Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Anne Grant and the 'Primitive': Highlanders and Mohawks"
Betty Hagglund
Department of English
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham 15
gcoffi@globalnet.co.uk
In 1773, the Glasgowborn teenager Anne Macvicar travelled through the Highlands of Scotland with her family. Her letters recounting that journey were later published as Letters from the Mountains (1806) and make lively reading. She met and married a local minister, James Grant, settled in the Highlands, began to learn to speak Gaelic and devoted much of her life to representing the "primitive" culture of the Highlanders to the outside world.
Anne Grant's response to the Highland landscape and to the Highland people was coloured not only by her own identity as a Lowlandborn Scot of Highland parentage but, perhaps even more significantly, by her early experience of another culture and people as a young adolescent in the colonies in Albany, New York, a mixed community which included Dutch, Scottish, English and native-born settlers, black slaves and Indians from a variety of tribes.
In both the American and the Scottish context, Grant explored what it meant both to be a settler and a traveller. Her early writing about the Highlands told of her travels, but she settled in Laggan with her husband and became a not uncritical interpreter to the wider world of the culture she found there, learning Gaelic just as those she most admired in Albany had learned Native American languages. Her descriptions of Albany looked at the development of a young society of colonists, but some of her most vivid writing about America was reserved for descriptions of her travel into the wilderness. In both places, Grant had a peculiar position as both outsider and insider, both participant and observer. Given her early experiences, it is perhaps not surprising that travel soon became a main theme in Grant's writings and all but one of her six books are either directly about travel or examine the interface between cultures.
For Grant there were direct parallels between the Mohawk Indians of her childhood and the Highlanders of her husband's parish in Laggan. Although other commentators linked the Highlanders with the American Indians as examples of primitive and savage peoples, Grant was one of the few writers who had direct personal experience of the two cultures upon which to base her observations.
In this paper, I will concentrate on Grant's representations of the Indians and of the Highlanders and on her response to the wilderness landscape she encountered in both places. In addition, I will look at Grant's contribution to the process by which the romantic image of Scotland was formed, an image which persists in travel writing and tourist literature today.
My work on Grant forms part of a larger project on women's travel writing about Scotland during the period 1770 - 1820.
Department of English
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham 15
England
home: 79 Esme Road
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Birmingham
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email: gcoffi@globalnet.co.uk
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Updated May 23, 1999