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The Destabilisation of Gender and National Boundaries in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair: A Long Nineteenth-Century Perspective

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Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond

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Abstract

This chapter explores the nexus between nation and gender in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, one of the most iconic texts of modern Scottish literature. By questioning canonical readings of the trilogy, focused on a conventionally nationalist stance or on the “realistic” components of Gibbon’s masterpiece, it attracts the attention on its subtle, radical re-drawing of gender and national boundaries, especially in relation to its two central characters, Chris and her son Ewan. The chapter identifies a subtle androgynous subtext in the trilogy—a (cross-)gender imagi-nation, interestingly reverberating the perspective of a number of nineteenth-century Scottish literary texts. While Gibbon’s trilogy may not be consistently radical, it nonetheless creates a “dislocated” discursive system, whose inherent tensions and ambivalences powerfully subvert contemporary notions of nation and gender identity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    By way of simplification, I will refer to the author as “Gibbon” throughout the essay, even when referring to texts authored by “Mitchell.” A choice I would not make in a more extended study.

  2. 2.

    See Uwe Zagratzki, “Gibbon’s Libertarian Fictional Politics,” in The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, ed. Scott Lyall (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2015), 60–75.

  3. 3.

    Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Michele Barrett (London: Penguin, 1993), 233. First published respectively in 1929 and 1938.

  4. 4.

    Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review 44 (1993): 61.

  5. 5.

    Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 355.

  6. 6.

    Tamar Mayer, “Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage,” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London: Routledge, 2000), 1.

  7. 7.

    Adrienne Rich, “Notes towards a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (London: Virago, 1986), 212; first published in 1984.

  8. 8.

    Lois A. West, “Introduction: Feminism Constructs Nationalism,” in Feminist Nationalism, ed. Lois A. West (New York: Routledge: 1997), xiii.

  9. 9.

    Peter Dickinson, “Introduction: Here is Queer,” in Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada, ed. Peter Dickinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 4.

  10. 10.

    Carole Jones, Disappearing Men: Gender Disorientation in Scottish Fiction, 1979–1999 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 12.

  11. 11.

    Christopher Whyte, “Introduction,” in Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature, ed. Christopher Whyte (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), xv.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., xvi.

  13. 13.

    Kirsten Stirling, Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 11, 12.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 12.

  15. 15.

    Maureen M. Martin, The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 8.

  16. 16.

    Juliet Shields, Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 140, 141.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 144.

  19. 19.

    Barbara Leonardi, “James Hogg’s The Profligate Princes: An Unconventional Treatment of Scottish Female Sexuality in Romantic Writing for the Theatre,” Scottish Literary Review 8, no. 2 (2016): 50.

  20. 20.

    Benjamine Toussaint, “Untrammelled by Theory: Susan Ferrier’s Polyphonic Vision of Scotland and the Union in Marriage,” Scottish Literary Review 8, no. 1 (2016): 37, 41.

  21. 21.

    Christopher Whyte, “Queer Readings, Gay Texts from Redgauntlet to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness, ed. Marco Fazzini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 166, 167.

  22. 22.

    Emily Allen, “Re-Marking Territory: Redgauntlet and the Restoration of Sir Walter Scott,” Studies in Romanticism 37, no. 2 (1998): 173.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    See, among others, Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 246–47.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 101.

  26. 26.

    Evan Gottlieb, Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 65.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Ian Duncan, “Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation, and World System,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15, no. 1 (2002): 88.

  29. 29.

    See, among recent studies on the topic, Community in Modern Scottish Literature, ed. Scott Lyall (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2016).

  30. 30.

    For an overview of contemporary responses, see Ian Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), 74–78.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 211.

  32. 32.

    See, among others, H. Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), and, more recently, Nicola Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction (London: Routledge, 2016).

  33. 33.

    I will refer to Chris’s son as “Ewan Jr.” throughout the essay, so as to avoid confusion with his father, also named Ewan. In the trilogy they are both referred to as “Ewan,” as the narrative context clarifies the character’s identity.

  34. 34.

    For a discussion of Ewan as a Marxist hero, see William K. Malcolm, A Blasphemer and Reformer: A Study of James Leslie Mitchell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), 157–70.

