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Adjusting the borders of self: Sir Walter Scott's The Two Drovers
Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2001 by Ali, Zahra A Hussein
Not surprisingly, all agents in the text, human (M'Combich, Wakefield, Morrison) and inhuman (sovereign English Law), engage in a quest for space; the former literally seek lucrative markets, the latter seeks the creation of functional, hegemonized urban places. As an object of desire, space is projected kaleidoscopically; from the perspective of entrepreneurial characters, it is the locus for liminality; from the perspective of English institutional law, it is the crucible for dynamic demographic synthesis; and from the perspective of the narrator, it is the domain for the ethics of cultural in-betweeness.
The novella's poetics of space has yet another aspect, the delineation of a tripartite spacial/racial division of Highland, Lowland, England, which corresponds to the tripartite process of border-crossing-isolation, liminality, assimilation-and which, furthermore, corresponds to the temporal tripartite division of past (i.e., feudaism as the ancienct universalsystem of the land), present (i.e.,the ongoing process of urbanization prevailing unfalteringly over the land), and future (i.e., the ultimate dominance of anglocentric capitalism) . In light of the story's aesthetics and politics of liminality, it is the Lowlands, the native region of Sir Walter Scott, that is the most privileged geographic space because it borders on two worlds (Scotland and England), two languages, two cultures, and two modes of life. It is not only the place of high exuberant border markets, but also the site, par excellence, for hybridity, and the flourishing of the principles of civic society where the dialectics of difference is constantly subverted by the agencies of rationality and respect for order, and where the cultures of the skene-dhu (dirk) and that of the conquering "clothyard shafts" and broad "good sabres" are absent. When Hugh Morrison, at the outset of the journey, volunteers to safe-keep M'Combich's dirk in order to curb the prophesized conflict, he proudly declares that lowlanders "never took short weapons against a man in their lives. And neither needed they: they had their broadswords" (304).
Although the bicultured, tolerant, entrepreneurial Lowlander Morrison is admirable, it is Mrs. Heskett, the publican's wife- half Scot and half Saxon-who possesses a truly heteroglot subjectivity and is idealized. She runs a successful inn, the very emblem of liminal spaces, where border-crossers exchange business, cultures, and values. Her discourse, though brief, is memorable because it simultaneously counteracts that of M'Combich's anglophobic aunt and that of the gaelophobic men who fanned Wakefield's irascible nature when he lost his bargain for Ireby's enclosure and who cheered his boxing of M'Combich. The conceptual image of an inn as would be run solely by Mrs. Heskett, the text suggests, is the ideal civil/civic sphere where the process of cultural hybridity enmeshes travelling entrepreneurial selves in a network of symbiotic, dynamic relationships, incorporating them into the emerging body politic, thus generating further spaces and loci, within and without, for lucrative identity negotiations, acculturation, and transsubjectivity, and ultimately installing one unified axiological/semiotic system and securing the coveted full representation of Pan-Britishism, the culmination of a linearly progressive historical process.15
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