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1. Waverly as a Modern Novel
Submitted To:Mrs Ayesha Farhan
Submitted By: Zeeshan Gul Niazi
Date: 20-Feb-2016

2. Let us consider the main characteristics of the modern novel. In
the first place, we can say that it is realistic as opposed to idealistic.
The ‘realistic' writer is one who thinks that truth to observed facts—
facts about the outer world, or facts about his own feelings—is the
great thing while the ‘idealistic' writer wants rather create a pleasant
and edifying picture. The modern novelist is ‘realistic' in this sense
and not in the sense of an elaborate documentation of fact, dealing
often with rather more a sordid side of contemporary life, as we find
in the novels of Zola. He is ‘realistic' in the wider sense and tries to
include within the limits of the novel almost everything—the mixed,
average human nature—and not merely one-sided view of it.
Tolstoy's War and Peace and George Eliot’s Middle March had
proved that the texture of the novel can be made as supple and various
as life itself. The modern novelists have continued this experiment
still further and are trying to make the novel more elegant and
flexible.
Scott's Edward Waverley, for example, views historical events
in a scenic manner. But Waverley itself criticizes the hero's limited
vision. Waverley's tendency to view people, places, and events as
picturesque is symptomatic of his inability to distinguish between
imagination and reality. Waverley does not merely see landscapes as
pictures, he sees action as a series of ‘'gratifies''. Waverley with the
romantic effect it produces: ‘'a moving picture upon the narrow plain,
forming various changeful groups, their feathers and loose plaids
waving in the morning breeze, and their arms glittering in the rising
sun''.
Scott’s narrator tells us Waverley has a tendency to paint his
own picture of things; his mind ‘’ communication to them a tincture of
its own romantic tone and colouring’’. Waverley is unable to see the
connection between past, present, and future: people and events,
whether fictional or real, become isolated pictures in his mind. He
views history as a series of theatrical vignettes, rather than as an
ongoing process that affects the present. This distant, aesthetic attitude
helps Waverley to maintain his romantic dream. The narrator points

3. out that distance, in truth, produces in idea the same effect as in real
perspective…. The harsher and more ordinary points of character are
mellowed down, and those by which it is remembered are the more
striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty''. The distancing
power of picturesque, Scott suggests, makes it a seductive and
dangerous model of reality.
In the second place, the modern novel is psychological. The
psychological problem concerns the nature of consciousness and its
relation to time. Modern psychology has made it very difficult for the
novelist to think of consciousness, as moving in a straight
chronological line from one point to the next. He tends rather see it as
altogether fluid, existing simultaneously at several different levels. To
the modern novelists and readers who look at consciousness in this
way, the presentation of a story in a straight chronological line
becomes unsatisfactory and unreal. People are what they are because
of what they have been. We are memories, and to describe as
truthfully at any given moment means to say everything about our
past. This method to describe this consciousness in operation is called
the ‘stream of consciousness' method. The novelist claims complete
omniscience and moves at once right inside the characters' minds. In
this kind of a novel a character's change in mood, marked externally
by a sigh or a flicker of an eyelid, or perhaps not perceived at all, may
mean more than his outward acts, like his decision to marry or the loss
of a fortune. Moreover, in such a novel the main characters are not
brought through a series of testing circumstances in order to reveal
their potentialities. Everything about the character is always there, at
some level of his consciousness, and it can be revealed by the author
by probing depthwise rather than proceeding lengthwise.
Scott's young men?" After all, Sir Walter Scott's historical
novels differ markedly from the variety of genres that make up
Charles Dickens's novels. However, taking Waverley as an example,
and assuming that the protagonist is typical of Scott's young men, it
might be argued that Edward Waverley is a blank slate, a passive
hero; he has both romantic ideas and a sense of honour (military,

4. family, and personal honour in Waverley's case). Moreover, he is,
capable of violence in defending the latter. Despite the latter's military
profession and his involvement in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745.
Waverley at times seems to realize his own passivity: for example,
when he arrives at the Castle of Doune, having been handed over from
one group of characters to another: he contemplates "the strangeness
of his fortune, which seemed to delight in placing him at the disposal
of others, without the power of directing his own emotions" (198); in
this case, he wants to read the papers Alice left him but is prevented
from doing so (198-99). This is perhaps a trivial example, but a telling
one nonetheless, since these papers will later form part of the evidence
that incriminates him by implicating him in the Jacobite rebellion. In
addition, the narrator explicitly comments on the fact of Waverley's
passivity as in me, 7, and the fact that he is influenced by others in III
4 and 5. So the mental state of Waverley describes the abilities, he
has. It does not need any specific event to follow to recognize the true
inner-self of Waverley.
Waverley's passivity is perhaps also reflected in the several
aliases which he is forced to adopt towards the end of the novel:
Williams, Butler, and Stanley (305, 311) and also in his several
changes of costume — English civilian dress, English military
uniform, Highland dress, Stuart military uniform, poor English
clothes, and the fashionable English dress of a rich man. The apogee
of this "dressing up" comes in the portrait painted of him and Fergus
which hangs in Tully Veolan at the end. So the physical appearances
prove that Waverley has a flexible nature as well as not a static
character.
Since the ‘stream of consciousness' novelists, like Virginia
Woolf, believe that the individual's reaction to any given situation is
determined by the sum of his past experience, it follows that everyone
is in some sense a prisoner of his own individuality. In such a world
of loneliness, there is no scope for love, because each personality,
being determined by past history, is unique.

