ABSTRACT
Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century (1824) combines many of the formal and thematic dimensions of friendship that contributed to the development of the novel genre in the later Hanoverian decades. Scott (1771-1832) presents friendship both as key quality of homo-and heterosocial relations that inspires virtuous conduct, and as a value in its own right that wants – and receives – adherence over familial obligations. The friendship motif also features as a core element in the plot, and repeatedly as a stimulus of narrative action. In addition, the novel realizes a fictional solution to an actual historical conflict with the character constellation of two friends positioned at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The actions of the autodiegetic narrative agents are occasioned and directed by friendship, which characterizes the information they share, and the fictional means by which they convey it. The novel’s different narrative perspectives may confirm, complement, or contradict their respective versions of the story, but are shown to possess equal value for the semantics of the text. Friendship therefore is the quality that enables what I call the novel’s perceptive pluralism.
