Robert Louis Stevenson's South Seas Writing: Its
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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S SOUTH SEAS WRITING: ITS PRODUCTIONAND CONTEXT WITHIN THE VICTORIAN STUDY OF CULTURE LAAVANYAN RATNAPALAN GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE PHD HISTORY ABSTRACT The thesis is split into two parts. The first part investigates the production, reception, and reconstruction of Robert Louis Stevenson's South Seas writing during his travels there in the years 1888-91, and its subsequent publication as In the South Seas in 1896. The second part concentrates on the findings that Stevenson makes during his Pacific travels in respect of the discourses of culture that shape the academic sciences of his day. The writing that Stevenson produces for his 'Big Book' on the cultures of the Pacific Islands is among the least-examined of all his works. His book of travel, In the South Seas, is published posthumously and contains material that is presented in a way that is not intended by the author. In the present study the reasons for this situation are investigated, and the work that the author intends to produce is recovered on the basis of the plans, notes, and photographs which remain from the period of his travels. The reconstructed work is then compared with the published volume of In the South Seas to show the extent to which textual mutilation and re-editing has significantly altered the meaning of Stevenson's original writing. In the South Seas is a text that is re-shaped by his editor in order to satisfy what is seen as a Victorian readership's desire for sentimental voyaging. Stevenson's writing is then read within the context of the Victorian study of culture as represented by Edward Burnett Tylor, to show his engagement with and criticism of some of Tylor's theories. Finally, the South Seas writing is framed within the perspective of Stevenson's reading of GWF Hegel, showing the extent to which his observations on Pacific landscapes and cultures are informed by Hegel's discussion of the antinomies of Immanuel Kant. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 INTRODUCTION 7 Victorian Travel Writing 7 Samoa and Stevenson 11 Writing the Pacific Islands 14 Outline of Contents of Present Study 19 Bibliographical Overview 26 1. A SOUTH SEAS MODEL 43 One or Many Stevensons? 43 An Idea for a Cruise 44 Planning 'The South Seas' 62 The South Seas Letters 74 2. REFLECTIVE TRAVEL 79 The Victorian Origins of Photography 80 Photography and Anthropology 82 Photography in Samoa 84 'The South Seas' in Pictures 87 3. IN THE SOUTH SEAS AS FAILURE 100 Breakdown 107 The Composition of In the South Seas 117 3 4. THE EDINBURGH EDITION 123 The Marquesas 124 The Paumotus 138 The Gilberts - Apemama 147 5. CULTURAL SURVIVALS 154 EB Tylor and Cultural Survivals 155 Cultural Survivals in the South Seas 160 Histories of Progress 168 6. WRITING CULTURE 175 The Limits of the Visible 176 Stevenson and Hegel 190 CONCLUSION 201 APPENDICES 211 Appendix A: Old and Modern Names of Pacific Islands 211 Appendix B: List of Photographs Taken by the 212 Stevenson Family during their South Seas Travels BIBLIOGRAPHY 220 4 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1 A map of Stevenson's travels in the Pacific. 49 2 Stevenson and his wife in Butaritari with Nantok' 52 and Natakauti. 3. Thomas Andrew, 'Samoan Women with Fan'. 86 4. 'King Tembinoka writing the "History of Apemama" in an 92 account book.' 5 'White trader and family - taken at Majuro, Marshall 93 Islands. ' 6 'Penryn: - trader's verandah with figure-head from wreck.' 94 7 'Girls' costume in Tokelau Islands.' 95 8 'King of Manihiki with the island judge in right hand. In 96 front a beachcomber. ' 9. 'Traders weighing copra in Kuria Island- Kingsmills.' 97 10 Excerpt from MS of Stevenson's MarquesanLetters. 137 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For providing help with obtaining the materials for this study I would like to thank Roger Swearingen, The University of London Central Research Fund, The Writers' Museum in Edinburgh, Yale University Library, The Huntington Library, and The State Library of New South Wales. In helping with the revision of the text I would also like to thank the following people: Brigitte Resl, Sally Alexander, Vivienne Richmond, Richard Ambrosini, Howard Caygill, Paolo Cabrelli, Stuart Alley, and Anna Gust. 6 INTRODUCTION Victorian Travel Writing The intersection between travel writing and empire has been one of the most fruitful recent subjects of cultural history. ' Partly, this has been on account of the vast amount of material - in the form of biographies, diaries, memoirs and serialisations - that is now available for study and interpretation; but also, the contemporary interest in cultural identity has informed attempts either to untangle or to situate meaning in the web of knowledge and desire that motivates travel writing. The historical credibility that is now granted to different forms of writing, not just traditional historical records, was gained through the work of historians 'from below' in the latter half of the twentieth century, such as Eric Hobsbawm and Carlo Ginzburg. By applying similar analytical approaches to the study of different kinds of written material from the past, they also helped to blur the distinction between historical testimony and literature. 