which we could say this lived and moved!” (p. 399). Rebecca’s stoic faith has grandeur, but not such depths as Bois-Guilbert’s despair. The fact that he dies not from Ivanhoe’s lance but his own “contending passions” is a fantastic, even surreal moment in the text that has embarrassed and perplexed Scott’s readers, but in fact manifests beautifully the historical impossibility of the Templar Knight’s continuing presence in the book. It would do as well for him to have disappeared in a puff of smoke, and awakened on the streets of St. Petersburg in 1895, or Paris in 1968.
As an object of desire in the novel who chooses exile over those who might love her, Rebecca resembles no one in the novel more strikingly than King Richard, who is likewise the object of Ivanhoe’s (and England’s) frustrated love. Richard tantalizingly comes within the precincts of his kingdom, but remotely, in disguise. And when he reveals himself, it is only a temporary emergence from his preferred elusive career as a knight errant. Although the novel ends at a moment of promise for Richard’s reign, Scott has already informed us that he will fail as king, and die on some foolish military adventure in Belgium. Rebecca might belong to an ostracized community, and Richard be merely “brilliant, but useless” (p. 424), but in terms of the generative energies of the novel itself, they are equals. Their remoteness, their unavailability, governs it all. Only Richard’s neglect has allowed the political ambitions of his brother John, and the resistant romantic nationalism of the Saxon Cedric, to flourish. Only Richard’s failure in Palestine has brought Ivanhoe home at all. And it is Rebecca who produces the final showdown between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, the former ready to desert Rowena even at the very moment of their betrothal. In riding, half-dead, to Templestowe to rescue Rebecca, Ivanhoe shows us that the impediments to his union with Rowena have never been important. It is the impossible union with Rebecca that drives him, and with it the real action of the novel.
But Rebecca, like Richard, is a love object who will not be loved, an exile who will soon return to exile. Thus the central love objects of the novel are never properly integrated into the national community, leaving the prospects for the emergent Anglo-Norman civilization meager and almost uninteresting. Without Christian chivalry and its magnificent opposite, Jewish martyrdom, Scott’s England is left in a muddle, and it is no wonder that he does not extend the novel to describe its bleak return to what Rebecca calls “a land of war and blood, surrounded by hostile neighbours, and distracted by internal factions” (p. 462). This is the pessimistic counterpoint to the progressive theme of cultural mixture in the novel, and one that seems particularly relevant to the time of Scott’s writing, when Britain’s devastating war against Napoleon had only just concluded, and citizens protesting for political reform lay dead in the town squares of the north at the hands of their countrymen.
Unlike the magnanimous Rebecca, however, Rowena’s more dangerous rival never quits the scene. Ivanhoe’s true love object is chivalry itself, his knightly career, of which Richard is merely the earthly embodiment. Rebecca recognizes the unhealthy grip of chivalric ideology on Ivanhoe’s imagination and, in terms that seem uncannily to anticipate Mark Twain, does her best to disabuse him: “Is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are so wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?” (p. 293). As Cervantes makes plain in his grand satire of chivalry, Don Quixote (1605), knight-errantry was always more a literary phenomenon than an historical one, and Rebecca perceives that Ivanhoe’s self-image is essentially poetic, not a thing of the world. In mockingly pointing this out, Rebecca casts an ironic light on the generic complexities of Scott’s own project, where history lays perpetual siege to the glitter of romance, in fact to literature itself. Scott’s novel might have spawned a global fad for jousting and knights-errant, but his historical critique of chivalry is sincere.