Shame and honour again

Blogging Rob Roy: chapters 10 to 12 (Update: Corrected, this used to say 12-14)
Sometimes people argue that some social feature simply cannot be gotten rid of. Poverty is wrong, they will say, but humans are flawed such that it cannot be eliminated. We might say that this sort of argument is that X should be done but cannot be done.

I want to argue that the reason shame-honour values persist is because we keep choosing them. We can all think of spheres where they should not apply  but we also keep finding situations to use them.

It's analogous to alcohol and automobiles. The social cost for both these things is huge and if we only focused on the damage they do we'd all be prohibitionists. But the truth is that none of us would get rid of either. And we don't really want to get rid of shame either.

One of the great lessons of prohibition, by the way, was that it turned out that nobody thought the law should apply to them. They didn't want to stop drinking so much as they wanted to stop certain undesirable people from drinking while they continued to do so themselves.

In these chapters of Rob Roy we see a fascinating example of a man, Francis Osbaldistone, who wants to eliminate shame. He won't acknowledge it or consider it because all that matters to him is his innocence.

First, however, we get some more of Die Vernon's virtues and very attractive virtues they are. She can read and speak Latin, Greek and Gaelic. She can ride a horse as well as bridle and saddle him. She can jump the horse over a gate and she can fire a gun without blinking. She also has, this is pretty neat, two ancestors who appear in Shakespeare, on in a negative light and one positively. What she cannot do is anything a reasonable Jane Austen heroine might be expected to do and this is pointed out by another woman:

I can neither sew a tucker, nor work cross-stitch, nor make a pudding, nor—as the vicar's fat wife, with as much truth as elegance, good-will, and politeness, was pleased to say in my behalf—do any other useful thing in the varsal world.

You'd think that Frank would love this and you'd be right but he also wants to change Diana.  He thinks her lacking in feminine discretion.

He also displays  appalling ignorance and lack of tact when she starts talking about her family heritage and the honour she feels is due to that heritage.

He admires Rashleigh's public virtues and, we sense, either respects or fears these virtues, but also has criticism about Rashleigh's character and he delivers these rather smugly:

More learned than soundly wise—better acquainted with men's minds than with the moral principles that ought to regulate them, he had still powers of conversation which I have rarely seen equalled, never excelled.

And here he ought to have seen a warning because Rashleigh plays Frank like a fiddle. He quickly figures out that while Frank claims to care about innocence, he is very susceptible to suggestions concerning his honour. When Rashleigh suggests that he, Rashleigh, might marry Diana, not out of love but out of charity, Frank begins to lose it. His own sense of honour is so stirred up that he even begins to think less of Diana.

Addressing Tresham directly, Frank describes his flaw as pride, and pride it is, but it is specifically the suggest that Rashleigh might be his equal in matters of love with Diana (and he hasn't even admitted that love to himself yet) that gets Frank's goat. And boy does it get it. Mix in a little alcohol and he starts a fight and makes a fool of himself, thereby exhausting any honour he might have accumulated.

On Saturday we learn how Diana responds in Chapter 14.

Before leaving, I should note that Rashleigh also introduces a plot complication right out of a Gothic novel. Die Vernon must either marry one of Sir Hildebrand's sons or "take the veil". This is a favourite device of protestants slurring Catholicism at this point. Henry James is still doing in in The American almost a century later. It will be interesting to see what Sir Walter does with it.

Blogging Rob Roy begins here.

Next post will be here.