5. But in Waverley, the scene is little ambiguous. We found two
of beautiful ladies, Flora and Rose. Both capable of becoming the
heroine of the novel. Despite having good qualities, Flora did not
qualify for the race of becoming the heroine of Waverley.Flora we
could wish was never called Miss Mac-Ivor because in this country
there are tribes of vulgar Miss Macs, and this association is
unfavorable to the sublime and beautiful of your Flora—she is a true
heroine. Her first appearance seized upon the mind and enchanted us
so completely, that we were certain she was to be Scott’s heroine, and
the wife of your hero—but with what inimitable art writer gradually
convince the reader that she was not, as she said of herself, capable of
making Waverley happy; leaving her in full possession of our
admiration, writer first make us pity, then love, and at last give our
undivided affection to Rose Bradwardine—sweet Scotch Rose! The
last scene between Flora and Waverley is highly pathetic—that bridal
garment was shroud; because when the heart is touched we seldom
use the metaphor. So using these kinds of turning affections and
metaphor like shroud gave a sad picture as a theme of loneliness and
the world full of hatred.
Fergus Mac-Ivor is a character drawn by a master's pencil, from
his first introduction in the wilds of the Highlands to the final scene
before his execution, all the various features which the author
conceived are fully expressed. Even in his last moments, while we
shudder at his wild and intriguing ambition, we admire his original
and powerful genius, we honour his generous and intrepid fidelity. If
feminine softness, joined to the most romantic patriotism, can delight
our readers, of Flora they will feel themselves the devoted admirers.
Of Rose Bradwardine we read more than we see; the sweetness of her
character and the silent warmth of her affection for our hero render
her worthy of him.
It is in the technique of characterization that the ‘stream of
consciousness' novelist is responsible for an important development.
Previously two different methods were adopted by the novelists in the
delineation of character. Either the personalities of characters in

6. fiction emerge from a chronological account of a group of events and
the character's reaction to it; or we are given a descriptive portrait of
the character first, so that we know what to expect, and the resulting
actions and reactions of characters fill in and elaborate that picture.
The first method we see in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, where
in the beginning there is no hint of Michael’s real nature or
personality. That emerges from the story itself. The second method is
seen in Trollope’sBarchester Towers, where in the early chapter we
get general sketches of the characters of Dr. Proudie and
Mrs. Proudie, and in the later chapter we see the application to
particular events of the general principle already enunciated. whereas
Waverley does change. We are given long initial descriptions of
Waverley's personality and attitudes in chapters 3 and 4 of Volume I,
and in Volume II, 4 the narrator again offers a long analysis of
Waverley’s character and also shows Waverley indulging in self-
analysis. So the novel has the bothways of characterization.
One feature of the modern novel is its tendency towards
subjectivism, and away from what might be called "objective
realism". Objective idealism is an idealistic metaphysics that
postulates that there is in an important sense only one perceiver and
that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived. In the novels of
Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence etc. there is an increasing
emphasis on the inner life of the individual, more of a sense of the
individual self as sovereign and more 'authentic' than the
society/community "outside.
Whichever view is taken off the originality of early twentieth-
century fiction it is still possible to identify certain characteristics
which are all part of a general movement towards subjectivism and
personalism in the modern novel. We find most of these qualities in
Waverley.

7. This include:
(a)
Time and plot: a movement away from viewing characters in
relation to 'Public external Time' or History, towards internalised and
subjective experience of time, 'personal time' - for example, Waverley
has done a journey towards recognization of himself to be respected
person in the family. He travelled many places, found a number of
elderly and wise people to learn. For example, in new forms of a plot:
the 'one-day novel', or novels of the growth of consciousness or the
individual 'soul'. Waverley can be seen as the growth of consciousness
and the individual soul.
(b)
Characterisation: a movement towards seeing a character and
the self as fluid, irreducible, elusive, interiorised, for example, Scott’s
depiction of Flora and Rose.
(c)
Narration: a general tendency towards unreliable or personified
narration, and with narration being subjective, non-authoritative,
interrogative, or disappearing from the scene. Scott is not in a mood of
giving lectures to masses about patriotism, or dying for the country
but it is about Waverley self-honour.
(d)
Language and imagery/symbolism: a tendency towards greater
depth and density, more reliance on symbolic and metaphorical
modes. Scott seems different in his novel, he has given many poems
in it because he was a better poet than a prose writer. Metaphors are
there in great number.

8. (e)
Morality: again, more subjective, relative, provisional and
ambiguous, less authoritative and 'public', more local and shifting
(f)
New narrative modes which are anti- or post-Realist: the one-
day novel, the use of myth as a structuring principle, the reliance on
fable, allegory, dream or diary forms, a stream of consciousness
techniques. Waverley is composed of all these fragments, He narrates
some myths of that era, a story of an elderly witch, Janet Gellatley.
To conclude the assignment I give some one-line characteristics
which can clearly be seen in Waverley Novels which makes it as
Modern Novel.
 Another common characteristic of modernism is the decline of
the importance of religion. Many authors decided to replace
traditional religion with a new form of symbolism, which was
often pagan in origin……………………
 Chapters broken into fragments
 Sentences dissolved into the streams and flows of interior
psychic life.
 Traditional narration replaced with subjective narrative
 Consciousness”is the modern novels signature field of play.
 No moral preaching
 Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the novel.
 Individuals tended to focus more on personal concerns than on
larger social issues.