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R.L. Stevenson's Kidnapped: Indigenousness Begins at Home

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R.L. Stevenson's Kidnapped: Indigenousness Begins at Home ELOHI Peuples indigènes et environnement 4 | 2013 L’invention de l’indigène écologiste R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped: indigenousness begins at home Nathalie Jaëck Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/elohi/565 DOI: 10.4000/elohi.565 ISSN: 2268-5243 Publisher Presses universitaires de Bordeaux Printed version Date of publication: 1 July 2013 Number of pages: 61-75 ISBN: 978-2-86781-927-8 ISSN: 2431-8175 Electronic reference Nathalie Jaëck, « R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped: indigenousness begins at home », ELOHI [Online], 4 | 2013, Online since 01 July 2014, connection on 01 May 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ elohi/565 ; DOI : 10.4000/elohi.565 © PUB-CLIMAS R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped: indigenousness begins at home. NATHALIE JAËCK E.A. CLIMAS, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne It might seem to take a taste for paradox to elect Kidnapped, one of Stevenson’s most deeply Scottish novels, to exemplify his stance with indigenous peoples and the environment. Ater a life of traveling, Stevenson eventually settled in Samoa and ended his life there, becoming a staunch supporter of the Samoan desire for home rule and a defender of their rights, and endearing himself to the natives who called him Tusitala, “the teller of tales;” studying he Ebb-Tide or the In the South Seas where he explicitly condemns European colonial exploitation could thus seem the more obvious choice, and re-rooting indigenousness in Scotland might appear quite ironically ethnocentric.1 And yet, Stevenson’s later explicit 1. Oliver Buckton sums up the fact, which is now well-documented in Stevenson criticism: “His later South Seas writings are far more trenchant in their use of evidence on the devastating impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples and cultures” (30). Yet, critics have recently concentrated on the links between Scotland and Samoa in Stevenson’s experience and iction, particularly as fars his a analysis of imperial domination is concerned. As he himself developed in In the South Seas, he could ind in the Samoan situation a new eficient paradigm to look back upon and reassess the situation of imperia l domination imposed upon Highlanders. In Robert Louis Stevenson in the Paciic: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession, Roslyn Jolly deines Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped Stevenson published seven years later when he had settled in Samoa, as “a much more intellectual as well as a more political novel than Kidnapped” (119), and she carefully documents the fact that “critical interest in the ‘cross-fertilization’ between Stevenson’s Paciic experiences and his Scottish iction has tended to focus on comparisons betweenA Footnote to History and Catriona.” (119). She insists that Catriona’s “actual working out in both conceptual and psychological detail was signiicantly affected by Stevenson’s exposure to Paciic cultures betw een 1888 and 1892, and more particularly by his political experiences in Samoa in 1991-1992.” (Jolly: 121) The reade r can be referred here to Jolly’s exhaustive note n° 20, p. 121, where she fully refers to these pieces, quot ing in particular Letley’s introduction to Catriona, where he identiies the similarities betweenCatriona and A Footnote to History as far as the colonial situation is concerned. Oliver Buckton engages in a similar extensive comparison between the two books, and places it in the context of a broader assessment of the two countries’ separate colonial histories. He explicitly elects Catriona as the more adequate novel for the comparison, arguing that the atmosphere of the novel is “dramatically altered” from Kidnapped, and “stems from Stevenson’s observations of Samoan colonial politics” (202). Yet, I would like to follow in thequite alternative steps of Barry Menikov who, in Narrating Scotland, pointed out that as early as Kidnapped, published in 1886, Stevenson commented upon his country’s loss of indigenous culture, and linked the conlicts between the Highlands and the Lowlands to a political context that had much to do with imperial domination. ELOHI #2– Juill.