2 The trend towards the historical recognition of identities and national self-fashioning began in the wake of global decolonization and diasporic movements, from the middle to the latter half of the twentieth century. Partly inspired by these political movements, and also by the work of structuralist philosophers such as Michel Foucault, historians of literature such as Edward Said began to construct an alternative history of modernity to the story of unhindered progress which had come to be accepted as the 'grand tradition'. In his influential book Orientalism, Said examined the European representations of the Orient during the centuries of exploration and colonization as a discourse of the Other, where the key unifying factor in all of these representations is the attempt to maintain a set of established differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. ' One of the consequences of his interpretation of works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of 1 An influentialrecent exampleis Mary Louise Pratt's ImperialEyes: Travel Writingand Transculturation(London: 2 Routledge,1992). See for example the final chapter of Hobsbawm's Bandits (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) and also Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a sixteenth- century Miller (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1980). 3 and Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 7 Darkness has been a renewed critical encounter with colonial fiction which is specifically concerned with identifying the links between texts and their social and cultural settings. Besides fiction, other forms of expression have also been studied in their relationship to travel. The first attempt to write a history of the relationship between European artistic expression and exploration was made by Bernard Smith in his book European Vision and the South Pacific. 4 In this work Smith argues that it was European exploration in the Pacific Islands, beginning in the time of James Cook, that brought artists into contact with the subjects of scientific study, through ethnology and zoology, which in turn helped to define the modern boundary between artistic and scientific depictions of the world. Several disciplines, including literature studies, history, and philosophy, have therefore contributed to the present understanding of how the experience of travel is figured in different ways in writing. Travel writing is by its very nature provisional. Written, in theory, whilst the writer is in transit, and without the deep understanding of a place that is available to the indigenous inhabitant or the broader cultural perspective of the scholar, travel writers rarely have the opportunity to be accurate or to consider the ideological implications of their words. Nevertheless, across a broad span of time certain characteristics of European travel writing have been discovered. The Orientalist discourse of colonial-era travel writing involves the brutalising of a foreign landscape and its inhabitants. This is to ensure the point is made that, without the presence of Europeans, the land described would be the site of chaos and disorder. In contrast to the ordered and rational mind of the European, surveying all that is before them with calm and poise, the perceived Other is either in decline and barbaric regression, or it is an empty space that is waiting to be put to efficient (cultivated) use by civilisation. According to this interpretation, travel writing is subservient to colonialist claims and legitimates colonial interests. Depending on the time ° Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas, 2nd edn (London: Yale University Press, 1985). This text is also interesting because the writer draws much of the theoretical basis of his interpretation of images of the South Pacific from the 'Warburg School', which is discussed in more detail later in this introduction as well as in chapter 5. 8 and the place in which it is written, the travel narrative either clears ideological ground for a European takeover or justifies the exploitative actions of Europeans in the struggle for power and control over the remainder of the world.' One of the main aims of the present study is to challenge this received view of colonial-era travel writing. The notion that all travel writing is somehow expressive of control and subjugation, or at the very least guilt, is firstly unrealistic because it is too generalising. Nothing about the past is ever so one-sided, as the work of modern historians invariably demonstrates. Furthermore, this hegemonic cultural representation of travel writing is impossible to prove since not every line of every travel narrative can be accounted for in this way.