GREAT LITERARY LADY: Ivanhoe’s Rebecca
Ivanhoe (1819) is a chivalric romance, complete with jousting, sieges, trial by combat, King Richard and even Robin Hood. Wilfred of Ivanhoe is a Saxon noble, sympathetic to the Normans, who is banished by his father, Sir Cedric, for wanting to marry his father’s ward, the Lady Rowena. Sir Cedric hopes to secure a dynastic Saxon marriage between Rowena and Athelstane.
However, it is Rebecca, daughter of Isaac the Jew, who is the novel’s real female centre, rather than ‘damsel in distress’ Rowena – and one of the first positive representations of a Jewish woman in English literature. Exotic and lustrously beautiful, she is also an educated, canny protagonist.
Rebecca arranges for Ivanhoe to be given a horse and armour for the joust, and nurses him afterwards, when he’s been wounded. He fights as her champion in the concluding trial by combat against Sir Brian de Bois- Guilbert, who wanted her as a mistress. But although she loves Ivanhoe, she refuses to betray her faith for the sake of marriage.
Scott shows how Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultures united to become English, but he also wanted to contest historic British anti-Semitism. Rebecca – intellectual equal to any man – challenges Ivanhoe, arguing that the code of chivalry is just a pointless excuse for perpetual war.
The Georgians and Victorians loved Scott’s tale of knights and nationhood, but disliked his realist conclusion, in which Rebecca and her father emigrate to more tolerant Spain.
However, it is Rebecca, daughter of Isaac the Jew, who is the novel’s real female centre, rather than ‘damsel in distress’ Rowena – and one of the first positive representations of a Jewish woman in English literature. Exotic and lustrously beautiful, she is also an educated, canny protagonist.
Rebecca arranges for Ivanhoe to be given a horse and armour for the joust, and nurses him afterwards, when he’s been wounded. He fights as her champion in the concluding trial by combat against Sir Brian de Bois- Guilbert, who wanted her as a mistress. But although she loves Ivanhoe, she refuses to betray her faith for the sake of marriage.
Scott shows how Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultures united to become English, but he also wanted to contest historic British anti-Semitism. Rebecca – intellectual equal to any man – challenges Ivanhoe, arguing that the code of chivalry is just a pointless excuse for perpetual war.
The Georgians and Victorians loved Scott’s tale of knights and nationhood, but disliked his realist conclusion, in which Rebecca and her father emigrate to more tolerant Spain.