Passionate friendships

Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels.

Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels. Nevertheless, writing of the relationship between the two young men who share most of the narrative in Redgauntlet, Professor David Hewitt, editor of the splendid Edinburgh Edition, declares ‘Alan and Darsie are in love with each other. There is absolutely no suggestion of their relationship being physical, but the love is overt.’ They regularly express passionate friendship for each other in the letters they exchange, and when Alan displays his interest in the girl whom he knows only as ‘Green Mantle’, Darsie ‘uses the words in which David laments the death of Jonathan, “my love for Alan Fairford surpasses the love of woman” ’ . Then, acknowledging that ‘this fair unknown has made a deeper impression’ on Alan than he is ready to admit, Darsie tell him he ‘shall see I can tear the arrow from my own wound, barb and all’. ‘The arrow he pulls out is Cupid’s,’ Hewitt writes, ‘and implies erotic desire.’

The argument is convincing, Hewitt also adducing much additional evidence. Moreover, in an uncanny anticipation of modern usage, Alan’s father, the worthy and deeply respectable Edinburgh lawyer, is happy when Darsie sets off on his travels because it affords ‘the means of separating Alan from his gay companion’. To Saunders Fairford’s mind, the close friendship between the boys was a disturbing one, not only, one senses, because of his fear that it would distract Alan from his career. Indeed it does just that, for, on learning that Darsie is in danger, Alan abandons his first case and his vexatious client, and dashes off in search of his friend.