‘On the rack’: Shame and Imperialism in Robert Louis Stevenson
Roland Alexander Sydney, Australia B.A. & LLB. University of Melbourne, 2008
A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Research School of the University of New South Wales in Candidacy of the Degree of Masters of Arts by Research
School of the Arts & Media Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
University of New South Wales August 2015
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Surname or Family name: Alexander
First name: Roland Other name/s: Hugh Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: Masters of Arts by Research (MRES)
School: School of the Arts & Media Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Title: 'On the rack': Shame and Imperialism in Robert Louis Stevenson
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)
Shame features prominently in the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson yet it has not previously been the subject of a major study. This affect and its nuances reach back into the childhood and heritage of the writer, and forward through his most iconic novels to his stories of the South Seas (especially The Beach of Falesa and The Ebb-Tide) that are the focus of this investigation.
The thesis argues that Stevenson uses shame as a tool to critique attitudes to imperialism in his fiction writing of the South Seas. It shows, first, that he had a particular understanding of shame, conscious and unconscious, that was informed by both his personal experience of shame and his ideas on the role of emotion in literature - what may be called 'Stevensonian Shame'. Secondly, Stevenson's experience and understanding of shame is shown to shape his understanding of Western imperialism in the Pacific within a wider context of conflicting contemporary attitudes to empire. Thirdly, Stevenson's understanding of imperialism, informed by shame, is presented as central to his use of the emotion in his South Seas writing, in particular his fiction, as a device to examine and project his attitudes to imperialism thereby challenging and moulding the attitudes of his contemporary readership.
The thesis is structured to reveal the growing power of shame to provide Stevenson with a natural approach to understanding his own character and to developing his conception of the moral universe, especially in relation to his experience and writing in the Pacific. The first two chapters provide background and an~llyse 'Stevensonian Shame' as it relates to the author's understanding of empire, demonstrating the shift of shame in his work from preoccupation to occupational tool. Chapters three and four provide in depth explorations of Stevenson's use of shame in his South Sea tales: 'The Beach of Falesa', 'The Bottle Imp' and 'The Isle of Voices' (collected in Island Nights' Entertainments), and The Ebb-Tide, demonstrating conclusively that Stevenson's notion of shame is a significant part of his nuanced critique of Western imperialism. The thesis shows that it is the complex and conflicted rendering of shame in the South Seas narratives that generates their ambiguity in relation to imperialism, and that also enables Stevenson to instil in the reader at 'home' a sense of collective shame.
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Abstract
‘On the rack’: Shame and Imperialism in Robert Louis Stevenson by Roland Alexander
Shame features prominently in the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson yet it has not previously been the subject of a major study. This affect and its nuances reach back into the childhood and heritage of the writer, and forward through his most iconic novels to his stories of the South Seas (especially The Beach of Falesá and The Ebb-Tide) that are the focus of this investigation. This thesis argues that Stevenson uses shame as a tool to critique attitudes to imperialism in his fiction writing of the South Seas. It shows, first, that he had a particular understanding of shame, conscious and unconscious, that was informed by both his personal experience of shame and his ideas on the role of emotion in literature – what may be called ‘Stevensonian shame’. Secondly, Stevenson’s experience and understanding of shame is shown to shape his understanding of Western imperialism in the Pacific within a wider context of conflicting contemporary attitudes to empire. Thirdly, Stevenson’s understanding of imperialism, informed by shame, is presented as central to his use of the emotion in his South Seas writing, in particular his fiction, as a device to examine and project his attitudes to imperialism thereby challenging and moulding the attitudes of his contemporary readership. The thesis is structured to reveal the growing power of shame to provide Stevenson with a natural approach to understanding his own character and to developing his conception of the moral universe, especially in relation to his experience and writing in the Pacific. The first two chapters provide background and analyse ‘Stevensonian shame’ as it relates to the author’s understanding of empire, demonstrating the shift of shame in his work from preoccupation to occupational tool. Chapters three and four provide in depth explorations of Stevenson’s use of shame in his South Sea tales: ‘The Beach of Falesá’, ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments), and The Ebb-Tide, demonstrating conclusively that Stevenson’s notion of shame is a significant part of his nuanced critique of Western imperialism. The thesis shows that it is the complex and conflicted rendering of shame in the South Seas narratives that generates their ambiguity in relation to imperialism, and that also enables Stevenson to instil in the reader at ‘home’ a sense of collective shame.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to my supervisors Associate Professor Roslyn Jolly and Dr John Attridge in the School of the Arts and Media, at the University of New South Wales, for their teaching, support and guidance in the writing of this thesis.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: ‘My ears burn’: Stevensonian Shame 25
Chapter 2: ‘A hollow fraud’: Shame and Empire 53
Chapter 3: ‘My conscience smote me’: Shame in Island Nights’ 83 Entertainments
Chapter 4: ‘A mind divided’: Shame in The Ebb-Tide 139
Conclusion 163
Works Cited and Consulted 169
1
Introduction
Robert Louis Stevenson has recently been recognised as one of the most important writers in English fiction of the second half of the nineteenth century. Popular in his own time, his reputation has waxed and waned like the shadow in his famous poem. For much of the twentieth century, his choice of genre and narrative aesthetics were largely misunderstood and his ‘parables of adventure’1 were relegated to children’s or young- adult fiction. In 1966, he was omitted from the influential Victorian Fiction:
A Guide to Research, which included his colleagues Gissing and Reade but judged that ‘in spite of [Stevenson’s] influence on romantic fiction … his adult novels are few and of debatable rank’.2 As Alistair Fowler pointed out in 1979,3 despite Henry James’s own admiration for his friend Stevenson’s
‘romance’, Jamesian critics continued to misunderstand Stevenson’s artistic progression and exclude him from the literary canon.
The early 1990s saw a number of critics reconfigure this existing simplified image of Stevenson as no more than a romance writer of adventure fiction into a proto-modernist and anti-imperialist; and, with the rise of Scottish Studies, Stevenson has been claimed with pride and his works examined with new critical acumen. More recently, Stevenson studies has been dominated by anthropology and psychoanalysis, as
1 Alistair Fowler’s astute phrase for Stevenson’s longer prose works usually catagorised at the time as ‘romances’ and therefore ‘debatable novels’: Alistair Fowler, ‘Parables of Adventure: the Debatable Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson’ in Ian Campbell (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction: Critical Essays (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1979) 105. 2 Ibid 105. 3 Ibid 105-6.
2 critics have sought to understand his work within its historical context and in relation to his own intellectual interests. It is not too much to claim that Stevenson scholarship has recently undergone something of a renaissance in the way the author is viewed both as a writer and as a representative of Empire living in the South Pacific.
Critics have now come to recognise the ‘aesthetic shaping’ and ‘firm moral patterns’ in Stevenson’s work, but are still exercised by the way his stories challenge any stable narrative or moral meaning. Some have explained this by characterising Stevenson’s development as ‘a search for fuller psychological mimesis’,4 while others have recognised the conflict involved in his critical exploration of colonialist and racist thinking. This thesis will engage with both these approaches through the affective lens of shame, in order to throw new light on what Roslyn Jolly has characterised as ‘the complexities of Stevenson’s inside/outside relation to the British
Empire’.5
Shame features prominently in the writing of Robert Louis
Stevenson, so prominently that it is surprising it has been as yet little examined. The affect shame and its nuances reach back into the childhood and heritage of the writer, and forward through his most iconic novels (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, The Master of
Ballantrae) to his stories of the South Seas (‘The Beach of Falesá’ and The
Ebb-Tide) that will be the focus of this dissertation. The following
Introduction will first map the background to this thesis in relation to
4 The quoted phrases here and above are those of Fowler: ibid 108. 5 Roslyn Jolly, ‘Essays on R.L.S.’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 50.4 (2007) 454.
3 shame studies and to post-colonial criticism as they relate to Stevenson – outlining both the theoretical stance and the methodology used in this thesis. It will then address the importance, the argument, and the structure of this investigation of Stevenson’s later Pacific fiction.
Shame studies
In recent years, literary scholars have become increasingly interested in shame as part of the wider ‘turn to affect’ in the humanities generally; but its entry into the humanities has not been without controversy and there is still no one definition of the meaning of ‘shame’. Shame, as distinct from guilt, became a focal point in the study of psychology in the latter half of the twentieth century, to a large extent as a result of the re-examination of
Freud’s psychoanalysis and the development of the theory of affect by the psychologist Silvan Tomkins.6 The humanities utilized this work to explore whether reason and rationality ‘in politics, ethics, and aesthetics’ had been overvalued, and to form a more complex idea of conscious and unconscious forming of opinions and decisions.7 What Ruth Leys refers to as ‘the turn to affect’ in literary scholarship has produced a multitude of interpretations of shame as various as the affective spectrum of shame itself.8 Shame as an affect or motivator has been seen as a variously stupefying, enraging, constructively energizing and trauma-inducing
6 ‘What Are Affects?’ and ‘Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust,’ in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds), Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 33-74, 133-178. 7 Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011) 434-472, 436. 8 Ibid, 436.
4 emotion for its subjects in a diversity of literary studies.9 Many critics, responding to Tomkins and his followers, consider shame as the affect
‘that most defines the space wherein a sense of self will develop’.10 This is directly relevant to Stevenson’s own psychology, to his interest in evolutionary ideas, and to his construction of character through language.
Affect, then, provides an analytical tool with which to approach the problem of shame in Stevenson’s work. But there is no one theory of affect: critics in the field are conflicted and the subject is still controversial.11 Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin provide a working definition that privileges Massumi’s idea of affect as ‘a nonconscious experience of
9 For example, Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Joseph Adamson, Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye: A Psychoanalytic Reading (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997); Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002); Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); David Ellis, Shakespeare’s Practical Jokes: An Introduction to the Comic in His Work (Massachusetts: Rosemont Publishing, 2007); and Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: melancholia and the politics of modernism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008). 10 Sedgwick and Frank (eds), Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, 6. 11 In what might be called an historical trajectory of affect in relation to literature, it is possible to distinguish broadly two branches of development: one deriving from the psychological sciences and the other stemming back to the eighteenth-century tradition of aesthetics. The first branch derives from several scientific approaches to the emotions in the 1960s (Tomkins, as developed by Ekman and interpolated into the humanities by Sedgwick) that proposed an anti-intentionalism that has been especially influential among philosophers. Tomkins, for example, developed a Basic Emotions paradigm (including ‘shame’) and argued that the affects and cognition constituted two entirely separate systems and that accordingly the emotions should be theorized in anti-intentionalist terms. The second branch deriving especially from the work of Brian Massumi (building on ideas of Gilles Deluze and Félix Guattari) distinguishes affect less scientifically as an ‘intensity’ disconnected from any signifying function. Both groups clearly distinguish between affect and emotion, although literary critics continue to use affect loosely as a synonym for emotion. Generally speaking, affect includes the notion of a ‘feeling body’ that is equipped with the ability to discriminate and make judgements of the appropriate bodily response. Emotions arise from the evaluations of that response. There is a particular research focus now on the role of affect and emotion in cognition and this field remains to some extent controversial; but it is clearly established that bodily feelings play an important role in affect.
5 intensity’.12 They state that affect ‘refers to the domain of non-cognitive experience that includes feelings, emotions and other autonomic responses to stimuli’ and that although it exists ‘below and beyond the level of representation’, it is ‘deeply operative in people’s experience of the world’.13
The characteristics of shame are myriad. Yet, from the definition of affect above, two aspects of shame as affect stand out as particularly relevant to the study of shame in Stevenson: (1) the powerful, autonomic aspect of shame as a ‘non-cognitive’ or ‘nonconscious experience’; and (2) the important formative nature of shame – as it relates to identity and
‘people’s experience of the world’. The first of these – shame’s unintentionality – has been challenged by Leys who argues that there is no neurological proof that affects are indeed ‘non-intentional’.14 Scholars of queer theory, building on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others, 15 have also questioned the volition of the conscious self in prioritising various affective states.16 Some theorists have purposefully
12 Massumi paraphrased by Shouse, as quoted in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: the Key Concepts, 3rd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) 4. Brian Massumi asserts that affect is ‘irreducibly bodily and autonomic’: Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002) 28. 13 Ibid. 14 Leys, 464–72. 15 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Adam Frank, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), in particular ‘Chapter 3: Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins’, 93. See also Lauren Berlant ‘Love, A Queer Feeling’ in Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (eds), Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (London: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 432-451 and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 16 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004) and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007). I note here that an engagement with Queer Theory is outside the scope of this thesis.
6 allowed the debate over the intentionality of affect to remain undecided in their work.17 For the purposes of this thesis, however, it is enough to accept Massumi’s statement that ‘[e]xperience, normal or clinical, is never fully intentional’.18
The ‘non-conscious experience’ of shame is relevant to Stevenson’s own understanding of shame discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis.
Stevenson was a thinker of his time, strongly influenced by nineteen- century evolutionary psychology. He adopted contemporary evolutionist ideas associated with the ‘primitive’, what Julia Reed describes as ‘a unifying preoccupation across his work’.19 In particular, Stevenson’s belief in a shared emotional experience, what he considered to be the product of a primitive, atavistic self, led the author to embrace a view of emotion compatible with Massumi’s idea of the ‘non-cognitive’ nature of affect.20
For Stevenson, because emotions like shame were part of an instinctual, primordial experience, rooted in the primitive, they were also necessarily powerful and autonomous. This in turn had consequences for the way
17 Marta Figlerowicz notes that ‘many other theorists who write about affects, Kathleen Stewart and Charles Altieri among them, openly allow the tension between conscious and unconscious affects to remain unresolved’ and that ‘William E. Connolly notes signs of a similarly careful negotiation of these questions in neuroscientific work on affect by, among others, Walter Kaufmann, Antonio Damasio, and Giacomo Rizzolatti as well as in many cultural theorists whose work these scientists inspired’: Marta Figlerowicz, ‘Affect Theory Dossier: An Introduction’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 20.2 (2012) 3-18, 7. 18 Massumi, 191. 19 Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siécle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 5. 20 It is pertinent to state here that while, as stated in footnote 11 above, affect theorists generally do distinguish ‘affect’ from ‘emotion’, the distinction is illusory for the purposes of this thesis. Like the vast majority of literary critical work, this thesis will use affect loosely as a synonym for emotion. I note, however, Elspeth Probyn’s neat summary of the distinction ‘that emotion refers to the social expression of affect, and affect in turn is the biological and physiological experience of it’: Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Ltd, 2005) 25.
7
Stevenson thought about his writing, particularly romance, and the use of emotion in his work.
The second important characteristic of shame for the study of the affect in Stevenson’s work is shame’s role in identity formation. The
‘deeply operative’ function of affect in ‘people’s experience of the world’ allows shame, as Eric Shouse puts it, to play ‘an important role in determining the relationship between our bodies, our environment, and others’.21 Many scholars have emphasised the ability of affect to structure the self in relation to the world. Charles Altieri highlights the function of
‘rapture’ in progressing and reconstructing personal identity and motivation.22 Others have similarly accentuated the potential for affect to conceive a well-rounded and ethical self.23
The formative role of shame as affect has important implications for
Stevenson’s political and social critique in his South Sea writings.
Discussing the political implications of affects, Michael Hardt suggests that affects illuminate ‘both our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these two powers’.24 Many scholars have examined the close connection between
21 Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal, 8.6 (2005) 1-5:
8 affect and social critique, emphasising, in particular, affect’s ability to define the relationship between the self and the world.25 Viewed in this way, the affective nature of shame makes its utilization particularly appropriate and valuable in engaging with social or political questions, such as those of race and, more specifically, imperialism. The epithets used by Stevenson and discussed by Reid26 – ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, and
‘civilized’ – are loaded Western constructions used, I will show, in relation to shame and vital to Stevenson’s intentional shaming of his audience. All
Stevenson’s South Seas tales, especially ‘The Beach of Falesá’ and The
Ebb-Tide, address Western imperialism, and the consequent ‘more contemporary and more grimly realistic’ mode of these works compared to that of his previous novels,27 which was immediately discerned on their publication, is in large part due to the pervading use of shame.
It is the unique nature of shame, however, which makes the affect particularly important in the formation of the self.28 Shame is a self-
of causality’: Michael Hardt, ‘What Affects are Good For’ in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007) ix-xiii, ix. 25 See generally the works collected in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010). In their introductory essay ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, Gregg and Seigworth discuss the relationship between the ‘body’ and the ‘world’ and state that ‘[t]he political dimensions of affect generally proceed through or persist immediately alongside its aesthetics’: 3-25. 26 Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siécle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 5, 10-12, 13-14, and especially part II ‘Degeneration and Psychology’. 27 David Daiches (ed.), The Ebb-Tide (London: Dent, 1994) xxii. See also Roslyn Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: South Sea Tales (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) xxvi-xxvii. 28 Sedgwick and Frank (eds), Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, 136-145. See also Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame- Based Syndromes (New York: Springer Publishing, 1996). Kaufman states that ‘[n]o other affect is more central to identity formation. Our sense of self, both particular and universal, is deeply embedded in our struggles with the alienating affect. Answers to the questions, “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” are forged in the crucible of shame’: 5.
9 reflexive, self-critical emotion, in which the individual is convicted of having failed to uphold the standards that he or she affirms and claims to live by.29 By its nature, shame convicts the individual of guilt, not by others’ standards, but by his or her own.30 At its heart this affect involves nothing less than a crisis of identity caused by a failure to live up to one’s own representation of oneself. 31 The divided, contradictory nature of shame is reflected in the primary definition of the noun in The Oxford
English Dictionary (which offers no fewer than eleven different definitions, most of which are themselves multiple and complex): ‘The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one’s own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one’s own), or of being in a situation which offends one’s sense of modesty or decency’.
Shame therefore results in a powerful and complex emotion ensuing from the affirmation of a system of values, vital to the individual, and the simultaneous recognition of that system’s violation by the self. It follows from this that the experience of shame gives rise to a searching self- analysis of a literary character, and (simultaneously) a potentially radical change in that character. By extension, as a result of this shift in
29 Wurmser describes the divided nature of shame reflecting ‘a tension between distinct structural elements, between the ego ideal (what one wants to be) and the ego (what one perceives that one is)’: Léon Wurmser, The Mask of Shame (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 49. See also Lynd’s discussion of shame as the result of the ‘incongruity’ between the apparent, revealed self and the previously assumed image of self: Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) 34-43. 30 In discussing the phenomenology of shame, Kaufman states that shame is the ‘experience of the self by the self … dividing us from ourselves and others’: Kaufman, 16. 31 Kaufman states that the effect of shame is to make the individual ‘feel divided and secretly yearn to feel one, whole’: Kaufman, 18.
10 character, shame will drive a major change or development in the plot of a story or novella. This narrative movement appears in a variety of ways in
Stevenson’s South Seas tales.
