Sir Walter's Orphanage

IF one should summon in mental review the maidens fair and dark — all beautiful —whose joys and sorrows fill the pages of the ‘Wizard of the North,’ how many, think you, would be found provided with mammas? Sometimes a brother guides the heroine’s destinies — in each case, I believe, to an unhappy end. Fathers of every description, intrusted with rearing this exotic genus, bring to the task an infinite variety of temperaments and disabilities. There is the old father, bent and gray, broken by the weight of many sorrows. There are fathers selfish, sombre, suffering from remorse, grieving for the beloved wife who died long since, disappointed, misanthropical, agnostic, religious, sternly strict, blindly doting. There is one grandmother and there are several aunts — shadowy aunts — abbesses generally. Again, it is a duenna more remotely related who accompanies the fair one on some romantic journey or quest. Then it is the young cousin or girl friend, and, in two instances, the sister, whose companionship relieves the loneliness of the heroine without putting upon her actions the restraint that a mother might be supposed to enforce. The quite friendless orphan is also to be found, and the uncle figures as guardian, sometimes loving and tender, sometimes fierce and tyrannical.

In the twenty-seven novels Scott has given us, one mother moves — sternly enough — through the scenes his wand has conjured up. In the presence of a rule so generally observed and so uniquely broken we ask ourselves, ’Can the heroine of pure romance consistently have a mother?’ With the exception of Lucy Ashton, in The Bride of Lammermoor, these maidens fulfill their destinies untrammeled by maternal advice. The care and love and counsel of a mother, besides making for the commonplace, must be unnecessary in the development of character, for we find all virtue blossoming on the Scottish crags, or wherever the scene may take us, quite independent of the training of mamma. We must infer that maternal protection is essentially prosaic, and the friendship and mutual confidence of mother and daughter, as a matter of course, uninteresting.

We mothers are evidently not picturesque. As modern ‘copy,’ we are obvious foils for charming daughters, sordid or vulgar or simply ungrammatical. In the old days, to be the mother of a heroine one must die young. The trick — if trick it is —was easily turned. One sentence early in the action disposes of the obstacle, and then, uncribb’d, uncabin’d, unconfin’d, a Diana Vernon or a Flora Mclvor follows the dictates of her own sweet will along paths not exactly conventional. With a background of savage cousins and a father in disguise, Diana fascinates us with her beauty and her mysterious sorrows; while Flora, with a chieftain-brother for sole protector, develops and soars like a young eagle. How different would have been their lives had each had a mother with ideas! I am convinced that an ounce of maternal common sense would have wrecked the plot of any one of Scott’s novels. How simple, then, the formula!

In the recipe for a full-fledged heroine of the good, old-fashioned sort, we might expect to find the initial injunction, ‘First kill the mother.’ Let us look at the novels as they appeared in turn. The epoch-making Waverley, 1814, has its dual interest in Flora Mclvor— whole orphan—and Rose Bradwardine, ‘ the very apple of her father’s eye. Her beauty, in which he recalled the features of his beloved wife, would have justified the affection of the most doting father.’ Guy Mannering the next year provided the reading public with two more interesting young women. Lucy Bertram’s mother dies at her birth. Mrs. Mannering has died out in India before the real story opens, and the melancholy father of Julia, pursued by remorse for a supposed crime, makes an ideal protector for a pair of moon-struck girls. In 1816 The Antiquary presents to us Isabella Wardour. ‘She with a brother absent from home formed now her father’s whole surviving family.’ The constant companion of Sir Arthur, and peace-maker between him and Mr. Oldbuck, she goes from adventure to adventure, and finally marries the hero, as all good heroines should.

The year 1817 saw the publication of both The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality, but no marplot mammas appear to alter either tale. In the former, ‘Mr. Vere of Ellieslaw was many years absent from his family estate. Suddenly and unexpectedly he returns, a widower, bringing with him his daughter, then a girl of about ten years old.’ Isabella has a hard time until rescued by the Black Dwarf; for Mr. Vere, you recall, was a gentleman of uncommon selfishness and cruelty. A sensible wife doubtless would have ruined the action of the story. Edith Bellenden, in Old Mortality, has the most natural and delightful of grandmothers, but in the care of old Lady Margaret there is that carelessness which insures plenty of romantic happenings.

