Maureen Martin’s The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity represents a welcome and important contribution to a body of work on Scottish culture and national identity in the nineteenth century that has only now reached a kind of critical mass, particularly after devolution and the reinstitution of a Scottish parliament in 1999. Recent attention to Scotland’s position as a stateless nation in a postcolonial, postnational world has prompted a rethinking of the formation of Scottishness in the era of Britain’s rise as an imperial power. Though Martin frames her own analysis within critical terms now perhaps superseded by more recent thinking, she offers fresh and compelling insights on her subject. Martin focuses on the interplay between national identity and masculinity. The link between Scottish masculinity and Scottish national identity is well-covered territory, but much previous analysis has limited its scope to Scottish Highland masculinity and its rise to popularity in the early part of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the era of Ossian (1765) and Rob Roy (1817). Martin gives a much-needed fuller accounting, helped by the work of queer theorists such as Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, of the ways in which Scottish masculinity gets articulated through a complex interrelation between Scottish Highland, Lowland, and English masculinities.

Martin’s theoretical aims and methodology are encapsulated in chapter 1, which takes on a familiar trope of Scottish cultural history: the failed Jacobite Rebellion as the inauguration of a modern Scottish national identity. Reading both Walter Scott’s 1824 historical romance Redgauntlet and John Everett Millais’s 1853 genre painting, The Order of Release, Martin looks at the ways in which the defeat of Prince Charles’s Jacobite invasion, Scotland’s grand “lost cause,” is configured as the termination of Scotland as an independent state and the beginning of Scotland as a national narrative. In both painting and novel, the alignment of defeated Jacobitism with Scottishness and a particular mode of masculinity do the cultural work of cementing an Anglo-dominated British union. Both works enunciate a wild Highland “brawny masculinity” while containing its potential subversiveness by its incorporation, through inverted gender positions, into the British nation-state. Martin’s analysis is particularly suggestive in her reading of the homoerotics of national union that play out in Scott’s novel. In Redgauntlet, Martin argues, the Englishman finds his object of homosocial desire not in the Highlander but the Lowlander, signifying the uneasy relation between Scottish and English masculinities. Martin sees in these earlier works (not only in Scott but in the Gothic novels of James Hogg) the articulation of stark divisions in Scottish masculine identity, between Jacobite and Hanoverian, Highlander and Lowlander, English and Scottish. In this, Martin not only foregrounds the importance of Lowland masculinity, often overlooked in critical study, but the ways in which the construction of Scottish masculinity in the nineteenth century is bound up with the construction of English masculinity. This argument is given more substance in chapter 2, which examines the (English) craze for Highland deerstalking. Martin looks at deerstalking depictions in the popular press as well as in actual guidebooks on the sport. In these, Englishmen could lay claim to Scottish masculinity through manly (and for the vast majority of readers, vicarious) pursuit of wild animals amid a rugged and unforgiving landscape, while at same time reasserting English political and cultural dominance over Scotland.

In chapters 3 and 4, which take on the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, Martin probes more deeply the implications of the ascendancy of the Scottish Highland figure as the dominant image of Scottish masculinity for Scottish Lowland identity. In Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886), for example, we see the continuation of themes and associations established a generation before by Walter Scott, linking Jacobitism and a Highland warrior masculinity, which became the origin and repository of Scottish identity. Stevenson’s coming-of-age story of young Davie Balfour, in Martin’s line of thinking, poses a working out of the problematic of Lowland masculinity that seeks to appropriate Highland masculinity without being simply absorbed into Highland culture. Can this be achieved? For Martin, the answer is no. In Kidnapped the Lowlander maintains a troubled relationship to the Highland world, which increasingly urban and industrial Scots had both romanticized and marginalized. Highland masculinity is persistently resistant to appropriation. At the same time, Lowland efforts at self-“Celtification” mean a continued undermining and degrading of a masculinity “based on their own Lowland culture, traditions and achievements” (104). What is left at the end of Stevenson’s novel is a Scottish masculinity at war with itself. In this, Martin affirms the well-established notion of a split, conflicted Scottish identity, described by Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) as the “Caledonian antisyzygy” (“The Caledonian Antisyzgy and the Gaelic Idea,” The Modern Scot [1931–32]), which is said to reside in the core of modern Scottishness. In The Master of Ballantrae (1889), the conflicting poles of Scottish identity become more insistent in the characters of the two feuding brothers, Henry and James Drurie. Stevenson’s late work also continues to play out homoerotic and homophobic themes.

In her last chapter, Martin turns to femininity and Scottish women writers of the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and sees an attempt to rescue Scottish national identity from the masculine quandary established by (mostly male) writers such as Scott and Stevenson. In Margaret Oliphant’s essay contributions to Blackwood’s and her 1884 novel The Wizard’s Son, for example, Martin identifies an attempt to resolve the perennial dilemmas of Scottish masculinity by regendering the nation as female, which offers a “feminine vision of contemporary Scottish identity” (131). This work is carried through into the domain of visual representation in the Glasgow Style of art and design, manifested in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and Margaret MacDonald (1865–1933). Both artists looked to feminine motifs to supplant the grimy world of the industrialized city in which they worked and lived. In doing so, they, like Oliphant, provide an alternative femininity that registered as both Scottish and modern, moving beyond the constrictive figurations of gender and history by which Scottish identity seemed bounded. The focus of this last chapter recaps what is most useful and suggestive in Martin’s work—her exploration of gender and national identity beyond the well-examined manufacture of a romantic Highlands, post-Ossian, pre-Crofter’s Act (1886). Martin shows how the gendering of the Scottish nation in the nineteenth century did not begin and end with the wild Highlander. Still, she must acknowledge the persistence of the figure of the manly (Highland) Scot, still bekilted and bewitching, in contemporary British culture, which is tied, as Martin makes clear, to Scotland’s status as stateless nation in the British union. Martin’s work does what she hopes it would: it provides a closer understanding of “the conflicting, problematic, changing, multiple meanings of Englishness, Scottishness, and manhood in nineteenth-century Britain” (14).