Scott's Ghost-Seeing

Abstract

Episodes of ghost-seeing radicalize a key device of Walter Scott’s historical novels, in which cultural difference submits to a developmental logic of historical difference. The spectral apparition signals not only the ghost-seer’s imminent death but also a historical extinction, that of the life-world in which supernatural phenomena count as real. This essay considers the complication of this historicist logic in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and The Monastery (1820). In the former, ghostliness is endemic to a time of pure liminality, unmoored from historical purpose: the suspension of the present between a past that fails to pass and a future that fails to arrive empties it of ontological substance. In The Monastery, the ghost rudely resists exorcism by rational explanation. Scott’s White Lady indexes the severity of the historical breach inflicted by the Protestant Reformation: a discontinuity more violent, in its impact upon knowledge, belief and the imagination, than revolutions of dynasties or political systems.