There is a very important point here. Shame, since it both affirms a moral code (thereby building up the follower of that code) and convicts the individual of falling short in that moral code, results in a bifurcated emotion, both positive and simultaneously negative, that fits naturally into the view of personality of the man who wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, and who sees characters as self-contradictory, doubled, paralleled and divided. Stevenson is the spiritual inheritor of Scottish
Covenanters whose descendants both forgive and judge: he is the creator of the doppelganger brothers in The Master of Ballantrae and of Attwater with his muscular Christian teachings and his readiness to use the gun or the whip on others in The Ebb-Tide. Shame is a natural mechanism to be used by someone who thinks of his characters and himself as self-divided.
Crucially, shame’s conflicted and divided nature is reflected in
Stevenson’s imperial critique. As outlined in the next section of this
Introduction and discussed further in Chapter 2 of this thesis, Stevenson’s attitudes to empire have been seen as complex and at times contradictory.
It will be shown that Stevenson’s conflicted stance on imperialism is shaped by his complex personal understanding of shame and, consequently, informs his use of shame to interrogate attitudes to imperialism in his South Sea writings.
There are a number of other aspects of shame, discussed by scholars, which bear mentioning. The word ‘shame’ functions in language
11 as both a noun and a verb: an individual experiences shame, but can also actively shame others. As is clear from the OED definition of shame above, shame has a close, interdependent, relationship with the concept of honour.32 Shame is often experienced as an exposure of the self, creating in the subject a desire to ‘hide’ the self.33 Shame can be experienced both in public and in private: an individual may be shamed by the public
‘eye’,34 or feel personal shame alone without the involvement of others.35
The potential for collective shaming means that shame can be used as a mechanism of political or social control36 – with obvious implications for
Stevenson’s own use of shame to critique imperialism discussed below.
The act of shaming, particularly public shaming, has an element of punishment associated with it – as the OED definition of shame above states, shame is in essence a ‘painful emotion’.37 Importantly though, shame as punishment may be seen as both negative and positive: it is a
32 As stated by Kaufman, ‘[i]n the history of peoples, shame has always been associated with honour and pride’: Kaufman, 5. 33 Wurmser states that the ‘notion of hiding is intrinsic to and inseparable from the concept of shame’ and traces the word ‘shame’ ‘back to the Indo-European root ˆkam/ˆkem’ meaning ‘to cover, to veil, to hide’. He also notes Helen M. Lynd’s comment that experiences of shame are ‘experiences of exposure, exposure of peculiarly sensitive, intimate, vulnerable aspects of the self’: Wurmer, 29, 52. Kaufman states that ‘to feel shame is to feel seen in a painfully diminished sense. Shame reveals the inner self, exposing it to view. The self feels exposed both to itself and to anyone else present. The exposure can be of the self to the self alone, or it can be of the self to others’: Kaufman, 17. 34 Wurmser makes the point that ‘the “eye” to which such aspects of the self are exposed’ when we feel shame may be both external (as with public shaming) or internal (as with the private experience of shame): Wurmser, 49. 35 Kaufman notes that shame ‘can be an entirely internal experience with no one else present. The source of shame can be either in the self or in another, with the result that individuals can experience shame whether or not others are present and watching. Individuals will also feel shame whether or not others are actually doing the shaming. Only the self need watch the self and only the self need shame the self’: Kaufman, 5. 36 See Kaufman’s discussion of the dynamics of shame in racial, ethnic and religious group tensions as well as in international relations: Kaufman, 7. 37 Kaufman points out that shame is ‘acutely disturbing to the self. In fact, no other affect is more deeply disturbing. Like a wound made from the inside by an unseen hand, shame disrupts the natural functioning of the self’: Kaufman, 5.
12 painful experience for the individual but at the same time a vital reassertion of cultural or moral stability.38 Shame, then, as discussed above, plays an important role in the affirmation (or reaffirmation) of the self and, when viewed in this way, the punishment of shame takes on a corrective or redemptive quality.39 The redemptive aspect of shame will be discussed further in this thesis in relation to Stevenson’s South Sea tales.
Finally, the distinctions between shame and guilt, and shame and conscience, are fraught with uncertainty and, for the purposes of this thesis, not of vital significance.40 I note, nonetheless, that guilt is often applied to an individual’s actions while shame is used in relation to the individual’s self, though both are interrelated affects; 41 and that conscience has been seen as referring to rational or reasoned judgments and shame to internalised cultural norms, though again both concepts are inextricably linked,42 and arguably of much broader meaning than such distinctions allow.
38 Probyn examines the positive and negative aspects of shame and states that in examining ‘anthropological material it becomes clear that shame is a productive force in many societies’: Probyn, 29, 35. See further, Wurmser’s discussion on shame as the protector of personal ‘integrity and, as its antithesis, shame evoked by injured or by overweening narcissism’: Wurmser, 48. 39 Lynd states that ‘experiences of shame if confronted full in the face may throw an unexpected light on who one is and point the way toward who one may become. Fully faced, shame may become not primarily something to be covered, but a positive experience of revelation’: Lynd, 20. Kaufman states that ‘[b]y alerting us to misconduct or wrongdoing – to transgression in whatever form – shame motivates necessary self- correction’: Kaufman, 5. 40 This is because, as stated below, the definition of shame used in this thesis will be chiefly derived, not from shame studies, but from Stevenson’s own experience and understanding of shame mapped in Chapter 1. 41 See Wurmer, 27-39 and Lynd, 20-26. Kaufman challenges this distinction arguing that ‘[f]rom the perspective of affect theory, one can feel shameful about deeds as well as guilty about self’: Kaufman, 6. 42 Kaufman states that the ‘optimal development of conscience depends on adequate and appropriately graded doses of shame’: Kaufman, 5.
13
Critically, however, this thesis is not wholly dependent on shame studies, in part because of the diversity, contradiction, and fluidity of definition in current scholarship in different disciplines. Rather than extending or intervening explicitly in this theoretical discourse, this thesis will draw on certain concepts from shame studies in order to pursue the primary aim of tracing the role of shame in Stevenson’s work. In particular, the two aspects of shame discussed above (the powerful, autonomic aspect of shame and the important formative nature of shame as it relates to identity), are further discussed in Chapter 1 in the context of Stevenson’s own understanding of shame, where an operative definition of shame is set out specifically in relation to Stevenson and his writings.
Importantly, the definition of shame used in this thesis will primarily be derived, not from the multifarious characteristics of shame offered by shame studies, but from Stevenson’s own experience and understanding of shame mapped in the first chapter of this thesis – what may be called
‘Stevensonian shame’.
Accordingly, while drawing in part on shame studies, the methodology of this thesis will be essentially an historicist approach to shame and its use by Stevenson to explore both his own and his readers’ attitudes to imperialism. The discussion of Stevenson’s work will be situated in its contemporary intellectual context, in order to examine what he understood by ‘shame’ and both why and how he chose to use it to such effect in his late writing.
14
The South Seas tales and post-colonial studies
Despite the significant twentieth-century reassessment of Stevenson’s writing by David Daiches (1947), two major biographies by J.C. Furnas
(1951) and Jenii Calder (1980), and Barry Menikoff’s rehabilitation of ‘The
Beach of Falesá’ (1984),43 it was not until the 1990s that there was a new critical focus on Stevenson’s South Seas stories. Since then scholars have carried out work that has been grouped into roughly two lines of study:44 modernism, which explored the proto-modernist elements of his work, and post-colonialism, which re-examined Stevenson’s attitudes to Empire. As early as 1996, Alan Sandison made the case for Stevenson as a proto- modernist convincingly in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of
Modernism,45 and this has been further examined by (among others) Eric
Massie in relation to Conrad in Stevenson, Conrad and the proto-modernist novel.46 While Stevenson’s proto-modernism will be touched on in relation to his stylistic experimentation and unusual subject matter, which links directly with his use of shame, the main critical emphasis of this thesis will be on shame as an innovative way of interrogating Stevenson’s narratives in relation to imperialism.
43 David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Revaluation (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions Books, 1947); J.C. Furnas, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Faber, 1952); Jenni Calder, RLS: A Life Study (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980); and Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and ‘The Beach of Falesá’: A Study in Victorian Publishing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984). 44 See Jolly in her review ‘Essays on R.L.S.’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 50.4 (2007) 454. 45 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 46 (Stirling: University of Stirling Press, 2002). This analysis has now expanded to encompass postmodernism: ibid 454.
15
In the 1990s, several scholars47 sought to disrupt the reductive myth of Stevenson as a simple supporter of Empire and even to champion the idea of Stevenson as an anti-imperialist. Roslyn Jolly speaks of the
‘unpicking or reconfiguring of those imperialist connections’ 48 by a number of the critics whose work appears in the collection of essays in
Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries, edited by Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (2006); and who also appear in The Edinburgh
Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Penny Fielding (2010). The essays in these volumes not only engage with the postcolonial but also address ‘the literary, cultural and historical contexts’ 49 of Stevenson’s work, including anthropology and psychoanalysis that now dominate
Stevenson studies and that are also relevant to the argument of my thesis.
Julia Reid’s Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) has proved particularly helpful in my effort to understand and explicate Stevenson’s engagement with contemporary anxieties relating to evolutionary psychology and shame in relation to imperialism.
47 See Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson's “Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá”’, The Review of English Studies, 50.200 (1999) 463-482; Katherine Bailey Linehan, ‘Taking Up With Kanakas: Stevenson’s Complex Social Criticism in “The Beach of Falesá”’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 33.4 (1990) 407–422; William J. Scheick, ‘The Ethos of Stevenson’s “The Isle of Voices”’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 27 (1992) 142-149; and Oliver S. Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007) 217, 245-246. 48 Jolly, ‘Essays on R.L.S.’, 454. 49 Penny Fielding, The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) 1. Fielding notes that Stevenson’s ‘posthumous reputation has had an uncertain relationship with the idea of literary “period”’; this has interesting implications for my discussion of Stevenson’s historical context mapped in chapter 2 of the thesis.
16
Since the turn of the century, the anti-imperialist view of the writer has been gradually modified as critics have delved deeper into the variety of Stevenson’s engagement with the Pacific, revealing an even more complex and conflicted view of his imperialist attitudes. In articles and monographs, critics like Vanessa Smith, John Kucich, Ann Colley, Roslyn
Jolly, and Lawrence Phillips to name a few, 50 have re-examined
Stevenson’s Pacific writings and his engagements in the South Seas from a variety of perspectives ranging from Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan print culture (Smith) and magical and melancholic masochism (Kucich) to piracy and slavery in the Pacific (Jolly). This thesis is informed by Roslyn Jolly’s in-depth study of Stevenson's intellectual encounter with Pacific anthropology and colonial politics and law in Robert
Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession
(2009); and by her articles on Stevenson’s South Seas writings listed in the thesis footnotes and Works Cited and Consulted. The thesis also builds on Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (2004), in which Ann Colley introduces an indeterminate complexity to Stevenson’s anti-imperialism in a study of the influence of nineteenth-century missionary culture on Stevenson in the Pacific, revealing the ‘shifting tones’ of his experience and thus his writing voice in relation to colonialism. These ‘shifting tones’ are the ambivalences and contradictions that this thesis seeks to explore in relation to shame.
50 Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Kucich, ‘Melancholy Magic: Masochism, Stevenson, Anti-Imperialism’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 56.3 (2001) 364-400; Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
17
The importance of Patrick Brantlinger’s ground-breaking work on what he termed ‘imperial Gothic’ cannot be over-estimated both to the new breed of Stevenson post-colonialists and to my own study. His early essay
‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel,
1880-1914’ (1985), 51 was followed by his Rule of Darkness: British
Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914,52 published in 1988; both works identified a group of issues in late nineteenth-century fiction that related to imperialist national identity and that will be discussed in relation to
Stevenson’s Island Nights’ Entertainments in Chapter 3 of this thesis. His term ‘imperial Gothic’, a subgenre that combines ‘the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism’ with ‘Gothic elements’, 53 is useful in providing a wider historical context for
Stevenson’s expression and use of shame in his work that can be seen as both associated with and in opposition to the moral anxiety that typified fin-de-siecle discourse at the time Stevenson was writing.
Finally, mention should be made here of the South Seas texts used in this study. While resident in Samoa in the last six years of his life,
Stevenson produced a significant body of fiction relating to the South
Seas. The most important of these writings include Island Nights’
Entertainments (1893: consisting of ‘The Beach of Falasá’, ‘The Bottle Imp’, and ‘The Isle of Voices’) and The Ebb-Tide (1894) – texts that are analysed in detail in this thesis. Because of the limited scope of a Master’s thesis,
51 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 28.3 (1985) 243-252. 52 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). 53 Ibid 227.
18 however, a further episodic adventure novel titled The Wrecker (1892), another of his ‘South Seas Yarns’54 that was written (like The Ebb-Tide) with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, is not included in this study. Much use has been made, however, of Stevenson’s non-fiction writings: A Footnote to
History (1892) and In the South Seas (1896); his open letter on Father
Damien; a number of his essays in various collections; and the eight- volume edition of Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (1994-1995), edited by
Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, that includes Stevenson’s many private and public letters (especially his letters to The Times) documenting his personal and political views in relation to colonialism.
Discussion of post-colonial theory in this thesis is limited to studies that specifically relate Stevenson to post-colonialism and assist in revealing the complex nature of his engagement with the culture and politics of the South Seas. Although critics like Edward Said and Bill
Ashcroft are referred to in this study, it is outside the scope of this
Masters thesis to engage more fully with post-colonial studies: the focus will remain on the conflicted nature of shame in Stevenson’s South Seas writings.
Clarifying the problem
The above survey of literary criticism in Stevenson studies clearly establishes the author as a significant participant in imperialist debate of the period. He both lived and wrote about the experience of empire. But his role is still seen as ambiguous: his own actions as a colonialist and his
54 Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95) 6: 330.
19 narratives are fraught with complex and often conflicted imperial attitudes. Thus an interpretative problem remains in the way Stevenson has been seen in terms of his complex attitudes to European imperialism.
As indicated above, critics initially saw his work as imperialist; more recently his writing has been interpreted as anti-imperialist. This has been both reinforced and further questioned by anthropological and psychoanalytical discussions of his work, not least because they also examine Stevenson’s attitudes to empire, race and politics. Thus the critique of European imperialism present in his South Seas stories remains the subject of academic debate and is still controversial. More work needs to be done to explain Stevenson’s complex response to imperialism. Interestingly though, to date no one appears to have interrogated Stevenson’s approach to empire in light of his preoccupation with shame. This is particularly surprising given the ability of shame to focus our attention on, precisely, the complexities of Stevenson’s position: shame is a vital tool for understanding the ambivalence in Stevenson’s relationship with imperialism.
Aim and significance of this study
The aim of this study is to explore the use of shame in the writings of
Robert Louis Stevenson in order to better understand his complex attitude to imperialism. This aim will be fulfilled by addressing three guiding questions:
• What continuities exist between Stevenson’s early milieu and the
author’s profound, complex and repeated evocations of shame in his
20
South Seas writing – in particular, what biographical and
psychological issues may have shaped Stevenson’s engagement with
shame in his work?
• How does Stevenson’s experience and understanding of shame
shape his attitude to empire? In other words, how does the
biographical and psychological approach to Stevenson’s personal
shame intersect with an historical and cultural approach to fin-de-
siecle, Western imperialism?
• How does Stevenson’s attitude to empire inform his use of shame to
critique the attitudes of others? In short, how does he use shame as
a device for political critique in his South Seas writing?
This will be the first full-scale examination of Stevenson’s focus on shame, revealing an important new aspect in the work of one of the most influential writers in English fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century. It will contribute both to Stevenson studies and to the burgeoning field of shame studies.
Importantly, understanding the major role of shame in Stevenson’s writing will assist in understanding his attitude to imperialism and will help bring subtlety to the debate about Stevenson’s imperialist attitudes.
Further, the role and importance of this previously unexplored aspect of his writing will help to explain and complicate not only his attitude to imperialism but also his attitude to self, to his characterisation, and to his manipulation of narrative. An exploration of the driving emotion shame, manifested both unconsciously and consciously in Stevenson’s work,
21 allows us further insight into the creative process of this complex and conflicted writer. Consequently, this thesis will help to provide a more nuanced assessment of Stevenson’s literary achievements.
Argument
This thesis argues that Stevenson uses shame as a tool to critique attitudes to imperialism in his fiction writing of the South Seas. This argument will be developed in the following way. First, it will be argued that Stevenson had a particular understanding of shame, conscious and unconscious, that was informed by both his personal experience of shame and his ideas on the role of emotion in literature – termed here,
‘Stevensonian shame’. Secondly, Stevenson’s experience and understanding of shame helped shape his understanding of Western imperialism in the Pacific within a wider context of conflicting contemporary attitudes to empire. Thirdly, Stevenson’s understanding of imperialism, informed by shame, is central to his use of the emotion in his
South Seas writing, in particular his fiction, as a device to examine and project his attitudes to imperialism thereby challenging and moulding the attitudes of his contemporary readership.
My argument is structured in this way to reveal the growing power of shame to provide Stevenson with a natural approach to understanding his own character and to developing his conception of the moral universe.
Shame will be seen to help mould and inform his understanding of self which in turn reveals his profound attraction to characters who are doubles, doppelgangers, self-divided, parallels and opposites; and flowing
22 from this, plots which balance these divided characters against each other, Jekyll against Hyde, the Master of Ballantrae against his brother, and the many self-contradictory characters of the South Sea tales against themselves and one another. Thus the argument is structured to show how shame provides Stevenson not only with a way to understand himself and the world, but with a mechanism to reshape the world through his critique of readers’ attitudes to imperialism.
Structure: Chapter summaries
The organization and content of the thesis chapters follows the same trajectory as the above argument:
Chapter 1, titled ‘“My Ears Burn”: Stevensonian Shame’, identifies what shame meant to Stevenson, both consciously and unconsciously.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines
Stevenson’s biographical experience of shame. It provides a biographical exploration of Stevenson’s early experience of and interest in the emotion of shame and the way this became part of the medium of the writer. The sources of his personal shame – economic, professional, masculine and religious – that all find a focal point in the father/son relationship are examined through the use of letters, juvenilia, autobiographical essays, early stories and secondary material. The second section analyses
Stevenson’s particular ideas and beliefs about emotion, particularly shame, in literature. It focuses on the way Stevenson’s thinking about shame was shaped by contemporary theories of evolution and psychology.
The third section draws on examples from across Stevenson’s oeuvre to
23 demonstrate the author’s understanding of and preoccupation with shame, as discussed in the first two sections of the Chapter, in his writing.
Chapter 2, titled ‘“A Hollow Fraud”: Shame and Empire’, examines
Stevenson’s understanding of and attitudes to empire. This chapter is also divided into three sections. The first maps the historical context of
Stevenson’s South Seas writings and examines the contemporary competing fin-de-siécle anxieties about empire. The second section situates Stevenson’s attitudes to imperialism within the contextual landscape outlined in the first section and explores the extent to which
Stevenson’s understanding of empire was shaped by his own Stevensonian shame. The third section examines the way Stevenson reacted to his understanding of empire, informed by Stevensonian shame, by using shame as a tool to critique empire in his writings. Through an analysis of contemporary political writings, Stevenson’s non-fiction works and letters, and post-colonial scholarship, this chapter aims to introduce Stevenson’s use of shame as a tool to speak about empire. It will become clear that
Stevenson’s personal sense of shame did not remain pathological: the author’s idea of himself influenced and informed his idea of the world and his role as literary commentator.
Chapter 3, titled ‘“My Conscience Smote Me”: Shame in Island Nights’
Entertainments’, will explore Stevenson’s use of shame in ‘The Beach of
Falesá’ and the other South Sea tales, ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of
Voices’, collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments. This Chapter will first explore the commonality between the three stories and then show that, in
24 each of the stories, Stevenson interrogates the justification of empire by using shame to disrupt and subvert the central themes of imperial Gothic fiction. It will then examine the way Stevenson’s conflicted view of imperialism serves to weaken and confuse his subversion of the imperial
Gothic subgenre.
Chapter 4, titled ‘“A mind divided”: Shame in The Ebb-Tide’, continues the exploration of shame in the last of the South Sea tales. The narrative of The Ebb-Tide is underpinned by the affect shame; it represents
Stevenson’s most revealing and dramatic use of shame in the imperial context. This chapter will demonstrate conclusively that Stevenson’s notion of shame is a significant part of his nuanced critique of Western imperialism.
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Chapter 1
‘My ears burn’: Stevensonian Shame
Shame pervades Stevenson’s oeuvre. The basis for this preoccupation with shame is revealed through, first, an examination of Stevenson’s personal experience of shame and, secondly, an analysis of his conscious ideas about the emotion.
Stevenson’s experience of shame
From Stevenson’s personal letters and other biographical sources it is clear that he experienced profound personal shame. The various sources of shame experienced by Stevenson and expressed in his letters are complex, connected and at times contradictory. It is interesting to note, however, that these sources of personal shame (whether economic, professional, masculine or religious in nature) find a focal point in
Stevenson’s turbulent relationship with his father, Thomas Stevenson,1 and may help to explain his increasing fascination for this particular emotion.
Robert Louis Stevenson came from a family renowned for their business pragmatism and religious commitment.2 He was proud of the prominence of his family and their fame as practical engineers and designers, who had erected many of the lighthouses around the dangerous
1 Robert Louis Stevenson writes that his father ‘was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition’ and ‘a morbid sense of his own unworthiness’: Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Thomas Stevenson: Civil Engineer’ in Jeremy Treglown (ed.), The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1988) 213. 2 Jenni Calder, RLS: A Life Study (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980) 26-27.
26 coasts of Scotland.3 Their physical and mental strength, their material success, and their role in saving countless lives through their exceptional work on lighthouse design and construction, made him feel bitterly inadequate by comparison.4 Writing to his editor at Scribner’s regarding corrections to a brief biographical article in the Book Buyer, Stevenson complained that
my father is not ‘an inspector’ of lighthouses; he, two of my uncles, my grandfather, and my great grandfather in succession, have been engineers to the Scotch Lighthouse service; All the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name … I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well.5
Stevenson’s sense of familial inadequacy was intertwined with an acute anxiety over his profession as a writer. This is most clear in his comparison of his literary ‘labours’ with those of his ancestors: ‘I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfours too’ (Letters
8: 235). The proverbial lament of ‘Hinc illae lacrymae’,6 which follows this statement of self-condemnation, while perhaps tongue-in-cheek, discloses a serious source of personal and professional shame for the writer. His recollection that ‘My father said that [writing] was no profession’ (Letters 6:
47) taken together with his condemnation of David Balfour as ‘a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a man’s life it seems to me inadequate’
3 See Stevenson, Records of a Family of Engineers (NetLibrary: Project Gutenberg, 1999); and Stevenson, ‘Thomas Stevenson: Civil Engineer’. 4 As argued in Roslyn Jolly, ‘Light work’, The Times Literary Supplement (London, 28 January 2005) 14, 15. 5 Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95) 5: 229-230. Subsequent references to this work are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘Letters’. 6 ‘Hence those tears’, from Terence, Andria, 1. 126 and Horace, Epistles, I. xix. 41 as noted in Letters 8: 235.
27
(Letters 8: 235), reveals a professional anxiety which plagued Stevenson throughout his literary career, 7 and which Oliver Buckton suggests reached a crescendo during his cruises in the South Seas.8 It was from
Vailima that Stevenson expressly stated his professional shame in a letter to Will Hicok Low in January 1894: ‘We take all these pains, and we don’t even do as well as Michael Angelo or Leonardo, or Fielding … J’ai honte pour nous; my ears burn’ (Letters 8: 235).9
A corollary of Stevenson’s professional anxiety was his feeling of personal deficiency caused by a prolonged financial dependence on his family.10 For much of his life he was economically dependent on his father, and an abortive early apprenticeship observing the construction of lighthouses on windswept coasts confirmed his physical and mental inadequacy for such a profession. It is telling that when Stevenson finally did become financially self-sufficient, he wrote to his mother, Margaret
Stevenson, offering to send her
a cheque for £100 tomorrow: which is certainly a pleasant thing to be able to say. I wish it had happened while my father was still here; I
7 Stevenson’s anxiety over his position as a writer may be seen as the impetus for his essays ‘On the Choice of a Profession’ (1879) and ‘The Morality of the Profession’ (1881): Stevenson, ‘On the Choice of a Profession’, Essays Literary and Critical, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala Edition, 35 vols (London: Heinemann, 1923-24) 28: 12- 19; Stevenson, ‘The Morality of the Profession of Letters’, Essays in the Art of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1917) 53. See Jolly’s discussion of both essays in relation to the ‘psychological burden of Thomas Stevenson’s condemnation of his chosen career’: Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (Cornwall: Ashgate, 2009) 4-5. 8 Oliver S. Buckton, ‘Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: The South Seas from Journal to Fiction’, in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (Madison Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) 199. 9 ‘J’ai honte pour nous’ translates to ‘I am shamed for us’. 10 As Mintz states, well into adulthood, Stevenson’s letters to his parents were concerned with his attempts to establish financial independence: Steven Mintz, A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1983) 85, 87.
28
should have liked to help him once; perhaps even from a mean reason: that he might see I had not been wrong in taking to letters (Letters 5: 430).
Stevenson’s financial dependence on his family was in large part due to, and compounded by, his lifelong ill health.11 His frustration at his own physical weakness is registered in a letter to his friend Charles Baxter in
December 1873: ‘I have a great deal in view that may or may not be possible … If I can only get back my health, by God! I shall not be as useless as I have been’ (Letters 1: 398).
Paradoxically, when Stevenson did achieve professional success, and consequently economic independence, he experienced guilt, or more accurately shame (because it manifested in a condemnation of the self).
Stevenson’s self-criticism is clear in his comments to Edmund Gosse in
January 1886, when he compares himself and his fellow writers to ‘whores of the mind selling to the public the amusements of our fireside as the whore sells the pleasures of her bed’ (Letters, vol. 5, 171). Steven Mintz convincingly argues,12 as neatly stated by Luisa Villa, that ‘Stevenson’s desire to achieve professional success … was ultimately guilt-ridden since the very same achievement of economic independence was bound to weaken domestic bonds’.13 This is suggested in Stevenson’s confession that
my father’s services to lighthouse optics have been distinguished indeed … and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little,
11 He wrote to Baxter in 1873: ‘I do somewhat portend that I may not recover at all, or at best that I shall be long about it. My system does seem extraordinarily played out’ (Letters 1: 395). See also Claire Harman, Myself & The Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Harper Collins, 2005) 196-203; and Mintz, 82-83, 85-86. 12 Mintz, 87. 13 Luisa Villa, ‘Quarreling with the Father’, in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), 110.
29
frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it with the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward (Letters 5: 229- 230).
Even more serious as a source of shame in him, however, was his sense of having fallen away from his family’s spiritual values. His fascination with the Covenanter history of his ancestors, manifested in his first publication The Pentland Rising written at the age of sixteen,14 and his admiration for his maternal grandfather, a much-respected
Presbyterian minister in whose manse he often spent childhood holidays, 15 shaded uneasily into a scornful rejection of Christian fundamentalism.16 This complex and contradictory reaction to Christianity can be seen in everything he wrote, and shows up most vividly in The Ebb
Tide, in the depiction of the extraordinary character of Attwater, as will become apparent in chapter 4 of this thesis.
Stevenson’s inability to give full assent to Christian teachings produced one of the great crises of his early manhood.17 At the age of twenty-two, an energetic and iconoclastic university student, Stevenson and a few young friends set up a club which they called the Liberty,
Justice, Reverence club: L.J.R.18 Its main activity consisted of meeting in pubs; but they also drew up a constitution for the club in writing, the
14 The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666 (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1866). 15 See Stevenson, ‘Manse’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits (The University of Adelaide: ebooks@Adelaide, text derived from 1912 Chatto and Windus Edition) ch. 7 [no page numbers]. 16 Calder, 57-60. 17 Stevenson’s religious conflict with his father has been well documented and is the subject of much psychological analysis: see in particular Villa, 109-119. 18 See the reference to the society in Stevenson’s letter to Baxter dated 9 April 1872: Letters 1: 225.
30 language of which was for the period irreverent and irreligious. 19
Stevenson’s father found the constitution, read it with horror, and questioned Stevenson about it when he came in late one evening, tipsy and nonchalant.20
Interrogated about his religious and moral beliefs and forced to take a fixed position on views he was still considering and developing, Stevenson found himself in agonized disagreement with his father, and eventually with his mother too.21 He writes at the time ‘my game is not the light- hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel: I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio’ (Letters 1: 273).
The process of challenge from his father, riposte from Stevenson, and horrified reaction from his parents, was not a thing of one night: it went on for months, to Stevenson’s growing distress, and with his parents’ reactions growing increasingly frenetic. Thomas Stevenson, who loved his son dearly, ‘hysterically declared that he wished he had never married, had never had a son, or wished his son dead rather than an atheist’.22
Confiding in Baxter, Stevenson wrote, ‘what a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said, “You have rendered my whole life a failure.” As my mother said, “This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me”’
19 See Stevenson’s allusions to the constitution in his letter to Baxter dated 10 November 1891: Letters 7: 191. 20 Stevenson wrote a revealing fictionalised description of this event in his Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family: Roger Swearingen (ed.), Newly Discovered Long Story, An Old Song and a Previously Unpublished Short Story, Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1982). See also Letters 1: 225, n. 7; and Calder’s discussion of the self-referential work: Calder, 61. 21 Stevenson writes to Baxter in February 1873: ‘I so far thought of my father, but I had forgotten my mother. And now! They are both ill, both silent, both as down in the mouth as if – I can find no simile’: Letters 1: 273. 22 Calder, 61.
31
(Letters 1: 273). There can be no doubt that Stevenson felt lasting shame at the suffering he was inflicting on the two people he loved most, and who loved him: ‘O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world’ (Letters 1: 273).
There is, importantly, a further source of shame which influenced
Stevenson and which together with the earlier sources of personal shame informs his later writing: a conscious shame about empire. Stevenson expressed this imperial shame through his works of nonfiction. His In the
South Seas (1896)23 continually presents the Islanders as morally superior to their European counterparts: for example, he rhetorically asks the reader ‘were not whites in the Pacific the usual instigators and accomplices of native outrage?’ (ISS 7).24 He laments that ‘Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and hamlet’ (ISS 10). His controversial colonial history of Samoa, A Footnote to History (1892),25 which Oliver S.
Buckton calls his ‘most scathing dissection of the impact of European
23 Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896), The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala Edition, 35 vols (London: Heinemann, 1923-24) vol. 17. The work was posthumously published and was largely derived from a journal he had kept while cruising in the South Pacific. Subsequent references to this work are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘ISS’. 24 See also his chapters on ‘Death’ and ‘Depopulation’, and his description of colonial justice in ‘The Port of Entry’: ISS 32-47, 60-62. 25 Stevenson, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996). Buckton states that the work embroiled Stevenson ‘in a controversy that arose directly from his attempt to be both an advocate and a spectator’: Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007) 204.
32 colonialism’,26 conveys a profound sense of ignominy over the actions of his fellow Europeans in Samoa. This shame is clearly echoed in his comments on the colonial system to Colvin from Vailima in 1891: ‘I feel it wretched to see this dance of folly and injustice and unconscious rapacity go forward from day to day, and to be impotent’ (Letters 7: 153).
While Stevenson patently expressed a conscious shame about empire, his imperial shame is complicated both by other competing (probably unconscious) sources of shame and by the conflicted nature of shame itself. The contradictions and complexities of Stevenson’s shame over imperialism will be explored further in Chapter 2 of this thesis. It is enough to say here that the personal shame embedded in Stevenson’s life experiences gives nuance and complexity to our understanding of the author’s articulation of shame about empire discussed in the next chapter.
Stevenson’s idea of shame
It is clear that shame was one of the determining emotions of Stevenson’s life, an emotion that played out in various guises in both his personal experience and his writing. Shame in his work, however, is not informed solely by his personal shame but also by his conscious ideas on emotion.
As his essays reveal, he paid increasing attention to the role that emotions such as shame play in the production and consumption of literature; and
26 Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson, 182. Buckton also calls the work ‘a nonfictional counterpart to the scathing representations of colonialists in the South Sea stories “The Beach of Falesá” and The Ebb-Tide’: 191.
33 this in turn influenced the way Stevenson used shame as a mechanism to talk about empire in his writing.
In particular, Stevenson’s thinking about shame was shaped by contemporary theories of evolution. 27 This is reflected in the famous debate with Henry James over the competing merits of romance and realism. Julia Reid suggests that Stevenson’s arguments in favour of
Romance ‘deployed evolutionist rhetoric to celebrate what he saw as the universal appeal of romance’.28 Such evolutionist rhetoric appears in ‘A
Humble Remonstrance’ (1884), where Stevenson described ‘the novel of adventure’ as appealing ‘to certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man’, the luxury of which ‘is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow’.29 Realism in contrast is seen as appealing to ‘our intellectual appreciation of man’s foibles’ where ‘the working of passion is suppressed’. 30 The language Stevenson uses to describe his art discloses his adoption of contemporary ideas on evolutionary psychology; indeed, he fraternized with notable evolutionary scientists such as the folklorist Andrew Lang, the evolutionary psychologist James Sully, and F.W.H. Myers, leader of the Society of
27 This perhaps goes some way towards explaining why anxieties over ancestral inadequacy pervade his personal experience of shame. Stevenson writes to his cousin, Bob Stevenson, in September 1894: ‘What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather!’ (Letters 8: 362). See also Stevenson, Records of a Family of Engineers. 28 Julia Reid, ‘Stevenson, Romance, and Evolutionary Psychology’, in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), 218. 29 Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (1884), in Treglown (ed.), 196. 30 Ibid 196-197.
34
Psychological Research.31 His essay ‘Pastoral’ (1887), described by Reid as a call for an art that connects ‘with humanity’s primitive heritage’, 32 advocates the existence of a universal ancestral experience which is remembered instinctually by the reader and into which the writer may tap:
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims of his old, wild, tree- top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.33
Here again Stevenson’s use of Charles Darwin’s phrase ‘Probably Arboreal’ discloses Stevenson’s adoption of contemporary evolutionist ideas.
Collective, instinctual, primordial experience, with its ‘sensual’ and
‘illogical tendencies’, is embedded in the realm of emotion. The atavistic ancestral memory, to which he attributed the appeal of romance, manifested for Stevenson in the feeling, unconscious part of the self: the part concerned with ‘rude terrors and pleasures’. Significantly,
Stevenson’s belief in shared emotional experience led him to treat emotion in his writing in particularly interesting ways.
First, Stevenson believed that the atavistic, emotional self was universal: that our ‘illogical tendencies’ were derived from a ‘common ancestor’. These universal emotions were for Stevenson what successful writing (specifically romance) relied upon. He states that ‘The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in
31 Reid, 217. Stevenson came into contact with a number of such people most notably through the Savile Club as early as June 1874: see Letters 2: 22. 32 Reid, 218. 33 Stevenson, ‘Pastoral’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits, ch. 6. As Reid points out, Stevenson’s ideas draw on the theory of ‘organic memory’ developed by Samuel Butler and others: Reid, 219.
35 the inherited experience of him who reads’.34 Interestingly, the belief in the universality of emotions, such as shame, may have led Stevenson to project his pathology of shame onto others, and into his discussion of other races, as readily as he does in his writing. Particularly in his South
Seas stories, Stevenson conveys an implied acceptance of common human emotional experience, most clearly when he writes on behalf of Polynesian culture in the short stories ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ or in the ballad poem ‘The Song of Rahéro’ where shame structures social relations in a legendary, pre-colonial past.35 Belief in the universality of emotions arguably provided Stevenson with a deep empathy for others, and a strong sense of authority to speak from their perspective.36
Secondly, for Stevenson, the inherited, emotional self was powerful and autonomous: a force to which ‘all must obediently thrill’. 37 The
‘obedience’ of the rational to the emotional self is described in the essay
‘Manse’ (1887), where Stevenson links his own experience with that of his
34 Stevenson, ‘Pastoral’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits, ch. 6. Interestingly, Stevenson’s notion of ‘inherited experience’ is particularly close to the idea of ‘racial memory’ postulated by psychologist, Carl Jung. 35 See Jolly’s discussion of the ‘The Song of Rahéro’ and ‘The Bottle Imp’ in Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s Pacific Transnarratives’, International Journal of Scottish Literature, 9 (2013) 5-25. 36 Stevenson’s sense of authority is clear in his letter to a friend regarding her intention to become a missionary: ‘remember that you cannot change ancestral feelings of right and wrong without what is practically soul-murder’ (Letters 8: 326). See also Tulloch’s consideration of whether Stevenson ‘allows any effective voice’ to indigenous people by ‘[m]oving beyond the dominant English-speaking voices’ and by the ‘introduction of occasional words from South Pacific languages, of longer passages of pidgin, or even of whole stories told from an indigenous perspecitive’: Graham Tulloch, ‘Colonialism and Postcolonialism’ in Caroline McCracken-Flesher (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: MLA, 2013) 76. 37 As stated in the Introduction to this thesis, Stevenson’s belief in the autonomous nature of emotion is compatible with a number of theorists’ views that affects are non-intentional – in particular, Massumi’s idea of affect as a nonconscious, autonomic experience: Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002) 28.
36
Grandfather.38 Stevenson writes of his Grandfather that ‘there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his’, that he had ‘tree-top instincts’, ‘like undeveloped negatives’ lying dormant until they ‘awoke and were trod down’. An ‘aboriginal frisking’ having to be ‘trod down’ conveys the idea of a powerful, vital force, independent of our conscious selves: as
Stevenson states ‘Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us’. 39 ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888) further demonstrates, as Reid puts it, Stevenson’s belief in ‘the involuntary nature of the unconscious’.40 In the essay, he famously wrote of ‘Brownies’ that
‘do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself’.41 The power and involuntary nature of the unconscious, emotional self allows the writer to draw upon the shared
‘experience of him who reads’ (such as the experience of shame) to manipulate and persuade. Certain ‘undeveloped negatives’, like shame, become a powerful, involuntary (and therefore authentic) tool through which to explore the effect of empire and, possibly, to excite real change in the reader.
Preoccupation with shame
This chapter has claimed that Stevenson demonstrates a preoccupation with the emotion shame throughout his writing. Evidence of this
38 Stevenson asks, ‘Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister’: Stevenson, ‘Manse’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits, ch 7. 39 Stevenson, ‘Manse’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits, ch. 7. 40 Reid, 221. 41 Stevenson, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ in Jeremy Treglown (ed.), 223.
37 preoccupation and the varied ways he came to use shame in all his writing is beyond the scope of this Masters thesis, which focuses on his South Sea tales. Nonetheless, the following section will give a brief indication of the way Stevenson’s personal experience of shame and his conscious ideas about the emotion, as discussed above, found expression in his writing.
As noted, Stevenson’s personal shame found a focal point in his relationship with his father, Thomas Stevenson. It is revealing then that so many of his fictional works explore a dynamics of shame within the context of a father/son relationship. The short stories ‘An Old Song’
(1875), ‘The Story of a Lie’ (1879) and ‘The Misadventures of John
Nicholson’ (1887) all involve young men disgracing father figures, a plot situation that in turn defines narrative progression. The motif of son shaming father leads Stevenson to explore varying permutations of the biblical story of the prodigal son’s return – played out in ‘The
Misadventures of John Nicholson’, ‘An Old Song’ and most notably in
Stevenson’s novel The Master of Ballantrae (1889) (which, interestingly, thematically parallels the earlier story of ‘An Old Song’).42 Many of his works also rely for their narrative development on fathers shaming sons.
‘The Story of a Lie’, ‘The Merry Men’ (1887) and the novel Kidnapped
(1886) all feature shameful and shameless father figures (or would-be father figures) who must be confronted by their younger counterparts in order to reestablish the honour of the family name. Upon first hearing that
42 According to my research so far, this is the first time the parallels between ‘An Old Song’ and The Master of Ballantrae have been noted. It is also noted here that in ‘An Old Song’, John is never permitted to return home by his Uncle the Colonel whose pride and principle would not ‘allow him to kill the fatted calf for such an unregenerate prodigal’: Stevenson, ‘An Old Song’ in Barry Menikoff (ed.), The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Modern Library, 2002) 644.
38
Uncle Ebenezer is his father’s brother, Davie confides in the reader that ‘‘If
I had been some years younger, what with shame, weariness, and disappointment, I believe I had burst into tears’.43
A perceived inability to live up to familial honour was, as discussed, an acute source of shame to Stevenson, so it is telling that many of his most famous tales concern themselves with the shaming of family names.
In both The Master of Ballantrae, the story of how the once great family of
Durrisdeer ended in tragedy and shame, and Kidnapped, with its highland obsession about clan honour, familial pride serves as a constant motivator for both character and plot. Even Treasure Island (1883), which Stevenson referred to as ‘the story for boys’,44 begins with Jim attempting to defend the honour of his family against the pirates and their associated shame:
‘what a disgrace upon the house!’ Jim’s mother cries in the wake of the
Captain’s fight with Black Dog.45 Revealingly, in ‘The Merry Men’, the story of a family shamed by its patriarch’s murderous profiting from ship wrecks, Stevenson goes so far as to have his narrator note the contrasting honour of Stevenson’s own ancestral vocation: ‘The thought of all these dangers [to ships at sea], in the place I knew so long, makes me particularly welcome the works now going forward to set lights upon the headlands and buoys along the channels of our ironbound, inhospitable islands’.46
Other sources of personal shame also appear in Stevenson’s works.
Anxiety Stevenson felt over his profession as a writer is echoed by
43 Stevenson, Kidnapped (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1994) 22. 44 Stevenson, Treasure Island (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 195. 45 Ibid 11. 46 Stevenson, ‘The Merry Men’ in Menikoff, 328.
39 numerous characters’ acquisition of wealth through shameful means. In
‘An Old Song’, the prodigal John becomes a writer for failing newspapers and lives ‘from hand to mouth; and the hand was not always spotless, which fostered his cynicism’. 47 The narrator of ‘The Merry Men’ is ashamed of his desire for ‘dead men’s treasures’ to restore the honour of his family and improve the life of his beloved.48 The young Fettes in ‘The
Body Snatcher’ (1884) shamelessly slaps ‘his pocket till the gold pieces rang’ when engaged in the grizzly task of grave robbing, and Jim reflects on the ‘shame and lies and cruelty’ which amassed the treasure of
Treasure Island.49 Similarly, Stevenson’s shame over prolonged financial dependence may be seen in the despairing character of ‘the Young Man with the Cream Tarts’ in ‘The Suicide Club’, or John and Alexander
Nicholson’s economic subjugation by their overbearing father in ‘The
Misadventures of John Nicholson’.
Physical weakness and lack of masculine strength become sources of shame throughout Stevenson’s fiction. The shamed members of ‘The
Suicide Club’ are described ‘as in the prime of youth, with every show of intelligence and sensibility in their appearance, but with little promise of strength or the quality that makes success’; 50 the shameful John
Nicholson is ‘Inwardly, in spite of his gross body and highly masculine whiskers … more like a maiden lady than a man of twenty-nine’;51 and when Jim and his mother attempt to enlist help against the pirates from
47 Stevenson, ‘An Old Song’, 647. 48 Stevenson, ‘The Merry Men’, 330. 49 Stevenson, Treasure Island, 185. 50 Stevenson, ‘The Suicide Club’ in Menikoff, 16. 51 Stevenson, ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’ in Menikoff, 743.
40 the local hamlet, Jim comments knowingly to the reader: ‘you would have thought men would have been ashamed of themselves – no soul would consent to return with us to the “Admiral Benbow”’.52
Stevenson sometimes equates masculine shame with another source of shame: moral or religious shame. In his early story ‘A Lodging for the
Night’ (1877) the morally shameless Villon is described ‘as a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks’ and ‘of phthisical tendency’ (as was Stevenson himself).53 Villon’s description is not too dissimilar to the abominable Mr Hyde’s in Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), who is ‘dwarfish’, ‘troglodytic’ and gives a
‘haunting sense of unexpressed deformity’.54 As is the description and nature of the sybaritic Mr Malthus in ‘The Suicide Club’ like that of Hyde: a paralytic who incites a strong feeling of repulsion in the honourable.55
Importantly, though, Stevenson more often brings the masculine and moral realms of shame into conflict. Time and again in Stevenson’s work morally shameful characters are imbued with strong masculine characteristics. A clear example is the murderous Macfarlane in ‘The Body
Snatcher’ who becomes a ‘great London doctor’ by following his own credo of courage and strength: ‘if you’re a lion, you’ll live and drive a horse like me, like K–, like all the world with any wit or courage’.56 Further, these characteristics of strength and masculinity are often admired by the narrator as honourable or redeeming attributes, thus presenting such
52 Stevenson, Treasure Island, 20. 53 Stevenson, ‘A Lodging for the Night’ in Menikoff, 187, 196. 54 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 266, 276. 55 Stevenson, ‘The Suicide Club’ in Menikoff, 18-19. 56 Stevenson, ‘The Body Snatcher’ in Menikoff, 721. Tellingly, the horse that Macfarlane drove in his youth pulled a grave-robbing cart.
41 characters to the reader in a complex and conflicted way. This is most clearly seen in the capable, courageous and morally shameful character of the Master of Ballantrae. The novel’s narrators, Mr MacKellar, who is loyal to the Master’s long-suffering brother, and the Chevalier de Burke, the
Master’s companion, clearly admire the Master’s daring. This admiration colours, and arguably softens, the narrators’ condemnation of the Master’s shamefully immoral actions. This conflicted view of a disgraceful character is also exemplified in Jim’s confused reaction to Long John Silver: Jim admires Silver’s strength and abilities in spite of his wickedness.
Such contradictory reactions to various types of shame will be explored further in Chapter 3 of this thesis in relation to Stevenson’s subversion of the imperial Gothic in Island Nights’ Entertainments and in
Chapter 4 in the context of Herrick’s conflicted response to the complex character of Attwater in The Ebb-Tide. It is enough to say here that such confused responses to shameful characters are a hallmark of Stevenson’s later South Sea fiction, and are often presented in the context of shame about empire. Further, the description and imagery of such characters and the responses they illicit contribute to a language or poetics of shame that Stevenson developed throughout his career – something that will be examined in later chapters of this thesis. An early example of a mixed reaction to a shameless character, which touches on the idea of empire, is
Jim’s and his father’s contrasting reactions to the bellicose and vulgar
Captain: ‘My father was always saying the inn would be ruined … but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it … there was even a party of the
42 younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a “true sea-dog,” and a “real old salt,” and suchlike names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea’.57
Moral or religious shame is by far the most prevalent source of the emotion in Stevenson’s fiction. There is clear interplay between morally shamed and morally shameless characters in his work and a dynamics of concealment and exposure of the self. The best example of this is Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The entire story may be viewed as a story of detection and discovery where Jekyll seeks to hide the source of his personal shame, Mr Hyde, and his friend Utterson attempts to discover it.
Initially, Utterson is loath to investigate the connection between Hyde and
Jekyll lest he expose ‘some concealed disgrace’ of Jekyll’s.58 He reasons that Hyde must be using ‘some old sin’ in Jekyll’s past to blackmail Jekyll, but later convinces himself that if he can expose some ‘black secrets’ of
Hyde’s then he will have the power over Hyde to force him to relinquish his hold over Jekyll.59 In the end, Utterson, with Poole, is forced to literally break into Jekyll’s private, concealed, physical space to expose Jekyll’s secret shame – a telling scene in a story where the mental (or emotional) becomes physical.60 Viewed in this way, Hyde may be seen as moral shame incarnate: the blasphemous annotator of bibles, the burner of his father’s portrait (a symbol of Jekyll’s inherited moral code) and, finally, the murderer of honourable men.
57 Stevenson, Treasure Island, 4. 58 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 267. 59 Ibid 267-268. 60 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 295.
43
The physical manifestation of shame in the character Hyde complicates the usual representations of shame in the narrative. Jekyll’s partial success in separating his more shameful self from himself has the effect of diluting the power of shame in Jekyll: ‘It was Hyde, after all, and
Hyde alone, that was guilty; Jekyll was not worse … And thus his conscience slumbered’.61 Interestingly, it is Jekyll’s lack of shame, his pride, which allows Hyde to first break free without the aid of the drug, and as he does so Jekyll experiences a pang of shame: ‘then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering’.62 Further, Hyde, as Jekyll’s shame in physical form, causes the dynamics of hiding in the story to become complex: Jekyll seeks to hide Hyde, both Hyde and Jekyll hide from society, Hyde hides within
Jekyll and when Utterson seeks either Jekyll or Hyde he eventually finds the other. We are told that when Jekyll managed to suppress temptation, and deny himself the transformation, he ‘came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar guest and entertainer’.63 Hyde’s understanding of Jekyll is most revealing: Hyde
‘remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit’.64 The whole tale, then, may be viewed as a game of hide and seek where what is being hidden and found out is the moral shame of a man.
61 Ibid 311. 62 Ibid 316. 63 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 282. 64 Ibid 313-314.
44
Importantly, moral shame throughout Stevenson’s work is, in true
Covenanting fashion, inexorably linked to punishment and death. Jekyll’s association with Hyde and his resultant shame is described by Jekyll as ‘a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners,
I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning’.65 Jekyll also equates
Hyde with death: ‘To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless’.66
Further, certain types of death are equated with shame. A number of stories present shame as a social death. In ‘The Misadventures of John
Nicholson’, John’s father ‘long regarded his son as one dead’ and when he hears new reports of John’s shameful dealings ‘to have the long lost resuscitated in a fresh disgrace was doubly bitter’.67 Similarly, after Dr
Lanyon has seen Jekyll’s shame, Lanyon considers his friend dead and begs Utterson not to mention him: ‘spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead’.
Shame is also equated with the death of the soul. To the honourable character, such a death is immeasurably worse than the death of the body. It follows then that honourable characters repeatedly view shame as worse than death, while shameful and shameless characters avoid death in favour of shame. When Jekyll finally becomes more afraid of his shame than of death it marks a point of moral progression in the character from
65 Ibid 284. 66 Ibid 314. 67 Stevenson, ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’ in Menikoff, 739.
45 someone who merely wishes to hide or isolate the shameful parts of himself for his own benefit, to someone who is genuinely concerned for their soul: ‘A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me’.68 I note here
Stevenson’s use of the word ‘racked’ (as in The Ebb-Tide) to describe the horror and torture of shame. The shameless Hyde, on the other hand, is more concerned by death: Jekyll tells us that ‘had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin’.69
Related to the repeated preference of honourable men for death before shame is the recurring link between shame and suicide. Given the self-divided nature of shame, where the self condemns the self, it may not be so far fetched to see suicide as the natural extension of shame. The most obvious example of this is ‘The Suicide Club’ whose members’
‘disgraceful actions … had reduced them to seek refuge in death’, yet are offered an escape from shame without the ignominy of suicide: 70 the young man with the cream tarts boasts that he ‘can show you into eternity without ceremony and yet without scandal’.71 Another example is the story of ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ (1877), in which the young Blanche says she would rather stab herself than be forced into a shameful marriage by her Uncle: ‘There is not a woman in all the world but would prefer death to such a nuptial’.72 So too in ‘Markheim’ (1884), after being told by the devil
68 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 318. 69 Ibid 320. 70 Stevenson, ‘The Suicide Club’ in Menikoff, 17. 71 Stevenson, ‘The Suicide Club’ in Menikoff, 10. 72 Stevenson, ‘The Sire de Maletroit’s Door’ in Menikoff, 214.
46 that he is wholly bad with no hope of recovery, Markheim’s residual aversion to evil, and by extension to himself, propels him to turn himself over to the law and the gallows.73 When Utterson forces his way into the cabinet where Hyde has concealed himself, Hyde commits suicide rather than let himself be exposed: ‘Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer’. And in ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’,
John is so ashamed of himself under the weight of his father’s condemnation that he cries: ‘“I just wish that I was dead!” And he fell on his knees before a chair and hid his face’.74
It appears evident from the foregoing discussion that Stevenson’s personal experience of shame helped to shape the representations of shame in his fictional work. It is also apparent that Stevenson’s beliefs about emotion may have influenced his use of shame in his writing. The parallels with Stevenson’s comments on evolution, for example, are unmistakable in the imagery of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The ‘aboriginal frisking’ of Hyde within Jekyll is clear in the Doctor’s description of his baser self: ‘the animal within me licking the chops of memory’ … ‘began to growl for license’.75 The conscious articulation of
‘tree-top instincts’ in the murder of Sir Danvers Carew is distinct: Hyde beats Carew to death with ‘ape-like fury’.76 Throughout the novella, Hyde is presented in terms not dissimilar from ‘Probably Arboreal’: his hands are ‘corded and hairy’ like an ape’s, he plays ‘apelike tricks’ on his more
73 Stevenson, ‘Markheim’ in Menikoff, 408-409. 74 Stevenson, ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’ in Menikoff, 739. See also Herrick’s abortive suicide in The Ebb-Tide, discussed in Chapter 4 of this thesis. 75 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 316. 76 Ibid 273.
47 developed counterpart, and when cornered he screeches ‘as of mere animal terror’.77
Stevenson’s belief in the universality and autonomous power of the unconscious, emotional self, played a formative role in his use of shame throughout his oeuvre. The empathy derived from the universality of emotion is exemplified in Kidnapped by the play of difference and similarity between lowland and highland moral codes. Alan and Davie hold varying belief systems but the honour derived from their assiduity for and adherence to their beliefs is a point of common ground. Davie speaks with admiration when he says that ‘Alan’s morals were all tail-first, but he was ready to give his life for them, such as they were’.78 Likewise, failure to live up to their respective and contrasting moral codes creates a shared experience of shame: Alan considers his service in the English army as ‘a black spot upon my character at the best of times’ just as Davie considers
Alan’s desertion from the same army an ‘unpardonable fault of honour’.79
While both Davie and Alan suffer shame in each others’ worlds (in the highlands Davie has no Gaelic and is considered ‘a kinless loon’ when he acknowledges his disgraceful ignorance of his own descent,80 while in the lowlands Alan is described by Mr Rankeillor as a ‘sore embarrassment’),81 but regardless of how lost and shamed each other are in their respective realms, the nature and effect of shame is common to both and acts as a point of understanding between the two characters. This shared emotional
77 Ibid 317, 319 and 295. 78 Stevenson, Kidnapped, 143. 79 Ibid 91. 80 Stevenson, Kidnapped, 210. 81 Ibid 234.
48 experience between two culturally and religiously divided characters in
Kidnapped prefigures Stevenson’s use of shame to transcend cultural and racial boundaries in his South Sea fiction, as mentioned above.
Similarly, Stevenson’s faith in the autonomous power of emotions, and the ability of romance writing to tap into that power, plays a significant role in inspiring his use of shame to control, manipulate and guide character and narrative. Throughout his writing, characters use shame to control and manipulate other characters. In Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the threat of shame is constantly used as a manipulative tool – the currency of extortion. As shown above, Utterson suspects Hyde to be blackmailing Jekyll with the threat of shame and is, consequently, afraid to expose Jekyll’s shame yet keen to uncover Hyde’s for its blackmail potential;82 Enfield uses the threat of ignominy to extract a hundred pounds from Hyde for the family of the child Hyde trampled;83 and, similarly, the spectre of shame is used as a surety by Jekyll when he swears to Utterson his connection with Hyde is over: ‘I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world’.84 Likewise, in Stevenson’s story ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ (1880), the villainous Northmour uses
Bernard Huddlestone’s disgrace and fear to strike a shameful bargain
‘unworthy of a gentleman’: his daughter Clara’s hand in marriage for Mr
Huddleston’s concealment and escape.85
Just as characters use the threat of shame to manipulate each other, so characters regularly rescue each other from the threat of shame
82 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 267-268. 83 Ibid 258. 84 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Menikoff, 278. 85 Stevenson, ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ in Menikoff, 155.
49
– a saviour role often played by the protagonist of the tale. Northmour, the would-be rescuer of Mr Huddleston from ignominy and death, may be viewed as the shameful counterpart of the real saviour of the story, Mr
Cassilis, who rescues Clara from the indignity of Northmour’s designs upon her. In a revealing scene, Northmour shamefully caresses Clara while she is unconscious: ‘Shame!’ cries Mr Cassilis, then proceeds to kiss the insensible Clara himself but in a platonic fashion, ‘with the dearest respect’.86 In ‘The Sire De Malétroit’s Door’ the Sire’s niece, Blanche, is ashamed of being forced upon Denis de Beaulieu by her Uncle: we are told that ‘shame and exhaustion were expressed in every line of her fresh young body; and she held her head down and kept her eyes upon the pavement’.87 Denis, like the hero that he is, rescues Blanche from the shame of her previous liaison with a French captain by welcoming the marriage and pretending to have no knowledge of her previous love affair. 88 In the Gothic tale ‘Olalla’, the narrator, an English officer recovering from his wounds, seeks to rescue Olalla, whom he loves, from the ignominy of hereditary madness. The rescue, however, fails, due in part to the local villagers’ superstitious condemnation of the pairing,89 but due predominantly to Olalla’s choice to seek relief from, or at least acceptance of, her shame within the Catholic tradition (paradoxically, the same tradition which provides fertile ground for local superstitions about
Olalla’s family). Olalla is presented as so immersed in shame, being inextricably linked with a tainted family line, that only God’s love, rather
86 Ibid 183. 87 Stevenson, ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ in Menikoff, 212. 88 Stevenson, ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ in Menikoff, 223. 89 Stevenson, ‘Olalla’ in Menikoff, 455-456.
50 than the love of the narrator, can give her succour: she asks the narrator to remember her as ‘one who loved you indeed, but who hated herself so deeply that her love was hateful to her’.90
It is interesting to note here that in Stevenson’s ‘The Beach of
Falesá’, noted as his turn away from Romanticism and discussed in
Chapter 3 of this thesis, the motif of a heroic rescue of a character from shame is treated in a cynical manner. The ignorant Wiltshire is unaware of Uma’s taboo within the Island community as he is of her conception of him as her saviour: not until well after the marriage is Wiltshire enlightened when Uma says, ‘Now you come marry me. You big heart – you no ‘shamed island-girl. That thing I love you for too much. I proud’.91
While Stevenson’s characters use shame to control or liberate one another, the author also employs the emotion to motivate and develop his characters. This can be seen particularly clearly in his two most famous adventure novels, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, where the actions of both Jim and Davie are repeatedly motivated by their sense of honour and the associated threat of shame. Jim feels an intense sense of shame for having left his companions at the fort: ‘I blamed myself sharply for leaving them in that danger with so few to mount guard’,92 and when he again meets the doctor he is ‘ashamed to look him in the face’.93 Jim’s shame is then relieved by his action of commandeering the Hispaniola, thus
90 Ibid 451. 91 Stevenson, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ in John Kucich, (ed.), Fictions of Empire (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003) 213. As will be shown in Chapter 3 of this thesis, the story is more concerned with Uma’s rescue of Wiltshire from moral shame, than his rescue of her from public ignominy. 92 Stevenson, Treasure Island, 147. 93 Ibid 163.
51 allowing him to redeem himself in his own eyes and those of his friends:
‘my conscience, which had smitten me hard for my desertion, was quieted by the great conquest I had made’.94
From the outset of Kidnapped, the author propels Davie forward on his adventures through the use of shame: in spite of the ominous reaction of the locals to the mention of house of Shaws, Davie says ‘shame would not suffer me to desist till I had put the matter to the touch of proof. I was bound, out of mere self-respect, to carry it through’.95 And it is shame that creates and defines the greatest conflict between Davie and Alan. While
Davie and Alan are guests in ‘Cluny’s Cage’, Alan borrows money from the delirious and febrile Davie to continue his game of cards with Cluny, which Davie considers a ‘shameful practice’.96 Davie then awakes to find that Alan has lost his money, which is sorely needed for their escape south. What follows is a merry-go-round of shaming, ‘a mortifying matter for all concerned’,97 where indignity is passed from Alan to Davie to Cluny and which eventually results in ‘The Quarrel’ between Davie and Alan – an important event for both narrative and character development in the novel.98 Alan, we are told, is ‘angry and ashamed’: ‘ashamed that he had lost my money, angry that I should take it so ill’;99 Davie is also angry and ashamed, being forced to ask for his money back from Cluny, he reacts by transferring the ignominy onto Cluny. Davie asks Cluny to advise him ‘as you would your son’ and forces Cluny to acknowledge the difficulty of
94 Ibid 135. 95 Stevenson, Kidnapped, 17. 96 Ibid 189. 97 Stevenson, Kidnapped, 194. 98 Ibid 189-196. 99 Ibid 195.
52
Davie’s position: ‘you can see for yourself it must be hard upon a man of any pride’.100 Cluny in turn attempts to force the ignominy back on Davie saying ‘ye give me very much the look of a man that has entrapped poor people to their hurt’, but finally backs down: either Davie’s ‘youth disarmed him, or perhaps his own sense of justice’.101
For Stevenson, emotion’s autonomous nature provides not only a useful device for narratological and character development, but a powerful tool for controlling and persuading the reader. As discussed, Stevenson believed that through primordial emotions, such as shame, the writer might connect with and influence his readership. This is most clearly seen in his tales of the South Seas, the subject of Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis. It is this use of shame – shame as an occupational tool rather than mere preoccupation – that will be the subject of the next chapter of this thesis. An examination of Stevenson’s use of shame as a mechanism to incite social change will reveal the way in which Stevensonian shame – that is, both his emotional experience and intellectual understanding of shame discussed in this chapter – informs Stevenson’s response to empire.102
100 Ibid 193. 101 Ibid 193. 102 Shame is also evident in Stevenson’s juvenilia, autobiographical essays, poems, letters, political writing and other short stories and novels not mentioned above – this brief discussion of shame in Stevenson’s work is merely meant as a snap shot.
53
Chapter 2
‘A hollow fraud’: Shame and Empire
Shame is employed as a political device throughout Stevenson’s South
Seas writings. The author consistently uses shame in his fictional and non-fictional work to examine and critique fin-de-siècle Western imperialism in the Pacific. This use of shame to engage with contemporary attitudes to empire discloses how central the emotion was to Stevenson’s own understanding of empire.
This Chapter will, first, examine the historical context of Stevenson’s
South Seas writings and, in particular, identify the contemporary competing fin-de-siècle anxieties about empire. Secondly, Stevenson’s own anxieties about empire will be situated within the historical context mapped in the first section. It will be shown that Stevenson’s attitude to empire was shaped by his own experience and understanding of shame – the ‘Stevensonian shame’ discussed in the previous chapter. Thirdly,
Stevenson’s use of shame as a device to challenge and critique attitudes to imperialism in his non-fiction writing will be examined. The importance of shame’s influence on Stevenson’s understanding of imperialism will be revealed as fundamental to the author’s employment of shame to talk about empire: shame in Stevenson’s South Seas writings developed from preoccupation to occupational tool.
54
Fin-de-siècle Imperialism
By the time the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened at the so-called Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in London in May
1851, Britain had the largest empire in the world. Although other
European nations such as France and Germany also displayed exhibits,
Britain was clearly the leader in technological progress and commercial expansion: her ‘conscious greatness’ was displayed in raw materials, industrial products and manufactures that comprised over half the
Crystal Palace and that were associated with distant parts of the globe.1
The exhibition indicated her superiority in trade and ‘Trade follows the flag’, as contemporary politicians constantly reminded the British public.2
By the 1880s, however, the extension of such global trade and the colonization that followed were beginning to be seen as a complex liability that could dilute the vital powers of the imperial centre itself. There were competing anxieties driven both by those whose morality led them to question the very justification of empire and by those who advocated empire but who were concerned for its efficacy in the face of threats to a stable hegemony and identity – threats that were expressed in literature through what is known as the ‘imperial Gothic’.
On the one hand, there was genuine concern about the moral correctness of empire. Although slavery had been officially abolished in
Britain as early as 1807 and in all British territories in 1833, and although the British navy continued to patrol the coasts of Africa in an
1 James Buzard, ‘“Then on the Shore of the Wide World”: The Victorian Nation and its Others’ in Herbert F. Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) 438-9. 2 John Kucich (ed.), Fictions of Empire (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003) 1.
55 effort to halt the slave trade of other nations, outposts of quasi-colonial
Britons were still acting illegally and indulging in practices like ‘black- birding’.3 This compromised the moral high-ground Britain had won by abolition, undermining pride in what many considered to be imperial benevolence and causing anxiety over the moral justification for Empire.
By the mid-1880s the ‘scramble for Africa’ was well underway, in part driven by missionary and abolitionist concern about how quasi- colonization was affecting indigenous populations;4 and similar concerns and intervention occurred in the Americas, South Africa, Australia and
New Zealand. (Reforms in India had already converted the East India
Company ‘from a piratical operation into a governing institution supposedly serving Indians rather than Britons’).5 Ironically, then, fears about uncontrolled conquest and inhumane colonization practices led not to withdrawal but to increased official imperialism: ‘[t]he typical finding of the APS [Aborigines Protection Society, an offshoot of the original anti- slavery movement] was that the Colonial Office needed to exert more, not less, control over the frontiers of white settlement’.6
3 ‘Blackbirding’ or the kidnapping of indigenous people to work as labourers was particularly prevalent in the Pacific from the 1860s and 1870s until the end of the century: see E. V. Stevens, ‘Blackbirding: a brief history of the South Sea Islands labour traffic and the vessels engaged in it’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 4.3 (1950) 361-403; and Roslyn Jolly, ‘Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture 35.1 (2007) 157-173, 158. 4 See Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Avon Books, 1990). Pakenham explores the dichotomy between the civilizing pursuit of some representatives of empire, such as Livingstone, and the exploitative ruthlessness of others, such as Leopold II of Belgium. 5 Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 20. 6 Ibid.
56
While missionaries defended the ‘natives’ against exploitation by ruthless colonizers, they also aimed to defend Empire against ignorance and superstition. Their fight against ‘heathen’ influences was seen to improve and therefore justify empire. Many Britons feared however that, apart from Livingstone’s heroic example and that of a few others, these
‘soldiers of Christ’ and their supporters were neglecting their mission back home.7 Dickens, for example, resented the ‘telescopic philanthropy’ of the
Mrs Jellybys of England whose concern for Africans led to neglect of the poor and disadvantaged in Britain. 8 Many of those poor and disadvantaged were, in fact, the source of new colonialists who left home for employment and a better life overseas. In this respect the colonies both assisted in relieving problems at home – what Carlyle called ‘The
Condition of England Question’ – and also caused new anxieties of far- flung management abroad.9
On the other hand, fin-de-siècle anxieties began to undermine confidence in the efficacy of empire: ‘a deep gloom about Britain’s imperial destiny coexisted with a jingoistic celebration of imperial values and imperial might’.10 As Linda Colley states, despite the common belief among
Victorians that their empire was ‘final and conclusive proof of Great
7 A term popularized by Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘Soldiers of Christ’ (1707-1788). 8 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) Chapter 4. Mrs Jellyby has been seen by many as a criticism of overseas humanitarians such as Caroline Christholm (who worked with the poor in Australia). 9 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1834) (London: Elibron Classics Replica Edition, 2005). Carlyle speaks of the threat of revolution due to economic depression, trade unionism, Chartism and overpopulation. 10 Yumna Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) 27.
57
Britain’s providential destiny’, 11 their ‘complacency’ was shadowed by many expressions of anxiety about their nation’s vulnerability to infiltration by the far-flung spirits empire had awakened. This widespread anxiety can be seen in concern about racial and other contamination, and in anxiety about social regression and the breakdown of civilization.
The prevailing scientific concept of the Victorian period was that of evolution, whether of individuals, species, cultures, or societies. Common evolutionist themes united the new sciences of psychology, degeneration theory, and anthropology; 12 but there was also contradiction and disagreement that helped to fuel anxiety. Julia Reid points out that following The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin’s hypothesis of ‘natural selection’ of random variations ‘was subject to multiple, conflicting interpretations: progress and direction existed alongside unpredictability and extinction’.13 At the same time, E.B. Tylor and especially Herbert
Spencer propagated influential sociocultural accounts of human progress and evolution as a natural progression from savagery to civilization. Yet while the advance of mankind might be celebrated, thinkers were
‘nonetheless preoccupied by the survival of the past within the present, the endurance of savage psychologies’. 14 Such concerns fuelled fin-de- siècle disquiet about racial decline.
11 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conneticut and London: Yale University Press, 1992) 368. 12 Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 6. 13 Ibid 7. 14 Ibid 8. I note here that some racial degeneration fears were related not to anxieties about contact with non-white races but to concerns about the quality of civilization at home. This was exemplified by the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904):
58
Thus although there was genuine recognition, even by supporters of
Anglo-Saxon supremacy, that the ‘English’ were a hybrid race, there was nevertheless widespread ‘anxiety about the purity and permanence of its racial categories’.15 Fears were raised especially by the new discipline of ethnography, which warned that ‘degeneration’ could be caused by contact between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races.16 Such anxiety about the consequences of contamination through imperialism are clearly illustrated by the narrator of Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain (1887): ‘Civilization is only savagery silver-guild. A vainglory is it, and, like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark’.17
Contemporary commentators explained any adverse cultural effects of imperialism in terms of ‘atavism’ or a ‘reversion to savagery’. In The
Psychology of Jingoism, written at the end of the nineteenth century, J. A.
Hobson for example writes: ‘the superstructure which centuries of civilization have imposed upon … the individual, gives way before some sudden wave of ancient savage nature roused from its subconscious depths’.18 Missionary writings are full of concern about being converted to heathenism instead of converting the heathen. Even more insidious was the trade in esoteric writings that accompanied the ethnographic interest in other cultures, languages, and ancient religions. The fin-de-siècle decline in Christianity and an accompanying rise of interest in the occult
see Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 22. 15 Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies, 45. 16 Kucich, 5. 17 Quoted in Kucich, 5. 18 J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) (London: Elibron Classics Replica Edition, 2005) 19. See also J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).
59 and in beliefs from Buddhism to Rosicrucianism, not only in outposts of empire but in Britain itself, was seen as symptomatic of an atavistic degeneration. According to Janet Oppenheim, people turned to occultism because of the success of scientific scepticism: ‘triumphant positivism sparked an international reaction against its restrictive world view’.19 Even imperialism itself came to function as a type of pseudo-religion, ‘a substitute for declining or fallen Christianity’.20
Thus the maintenance of Britishness, Christianity, and the rule of law at what was seen as the source of degeneration – those far-flung communities of trade and influence – was a constant concern. Anxiety that individuals cut off from the centre of empire might degenerate prompted increased activity by the London Missionary Society and caused obliging British governments in the late 1880s to establish protectorates and colonies in order to curb ‘[a]cts of private colonization and a range of quasi-colonialist activities’,21 ranging from inappropriate trade to piracy and slavery by unofficial colonials. Examples of regression or ‘going native’ were constantly reported to government authorities: in 1897, Sir Harry H.
Johnston, first governor of Nyasaland, wrote: ‘I have been increasingly struck with the rapidity with which such members of the white race as are not of the best class, can throw over the restraints of civilisation and
19 Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 1985) 160. 20 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914’, English Literature in Transition 28.3 (1985) 243-252, 246. 21 Jolly, ‘Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction’, 157.
60 develop into savages of unbridled lust and cruelty’.22
Such savage regression was ‘re-interpreted within a scientific realist framework of degeneration theory’. 23 Suggestions of a return to the primitive were allied to symptoms of madness and sexual irregularity. Reid suggests that such ideas appear in Stevenson’s fiction: the primitive evoked by the ‘glee’ and ‘horror’ of the Pan figure in his poem ‘Et Tu in
Arcadia Vixisti’, 24 or the fear about modern man’s attraction to the primitive expressed in his short story ‘Olalla’.25 Olalla, discussed briefly in the previous chapter, is particularly interesting in this regard: the narrator is an imperial hero type, a British officer, who becomes contaminated by the grand family he stays with in Spain, a family whose decadence is epitomized by the half-witted, ape-like and sadistic son. Reid points out that the views of the narrator ‘chime with the contemporary scientific belief’, especially the predisposition of women to be at the mercy of their bodies. 26 The narrator is horrified by signs of animal passion and unbridled female sexuality in Olalla, to whom he is attracted: ‘Yes, they were beautiful sounds, and they were inspired by human tenderness; but was their beauty human?’.27 The narrator’s anxiety, indeed shame, about his own fascination for these primitive sounds reflects growing concerns
22 Quoted by Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic’, 247; from Sir Harry H. Johnston, British Central Africa (London: Methuen, 1897) 68. 23 Reid, 84. 24 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Et Tu in Arcadia Vixisti’ in Angus Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson: Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1998) 117. 25 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Olalla’ in Barry Menikoff, The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: The Modern Library, 2002) 420-457. Reid discusses the way both the poem and ‘Olalla’ undermine ‘simple hereditary determinism’: Reid, 84-86. 26 Reid, 86. Reid quotes contemporary physician J.G. Millingen: ‘[w]oman, with her exalted spiritualism, is more forcibly under the control of matter’. 27 Stevenson, ‘Olalla’, 448.
61 about the resurgence of instinctive sensuality, which was thought to be multiplied by the temptations of colonial experience. Images expressed, for example, in Paul Gauguin’s luscious primitivistic paintings of primitive island bliss fuelled and reinforced such views. In such a lax environment, men were seen to become less manly (a pathology in the discourse of
Victorian hero-worship), with a concomitant rise in homosexuality.28
Such regression was to be feared: it was thought to signal ‘a new barbarian invasion’ against which, according to Brantlinger, empire was seen as ‘a barricade’.29 This was particularly the case in the Pacific and, as
Roslyn Jolly points out, resulted in a ‘tension between the expansive energies of individuals and the curbing power of law’. 30 Another consequence of such anxieties was that a raft of fictional works – most notably H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – began to portray the ‘imperial Gothic’, stories that depict ‘a Britain alarmingly open to penetration by alien, even demonic forces that insinuate themselves into the fiber of British being’.31
Literature expressed the competing contemporary anxieties of imperialism, both in the metropole and in the colonies. Brantlinger points out that ‘[a]ll … popular romance formulas – imperial Gothic, Wellsian science fiction, invasion fantasies, spy stories – betray anxieties characteristic of imperialism both as an ideology and as a phase of
28 Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys (London: Harper Collins, 1991) 141. 29 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988) 230. 30 Jolly, ‘Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction’, 157. 31 Buzard, 449.
