Adjusting the borders of self: Sir Walter Scott's The Two Drovers

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2001 by Ali, Zahra A Hussein

Thematically The Two Drovers is a vindication of the hypothesis that a feasible vision of nation building rests on the hybridization of the best in the indigenous/vernacular cultures within the British Isles. Hence the cultural aim of the story is to critique the resistance of subaltern ethno-racial paradigms of the isolated regions of Britain to the sovereign anglocentric culture. To migrate out from the boundaries of the nativist to the transethnic and the transracial is not only to part with the yearning for origin, namely, the clan, feudalism, Old Scotland, but also to set up what the Chicano critic Renato Rosaldo terms "cultural inbetweeness" as the highest virtue, the very emblem of cultivation and progress (qtd. in Saldivar 28). Significantly, and despite its tragic ending, M'Combich never perceives his border-crossing into England as exile, diaspora, or arriving at the colonial frontier. Moreover, the narrator, a young Scottish lawyer and the mouthpiece of Scott, laments the fall of M'Combich but not the elimination of the Scottish Highland border. And in his court speech, the Judge, another mouthpiece for Scott, desires to install a polyphonic, meta-border, pan-British discourse of modernity. He consequently suffuses his speech with a rhetoric that effaces differences among Celts and Saxons. At the outset of his journey, M'Combich himself shares in the act of differenceeffacing. When his Muhme, the voice of anglophobia and the symbol of the Scottish/Highland communal consciousness hostile to cultural assimilation, walks the protective deasil around him, takes away his dirk, and in her Taishataragh warns that "there is blood on your hand, and it is English blood. The blood of a Gael is richer and redder" (304), M'Combich resorts to the sacred and the secular, the Bible and rationality: Prutt, trutt ... For shame, Muhme-give me the dirk. You cannot tell by the colour the difference betwixt the blood of a black bullock and a white one, and you speak of knowing Saxon from Gaelic blood. All men have their blood from Adam. (304)

Narration in The Two Drovers is bound by the binarisms of Scotland/England, feudalism/modernism, nature/culture, self/ other, death/life. Although the terrain between the poles of these binarisms is the stage where the conflict of cultures and the problematics of identity-fashioning are dramatized, they are simultaneously the domain where the necessity of establishing a border-challenging, collective, national identity is asserted. M'Combich's and Wakefield's tragedies lie in their inability to transcend the exclusory polarization of these binarisms because their politics of geocultural identity neither recognizes (the case of Wakefield) nor seeks wholeheartedly (the case of M'Combich) the values of cultural in-betweeness and self-hybridization.

The context of The Two Drovers is the pre-capitalist, turn-ofthe-nineteenth-century market economy of commodity production and circulation, and its corollary, the vacillations of the process of supply and demand. Historically, this period is the dawn of economic modernism and social modernity, especially in the hinterlands. The narrative's discourse embodies an aesthetics of the market, in particular, the market near regional borders. It is from the perspective of this aesthetics that signs of contempt for either commerce or the preoccupation with moneymaking are totally absent.' The Scotland-England "high" and "brisk" border markets of Doune and Falkirk, with their large healthy droves, are not only consecrated and depicted as the very sign of national vitality and benefaction, but they are fetishized as the instrument of nation formation: "It has been a brisk market, several dealers had attended from the northern and midland counties in England, and English money had flown so merrily about as to gladden the hearts of the Highland farmers" (301).