Dragonfly: Why Failure? (UPDATE)

Before leaving the idea of time travel and politics, I want to ruminate for a moment on Claire's particular historical perspective in Dragonfly:

     "What's to come."  What was to come?  I wondered.  What would come, if we were not successful in our efforts here, was an armed rebellion, an attempt at restoration of the Stuart monarchy, led by Prince Charles Edward Casimir Maria Sylvester Stuart, the son of the exiled king.
     "Bonnie Prince Charlie," I said softly to myself, looking over my reflection in the large pier glass.  He was here, now, in the same city, perhaps not too far away.  What would he be like?  I could think of him only in terms of his usual historical portrait, which showed a handsome, slightly effeminate youth of sixteen or so, with soft pink lips and powdered hair, in the fashion of the times.  Or the imagined paintings, showing a more robust version of the same thing, brandishing a broadsword as he stepped out of a boat onto the shore of Scotland.
     A Scotland he would ruin and lay waste in the effort to reclaim it for his father and himself.  Doomed to failure, he would attract enough support to cleave the country, and lead his followers through civil war to a bloody end on the field of Culloden.  Then he would flee to safety in France, but the retribution of his enemies would be exacted upon those he left behind.
     It was to prevent such a disaster that we had come.  It seemed incredible, thinking about it in the peace and luxury of Jared's house.  How did one stop a rebellion?  Well, if risings were fomented in taverns, perhaps they could be stopped over dinner tables.  (130-131)

There is a curious logic to Claire's and Jamie's attempt to prevent the Jacobite uprising.  There is no abstraction here--quite different from most 18th Century causes, in fact--no sense of justice or liberty to guide their endeavors.  Rather, this is what the genuine Jacobite's possess--and, in fact, what Geilis/Geilie possesses.

Knowing that an attempt--one, particular historical attempt--to recapture the throne of Scotland will end in failure, Claire decides that to prevent the failure, she (and Jamie) should try to prevent the attempt.  Best to stop the idealist--usurper?--rather than the English, who would be dealing out the retribution?  Assuming that it is possible to prevent the whole Rising, why would it not also be possible to insure its success?  If failure can be prevented by preventing the attempt, then surely failure might also be prevented by orchestrating success.  But then, how much of Claire's perspective comes from her own biases?  She was raised by an anthropologist, wedded to a historian, and remains altogether English.

For all the demonization of Geilis/Geilie, time traveler from 1968 whom, at this point in the narrative, the reader assumes burned as a witch, she is a Scot, and her (admittedly obsessive and fanatical) 1960s patriotism is a postcolonial one.  Perhaps it is once again a reactionary move that Claire, the representative of Empire, is the sympathetic voice?  Or perhaps the reader is asked to disagree with Claire and her prevention of the Rising.  I will be searching for narrative clues to whether the reader is asked to be skeptical of Claire's endeavor (which can theoretically happen--even though Claire controls the narrative).  I suspect that she is the voice of our sympathies--the worldly pacifist, or else the virtuous Imperialist.  At least, for now...

Update, January 10:

When I posited earlier that Claire chose failure rather than success for Charles Stuart's expedition, I was considering Claire's and Jamie's efforts to sabotage Charles's attempt at reclaiming the throne of Scotland in the hopes that he would change his mind and abandon the doomed quest. Since he does not change his mind, their efforts to sabotage and dissuade become successful efforts to sabotage his efforts--thereby insuring the failure of the Jacobite Rising. It's rather as if someone went back in time to sabotage the funding for weapons, supplies, and boats to carry soldiers to the beaches of Normandy in order to prevent the invasion from happening and prevent loss of life, only to have the plans carried out with inadequate resources so that the invasion ultimately fails, resulting in even more massive loss of life.  Except that in the case of Culloden, history does not change.

When it becomes clear that Charles has involved Jamie in treason, only one option remains. As his sister Jenny says,

"There's only one thing ye can do, my dearie. Ye must go and fight for Charles Stuart. Ye must help him win." (584)

Considering that Jamie is effectively forced to play the role he has been feigning throughout the novel, it becomes lamentable that he and Claire had indeed "succeeded in preventing Charles Stuart from getting money to finance his rebellion" (592). How, then, if they had instead used Jamie's business sense to finance it, and his apparent magnetism to gain the support of the nobles and the king?  Might we have had a genre change? And a whole lot more work for the author in the coming volumes?

Is it in fact the case that Jamie and Claire orchestrated the self-fulfilling prophecy of Culloden and the failed uprising and destruction of the Highland clans?

Speculative food for thought...