Burns on trial Would the Bard face cancellation in the ‘woke’ era?
It’s Burns Night soon, but should we celebrate it? Our National Poet is accused of everything from sympathy with slavery to sex crimes. Is it true? Our Writer at Large speaks to Scotland’s leading Burns scholars to find out
HE is a philanderer. A feminist. A racist. A champion of human rights. A tool of empire. A republican. He supported Scottish independence. He backed the union. He writes kitsch doggerel. He’s literary genius up there with Shakespeare. He is a rebel. He is a pillar of the establishment. A sectarian bigot. A man for all people. A symbol of tartanised tourist tat. A global Scottish icon.
Poor old Rabbie Burns. What is he really? Burns is a vehicle for just about every cause and complaint in modern Scotland. He’s endlessly hijacked and appropriated. For Scotland’s national poet, we seem to find little to agree on when it comes to Burns.
With Burns Night just around the corner, The Herald on Sunday met with Scotland’s leading Burns scholars at Glasgow University to separate myth from truth. Professor Gerry Carruthers founded the university’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies in 2007. Astonishingly, Scotland had no dedicated centre for the study of our greatest poet until then. Professor Kirsteen McCue became co-director shortly after the centre launched.
They are both on a mission to dispel the disinformation that has grown up around Burns since he died in 1796. Let’s start with the most persistent claim: Burns wasn’t just a “womaniser”, but a predator.
Sex pest?
AT the height of the MeToo movement, Scottish poet Liz Lochhead claimed that a letter Burns wrote implied he was a rapist. The letter mentioned Jean Armour, then pregnant and later Burns’s wife. In the letter, to a male friend, Burns bragged of giving his lover a “thundering scalade” – or military attack – which “electrified the very marrow of her bones”. Burns adds he “f****d her until she rejoiced”.
Lochhead called Burns “Weinsteinian”, and a “sex pest”, saying the “disgraceful boast … seemed very like a rape of his heavily pregnant girlfriend”. So, was he a male chauvinist pig? Even a predator? Carruthers has plenty to say. “There’s a piece of nonsense that gets trotted out – that he’s just doing what everyone else was doing. No he wasn’t. He was more sexually active because he’d more opportunity. It’s not necessarily easy to defend his behaviour on all occasions. But nonetheless it’s nonsensical presentism comparing him to Weinstein.”
By “presentism” Carruthers means inflicting today’s values onto the past. “Where’s the evidence of rape? In that letter, he says ‘I gave her a damn good seeing to and she cried out with joy’. Are those people who claim that’s rape, saying the rape victim cries out with joy? They need to look at their own sexual politics.
Nobody yet has shown any evidence of rape or sexual predatoriness. Yes, he’s promiscuous – there are at least 13 pregnancies with five women – but as far as we know all these partners were willing.
“Without wanting to whitewash him, the case against him is a very generic ‘he’s a man therefore he’s a b*****d’ – because of our idea of the way things should be, we want to go back and insert our views into that historical situation.”
Carruthers thinks it’s “stupid” calling Burns a sex pest. “What’s exactly does that mean? Where do we have the evidence? He chats up women, some go with him, some don’t. Why do we insist on this very presentist vocabulary and sellotaping it on top of Burns?”
Certainly, Burns “genuinely has high regard for the intellect of women” as he sends his manuscripts to women to read.
As a woman, does McCue feel differently? “It’s problematic when you start digging about