-Déc. 2012 61 L’invention de l’indigène écologiste preoccupation with the issue, and more speciically with the link between in- digenousness and territorial claims, is much closer to the bone, rooted in the history of his Scottish homeland. Kidnapped is set in the Scottish Highlands in 1751, in a context of author- itative English occupation of the territory following the heavy defeat of the Jacobites at the battle of Culloden in 1746. I would like to prove in this paper that the novel can be read as a documented denunciation of what is forcefully described as an imperialist situation, based on the same politics of clearances and proscription that were implemented in overseas colonies: Kidnapped is an act of literary and political resistance, an alter-version of history reclaiming territorial possession for those (not so) “wild Highlanders” (101).2 It is the story of an unlikely friendship between young and naive David Balfour of Shaws, a Whig Lowlander by family tradition but whose personal political positions are rather unsettled, and who cautiously deines himself as “betwixt and between” (60), and Alan Breck Stewart, a dashing and unwavering Jacobite Highlander and outlaw, a fervent and heroic supporter of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Ater a few personal incidents involving being kidnapped by his uncle who does not want him to inherit the family fortune and who treacherously embarks him on a boat bound for the colonies, David meets Alan on the boat, ater he was rescued, the only survivor, from a sinking ship. here happens to be another convenient shipwreck allowing the two men to escape from the unscru- pulous crew, and the better part of the novel then consists in David’s and Alan’s wandering light across the Highlands in order to return safely to Edinburgh and redeem David’s property while escaping the vigilance of the Red Coats that swarm the country ater the murder of Colin Campbell, the Red Fox. David is the irst-person narrator, and as he meets with natives and travels their lands under the masterful guidance of Alan, he is led to reassess his mildly patronising and stereotypical vision of those supposedly uncivilized indige- nous clan peoples, and thus to question the politics of domination of Britain, gradually coming to link them to practises of cultural and economic impe- rialism. But beyond these elements of denunciation, Kidnapped also crucially constitutes a symbolical act of territorial re-appropriation (a political parallel to the personal embedding story indeed, since Kidnapped is explicitly the story of an illegal expropriation and the eforts of the young hero, David, to reclaim his property): not only do David and Alan outwit the English occupant through Alan’s superior intimate knowledge of the ground, and walk over the territory, 2. All the references to the novel will be to the following edition: Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, London: Penguin Classics, 1994 (1886). It is worth pointing out that Stevenson himself being a Lowlander, “the other” in terms of Highland culture, makes his capacity to plead the Highlanders’ cause all the more remarkable. 62 ELOHI #4– Juill.-Déc. 2013 R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped: indigenousness begins at home. thus reclaiming their possession, but Stevenson comes up with a very strange map, at the outset of the story, as warning paratext.3 In this sketch of “the probable course of David Balfour’s Wanderings”, he totally subverts the contemporary use of the map as an instrument of power, as a major tool of colonisation: he empties it from any registration of English presence,4 he seems to return the land to a terra incognita, as he inscribes the map with Alan’s and David’s course only, and thus erases the marks of colonial history, restoring the territory to its legitimate if not legal owners. In his de- constructed and unauthoritative map, Stevenson disengages geography from power,5 the Highlands are back to an all-open territory, disencumbered from received constructions of political geographies and identities, for David and Alan to explore freely and take over. he irst point to make clear is that in Kidnapped, Stevenson depicts the Highlands as a colonized territory, and intimates that the same rhetoric as for the native peoples of overseas colonies was used to deine savage Highlanders, both by the English, and by supposedly more civilized Lowlanders. Such a vi- sion was indeed quite common at the time, as is developed by Colin Calloway in his book “White People, Indians, and Highlanders”: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America6 where he “examines the common ground 3. As Stevenson explains in his “Note to the map”, he gave very minute instructions to his cousin, David Stevenson, who designed the map. He was very speciic about several quite disquieting elements: “the line must be sometimes dotted to show uncertainty; sometimes full” (xxiv) – as if some parts of this ictive itinerary were more ictive than others; he also insisted that the inal stage of David’s journey should be off the limits of the map, in its unregistered margins, as if to highlight the fact that no representation is ever exhaustive: “The line (full again) descends Balquhidder from the top, turns down St rathire, strikes over Uam Var, hits Alan Water above Kippendaire, descends Alan Water to the Forth, along the N. bank of Forth to Stirling bridge, and by road by Alloa, Clackmannan and Culross, till it issues from the map; for I fear we don’t reach Limekilns; which we really should have done, for from that point my hero crosses the Forth to Cawiden, and thence to Queensferry. Terminus Malorum. (xxi) The map the reade r is suggested to pore over before embarking on the reading is thus no ordinary illustrative map: its function is to insist on some formal dissident characteristics of the text, by being quite a dissident map itself.
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