Rob Roy and The Heart of Midlothian followed the next year. In the first, Diana Vernon describes herself as ‘a creature motherless, friendless, alone in the world, left to her own guidance and protection.’ In the latter, dear Jeannie Deans’s mother is dead when the story opens, and the stepmother dies at Effie’s birth, leaving us again with two motherless girls. In 1819 appeared The Bride of Lammermoor and The Legend of Montrose. In Lady Ashton we find our one exception to the embargo put upon mothers. No memory this of a sainted parent, wafted heavenward from the first page, but a dominant, worldly-minded, inexorable woman, bent upon the attainment of her own ends, and showing no remorse that her pathway should be strewed with murder, madness, and sudden death. Perhaps in the Legend of Montrose we should note another exception, but Annot Lyle, stolen from her parents when a child and brought up as an orphan, never sees her mother nor knows of her existence. The poor lady, a tall, faded, melancholy female, dressed in deep mourning, flickers in one sentence on one page, and is extinguished in woe before Annot’s identity is disclosed to the surviving father.

In 1820 Scott gave the world three novels, Ivanhoe, The Monastery, and The Abbot. Rowena, the high-born ward of the Saxon Cedric, and Rebecca, the daughter of Isaac the Jew, are alike motherless. Catherine Seyton says, on her first entry on the scene, ’I also am an orphan’; while Mary Avenel, her father already dead, loses her mother when only twelve years old. The next year saw the publication of Kenilworth. If Sir Hugh had received, in the training of Amy Robsart, the aid of a woman, if his blind devotion and foolish indulgence had been checked by the firm hand of a mother, what dull reading the book would have made.

In 1822 Sir Walter produced again three novels in a twelvemonth, and one would expect that through mere carelessness a mother might have got left alive somewhere between the pages of The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel, and Peveril of the Peak. Not so. An early chapter of the first-named story opens thus: ‘We have already mentioned Minna and Brenda, the daughters of Magnus Troil. Their mother had been dead for many years and they were now two beautiful girls.’ Everybody remembers the adventures of Minna and Brenda. Would you forego the creepy sensation they gave you for any comfort a mother might have been to those girls? In The Fortunes of Nigel, where Margaret Ramsay, god-daughter of the court jeweler to James I, is shown to us at the age of twenty, her mother is already dead. Beautiful, willful, spoiled by her father and petted by Heriot, she falls in love with Nigel, and, disguised as a page, follows, saves, and marries him. Peveril of the Peak introduces us to another half-orphan in Alice Bridgenorth, the victim of her father’s ambition and an uncle’s villainy, whose mother died at her birth.

Quentin Durward in 1823 takes up the tale of the ‘Orphan of Croye,’ where the charming Countess Isabelle rides to many adventures, accompanied by her ridiculous aunt and her true and loyal knight, the Scottish hero. The next year we have St. Ronan’s Well and Redgauntlet. In the first the unhappy Clara Mowbray dies, half-mad — a scapegrace brother is the only protector of her orphan state. Lilias Redgauntlet, the heroine of the last, is kidnapped by an uncle when two years of age, and never knows her mother, who is already dead when the story opens.

In 1825 came from the pen of this ready writer both The Betrothed and The Talisman. In The Betrothed, an aunt, an abbess, has the care of Eveline Berenger, only child of Raymond Berenger, who died early in the action, leaving her an orphan at the age of sixteen; while Edith Plantagenet walks majestically through the delightful pages of The Talisman with only the hotheaded Richard for guardian and the companionship of his frivolous queen. Woodstock, in 1826, gives us the picture of Alice Lee, patiently supporting the tottering footsteps of Sir Henry, who says of her dead mother, ‘Ah! my beloved companion, who art now far from the sorrows and cares of this weary world.’ The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827) lost her mother at her birth. Her father died before her journey to India and her painful adventures there. The Fair Maid of Perth was published in 1828, and Catherine Glover, the heroine, who marries Henry Wynd, is the beloved daughter of Simon, a wealthy and respected glover—mother dead.

The next year appeared the charming story of Anne of Geierstein, the Maid of the Mist. Motherless, she is sent by her father, Count Albert, to be brought up by her uncle, the democratic Arnold. In Count Robert of Paris our rule may be said to be broken again. Brenhilda — father dead — has a mother on the first page, described by the author as ‘easily kept under management by the young lady herself’; but as she is never referred to again, and as Brenhilda marries the count at once and finds all her adventures in a foreign land with her husband, I have thought that at least she was no important factor in the heroine’s life. Castle Dangerous, which brings to a close in 1832 the wonderful series of Scott’s novels, has for its heroine Augusta of Berkely, an orphan, and the king’s ward. She, disguised as a boy, follows afar off the adventures of her lover, having set him a hard task and fearing for his safety.

And so amidst the din of arms and the vows of lovers, we come to the end of our list. When we contemplate this enrollment of thirty odd names on the books of the Waverley Orphan Asylum — all popular and successful heroines — we confidently advise the young novelist pondering plots to consider the mother as a negligible quantity.