1 Outlander 12 & 13: Lallybroch & The Watch: You can’t go home again; gender roles transitioning

Iane (Steve Cree) and Jamie (Sam Heugan) talking of memories shared after dinner (“Lallybroch,” (Episode 12, scripted Anne Kenney)

Claire: You missed the whirlwind.
Jamie: The what?
Claire: The servants. They tore through here like dervishes. I’d barely turned my back, and they’d cleared away all of Jenny and Ian’s things.
Jamie: It’s almost exactly how I remember it. My father always had a book over there open at the page he was reading.
Claire: Hmm.
Jamie: And he used to put his boots here.
Claire: Hmm.
Jamie: And he used to keep his Keep his Ah His blade.
Claire: Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s Viking, I think.
Jamie: Aye.
Claire: Five-lobed pommel. Tenth century. I told you, I was raised by an archeologist. I recognize the patterns on the hilt. It’s a fine example.
Jamie: I’d hardly tiptoe in here as a boy, so sacred was the Laird’s room. But I’d slip in when he was out at the fields just to hold it for a few moments. Dream of the day it would be mine.
Claire: It is yours now, Jamie.
Jamie: Ours.
Claire: Ours.
Jamie: And my father, he built this place, ye ken. His blood and sweat are in this stone. This land. And now his bones are as well. They buried him out in the graveyard next to my mother and my brother, Willie (“Lallybroch,” 12)

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) helping Jenny (Laura Donnelly) to give birth to a breech baby (“The Watch,” Episode 13, scripted Tony Graphia)

Jenny: I’m bursting.
Claire: I’d no idea it flowed liked that.
Jenny: Aye, the bairn’s sucking starts the milk. Then all the child need do is swallow. Ah! Feels much better. I cannot leave wee Maggie too long. It’s a nuisance. Everything to do with bairns is a nuisance, almost …
— on the road seeking Jamie (“The Search,” Episode 14)

Dear friends and readers,

What’s most striking about this pair of episodes, is how strongly it differs from Gabaldon’s Outlander. In Gabaldon’s book we have an idyllic interlude of home-coming, which might seem to project what a happy life Jamie and Claire could lead if they were not subject Scottish peoples in post-colonial British police state; in the mini-series as written by Kenney and Grapia, the lesson is one can’t go home again. The first hour is continual tension, misunderstanding, misapprehension, followed by a brief reconciliation and living together, to be followed by another set of recriminatory scenes; not much time goes by before the local protection racket, the watch comes, and the fear is they will turn Jamie in for the ransom. When they do not, there is the problem of trying to free Jamie of the charge, and the choice of the English traitor-spy turns out to be the wrongest of turns. Jamie is re-taken into custody to be sent to Black Jack Randall. To say Jamie and Claire are forced to realize he cannot remain at home in safety is not to reach the horror of what’s in store for him.

The male actors in Tara Bennett’s The Making of Outlander, refer how they understand the series to male soap opera series set in contemporary places and times: when I shut the door on Claire, it’s like Michael shutting the door on Diane Keaton in The Godfather says Graham McTavish as Dougal MacKenzie; the writers and directors sometimes say the same sort of thing: Toni Graphia says she had in mind The Sopanos as they wrote, directed and acted The Watch. Gabaldon had none of this in mind in her book but rather a loving recreation of a past world through reference to historical artefacts and ways of life, which is then wrecked by the intrusion of marauding bands of men in conflict.

Jamie (Sam Heughan, in front of the horse) and Claire (Caitriona Balfe, by its side), approaching Lallybroch (12)

After Claire has told Jamie the truth about who she is, where she comes from, and she has made what she feels is a permanent (irretrievable) choice not to try to escape through Craig Na Dun to the mid-20th century, Frank, and a relatively much individually safer life, but make a life for herself in the 18th, with Jamie and his home, Lally Broch, in the book there is a several chapter lingering integration into Lallybroch for the Laird and his wife. Yes an initial high conflict because Jamie still believes his sister, Jenny (Laura Donnelly) was raped, impregnated, gave birth to Black Jack Randall’s (Tobias Menzies) child, lived with an English officer after that, and has to be disabused of this nightmare. The child is her sweetheart, the disabled Ian’s (Steve Cree), and she is married to him, expecting another. But the clash and painful memories over, a beautiful comforting sequence of family life, farming, collecting rents, settling wrong-doing (which includes, as in the film, an abusive father whose son becomes part of the Fraser household) is as lingering as the euphoric halcyon moments of the few days after Claire and Jamie’s wedding (I refer to the fishing together sequence in the book), ensues.

