If Scotland Goes

Scotland, forever in two minds

By Brian Groom

Scottish writers have long been influenced by the idea of duality or the “divided self”: the national psyche as a kind of split personality. It is said to have to do with being a nation that is not a proper nation – a result of the 300 - year-old union with England, a much larger entity – and maintaining your identity while submerging it in someone else’s.

The bitter divisions on display during the country’s independence referendum campaign bring this notion freshly to mind. You see it in works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), in which a respected doctor changes into an evil creature free of conscience. James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions ...