Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 3

Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 3 i Editors Dr Linda Dryden Professor Roderick Watson Reader in Cultural Studies English Studies Faculty of Arts and Social University of Stirling Sciences Stirling Craighouse FK9 4LA Napier University Scotland Edinburgh EH10 5LG Scotland Tel: 0131 455 6128 Tel: 01786 467500 Email:[email protected] Email: [email protected] Contributions are warmly invited and should be sent to either of the editors listed above. The text should be submitted in MS WORD files in MHRA format. All contributions are subject to review by members of the Editorial Board. Published by The Centre for Scottish Studies University of Stirling © The contributors 2006 ISSN: 1744-3857 Printed and bound in the UK by Antony Rowe Ltd. Chippenhan, Wiltshire. ii Journal of Stevenson Studies Editorial Board Professor Richard Ambrosini Professor Katherine Linehan Universita’ di Roma Tre Department of English Rome Oberlin College Ohio Professor Stephen Arata School of English Professor Barry Menikoff University of Virginia Department of English University of Hawaii at Professor Oliver Buckton Manoa School of English Florida Atlantic University Professor Glenda Norquay Department of English and Dr Jenni Calder Cultural History National Museum of Scotland Liverpool John Moores University Dr Linda Dryden Faculty of Arts and Social Professor Marshall Walker Science Department of English Napier University The University of Waikato Professor Richard Dury Professor Roderick Watson University of Bergamo Department of English (Consultant Editor) Studies University of Stirling Professor Gordon Hirsch Department of English University of Minnesota iii Contents Editorial .....................................................................................1 Jim C Wilson RLS ............................................................................................4 Katherine Linehan The devil can cite scripture: intertextual hauntings in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. ............................................5 Isaac Yue Metaphors and the discourse of the late-Victorian divided self: the cultural implications of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its Chinese translations .........................................33 Wendy R. Katz Stevenson, Conrad and the idea of the gentleman: Long John Silver and Gentleman Brown ................................................ 51 Laavanyan Ratnapalan Stevenson and cultural survivals in the South Seas ..............69 Saverio Tomaiuolo Under Mackellar’s eyes: metanarrative strategies in The Master of Ballantrae ..........................................................................85 Roger Swearingen Stevenson’s final text of Kidnapped ..................................... 111 Giuseppe Albano ‘Stand sicker in oor auncient ways’: Stevenson’s Scots drinking verse and the fulfilment of a pastoral fantasy .......................116 Benjamin A. Brabon Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries ........................................ 136 Richard Dury Renata Kobetts Miller, Recent Reinterpretations of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Why and How This Novel Continues to Affect Us. ...............................................................................141 iv Journal of Stevenson Studies 1 Editorial This issue is released after the fourth international Stevenson conference at Saranac Lake. ‘Transatlantic Stevenson’ was a great success, and we are sure that we speak for everyone who was there in thanking Ann Colley and Martin Danahay who planned and organised the event. The local community —proud of the Stevenson cottage— took an active part in the social aspects of the conference in a way that may be difficult to match at any other venue. The next number of the Journal of Stevenson Studies will be a special issue based on papers from the Saranac conference, guest edited by Professors Colley and Danahay, while this present number contains a review of Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries, edited by Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury, based on papers from the third Stevenson conference at Gargano in 2002. Clearly these biennial conferences are doing much to bring Stevenson into contemporary contexts and new critical debates. And from the contributors to this issue of the Journal, it is equally clear that we are providing a forum for informed discussion and analysis of Stevenson’s work by academics from a wide range of disciplines and countries. In this issue, Katherine Linehan pursues several fascinatingly intertextual hauntings in Jekyll and Hyde and the critical and practical questions these raise for an editor, while Isaac Yue ponders hauntings of another kind in reflecting on some of the cultural echoes that have proved so elusive