Page 269 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

258 ENGLISH STUDIES

the hero to discard his glamorous careerist fiancee, who painlessly transfers her
affections to the duke, thus aptly supplementing her suspect femininity with an
equally defective masculinity (he has a ‘drooping moustache’). The three major
narrative strands show a close formal correspondence. In each three terms must
be reduced to two: a false claimant must be eliminated and the true one revealed.
In the marriage narrative the wrong woman is neatly removed, to be replaced by
the right one. In the property narrative the false heir gives way to the true one but
is reincorporated by becoming virtually the hero’s son. In the heather narrative
the plant is ‘stolen’, then recovered for its true owner, and potential
unpleasantness is avoided by the discovery that it was not stolen at all, but
merely removed inadvertently by a child, whose working-class mother is
satisfyingly abject and deferential. As the title suggests, the first two narratives
are mediated by the third, not only because the pursuit and recovery of the
heather actually provides the conditions for their successful outcome, but also
because at the level of formal functions it suggests the metaphorical mechanism
by which that outcome is accomplished: hybridization.
The text accords a surprising and seemingly irrelevant prominence to
nationality: Scottish, English, American. Each is variously nuanced, but it is not
difficult to see that problematics of gender, of ownership and domesticity, even,
marginally, of class are all condensed into the central motif of nationality. A
textual schema might look like this:

From this it can be seen that the inevitable rightness of the narrative
resolution is already composed, from the beginning, in the terms of a sub-
narrative ideology of hybridization. The cross-breeding of elements that
may in themselves be decayed, effete or crass produces a stronger, purer
stock—an alliance of aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie, of English-
speaking nations, above all of man and woman, children and home: the