The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population
Charlotte Sussman, University of Colorado
Volume 15, no. 1, October 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
After Effie Deans is convicted of infanticide, one of the other characters in The Heart of Midlothian remarks on the seeming hypocrisy of that legal decision. Says Plumdamas: “Do you think our auld enemies of England care a boddle whether we didna kill ane anither, skin and birn, horse and foot, men, women, and bairns, all and sindry, omnes et singulos, as Mr. Crossmyloof says?” A reasonable enough assumption, one might think. Yet, Scott’s novel proves Plumdamas wrong about the value of Scottish bodies to England, and thus wrong about the nature of “internal colonialism.” When the fate of Effie’s still-living child is revealed, it neatly refutes Plumdamas’s claim. Rather than dying at his mother’s hand, he has been purchased by “an agent in a horrible trade that carried on between Scotland and America, for supplying the plantations with servants,” that is, with “human flesh” (501). Unwanted, undomesticated, the child is commodified by a system that needs bodies to power colonial production. In this aspect of its plot, The Heart of Midlothian comes close to the vision of one eighteenth-century reformer, who thought Scotland might become “A People-Warren for supplying [the] King with brave soldiers and sailors and the more fertile parts of the kingdom with faithful servants of every description.” Scottish bodies acquire the most value in the process of imperial expansion not when they kill each other, but when they become portable units of labour.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “colonialism” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
Penelope Aubin and Narratives of Empire
by EDWARD J. KOZACZKA (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme
by INGVILD HAGEN KJØRHOLT (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
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