RL Stevenson's Kidnapped

ELOHI Peuples indigènes et environnement 4 | 2013 L’invention de l’indigène écologiste R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped: indigenousness begins at home Nathalie Jaëck Publisher Presses universitaires de Bordeaux Electronic version Printed version URL: http://elohi.revues.org/565 Date of publication: 1 juillet 2013 DOI: 10.4000/elohi.565 Number of pages: 61-75 ISSN: 2268-5243 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 04 October 2016. URL : http://elohi.revues.org/565 ; DOI : 10.4000/elohi.565 The text is a facsimile of the print edition. © 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. Afer 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 Te 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 fction, particularly as far as his analysis of imperial domination is concerned. As he himself developed in In the South Seas, he could fnd in the Samoan situation a new effcient paradigm to look back upon and reassess the situation of imperial domination imposed upon Highlanders. In Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacifc: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession, Roslyn Jolly defnes 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 Pacifc experiences and his Scottish fction has tended to focus on comparisons between A Footnote to History and Catriona.” (119). She insists that Catriona’s “actual working out in both conceptual and psychological detail was signifcantly affected by Stevenson’s exposure to Pacifc cultures between 1888 and 1892, and more particularly by his political experiences in Samoa in 1991-1992.” (Jolly: 121) The reader can be referred here to Jolly’s exhaustive note n° 20, p. 121, where she fully refers to these pieces, quoting in particular Letley’s introduction to Catriona, where he identifes the similarities between Catriona 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 the quite 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 conficts 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 specifcally with the link between indigenousness 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 defnes 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. Afer 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, afer he was rescued, the only survivor, from a sinking ship. Tere 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 fight 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 afer the murder of Colin Campbell, the Red Fox. David is the frst-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 indigenous 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. Te frst 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 defne savage Highlanders, both by the English, and by supposedly more civilized Lowlanders. Such a vision 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 specifc about several quite disquieting elements: “the line must be sometimes dotted to show uncertainty; sometimes full” (xxiv) – as if some parts of this fctive itinerary were more fctive than others; he also insisted that the fnal 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 Strathire, 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 reader 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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