62 political development’.32 It was the imperial Gothic, however, that most clearly expressed the fin-de-siècle nationalistic and racist fears about empire discussed above. Brantlinger ties the emergence and popularity of the subgenre directly to the British public’s expressions of concern about national regression that started to multiply ‘sometime in the 1870s’.33 He states that the British ‘found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as automatically progressive, and began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial stock’.
Brantlinger sets a temporal framework for the subgenre ranging ‘from J.
Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 down at least to John
Buchan’s Greenmantle in 1916’ – though it is foreshadowed by earlier novelists like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins.
Brantlinger describes the imperial Gothic as combining ‘the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism’ discussed above, with ‘Gothic elements’.34 He argues that the racial and jingoistic anxieties of empire form the basis for what he identifies as the three central themes of imperial Gothic fiction: atavism (meaning some kind of ‘psychological or social regression’); invasion (usually by exotic supernatural ‘powers from the past’); and the degradation of adventure
(often an expression of the fear of the loss of adventure).35
Atavism is central to the imperial Gothic. The idea of representatives of empire undergoing some kind of ‘psychological or social regression’ is pervasive throughout the subgenre. The fear of regression is repeatedly
32 Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic’, 244. 33 Ibid 247. 34 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 227. 35 Ibid 230; see also Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic’, 244.
63 conveyed by ‘insistent images of decline and fall, or of “civilization” turning into its opposite’.36 Some best known examples of this may be Conrad’s
‘Kurtz’s ‘going native’ in Heart of Darkness or Kipling’s Englishman in the
‘Mark of the Beast’ who literally regresses into animal form. Importantly, the mechanics of regression persistently constitute a contagion effect: degeneration befalls Western imperialists who come into contact with, and then adopt or ‘catch’, native influences. Such racial angst expressed through atavistic themes can be seen both as a fear about the dangers of racial mixing inherent in empire and as a justification for empire:
Brantlinger states that much ‘imperialist writing treats the Empire’ as a sort of ‘“dressing for dinner”, a way of preventing England itself from
“relapsing into barbarism”’.37
Brantlinger identifies the second theme of imperial Gothic as that of
‘invasion’ often presented ‘in the form of demonic powers from the past as in Machen’s and Stoker’s tales of terror’. 38 This Gothic, usually supernatural, threat to Western imperialist characters again reflects the racial anxieties associated with imperial Gothic literature. The subgenre is full of empire builders and adventurers coming under attack from native supernatural forces that must be fought against and overcome. Examples include Kipling’s collection of Indian ghost stories or Haggard’s She (1887).
The gothic elements of these stories, in particular the native supernatural, has invariably been seen as representing the fears of racial, cultural and social invasion and contamination so often associated with fin-de-siècle
36 Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic’, 245-246. 37 Ibid, 246. 38 Ibid 245.
64 imperialism, discussed above. As stated by Brantlinger, the invasive, native, supernatural elements of these tales are fictional representations of the contemporary concern that empire’s ‘Western rationality may be subverted by the very superstitions it rejects’.39
Unlike the adventure fiction of the early Victorian period, imperial
Gothic tales express anxieties about the decline of imperial exploits.
Identified by Brantlinger as the third central theme of imperial Gothic literature, the degradation of adventure represents a racist fear that
Europeans might not always dominate their native counterparts: in imperial Gothic fiction ‘white men don’t always “rise to the top” – they just as often sink into savagedom, cowardice, or exotic torpor’.40 As Brantlinger points out, there is a stark difference between the adventure tales of
Federick Marryat, Thomas Mayne Reid and R. M. Ballantyne, with their optimistic jingoism, and those of Joseph Conrad, which ‘frequently read like botched romances’ in which Western adventure ‘turns sour or squalid, undermined by moral frailty’.41
The themes expressed in imperial Gothic fiction, discussed further in the next chapter of this thesis, reinforced racist, imperial angst during the fin-de-siècle period. Edward Said argues that nineteenth-century fiction sets up a hierarchical structure that portrays the colonies as profoundly antithetical to England, with the geographic centre of British life opposed to its spatial peripheries, and the white in opposition to the
39 Ibid 243. 40 Ibid 248. 41 Ibid.
65 non-white world.42 Thus although novels don’t actually cause imperialism, their implicit geographical and racial hierarchies helped to sustain social consent to it: ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them’.43 It is this ‘power to narrate’, not to ‘block’ but to challenge and critique, that Stevenson uses in his South Seas tales. Unlike the many novels in the last decades of the nineteenth century that critics have identified as using the imperial
Gothic,44 Stevenson’s late works disrupt the status quo. Indeed, it will be shown in the next Chapter that they go further than this: in critiquing imperialism, they present a ‘realist, parodic inversion of imperial Gothic’,45 while at the same time expressing the competing anxieties of the period through what has been identified in this thesis as the conflicted nature of
Stevensonian shame.
Stevensonian Shame and Empire
Stevenson’s engagement with contemporary anxieties about empire is clearly documented in his letters from 1888 when he arrived in the Pacific in search of health and with a commission to write travel articles for
American and English newspapers until his death in December 1894.
During this time, he made three cruises the length and breadth of the
42 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1994) 196-201. 43 Ibid xiii. 44 See especially Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness; and J.A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism. 45 Regarding Stevenson’s ‘The Beach of Falesa’, Brantlinger states: ‘[t]he conversion of adventure into crime, the fake devils, and the miscegenetic, homebody ending compose a realist, parodic inversion of imperial Gothic’: Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic’, 249.
66 ocean – from Hawaii to Australia and from the eastern Marquesas Islands to the Marshall Islands in the west – before settling in 1890 on the island of Upolu in Samoa. In June of 1889, while travelling through the South
Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin that ‘the
Pacific is a strange place, the nineteenth century only exists there in spots; all round, it is a no man’s land of the ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes’.46 This fertile
‘space’ – away from the metropole – allowed him to question and adjust his priorities in life and literature.
In the Pacific, Stevenson became an anthropologist in the field, witnessing and experiencing the complex engagements of islanders, missionaries, travelers, and colonialists. As explained in Chapter 1, he believed in the endurance of savage psychologies that were common to all races. He was able to test, in person, the many apprehensions about racial contamination, ‘undermining psychologists’ and anthropologists’ confident assumptions about inevitable progress’. 47 Ann Colley explains that
‘Stevenson was intrigued by a cross-cultural dynamic that could occasionally eradicate the presumed differences between the two societies
[European and native] and even defy or subvert confidence in colonial authority by weakening and undermining it while at the same time bringing about the downfall of indigenous cultural practices’.48 She also
46 Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95) 6: 312. Subsequent references to this work are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘Letters’. 47 Reid, 8. 48 Ann C. Colley, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas Crossings’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 48.4 (2008) 871-884, 871-872.
67 points out that his response to this intriguing colonial culture was anything but coherent. As Jolly puts it in her review of Colley’s work:
‘If we trace Stevenson’s varying, ambivalent, and often self- contradictory responses to different missionaries, missionary practices, colonial agents, and imperial acts, we see that he is both critic and son of empire, as he is both critic and son of the missionary faith, and that he often found strategic value and emotional solace in ideas of which he was, on occasion, a trenchant critic’.49
This is precisely the contradictory stance that this thesis argues is motivated and thus shaped by shame.
It is because Stevenson was ultimately ‘a son of the missionary faith’ and a ‘son of empire’ that his encounter with imperialism drew contradictory responses to the various fin-de-siècle anxieties discussed above. His early interest in Darwinian evolution and in Spencer’s theories of progress from primitive savagery to civilization was modified when confronted by colonial experience itself. He found that colonial powers acted anything but ethically, missionaries were at odds with each other and often insensitive to native customs, and random colonialists were frequently exploitive and brutal. Such abuses and contamination, not by the ‘lower’ but by the so-called ‘higher’ races, engendered shame and outrage in Stevenson. Often as not, he found himself on the side of the colonized, in conflict with the agents of empire. Advising Adelaide Boodle, who was embarking on ‘Mission work’, Stevenson reveals his dislike and shame of those who commit what he calls ‘soul-murder’, the efforts of missionaries to root out ‘ancestral feelings of right and wrong’: ‘Barbarous
49 Roslyn Jolly, ‘Book Review: Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2004)’, Journal of British Studies, 44.4 (2005) 870-871, 870.
68 as the customs may seem, always hear them with patience – always judge them with gentleness – always find in them some seed of good; see that you always develop them; remember that all you can do is to civilize the man in the line of his own civilization such as it is’ (Letters 8: 326). As understanding and sympathetic as Stevenson was, however, his final phrase here, and the previous ‘all you can do’, betray his internal conflict as a ‘son of empire’. His final sentence of advice confirms this: ‘In fact, what you have to do is to teach the parents in the interests of their great- grandchildren’. The social correctness of empire is at issue here; sensitive teaching must still take place and barbarism may eventually be eradicated by the benefits of civilization – so long as the civilized themselves do not regress into barbarism.
No matter how ‘primitive’ Stevenson may have considered the
Polynesians to be, however, he came to value the culture and people of the
South Seas, and determined to depict and analyse it before ‘the unjust (yet as I can see the inevitable) extinction of the Polynesian Islanders by our shabby civilization’. 50 He was delighted with the generous ‘farrago’ of material he could gather for his travel writing, reporting to Colvin that he had collected ‘masses of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry’ (Letters 6: 312). Such new material and experiences led him to concentrate for a time on non-fiction writing, on what Richard Ambrosini called an ‘ethnographic treatise’,51 In the South
50 Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980) 176. 51 Richard Ambrosini, ‘The Four Boundary-Crossings of R.L. Stevenson, Novelist and Anthropologist’ in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (Madison Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) 33.
69
Seas (1896),52 and a chronicle of the colonial wars in Samoa titled A
Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892). The response to both of these works by compatriots was muted and often indignant.
Stevenson was accused of romanticizing the Polynesians, yet as Roslyn
Jolly points out he considered them as ‘ordinary men damnably misused’:
Stevenson believed Samoans to be ‘a healthy and happy people’ when left alone, unlike Europeans whose civilizing mission he came to regard as ‘a hollow fraud’ (Letters 6: 420).53
Stevenson’s political writing aimed to expose the ‘shabby civilization’ of empire.54 He was particularly exercised by the political problems of
Samoa, nominally independent but ruled by colonial powers. German interference and aggression in the 1880s had led to war and then agreement in 1889 to a tripartite rule over Samoa by Germany, Britain, and the United States, with little regard for the native chiefs. This incensed Stevenson’s view of fair-play. He complained to Colvin about the
German bureaucrats in Samoa:
They have these huge salaries, and they have all the taxes; they have made scarce a foot of road, they have not given a single native a position – all to beachcombers, they have scarce laid out a penny on Apia and scarce a penny on the King. They have forgot they were in Samoa or that such a thing as Samoans existed and had eyes and some intelligence … I see democracy here on the least scale … It’s an ugly picture (Letters 7: 152-4).
52 Jolly points out that Stevenson conceived of this book as a regional study based ‘on Darwinian concept of “selection” to explain racial and cultural differences between island groups’: Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009) 30. See also Liam Connell, ‘More Than a Library: the Ethnographic Potential of Stevenson’s South Seas Writing’, Journal of Stevenson Studies, 1 (2004) 150-171. 53 Roslyn Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: South Sea Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) xiii. 54 Swearingen, 176.
70
And in angry letters to the London Times, he denounced the German colonists and irritated the various colonial powers to such an extent that the British Foreign Office tried to have him deported. He was determined that his moral outrage and personal shame should become a collective responsibility and that his readers ‘back home’ should realize that the imposition of Empire was fraught with moral hazards for the empire- builders.
Interestingly, Stevenson’s own actions in the pacific mirror his competing attitudes: his own behavior at Vailima stands in contradistinction to his genuinely critical stance against the dubious morality of empire in the Pacific. His actions at Vailima provide a biographical example of the way in which Stevenson’s imperial shame was complicated by other competing (probably unconscious) sources of shame in his attitudes to individuals and himself. It is no small irony that
Stevenson’s plantation of Vailima and his patriarchal mode of living was in keeping with the imperial model of colonial residence, to such an extent that the motives for his ethnographic writing might be called into question. Stevenson was, after all, converting his observations gathered in the South Seas into books for ‘the money he needed to keep his Samoan chiefdom going’.55
At Vailima, Stevenson lived the life of the privileged plantation owner: presiding over 300 acres, flying the British flag, dispensing hospitality to visiting dignitaries and friends from overseas, overseeing the welfare of his servants and their families, and riding out each day to
55 Manfred Malzahn, ‘Voices of the Scottish Empire’ in Ambrosini and Dury (eds), 167.
71 supervise his workers.56 He required his staff to wear tartan kilts for formal dress – his mother called this the ‘Vailima Livery’57 – which ‘served both as a badge of the estate and a reminder of his homeland’.58 Colley points out that ‘[w]hen the “Vailima boys” (Letters from Samoa 199) were in
Apia, the closest town to Vailima, one would know where they came from and whom they served’.59 At best, one could say Stevenson modeled the
Scottish clan chieftain, with his family and retainers around him (he actually referred to Vailima as his ‘Abbotsford’ (Letters 7: 378)) but it is hard to believe he could not have been aware of his compromising position vis-à-vis his imperial critique, especially when he expressed interest in the role of British Consul to Samoa or, as surmised by Booth and Mehew,
‘even hankered for the position of Chief Justice’ (Letters 7: 153-4, 311n).
Indeed, his comical and somewhat rueful ‘review of the present state of our live stock’ at Valima in a letter to Colvin in March 1892 mocks ‘this
Babylon the Great which I have builded’ and reduces his ‘Abbotsford’ to
‘Subpriorsford’ (Letters 7: 248-9). 60 Furthermore, his constant prevarication over applying for the Consulate also suggests the tensions and conflict in his personal position: ‘my idea, so often entertained, so often recoiled from’ (Letters 7: 201).
56 In a letter to the novelist George Meredith in September 1893, Stevenson writes: ‘I am the head of a household of five whites, and of twelve Samoans, to all of whom I am the chief and father; my cook comes to me and asks leave to marry – and his mother a fine old chief woman, who has never lived here, does the same’: Letters 8, 163. 57 Stevenson, Letters from Samoa 1891-1895 (London: Methuen & Co, 1906) 231 as cited by Ann C. Colley in ‘Stevenson’s Pyjamas’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30.1 (2002) 129-155, 139. 58 Colley, ‘Stevenson’s Pyjamas’, 139. 59 Ibid. 60 Booth and Mehew note that ‘a subprior is two down from an abbot’: Letters 7: 249n.
72
Despite his occasional joking, however, ruling ‘patriarchally’ at
Vailima (Letters 8: 163), helped Stevenson to counteract his personal misgivings about lack of manliness discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis.
He was no longer simply a writer of fiction; he was genuinely engaged in building and in the affairs of men, continuing the family tradition of his engineering ancestors. His early frustration with his physical weakness and fear of being ‘useless’ (Letters 1: 398), is no longer so prevalent in his letters.61 He relished his new activity, authority and power, and was proud of being a man of action: ‘The Farmer Man and The Planter’, as he signed his letters (Letters 7: 16, 24). At Vailima, Stevenson was a man of consequence – a representative of the British Empire whether he liked it or not, for he was also a writer opposed to many of the consequences of empire. It was an ambiguous situation he had to negotiate in both his non-fictional and fictional works.
Even earlier, on his travels in the Pacific, he had enjoyed a privileged position as an important British traveller: in Hawaii, he fraternized with royalty; and in Apemama, he was the special guest of the
High Chief Tembinok for eight weeks in 1889. Somewhat perversely,
Stevenson appears to have admired Tembinok’s tyrannical rule over his
Gilbert Islands subjects and discusses him at length in In the South
Seas.62 His ‘triumph of firm rule’ and manly power clearly appealed to
Stevenson, despite his dubious morality;63 and for this reason, Tembinok
61 As noted in Chapter 1, Stevenson wrote to his friend Charles Baxter as early as December 1873, ‘[i]f I can only get back my health, by God! I shall not be as useless as I have been’: Letters 1: 398. 62 Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Heinemann, 1926) 300-313. 63 Ibid 309.
73 has been suggested as a model for Attwater in The Ebb-Tide,64 as noted in
Chapter 4 of this thesis. Complicating matters further is Stevenson’s admiration of heroic South Seas missionaries, George Brown, Shirley
Baker, and James Chalmers, the Scottish missionary to New Guinea, who is a further contender for the inspiration of the ruthless strongman,
Attwater. 65 This factor of Stevenson’s personality - his undisguised admiration for strong men regardless of the morality of their motives – can be seen to compromise his conscious shame about empire.
Ann Colley raises the question ‘to what degree Stevenson was really
“Victoria’s son”’, in view of critical evidence of ‘his antagonism to imperialist doctrines and to colonial intervention’. 66 Building on Jenni
Calder’s analysis of Stevenson as the Scottish Lowlander, being both a
‘victim of English cultural imperialism’ and an ‘intrusive colonial’ in regard to the Highlands, Colley sees similar ‘tensions and incongruities’ in ‘his reactions to his new surroundings’ in the Pacific. She concludes: ‘Looking closely at Stevenson’s reactions to the missionary culture and the Samoan political environment, one has to recognize, or, perhaps, reluctantly admit to oneself, that there are significant moments when he supports the colonial imperative and values its presence, indeed finds solace in it as
64 Olivers S. Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007) 171-172; Oliver S. Buckton, ‘Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: The South Seas from Journal to Fiction’, in Ambrosini and Dury (eds), 207. 65 As pointed out in Roslyn Jolly, ‘The Ebb-Tide and The Coral Island’, Scottish Studies Review, 7.2 (2006) 79-91, 84. I note that the list of strongmen Stevenson admired is lengthy and includes the soldier, explorer, Governor and Premier of New Zealand, Sir George Grey. 66 Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2004) 6.
74 well as hope for an island’s future’.67 Thus Colley confirms the conflicted position this thesis argues in relation to Stevenson’s response to empire.
