ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the way Scott presents competence in space-conquering activities in three heroines across his career: from Ellen Douglas rowing in The Lady of the Lake, Jeanie Deans walking in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, and Anne of Geierstein mountaineering. Scott converts them into activities for the specular gaze of the reader. The Lady of the Lake provides Scott's first athletic heroine, but also hedging devices to reassure his readers that the piquant spectacle she offers can be an image of desirable femininity. Ellen's powers are assimilated to a mixture of classical and romance models suggesting the otherworldly, as a mode of containing the implications of female bodily competence. Once there, Ellen, the 'mountain-maiden' still holds the secret of the path that leads to what Scott's note calls a 'place of retreat for the hour of necessity' but what the poem, calls a 'rustic bower' and 'an enchanted hall'.
