32 pages • 1 hour read
Robert BurnsTam O’Shanter
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1791A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Anti-Hero
Tam O’Shanter is many things—he is carefree, reckless, curious, sensual, full of appetite and energy—but he is hardly admirable. As the central character of a large-scale narrative, Tam would be expected to be the story’s hero and to behave heroically. Tam lacks the higher dimensions traditionally associated with heroes since Homer. He makes poor decisions; he is selfish, he lacks control of his impulses, he drinks compulsively and disregards the feelings and needs of his wife. He is neither brave, moral, or noble.
Yet, a reader cannot help but sympathize with Tam and his increasingly dangerous dilemma. In this, Tam O’Shanter represents an anti-hero, a literary tradition that positions thoroughly unheroic but nevertheless likable characters in the center of a narrative where their fumbling (mis)fortune endows the character with a kind of sympathy, even a grudging endearment. Unlike those towering heroic figures from the epics of Antiquity, Tam is one of us placed in a position where with luck and a bit of scrappy resourcefulness he triumphs despite not because of who he is. From the daring Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost to the befuddled Hamlet and Disney’s charismatic Captain Jack Sparrow, the figure of the reprobate emerges as someone who commands a level of admiration and down-to-earth relatability.
The Haunted Church
Although Robert Burns was a Romantic at heart, he was in his intellect a stone-cold product of the Enlightenment, which for close to a century had cast a hard and uncompromising eye on the failed institution of the Christian Church, dismissing its hierarchy and its grand drama of salvation and damnation.
As a product of the Enlightenment, Burns uses the abandoned church to mock the pretenses of the Christian faith. After all, the witches could have held their ball in a cemetery or the woods or in any convenient house. The church reveals Burns’ delightfully stinging critique of a faith he deemed flawed. What first attracts Tam’s attention as he reluctantly heads home from the tavern is that hellfire glancing from all the windows of the empty church, Burns as caustic wit fusing images of the Church with hellfire and damnation. The Church is not aglow with the heavenly light of grace. Among the macabre objects that decorate the church, Burns positions not one but three hearts of priests, black with sin. In the end God does not intervene to assert dominion—in fact God and the legions of angels do not appear at all; only Tam’s scrappy resourcefulness saves him. Using the Church as his setting for the unholy celebration of the legions of Hell, Burns suggests the profound failure of the Christian Church and suggests that the entire drama of demons and angels is best expressed not in sacred texts but in a delightfully entertaining mockery of an epic.
The Horse’s Tail
In the end the only one who pays for Tam’s carelessness and recklessness is his long-suffering horse Meg. In the chase that closes Tam’s night, the witch manages to snatch Meg’s tail before Tam gets safely across the bridge. The horse, now with a stub instead of a tail, stands as the symbol for heroic sacrifice typical in epics of antiquity. The horse’s now bare rump testifies to the reality of the adventure—without that tell-tale evidence the entire night could be dismissed as the wild and elaborate conjuring.
The tale, then, rests on the tail. The horse’s bare backside is the badge of honor, the evidence of heroics and the determination to triumph, literally, over the forces of evil. That it is a horse’s tail, hardly a radiant symbol of grand achievement, provides Burns’ epic with its happily mocking climax. The horse’s tail thus symbolizes both the heroism of Tam’s escape and the silliness of his escapade.
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