for Chinese transla- tors of Stevenson’s best-known novel. Richard Dury’s essay in JSS2 (‘Strange Language of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’) showed how Stevenson’s English prose style depends on finely nuanced and ever so slightly disruptive variations on what might be assumed to be normative expression and familiar English idiom, and such ‘strangeness’ must make any translator’s difficult job still more taxing. A similar complexity —along structural and narratological lines— is the focus of Saverio Tomaiuolo’s essay 2 Journal of Stevenson Studies on ‘metanarrative strategies’ in The Master of Ballantrae, in which he identifies a struggle for textual mastery by which ‘page after page of the novel will deal with the process of narration –as a permanent revision of pre-inscribed texts.’ Laavanyan Ratnapalan brings a specifically anthropological context to Stevenson’s South Seas stories, arguing that ‘Stevenson approaches cultural phenomena from a standpoint of contradic- tion and doubt, where the appearance of these phenomena is itself regarded as paradoxical and presents a problem for the observer to take in.’ Wendy Katz’s essay on the ‘gentleman’ takes on the sociology of class and changing mid-Victorian mores as it is reflected and further complicated in the fiction of Stevenson and Conrad. It is a pleasant coincidence that Stevenson’s essay on ‘Gentlemen’ was one of the series that he wrote for Scribner’s while staying at Saranac Lake –in touch with a freer and more bracingly open American society. Giuseppe Albano’s article on Stevenson’s poetry concentrates on the drinking poems where he finds a curious mixture of bohemian swagger and an ambivalent pastoralism of longing, parody, retreat and return —the complex work of a man separated from the city about which he had such mixed feelings in his youth and the language of it streets. The editors are now commissioning special essays for issue 5 of the Journal in 2008, which will focus on Stevenson’s legacy and his influence on later writers. A number of contemporary authors will contribute essays to this issue reflecting on how Stevenson influences their writing, or on the wider impact of Stevenson on the modern world of literature. These essays will be complemented by articles from leading scholars who will offer an assessment of Stevenson’s current reputation and the state of Stevenson studies in academe. In this way we hope that the Journal will make a significant contribution to the current revival of interest in Robert Louis Stevenson and his work. We are grateful to Roger G. Swearingen for permission to reproduce his notes on the text of Kidnapped and to Jim C. 3 Wilson for permission to use his poem ‘RLS’. Our thanks also go to Scott Russell who has designed this issue. We hope you like the new cover for the Journal. It has been developed from one of the Studio portraits of RLS, made by W. Notman of New York, probably in September 1887. Linda Dryden Roderick Watson 4 Journal of Stevenson Studies RLS The garden was unending to the child but Mr Hyde was there behind each tree. A high bright sun smiled down; the breeze was mild; the garden was unending. To the child the trees were masts. He sailed across the wild South Seas until he reached his final quay. His Eden seemed unending; he was beguiled; and Mr Hyde was there, behind each tree. Jim C Wilson Linehan 5 The devil can cite scripture: intertextual hauntings in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde1 Katherine Linehan Intertextual allusions typically operate as a ghostlike presence in the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. This deeply well-read author so strongly favored page-turning intensity over any show of erudition that he habitually left echoes of predecessor texts to be recognized —or not— through such trace effects as an association-laden proper name, a foreign phrase, a teasingly familiar-sounding turn of phrase, or a déjà vu sensation recalling an important scene in a well-known work. I doubt that any work of Stevenson’s, however, can match his most famous spook story, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), for suitability and subtlety of function involved in just such shadowiness of allusion. The haunting effects of intertextuality in this tale of mystery and horror depend upon a combination of, on the one hand, lightly disquieting surface atmospherics emanating from the elusiveness of intertextual echoes and, on the other, more deeply disquieting conceptual depths emanating from the implications of those echoes when tracked and considered. The tracking and considering are not likely to be part of an ordinary reading experience. I came to a series of intrigued conjectures about the patterned implications of the tale’s intertextual references only as a result of researching footnotes for my

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