  35. 35.

    Among the scholars who inspired Gibbon were Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937), an Australian-British anatomist and Egyptologist, and William James Perry (1868–1949), a British geographer and anthropologist.

  36. 36.

    William K. Malcolm, Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Revolutionary Writer (Edinburgh: Capercaillie Books, 2016), 23.

  37. 37.

    Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Grey Granite (1934), reprint, ed. and introd. Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1990), 202.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 168.

  39. 39.

    Carla Sassi, “The Shifting Identities of Mitchell and Gibbon,” in The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 38 (see note 2).

  40. 40.

    Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe, reprint, ed. and introd. Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1988), 142; first published in 1933.

  41. 41.

    Christopher Silver, “Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Scottish Nationalism,” in The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 105 (see note 2).

  42. 42.

    Lewis Grassic Gibbon, “Glasgow,” in Smeddum: A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology, ed. Valentina Bold (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001), 106. First published in Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene, or: The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (London: Jarrolds, 1934).

  43. 43.

    Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, reprint, ed. and introd. Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1988), xiii; first published in 1932.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 256.

  45. 45.

    Gibbon, Cloud Howe, 139, emphases original (see note 40).

  46. 46.

    Stirling, Bella Caledonia, 51 (see note 13).

  47. 47.

    Glenda Norquay, “Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Women,” in The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 76 (see note 2).

  48. 48.

    Isobel Murray, “A Celebration with Some Reservations,” in A Flame in the Mearns: Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Margery Palmer McCulloch and Sarah M. Dunningan (Glasgow: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2003), 59.

  49. 49.

    Alison Lumsden, “‘Women’s Time’: Reading the Quair as a Feminist Text,” in A Flame in the Mearns, 45 (see note 48 above).

  50. 50.

    Cited in Munro, Leslie Mitchell, 74 (see note 30).

  51. 51.

    Tom Crawford, ‘Introduction’, Sunset Song, viii (see note 43).

  52. 52.

    Gibbon, Cloud Howe, 110 (see note 40).

  53. 53.

    Gibbon, Grey Granite, 201 (see note 37).

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 204.

  55. 55.

    Gibbon, Sunset Song, 27, emphasis original (see note 43).

  56. 56.

    Gibbon, Cloud Howe, 137 (see note 40).

  57. 57.

    Gibbon, Sunset Song, 60, emphasis original (see note 43).

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 127.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 88, emphases original.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 183.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., emphases original.

  62. 62.

    Gibbon, Cloud Howe, 168, emphasis original (see note 40).

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 52.

  64. 64.

    Gibbon, Grey Granite, 43 (see note 37).

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 168.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 170.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 35.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 38.

  69. 69.

    Ibid.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 35.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., 154.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 42.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., 170.

  74. 74.

    Among the novels published as James Leslie Mitchell, see, for example, Thea in Stained Radiance (1930); Domina in The Thirteenth Disciple (1931); Bishop Nerses’ rebel daughter Amima in Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights (1932); Clair Stranlay in Three Go Back (1932); and Gay, in Gay Hunter (1934).

  75. 75.

    Gibbon, Sunset Song, 117 (see note 43).

  76. 76.

    Gibbon, Grey Granite, 194 (see note 37).

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 195.

  78. 78.

    Sassi, “The Shifting Identities of Mitchell and Gibbon,” 43 (see note 2).

  79. 79.

    Or “literary transvestism.” The concept has been widely deployed in the USA, Italy, and the Spanish-speaking world, less so in the UK. For a theoretical introduction, see Thomas E. Peterson, “Of Travesty and Truth: Towards a Theory of Literary Transvestism,” in Vested Voices: Literary Transvestism in Italian Literature, ed. Erminia Passannanti and Rossella Riccobono (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2006), 19–64.

  80. 80.

    Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 6, 10.

  81. 81.

    Sassi, “The Shifting Identities of Mitchell and Gibbon,” 46 (see note 2).

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  1. University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Carla Sassi

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    Barbara Leonardi

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Sassi, C. (2018). The Destabilisation of Gender and National Boundaries in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair: A Long Nineteenth-Century Perspective. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_6

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