It is clear from the above discussion that Stevenson’s shame about the morality of empire was complicated by competing sources of shame, such as his feelings of physical inadequacy, which are compatible with the racial and social anxieties over the strength and efficacy of empire expressed in imperial Gothic literature. Viewed in this way, it is possible to see how his Stevensonian shame interacted with and shaped his reaction to contemporary anxieties about imperialism in the Pacific. Anxieties about social regression and imperialist strength are consistent with
Stevenson’s behaviour at Vailima and with his response to strong men and empire builders in the South Seas. These anxieties continued to emerge both in his fictional and non-fictional South Sea writings. Further, as stated above, the fear of atavistic contamination is prefigured in his earlier stories: such as ‘Olalla’ – even Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde draws on ‘a language of panic, of unreasoning anxiety, blind revulsion, and distancing sensationalism’ that Howard Malchow sees as defining Gothic images of race.68 Importantly, however, Stevenson’s moral shame about empire led him to challenge such anxieties in his South Seas fiction and consequently, as will be shown in the next Chapter of this thesis, to subvert the central themes of the imperial Gothic subgenre. It also provided the impetus for his shaming of the reader in his non-fiction writing.
67 Ibid 5-6. 68 Howard Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 4.
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Shaming Empire
The questions of culture and government that can be seen preoccupying
Stevenson’s mind in his personal letters quoted above, provided him with new direction for his writing. Roslyn Jolly examines this change of course in his writing from the late 1880s when he first began his travels in the
Pacific to the end of his life as a respected resident in Samoa. She points out that, new opportunities provided by his Pacific experience led to ‘a radical change of course’ for Stevenson, shifting his writing ‘from romance to realism’ and himself ‘from the domain of the sentimental traveller to that of the anthropologist’.69 As we’ve seen in Chapter 1 of this thesis,
Stevenson had always been concerned about the flimsiness of his literary output compared to the legacy of his engineering forebears, and he felt he now had the opportunity ‘to do considerable services’ for the world and mankind. 70 Not only did his fiction develop into realistic critiques of imperialism as the following chapters demonstrate, but his occasional writing, the essays written ‘as play’ and expected and loved by his audiences back ‘home’, gave way to other discourses: history, which had been the focus of his earliest publication The Pentland Rising and in which he was now to make ‘a startlingly modern and experimental contribution’;71 and law, which he had abandoned in his university days.
Law, as Jolly explains, ‘now found its way into his fiction, history, travel- writing and political journalism, and provided Stevenson’s most important
69 Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, 25. 70 Stevenson, ‘The Morality of the Profession of Letters’, Essays in the Art of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1917) 53. 71 Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, 25.
76 conceptual apparatus for working through the problems of race, government and cultural difference with which he was confronted in the
Pacific’.72
The following discussion provides an indication of the way
Stevenson’s conflicted response to the anxieties of empire, shaped by
Stevensonian shame as outlined above, both drove and informed the change of direction in his writing, resulting in the non-fiction works that reveal his renewed interest in anthropology, history and law. We have seen how his experience of the Pacific provided him with a wealth of material for the task but also provoked a personal response that reached deep into his psyche, causing tension and conflict and eliciting emotions of shame and righteous indignation. An examination of his non-fictional writing shows that Stevenson’s personal shame did not remain pathological: the author’s idea of himself influenced and informed his idea of the world, combining in turn with intellectual and political ideas to influence his writing. Stevenson used his self-conscious understanding of shame as a device of political debate and exhortation. His preoccupation with shame was transformed into an occupational tool in his South Seas writing.
Stevenson wrote eleven political letters to The Times from the Pacific during the period February 1889 to July 1894 (though the last was not sent), and a further letter published in the Pall Mall Gazette in September
1893. They demonstrate his active shaming of the reader with the
72 Ibid. For a discussion of law in Stevenson’s colonial fiction, see Roslyn Jolly, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law’, Journal of British Studies, 45.3 (2006) 556-580.
77 injustices of imperialism:73 ‘Is this English law? Is it law at all? … And when we are asked by natives to explain these peculiarities of white man’s government and white man’s justice, in what form of words are we to answer?’ (Letters 7: 264). The Times letters also reveal how deeply
Stevenson was affected by what he saw as the legal and political wrongs of imperialism (particularly European imperialism in the case of Samoa) and the way in which he considered it his duty to use his position as an author to change the situation for the better. He realized that he was in a position of some power and therefore it was his duty to try to make a difference: he told Lord Jersey, ‘[i]ndeed I am the only person in Samoa who writes to The Times and therefore the only correspondent to be seriously feared’ (Letters 8: 23). This sense of duty, which compelled him to shame others into action, was a duty driven by personal shame, as is evident in his comment to Andrew Lang in 1892 that ‘I am in a deuce of a flutter with politics, which I hate and in which I certainly do not shine; but a fellow cannot stand aside and look on at such an exhibition as our
Government. ‘Tain’t decent; no gent can hold a candle to it’ (Letters 7:
312). Nor were his reading public in England happy to be chastised. One reviewer complained: ‘Write as many sequels to “Kidnapped” as you wish, and we will read them with zest, but do not tell us anything more about
Samoa’.74
73 Operating under the Berlin Treaty of 1889 (by which Britain, Germany and the United States preserved their economic and strategic interests), the nominal native government struggled to operate, since real power resided with the foreign consuls and the European Treaty officials: the Chief Justice of Samoa and the President of the Apia Municipal Council; see Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, 113. 74 From the review of A Footnote to History in The Queen, 27 August 1892, as quoted in Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson In the Pacific, 113.
78
In A Footnote to History, Stevenson not only records the recent wars, but also describes the manners and deeds of the Samoans themselves (he studied their language), emphasizing their heroism and admirable behaviour compared to the Imperialists’ devious actions – as he had done in the case of other Pacific Islanders in his anthropological work In the
South Seas, mentioned above. Stevenson clearly sympathized and identified with the Samoans whom he saw as a dispossessed people, much like himself as the emigrant Scot. He used his Scottish background to empathise with the Pacific Islanders, since he aligned Highlanders with
Islanders – a comparison that he believed allowed him an avenue into understanding their social structure and communication. This Highland connection has been much discussed from a variety of perspectives, not least in colonial and postcolonial analyses. Graham Tulloch cautions the reader to be aware of such nuances of ‘voice’ in Stevenson’s writings,75 especially in the South Seas fiction (that will be analysed in the following chapters) but also in the non-fiction. Despite (or perhaps because of)
Stevenson’s Highland analogy, as colonial narrator he is ‘always partly complicit with the colonizer, if only because of the need to use the colonizer’s language to write back to the metropole or even to describe
[his] colonial status’.76 We have already seen this ‘conflicted position of the colonial who is simultaneously attracted to the colonizing power and rejects it’ in Stevenson’s personal and political letters.
75 Graham Tulloch, ‘Colonialism and Postcolonialism’ in Caroline McCracken-Flesher (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: MLA, 2013) 75-6. 76 Ibid 75.
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This ‘conflicted position’ emerges throughout A Footnote to History as
Stevenson negotiates the narration of German intervention in Samoan affairs, the rivalry of Britain and the United States, and the fights over kingship between rival chiefs (one of whom Stevenson championed). His aim is to impress on his audience the collective responsibility of the imperialist powers, although his own conflicted position often compromised the effect of a single shaming voice. For example, he begins his History by advocating for Samoan independence, yet paradoxically suggests that such autonomy ‘is now no longer possible’ because of the damage done by empire.77 The well-meaning confusion here was not lost on the Times editor who wrote ‘the rather sniffy comment’:78 ‘[i]t would doubtless be pleasant to wander … amid the verdure and the flowers of
Upolu with minds so free from the carking cares of civilization as to find keen enjoyment in championing the lost causes of Samoan clans’. 79
Nevertheless, despite such adverse reaction and despite the harm such anti-imperialist criticism might be doing to his reputation as a novelist and essayist, Stevenson’s personal letters indicate that he still felt justified in his political campaign to propagate a collective shame about empire.
His protests had led to at least two colonial officials being recalled and his efforts had helped to salve his own conscience. As his friend and biographer Graham Balfour remembered, Stevenson had always regretted not writing to the newspapers urging more troops to be sent to save the
77 Stevenson, A Footnote to History, 80. 78 Colvin’s words, in a letter advising Stevenson abandon his letter writing to The Times: Letters 8: 334n. 79 The Times (2 June 1894) 13 as quoted in Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, 152.
80 imperial hero General Gordon at Khartoum: ‘I might not have been able to save Gordon, but at least I should feel I had done something. … I have lost one opportunity, I will not lose another’.80
This passion to adopt the high moral ground and apportion collective blame to those who support colonial abuse, has been seen to be motivated by a ‘strident crusade of anti-imperialist self-martyrdom’. 81
Christopher Herbert identifies ‘an essentially masochistic cultural and political unconscious in Victorian England’82 within which John Kucich situates aspects of Stevenson’s political activism in his letters to The Times and, in particular, A Footnote to History. Kucich stresses the ‘unconscious’ and ‘therefore unstable nature of Victorian masochism’ and thus the
‘ideological confusions’ of Stevenson, torn as he is ‘between colourful, stylized rebellions and moral earnestness’. 83 This suggests the same conflict and confusion we witness in Stevenson’s response to the fin-de- siècle anxieties discussed above. Stevenson is at once an admirer of the strong patriarchal culture he describes in his History of Samoan ‘clans’ and that he seeks to enact at Vailima (Kucich terms this Stevenson’s
‘megalomaniacal phase’) and ‘deeply indebted to the moral tone of evangelical activism’.84
80 Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1901) 2, 26. 81 John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 80. 82 Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 137. 83 John Kucich, ‘Melancholy Magic: Masochism, Stevenson, Anti-Imperialism’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 56.3 (2001) 364; and Kucich, Imperial Masochism, 82. 84 Kucich, Imperial Masochism, 80. See also, in relation to Stevenson’s ‘self-martyrdon’ and ‘shame’, his Vailima prayer ‘For Self-Blame’: Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Papers (London: Heinemann, 1927) 16.
81
This moral tone and something of the masochism in his political crusading can be seen in his powerful polemic Father Damien: An Open
Letter to the Reverend Dr Hyde. 85 This open letter, written while in
Honolulu in 1890, is a potent example of the power Stevenson could wield when using shame as a weapon against his reader.86 Stevenson had been deeply moved by his visit to the leper colony of Molokai Island where
Father Damien, a Roman Catholic missionary, had worked and recently died. In what has been described as ‘a white heat of indignation’, 87
Stevenson, in masterly fashion, convicts Damien’s detractors of wrong doing and then extends this shaming to all Christian readers,88 so that the imperial enterprise is rendered disgraceful,89 and Damian is elevated to sainthood:
Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your own heart? … I am not making too high an estimate of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the author of your days? … Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father; and he was your father too, if God had given you grace to see it.90
85 Stevenson, ‘Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde of Honolulu from Robert Louis Stevenson’, in Jeremy Treglown (ed.), The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1988) 265-276. 86 See Catherine Mathews discussion of the reader reaction to Stevenson’s open letter in Catherine Mathews, ‘Charting the foreigner at home: contemporary newspaper records of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, New Zealand and Australia 1890-1894’, Journal of Stevenson Studies 10 (2013) 87-128, 89. 87 Ernest Mehew, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 88 The open letter reveals how Stevenson’s deeply ambiguous attitudes to Christianity focused themselves on the missionaries he met when he began exploring the South Pacific: see Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, 11-48. 89 In the open letter, Stevenson accuses missionaries generally of exploiting their position in Hawaii to accumulate great wealth and implies that they had an easy job because ‘what troubles they supported came far more from whites than from Hawaiians’: Stevenson, ‘Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde of Honolulu from Robert Louis Stevenson’, in Treglown (ed.), 266-268. 90 Ibid 276.
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It is a similar use of shame conveyed through language that allows
Stevenson to explore and critique attitudes to imperialism in his fictional
South Sea tales.
This chapter has explored the cultural and historical context within which the contradictions and complexities of Stevenson’s shame over imperialism operated. The personal shame embedded in his experience, discussed in the previous chapter, can now be seen to give further nuance and complexity to our understanding of the author’s articulation and use of shame in relation to imperialism in the Pacific. Stevenson’s response to the competing fin-de-siècle anxieties about empire was fraught with tension and contradiction, shaped by the ambiguities of Stevensonian shame, and employed as a device to challenge the attitudes of his audience to imperialism in his non-fiction writings. The following two chapters present close readings and detailed analysis of a similar expression and use of shame in the fictional works of his Pacific period.
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Chapter 3
‘My conscience smote me’: Shame in Island Nights’ Entertainments
Stevenson’s use of shame as a tool to explore attitudes to imperialism in his fictional work is strikingly evident in his collection of short stories,
Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893). All three stories of the collection, ‘The
Beach of Falesá’ (1892), ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891) and ‘The Isle of Voices’
(1893), use shame to examine Western imperialism in the Pacific. This
Chapter will argue that in each of three stories of Island Nights’
Entertainments Stevenson interrogates the justification of empire by using shame to disrupt and subvert the subgenre of imperial Gothic fiction.
This chapter will first briefly outline the commonality between the three stories of the collection. Secondly, Stevenson’s subversive treatment of the central themes of imperial Gothic fiction, atavism and invasion, in
‘The Beach of Falesá’ (the focus of this chapter) will be examined. 1
Importantly, this examination will note the similarities between
Stevenson’s treatment of the imperial Gothic in this story and his use of shame in the ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’. Thirdly, the way
Stevenson’s conflicted view of imperialism serves to weaken and confuse his subversion of the imperial Gothic will be explained.
1 The third central theme of imperial Gothic fiction identified by Patrick Brantlinger, the degradation of adventure, will not be discussed as it does not constitute a critical part of Stevenson’s subversion of the subgenre.
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Island Nights’ Entertainments, Shame and the Imperial Gothic
‘The Beach of Falesá’ was written during the heyday of imperial Gothic fiction at just the time when anxiety over imperialist ideology was being expressed through the use of the Gothic by a range of contemporary authors – including Haggard, Conrad, Doyle, Bram Stoker and John
Buchan. However, Stevenson’s treatment of the imperial Gothic subgenre is far from conventional.2 In ‘The Beach of Falesá’, the jingoistic and racial anxieties usually expressed in such stories are undermined and confused by competing anxieties over the moral shamefulness of empire. Just as
Stevenson used shame as a tool to talk about empire in his non-fictional writings, shame is employed in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ to complicate the standard imperial Gothic themes of ‘atavism’ and ‘invasion’, discussed in
Chapter 2 of this thesis.
In contrast to ‘The Beach of Falesá’, the stories of ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ do not overtly reference the fiction of imperial romance but are presented by Stevenson as Polynesian parables – mimicking what Fanny Stevenson referred to as the Samoan’s ‘habit of speaking in parables’.3 Instead of an imperialist hero battling dark forces in the far-flung corners of empire, the stories focus on Islander characters
2 As argued by a range of commentators: Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 28.3 (1985) 243-252, 248; Roslyn Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 47.1 (2004) 37; Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 152. Julia Reid argues that ‘The Beach of Falesá’ ‘destabilizes anthropology’s belief in racial and cultural hierarchies, rendering ironic its vocabulary of degeneration and survivals’. She states that the narrative ‘moves towards a relativist view of culture’ by ‘[e]schewing a belief in gradual progress from irrationality to enlightenment, and orality to literacy’. 3 Preface to Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Heinemann, 1923-4).
85 acting within the newly colonialized landscapes of their Island homes.
Comments by the narrator such as ‘the trouble with these white men’,4 or
‘Keawe could see him as you see a fish in a pool upon the reef’,5 or San
Francisco ‘is a fine town, with a fine harbor, and rich people uncountable’
(‘IV’ 73), situate the stories from the point of view of the Islanders, as if they were tales written by Islanders for Islanders. Stevenson’s note on the text at the beginning of ‘The Bottle Imp’ expressly states that it ‘has been designed and written for a Polynesian audience’ which ‘may lend it some extraneous interest nearer home’ (‘BI’ 72), and the story was indeed translated into Samoan and published in a local newspaper in 1891.6 The two tales were also intended by the author to be published in a collection of Pacific Islander ‘folk tales and supernatural stories’ separate from ‘The
Beach of Falesá’, which was originally going to be part of a different series of short stories titled Beach de Mar based around an imaginary island called ‘Ulufanua’.7 Neither of the proposed volumes eventuated and the three tales were grouped together in Island Nights’ Entertainments to the
4 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Isle of Voices’ in Roslyn Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: South Sea Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 113. Subsequent references to the story are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘IV’. 5 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Bottle Imp’ in Roslyn Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: South Sea Tales, 73. Subsequent references to the story are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘BI’. 6 ‘The Bottle Imp’ was translated ‘into the Samoan language by the Revd Arthur E. Claxton and appeared as “O Le Fagu Aitu” from May to December 1891 in O Le Sulu Samoa’: Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: South Sea Tales, 270. 7 Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95) 7: 154. Subsequent references to this work are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘Letters’. See Jolly, South Sea Tales, xxiv-xxvi. See also Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and ‘The Beach of Falesá: A Study in Victorian Publishing, with the Original Text’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984) 59. As stated by Vanessa Smith, ‘Menikoff argues that editorial intervention effectively diluted’ Stevenson’s ‘radical critique of colonial practice’ in ‘The Beach of Falesá’: Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 167.
86 disappointment of Stevenson for, as he put it, ‘“The Beach of Falesá” is the child of a quite different inspiration’ (Letters 7: 436).8
There are, however, some important similarities between all three texts that become evident when ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ are examined in light of Stevenson’s subversion of the imperial Gothic in
‘The Beach of Falesá’. The same themes, and underlying anxieties, typical of imperial Gothic literature are explored and challenged in each text. For example, like ‘The Beach of Falesá’, ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of
Voices’ both feature protagonists who must fight against and overcome dark supernatural forces (whether imagined or not). When viewed in this way, aspects of the texts, which once appeared to be insurmountable differences, can be seen as common elements. The replacement of an imperialist hero (a feature shared by all imperial Gothic tales) with an
Islander one, or the substitution of an imperialist narrator with that of an
Islander voice, may be seen as a natural extension of the subversion of the imperial Gothic subgenre: an inversion of the theme of invasion, discussed below. Stevenson himself may have alluded to these common threads through the stories when he wrote ‘They all have a queer realism, even the most extravagant, even “The Isle of Voices”’ (Letters 7: 436).
The most important similarity, however, is that all three texts use shame to disrupt the themes of imperial Gothic fiction, thereby challenging Western attitudes to empire. It is argued here that both the supposedly Samoan tales, ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, are
8 Stevenson states that ‘“The Bottle Imp” was the piéce de résistance for my volume Island Nights Entertainments’ and that he ‘was too much disappointed to answer’ when he heard it would be put together with ‘The Beach of Falesá’: Letters 7: 436.
87 intended to incite more than ‘some extraneous interest nearer home’.
