Dislocating Literature: The Novel and the ~yetna Green Romance, LISA O'CONNELL Historians and theorists of the novel have rarely, if ever, noted that the genre's spiritual home, at least in the minds of late eighteenth-century British conserva- tive cultural commentators, was the Scottish border village of Gretna Green. When William Gilpin, the theorist of the picturesque, traveled through Scotland in 1776, he passed through Gretna on his return to England. The village, though scenically nondescript, was already famous as a resort for young lovers wishing to marry clandestinely in defiance of their parents' wishes and of England's mar- riage laws. In his Observations relative ... to the picturesque beauty .. . of Great Britain (1789), Gilpin remembers his encounter with Gretna like this: Gretna-green .. . is not a disagreeable scene. The village is concealed by a grove of trees; which occupy a gentle rise; at the end of which stands the church: and the picture isfinished with two distances.. . . Of all the seminaries in Europe, this is the seat, where that species of literature, c'alled novel-writing, may be the most successfilly studied. A few months conversation with the literati of this place, will furnish the inquisitive student with such afund of anecdotes, that with a moderate share of imagination in tacking them together, he may spin out as many volumes as he pleases.-ln his hands may shine the delicacy of that nymph, and an apology for her conduct, who unsupported by a father, unattended by a sister, boldly throws herself into the arms of some adventurer;Pies in thefice of every thing, that bears the name of decorum; endures the illiberal laugh, and jest of a whole country, through which she runs; mixes in the shocking scenes of this vile place, where every thing that is low, indelicate, and abominable presides; (no Loves and Graces to hold the nuptial torch, or lead the hymeneal dance; an inn the temple, and an innkeeper the priest;) and sujfers her name to be inrolled (I had almost said) in the records of prostitution. (2: 107-09) As a travel writer, Gilpin is interested in the particularity of locales, their specific "conversation," as he terms it. And for him Gretna is unique in that it is associ- ated with the modes of gossip and scandal that preoccupy the popular novel. The association works by way of an homology: the Gretna wedding is the lowest form of marriage, just as the novel is the lowest form of cultural production. This link turns a scene, not itself "disagreeable," into a "vile place" in which a prosti- tuted bride becomes a figure for a wider cultural degeneration quite opposed to the picturesque aesthetic. Since that aesthetic lies behind Gilpin's attempt to map the topography of Britain in terms of a cultural hierarchy of genres and