Claire’s helping Jenny give birth is part of that even though it is sandwiched in between the life-threatening visit of the “protection” blackmailing Watch, which ends in both book and film disaster: Horrocks, the traitor to the English, while himself blackmailing Jamie for money not to deliver him to the English, sets up an ambush for the Watch: MacQuarrie who we have learned has sterling qualities is hanged, and Jamie taken into custody and returned to the sadistic Black Jack.

So in the book we have a 21st century take on family life, as first named in Thomas Wolfe’s novel (at the time a favorite among teenage boys, equivalent say to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), young man growing up; in the movie the crudity of macho male popular TV, pastiche NYC Italian style. A great deal of both episodes is taken up by male confrontations. Episode 12 ends and 13 begins with MacQuarrie’s gun shoved in Jamie’s face, Claire’s POV from above stairs:

Taran MacQuarrie (Douglas Henshall), chief of the Watch, in characteristic pose (13)

Not only all the permutations of different gangs of males one-upping one another (Frasers versus the English in flashbacks, Frasers versus the Watch, Horrocks versus Jamie), but Jamie’s memories of Black Jack invading his house, near raping his sister, and Jamie himself almost captured by an English watch just passing by where the officer observes the mill is not working and comes over to help, the Watch going out and ambushed.

MacQuarrie (riding alongside Jamie): “Pale death visits with impartial footthe cottages of the poor and the castles of the rich”. These were made for Mary Stuart Real barrel of laughs, that one. You know, I don’t mind death as long as it comes under an open sky.
Jamie: Myself as well.”

The scripts have less of the above kind of poetry. Only in the scenes of Jamie and Claire upstairs in the room given up to him, in the scenes of eating, and most of all conversations between Jenny and Claire is the quality of the book’s chapters at this near end of the book brought out. In the book we are to experience the regret of loss when Jamie and Claire finally see they must flee to France for his safety as well as hers; the coming Culloden is then full tragedy. In the mini-series neither the original home or Jamie’s place in clan MacKenzie (at Castle Leoch) proven haven and refuge.

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Close-up of Jamie during one of the repeated flogging sequences and memories

Some thoughts: first looking back on the character of Jamie. Suzanne Jushasz in her Reading from the Heart, says essential, crucial to women’s romance is the mother figure disguised as a man, the protector who cares above all for and about you; from Rhett Butler (Gone with the Wind) to Mr Knightley (Emma). Gabaldon has undermined yet hit that squarely with Jamie. There is a pattern across the first season which is much more emphatic in the book which we see brought to final crisis in the recapture of Jamie: the subaltern hero is intensely punished. In the first episode (“Sassenach”) when Claire is transported to the 18th century and takes care of Jamie’s shoulder, is put on his horse, and the two ride to Castle Leogh, what is omitted from the film is his intense tenderness towards her right away. In the book Gabaldon insists on how he quietly is enduring great pain; he is immensely physically strong but self-sacrificing and the book’s corresponding chapter ends with him wrapping her tenderly in a blanket in the room in Castle Leogh, telling her she need never feel scared with she is with him, and she dissolves in tears.

Gabaldon has at the same time pulled the sadistic aggressive violent man (half-crazed serial killers) into the 18th century in the person of Black Jack, John Wolverton (wolf) Randall out of the 20th century gentle frank. The novel and this mini-series can be seen as deeply anti-homosexual — there is a tradition starting in mid-20th century when the films finally presented gay men they were sadistic twisted power- and control hungry people. Tim Piggott-Smith as the British officer in India in The Jewel in the Crown. What Frank does to Jamie is what Tim Piggot-Smith played and did to the Indian hero of that mini-series and the whole book series. Jamie is given a position where he can be protective (as the Indian hero could not); — he is also a Lord, aristocratic in the subordinate culture; Claire understands quickly in episode 1 that he matters because the men will not leave him and want him better. No one cares about the Indian hero of Jewel in the Crown, that’s why the initial raped white heroine is thrown away.

But she goes beyond this. In the wedding sequence and first love-making the book emphasizes Jamie’s virginity in ways the film does not dare. Much is made of his younger age, her experience: it is he who blushes, who feels grateful she has been generous (she praises his performance), his history is told by him in such a way as to emphasize the danger of the non-heir against other men if he’s perceived as a popular rival. It’s obvious that the last two episodes which come out of this disastrous or idyllic return home sequence are horrifyingly abusive of Jamie Fraser: he is tortured into submitting to anal sex, his spirit to resist broken by breaking his hand, flogging. I had realized his back shows horrific treatment too, but now bringing the mini-series together with the book I realize this a pattern: the ritual humiliation of the heroine (occurs much more weakly and not as centrally) is nothing to this. I’m told in Games of Thrones, men are abused, humiliated and killed off; in Agents of Shield these central subaltern central heroes go through enormous emotional turmoil. Gender roles are transitioning.

The first camera shot of Ian

I had noticed this pattern in Tudor dramas on film (Wolf Hall, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Hollow Crown, Henry 8 and Elizabeth I films): the men took the place hitherto reserved for the heroine, and took it that the Henry 8 story appeal was the ability to show masculinity of a very different sort than the modern controlled invulnerable (unattacked mostly) hero, but maybe not. In Outlander this fits the (mild or undeveloped very much) post-colonial perspective, an unintended consequence inheritance from Walter Scott is carried into gender transformations. I could suggest the use of a disabled man, also insisted upon, photographed to stress his crippling, with Colum Mackenzie also suffering from a debiltating disease is part of this, but I suspect these two characters are part of the modern trend to include disabled people in stories.

Jenny gives Claire some ancient bracelets

I’ve not done justice at all to the female friendships in this series: Claire and Mrs Fitzgibbons (Annette Badlands), Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeeck), and now Jenny Fraser (Laura Donnelly). Outlander passes the Bechtel test with ease: women have conversations and about many things beyond men. Perhaps not predominantly but enough. Claire saves Mrs Fitzgibbons’s god-child; she and Geillis share information about herbs and healing (and eventually that they are both time-travelers) and now Claire with Jenny learns about the household, discusses past history and helps her give birth.. In this scene she is using their friendship to focus on an authentic feeling archeaological object.

Let’s recall that Gabaldon has her heroine, Claire, brought up by an archeaologist, Uncle Lamb: it’s not improbable her parents might have been killed, but to be adopted by a wandering anthropologically minded bachelor around ancient sites is the sort of content-rich particular that calls attention to itself — when Claire is not reminding us. Jerome de Troot (Consuming Historical Fiction) writes of the modern ubiquity of historical fiction and film, and tells us respect for the genre has gone way up since writers became post-modern and post-colonial. The precious historical remains, be it a previous manuscript or book, or object or remains are remnants of an unknowable past that have survived. Reality is not as unknowable as we fear. The modern ethic take on it, removing all false idealism or sentimentality, can sustain us while we come into contact with something that feels authentic or is made to feel so.

A drawing of the houses around and Lallybroch

Today people are likely to allude to previous extant older texts, to use real pictures from the past (remember Tracey Chevalier’s Girl with the Pearl Earring). Gabaldon’s choice of the highlands, her use of a few of the hundreds of castles found in Scotland, of neolithic stones, and all sorts of 18th century artefacts tie us back to the imagined and real history. The time-traveling fantasy enables you to give the dead a life again, a living presence and show the life of the past compared to and interwoven with the present. At least I think Gabaldon had this conscious idea. The way she insists on the wounds, the scars, the breakage and recovery of parts of Jamie’s body is indicative. In Wallace’s Digging the Dirt (studies in archeaology) she shows how when we find corpse and skeletons of earlier eras, they show harsh violence inflicted on the bodies of these people, lots of fragile parts hurt too . Not in The Making of Outlander but in her own Outlandish Companion are found countless drawings, illustrations and sometimes photos of archeaological remains, ritual objects, ruins and the flora and fauna of Scotland there for generations past. All her many uses of archeaology and cultural anthropology are romancing ways of crossing the unknowability of the past

Seascape with ancient rocks

Ellen