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“He a Cripple and I a Boy”: the Pirate and the Gentleman in Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island

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“He a Cripple and I a Boy”: the Pirate and the Gentleman in Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island “He a Cripple and I a Boy”: The Pirate and the Gentleman in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island Chamutal Noimann The definition of a gentleman had been occupying English thought for cen- turies. Eminent Victorian thinkers and artists joined this debate, each offer- ing his own idea of what a gentlemen was and how he must be educated. In doing so, they produced an extraordinary collection of philosophical, theo- logical, and intellectual rhetoric. In Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman effectively summarizes the complexity of the issue. His study is based on the notion that “masculinity [is] an historical construction rather than an essen- tialist given.”1 He demonstrates how each artist and writer “shapes the possi- bilities of manliness available to him within his cultural moment into a very personal configuration that necessarily participates within the more general discourse of the masculine.”2 Thomas Carlyle, for example, promoted the idea of the gentleman as arti- san with his belief in the profundity of manual work as illustrated in novels like Adam Bede and Great Expectations; the masculine gentleman also showed 1. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14. 2. Ibid. © 2012 by Washington & Jefferson College. All rights reserved. 0049-4127/2012/5801-004 TOPIC: THE WASHINGTON & JEFFERSON COLLEGE REVIEW an absence of fear and heroic bravery. Cardinal Newman described his own ideal gentleman in The Idea of a University(1852) as one who never inflicts pain upon anyone, mainly by restraining from “whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast, . his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home.”3 Samuel Smiles dedicates the last chapter of Self-Help (1859) to “The True Gentleman,” advocating that a gentleman should be dedicated to a process of self-improvement and, like Carlyle, stressing the workingman’s sense of dignity and independence and the enterprising self-made man.4 In his chapter “Of Vulgarity” in Modern Painters (1860), John Ruskin separates the notion of breeding from class. He replaces the perception of gentlemanliness as an inherited trait with the idea that it is a learned, earned, and achieved quality. True to his Christian Social- ist agenda, the “pure” gentleman, in Ruskin’s view, is sensitive to others and should be “of structure in mind which renders it capable of the most delicate sympathies.”5 In Treasure Island (1883), Robert Louis Stevenson offers his own per- sonal configuration, born not only out of social context but out of personal experience as well. Like many of his contemporaries writing for children, Stevenson blames the empire for the erosion of British fathers’ importance in their children’s lives.6 His juxtaposition of treasure-seeking pirates and gentlemen offers some of the most scathing critiques of the types of men created by greed, capitalism, and colonialism, asking for honest self-criticism of the English character and of the way Englishmen deal with domestic and international issues. By the end of the novel, Stevenson’s view of the British 3. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, intro. and notes by Martin J. Svaglic (San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1960). Anthony Trollope’s Septimus Harding in The Warden is an ideal example of Newman’s gentleman. 4. Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 99–101; Samuel Smiles, Self Help: The Art of Achievement, Illustrated by Accounts of the Lives of Great Men (London: Sphere, 1968), 220–35. 5. Gilmour, 87. 6. Notable examples of books for children addressing the detrimental effects of the absent father are Rudyard Kipling’s The Light that Failed (1890) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). All three books also intertwine issues of masculinity, British imperialism (especially in India), and the role of fathers in the family. 56 TOPIC: THE WASHINGTON & JEFFERSON COLLEGE REVIEW Victorian gentleman emerges as part pirate and part child, both committed to their roles in the family.7 Treasure Island was originally published in serial form in the magazine Young Folks. It offered everything boys were supposed to enjoy: adventure, danger, travel, guns, fighting, and gore. Yet the response among young read- ers was lukewarm, at best.8 Arguably, the reason for the book’s failure among boys is that its hero, Jim Hawkins, is not the kind of young hero boys were conditioned to enjoy. Jim is not a public-school boy training to be a Chris- tian gentleman and soldier of the Empire, like the hero of Thomas Hughes’s popular Tom Brown’s Schooldays.9 Son of an innkeeper, Jim is the antithesis. In all his actions, Jim works alone, following his own instinct, his own heart, and not an inculcated patriotic duty to his country dependent on collective actions and motives. On the other hand, once published in book form, it was hailed by adult readers as one of the best adventure books ever pub- lished. Legend has it that Prime Minister Gladstone stayed up all night read- ing it.10 It appealed to contemporary Victorian men’s growing tendencies to reject their domestic role in favor of imperial adventures. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remarked that Treasure Island marked the beginning of “the modern masculine novel” because it does not endorse marriage as the ultimate desti- nation of a man’s adventures.11 It ends happily because the men return home safely and economically secure. Yet, upon closer analysis, the book seems to endorse the kind of domes- ticity adult readers thought it was rejecting. Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver are antiheroes, just as the book itself is an antistory, mocking contem- porary adventure tales by clearing away romantic ideas readers at the time 7. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, intro. Eoin Colfer (New York: Puffin Classics, 2008). All quotations from the novel are from this edition. 8. Not until 1883, when it was bound and published for adults, did the book received its due popularity. See David Angus, “Youth on the Prow: The First Publica- tion of Treasure Island,” Studies in Scottish Literature 25 (1990): 83–99. 9. John Springhall. “Building Character in the British Boy: The Attempt to Extend Christian Manliness to Working-Class Adolescents, 1880–1914,” in Manli- ness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 61–65. 10. Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Lewis Stevenson (New York: Scribner’s, 1901), 211–12. 11. Quoted in J. A. Hammerton, Stevensoniana: An Anecdotal Life and Apprecia- tion of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1907), 243. 57 TOPIC: THE WASHINGTON & JEFFERSON COLLEGE REVIEW Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, from the first American edition of Trea- sure Island (Boston: Roberts, 1884), illustration by Frank Thayer Merrill. Image courtesy HathiTrust Digital Library. 58 TOPIC: THE WASHINGTON & JEFFERSON COLLEGE REVIEW might have gotten from novels such as Robinson Crusoe.12 Both Jim and Silver offer alternatives to the contemporary British manly character that placed great emphasis on physical strength, religious devotion, and teamwork.13 Their behavior reveals Stevenson’s notions about the value of breaking with established practices and with expected gentlemanly behaviors.14 Jim’s defi- ance throughout the novel is an act of rebellion against boys’ education, against the contemporary notions of the gentleman based on it, and against the established image of the imperialistic and righteous British national char- acter. His accomplice and paternal surrogate, John Silver, is the perfect anti- gentleman gentleman. Stevenson is largely responsible for establishing the pirate in the popular imagination as a good/bad hero: dangerous yet roman- tic, fascinating yet repellent. Silver is the archetype upon whom all other pirates, from Captain Hook to Captain Jack Sparrow, rely. He is an outlaw, physically deformed, and morally questionable, yet seen by all as a gentle- man. According to David Castronovo, a gentleman can be one owing to his birth, honor, wealth, breeding, religion, and education.15 At various points in the narrative, Silver answers to all but the first of these definitions. At the same time, Stevenson’s juxtaposition of Silver as a “Gentleman o’ Fortune” (Silver’s euphemism for pirate) with the traditional gentleman also makes him a symbol for and critic of the failures of British masculinity. His violence and greed are the ailments of a imperialistic society that condones the prac- tice of stealing the treasures of others in the name of God, Gold, and Glory. This complexity, combined with Jim’s antiheroism, creates a tension exploring alternative definitions of the masculine. Lisa Honaker attributes Silver’s success as a character to his unique combination as both the hero of adventure stories and in his masculine role in the domestic sphere.16 This 12. Mara Gubar, Artful Dodgers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 70, 74–75. 13. Ibid., 65–67. 14. This defiance, especially by Jim, is what historian Steven Mintz explains as social forces that “increasingly cut off [the authority of the father] from the support of the broader culture. The father’s authority could not be insulated from the corro- sive effects of individualistic and egalitarian values” (A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture [New York: New York University Press, 1983], 61). 15. David Castronovo, The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society (New York: Ungar, 1987). 16. Lisa Honker, “‘One Man to Rely On’: Long John Silver and the Shifting Character of Victorian Boys’ Fiction,” Journal of Narrative Theory 34, no.
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