Apart from the obvious advantage in marketing the stories to the British audience as authentic Polynesian parables, the tales are parables primarily designed for a Western readership.9 In both stories Stevenson uses the lessons he seemingly hopes to impart to his Islander audience, to instruct the reading public back ‘home’.10 Time and again, the didacticism apparently intended for an Islander reader has the effect of shaming a contemporary Western reader – another example of the author’s use of shame to provoke social change. Interestingly, this quasi-dramatic irony creates intriguing layers of assumed identity, which relates to Stevenson’s idea about universality discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis: a white author vicariously speaks to his white audience by adopting an Islander voice that supposedly instructs an Islander readership.
Atavism Altered: the Shame of Imperialism
Shame is used in Island Nights’ Entertainments to undermine and invert the central theme of imperial Gothic literature, atavism. 11 Stevenson reverses the operation of atavism in each of the stories by depicting
9 Compare Ambrosini’s view that such tales were part of Stevenson’s attempt ‘to create for himself a space in between Polynesian and European cultures’: Richard Ambrosini, ‘The Four Boundary-Crossings of R.L. Stevenson, Novelist and Anthropologist’ in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (Madison Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) 33; and Jolly’s question of which literature, Scottish or Pacific, ‘is really the host and which the guest of the other’ in the ‘The Bottle Imp’: Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s Pacific Transnarratives’, International Journal of Scottish Literature, 9 (2013) 5-25, 20. 10 For added complexity, see Jolly’s discussion of ‘The Bottle Imp’ as a ‘transnarrative’ (a conflation of ‘transnational’ and ‘narrative’): Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s Pacific Transnarratives’, 5-25. 11 As Jolly states in relation to the imperial Gothic, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ ‘invokes but then parodies the ideas of atavism and “going native” which lie at the heart of this mode of imperial discourse’: Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’, 37.
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Western imperialist characters as shameful and their Islander counterparts as honourable. Any degeneration or regression occurs to the
Islanders when they come into contact with the shameful representatives of empire. Conversely, when imperialist characters are exposed to Islander influences they achieve moral progression. They are shamed by their own moral shortcomings vis-à-vis the Islanders and experience a redemption of sorts as a result. Interestingly, this moral progression via shaming, mirrors what Stevenson himself achieves by presenting a vision of shameful imperialism in the South Seas. Such a vision serves to shame the author’s contemporary Western readership, thereby provoking a redemptive change in the reader similar to that of Stevenson’s characters.
‘The Beach of Falesá’, as its title suggests, focuses squarely on a shameful image of whites in the Pacific who are corrupted not by
‘primitive’ islanders but through their own savage instincts and contact with each other. White settlements in the South Sea Islands usually clustered near the beach and were referred to simply as ‘the beach’, which also served as ‘a collective term for whites’.12 Stevenson’s comment on the
‘beach’ of Apia in a letter to Edward L. Burlingame in July 1890 reveals his opinion of white societies in the Pacific: ‘As for the white population of
(technically) “The Beach”, I don’t suppose it is possible for any person not thoroughly conversant with the South Seas to form the smallest conception of such a society, with its grog-shops, its apparently unemployed hangers-on, its merchants of all degrees of respectability and the reverse’ (Letters 6: 393-394).
12 John Kucich, (ed.), Fictions of Empire (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003) 189.
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‘The Beach of Falesá’ can be viewed as Stevenson’s attempt to impart a ‘conception of such a society’ to his British readership. 13
Wiltshire, both narrator and protagonist, describes his previous experience of the Pacific in shameful terms: constantly ‘getting tabooed, and going down to the Speak House to see and get it taken off; buying gin and going on a break, and then repenting’, and when he sailed to a neighboring island for European company ‘rough customers made the most of the society’.14 The first thing Wiltshire does when he reaches
Falesá is to have a drink with the shameful trader, Case: ‘I had a glass or two on board’; ‘the more I drank the lighter my heart’ (‘BF’ 191).
Wiltshire’s moral degeneration is perhaps best exemplified by his sham marriage to the Islander girl, Uma, aptly described by Diane Simmons as a
‘cynical wedding ceremony that makes a travesty of traditional European vows’.15
The other imperialist characters of the story are introduced as even more morally disgraceful and exhibit gratuitous violence. Before meeting them Wiltshire is informed that Case and his lackey Black Jack have ‘a gallows bad reputation’ (‘BF’ 189); and the ironically titled Captain
Randall, a potential figure of white authority on the Island, has a body
‘covered with grey hair and crawled over by flies’ (‘BF’ 193). Case is
13 Stevenson said in a letter to Colvin: ‘[y]ou will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library’: Letters 7: 161. 14 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ in Kucich (ed.), Fictions of Empire, 189. Subsequent references to the story are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘BF’. 15 Diane Simmons, The Narcissism of Empire (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2007) 62. Interestingly, Hunter Davies notes that at the time of the story’s publication ‘Wiltshire’s character, and his sex life, were a revelation, as the bad side of South Sea traders had been concealed from the public’: Hunter Davies, The Teller of Tales: In Search of Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Mackays of Chatham, 1994) 208.
90 implicated in a number of murders (‘BF’ 219-222). Both his and Randall’s savagery is typified by the ‘sickening yarn’ Case enjoys telling Wiltshire, of the Catholic priest, Father Galuchet, being beaten by Randall while trying to administer last rights to Adams, a fellow trader that Case has probably poisoned (‘BF’ 203).
Ignorance too is a hallmark of the European characters on the
Island (Case being the notable exception). Wiltshire is shamefully ignorant of the local language, history, customs and beliefs.16 He says that ‘on that first morning I knew no more than a fly’ (‘BF’ 190). He is repeatedly forced to rely on the deceptive Case as an interpreter – as when Case arranges his marriage with Uma or when he pleads Wiltshire’s case with the chiefs – or on Uma as a guide through the local landscape of tradition and custom
(‘BF’ 200). Wiltshire’s ‘ignorance of the native’ is expressly stated when
Wiltshire first feels the effects of Uma’s taboo: he complains that he ‘never saw such [damn fool] Islanders as your people here’ and Uma simply responds, ‘[s]avvy nothing’ with a ‘disgusted air that she was good at’ (‘BF’
190, 195).
Consistent with the theme of immoral imperialists is Stevenson’s presentation of his white characters as fraudsters and cheats.17 When
Wiltshire presents himself to the Island chiefs he says ‘I’m a white man, and a British subject, and no end of a big chief at home; and I’ve come here to do them good, and bring them civilization’ though he previously admitted his ambition was simply to exploit the Islanders for profit: ‘to
16 This is especially interesting given Stevenson’s own interest in the culture and customs of the South Seas: see generally Oliver S. Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007). 17 See discussion of greed in Buckton, 228.
91 make a fortune, and go home again and start a public-house’ (‘BF’ 206,
201). Case is a far worse deceiver, particularly of the Islanders. He deceives Uma into marrying Wiltshire by telling her Wiltshire ‘was mad to have her, and cared nothing for the consequence’ (‘BF’ 196), and deceives the Islander preacher, Namu, ‘by trickery and pretence’ into departing from the instruction of the white missionary, Tarleton (‘BF’ 220). Even his name is a deception to the Islanders, who mispronounce it as ‘Ese’, a confusion Wilshire explains as Case’s ‘name misheard and put in a
Kanaka spelling’ (‘BF’ 210).18 As with Case, Wiltshire’s name betrays his character: Wiltshire says he is mostly called ‘Welsher’, a name given to a deceiver or swindler (‘BF’ 216). Interestingly, it is ‘the people on the beach’ who mispronounce his name in this way, not the Islanders – implying that, as with Case, the Islanders remain ignorant of Wiltshire’s true nature.
The motivation for deception by the imperialists is usually greed associated with the copra trade, and even that is subject to fraud:
Wiltshire states that the imperialist traders ‘all have queerish balances’
(‘BF’ 245). The exploitation of the Islanders is so central to trading life on the Island that Case goes to great lengths to rid himself of any competition: having murdered or scared off Wiltshire’s predecessors, he attempts to do the same to Wiltshire. Ironically, Wiltshire shares Case’s venal motivations and his penchant for deception, and ends up doing to
Case, what Case had intended to do to him. Like all white traders, who have nothing but contempt for the trade goods they flog to the Islanders,
18 See Smith’s discussion of Case’s name in Smith, 171.
92
Wiltshire says of the dynamite, powder and match he uses to destroy
Case’s ‘dead wood shrine’: ‘You know what trade is. The stuff was good enough for Kanakas to go fishing with, … and the most they risk is only to have their hand blown off. But … a man would be crazy that trusted it’
(‘BF’ 240, 237). The way Wiltshire knowingly addresses the reader, coupled with his chillingly callous and racist remark, has a powerfully accusatory effect for Stevenson’s contemporary audience: ‘You know what trade is’.
The imperialists don’t cheat just the Islanders but also each other.
Case and Black Jack deceive and exploit Captain Randall just as they do the Islanders and, like the Islanders, Randall is ignorant of his treatment:
Randall is described as Case’s ‘gull’, ‘[t]rade and station belonged both to
Randall; Case and the negro were parasites; they crawled and fed upon him like the flies, he none the wiser’ (‘BF’ 194). In both his wedding and his meeting with the chiefs Wiltshire attempts to cheat Islanders, and in both cases is cheated himself by Case. In each instance Wiltshire’s deception is echoed by Case’s deception of Wiltshire. Further, Case repeatedly uses his own deception of Islander characters to undo his fellow whites: Case deceives Uma into marrying Wiltshire to taint Wiltshire with Uma’s taboo, just as he misleads Namu to undermine the authority of Tarleton. The dynamics of white deception in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ will be examined further below in relation the invasive supernatural.
‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ feature only marginal imperialist characters, but they too are depicted as shameful. In ‘The
Bottle Imp’, when the Hawaiian hero of the tale, Keawe, first encounters
93 the accursed bottle it is in the hands of a San Franciscan who tricks him into buying it: ‘You are not deceiving me?’ Keawe asks; the man then shamelessly binds ‘himself with a great oath’ (‘BI’ 76). When Keawe boards a steamer to Honolulu in search of the accursed bottle we are told that the
‘after-part of the ship was full of Haoles’ who ‘sat and played at the cards and drank whiskey as their custom is’ (‘BI’ 87), and when Keawe tracks down the bottle for the second time, it is in the hands of a European who purchased the bottle to avoid the consequences of shamefully embezzling funds: Keawe says to him ‘Poor creature … you would risk your soul upon so desperate an adventure, and to avoid the proper punishment of your own disgrace’ (‘BI’ 89). Significantly, Keawe finally rids himself of the bottle by convincing ‘an old brutal Haole’ to buy it, who had been, amongst other things, ‘a convict in prisons. He had a low mind and a foul mouth; he loved to drink and to see others drunken’ (‘BI’ 98).
In ‘The Isle of Voices’, the narrator warns his supposedly fellow
Islander audience against the deception and violence of Westerners saying
‘it was the trouble with these white men … that you could never be sure of them; they would all be sleeping sound, or else pretending, and if a sail shook, they would jump to their feet and fall on you with a rope’s end’ (‘IV’
113). The most prominent white character in the story is the ship’s mate who bullies and beats the tale’s Polynesian hero, Keola.19 We are told the crew of the ship are ‘no worse than other whites’ but that the mate ‘beat and cursed’ Keola daily ‘both for what he did and what he did not’ (‘IV’
112). The shamefulness of the mate is accentuated by the fact that he
19 It is interesting to note that the ship’s mate in ‘Isle of Voices’ is a similar character to the violent and drunken mates that appear in Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
94 used to work on ‘the schooner Eugenie’ that was an actual South Seas slave ship (‘IV’ 113).20 It is narratologically interesting that the shameful violence of the mate precipitates Keola’s arrival on the Isle of Voices: the mate swears that ‘if he got started after him with a belaying pin, it would be a cold day for Keola’ in response to which Keola sensibly jumps ship
(‘IV’ 113). Fittingly, the mate meets his end through his willful ignorance of local knowledge: he ‘died like the fool of a white man as he was’ by eating poisoned fish after being warned by the Islanders that such fish were deadly at that time of year (‘IV’ 116). This idea is repeated in Stevenson’s fable ‘Something In It’ (1895) in which a white missionary denies the truth of an Islander superstition that ‘it was death to bathe’ at a particular bay.21 He does so and is presently swept out to sea.
In contrast to the shameful representatives of empire, the Pacific
Islander characters of Island Nights’ Entertainments are largely depicted as honourable. The juxtaposition of this admirable image of Islanders against the disgraceful agents of empire further highlights the shamefulness of imperialism in the Pacific and effectively serves to heighten Stevenson’s shaming of the reader. Whereas the white figure of local authority in ‘The
Beach of Falesá’, Captain Randall, is described in terms of utter degradation (‘BF’ 193), the Islander figures of authority are described as
‘mighty stately men’ who sat ‘on mats in their white kilts and jackets; they had fans in their hands, like fine ladies; and two of the younger ones wore
Catholic medals’ which gave Wiltshire ‘matter of reflection’ (‘BF’ 206).
Wiltshire tells us he was reassured by ‘the civil appearance of the chiefs’
20 Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 278. 21 Ibid 255.
95 and their replies were ‘all in the same style, easy and genteel, but solemn underneath’ (‘BF’ 206, 207). Of the Island chief Maea, who eventually helps Wiltshire to extinguish Case’s power over the Island, Wiltshire says
‘[h]e was rich as well as powerful’ and ‘there is no doubt when an island chief wants to be civil he can do it’ (‘BF’ 234). Further, Tarleton describes
Maea as ‘a teller of the truth’ in opposition to the deceptive practices of the white traders of the Island (‘BF’ 220).
‘The Beach of Falesá’ also expresses a great respect for the power and authority of local beliefs and language. Uma makes the argument that
Wiltshire’s figures of power are of no use in Falesá. She states that
‘Victoreea he big chief, like you too much. No can help you here in Falesá; no can do – too far off’ (‘BF’ 226), indicating, as argued by Jolly, that ‘only the local is of any use in dealing with the practical problems of life’ on the
Island. 22 Tellingly, when Wiltshire finally has Tarleton conduct an honourable version of the previously shameful union between himself and
Uma, the marriage ceremony is conducted ‘in the native’ (‘BF’ 217), in recognition of the authority and efficacy of the local language.
Keawe, in ‘The Bottle Imp’, is similarly described in honourable terms. He is given the name of a famous Hawaiian King (‘BI’ 73). He is described as ‘brave’, is ‘a first-rate mariner besides’ and can ‘read and write like a schoolmaster’ (‘BI’ 73). Most importantly, though, Keawe is morally good. Unlike his white counterparts, he does not acquire the bottle through avarice but is tricked into buying it: he says he can do without a nice house but ‘there is one thing I could not be doing with one particle,
22 Roslyn Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’, 39.
96 and that is to be damned’ (‘BI’ 75). Even when Keawe buys the bottle for the second time, intentionally, the narrator stresses the fact that he does so out of the righteous motivation of love for his Hawaiian fiancée, Kokua, not merely to escape ‘the Chinese Evil’ (‘BI’ 85). The narrator reminds us that ‘so many’ would have married notwithstanding the blight of leprosy
‘because they have the souls of pigs’ but that Keawe instead seeks the bottle to cure him because he ‘loved the maid manfully’ (‘BI’ 86). His
Islander friend, Lopaka, is similarly virtuous, purchasing the bottle from
Keawe, as he said he would, even after seeing the hideous vision of the imp inside: ‘I am a man of my word … and had need to be so, or I would not touch this bottle with my foot’ (‘BI’ 81).
The subservience of the Islanders to Europeans, coupled with their honourable representation in the text, makes their poor treatment by the
Europeans all the more shameful. Virtue, obedience and respect from the
Islanders are repeatedly juxtaposed against contempt from the whites. The
Islanders of Falesá get ‘dressed out’ for the arrival of Wiltshire’s ship to the
Island – a ship delivering a cargo of grog and a trader intending to exploit the native inhabitants of the Island (‘BF’ 192). Uma, who stands to attention for Wiltshire ‘like a sentry to her officer’, ‘was always well brought up, and had a great respect for whites’ (‘BF’ 209), yet Case sneers about Islander women that ‘You can have your pick of the lot for a plug of tobacco’ (‘BF’ 192). So too in ‘The Isle of Voices’ we are told that the blows dealt to Keola by the violent ship’s mate ‘were very sore, for he was strong; and the words he used were very unpalatable, for Keola was come of a
97 good family and accustomed to respect’ (‘IV’ 112).23 Emphasizing their shameful ignorance, Europeans repeatedly scorn Islander knowledge: the boatswain’s rejection of Keawe’s warning about the bottle, ‘I don’t value any of your talk’ (‘BI’ 102), echoes Wiltshire’s attitude in ‘The Beach of
Falesá’: ‘I don’t value native talk a fourpenny-piece’ (‘BF’ 229) – though, as shown above in relation to the death of the ship’s mate in ‘The Isle of
Voices’ and the missionary in ‘Something In It’, Europeans invariable pay the price for their racist contempt.
Interestingly, the Islanders’ goodness, in the face of European exploitation, is presented in the text as a fatal flaw. Wiltshire tells Uma
‘You’re a trump, and that’s what’s wrong with you’ (‘BF’ 239), hinting that it is her virtue and innocence which makes her vulnerable to deception and exploitation – in this case by him through the fake wedding ceremony.24 This idea is also expressed at the end of the story, when
Wiltshire tells us Uma has ‘only the one fault. If you don’t keep your eye lifting she would give away the roof off the station. Well, it seems it’s natural in Kanakas’ (‘BF’ 245). ‘The Bottle Imp’ extends the notion of
Islanders suffering for their goodness, presenting the Islander characters
23 For further complexity on Keola’s character see Smith’s reference to him as an ‘anti- hero’: see Smith, 189. 24 Stevenson’s short fable ‘The Cart-Horses and the Saddle-Horse’ neatly conveys the same idea. The Islander Saddle-Horse offers his ‘affectionate compliments’ to the newly arrived ‘Cart-Horses’ and makes them ‘heartily welcome to the islands’. He is intrinsically more valuable as a saddle-horse and the cart-horses naturally ‘supposed he would not speak to them’, but because of saddle-horse’s courteous behavior the cart-horses change their tune: ‘He seems suspiciously civil’ says one to the other, concluding he must be ‘only a Kanaka’. Significantly, it is the Islander horse’s honourable behavior that causes the ‘colonials’ to shun (and shame) him (‘Go to the devil!’ cries the gelding) and to present themselves as superior to him (echoing Wiltshire’s meeting with the chiefs of Falesá): ‘I wonder at your impudence, speaking to persons of our quality!’ cries the cart-horse mare: Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 253.
98 as self-sacrificing, almost Christ-like figures. Both Keawe and Kokua procure the bottle surreptitiously from the other, to save the other from damnation, even though they know that whoever possess the bottle last, the ‘imp must abide with him until he died, and when he died must carry him to the red end of hell’ (‘BI’ 89).25
Throughout Island Nights’ Entertainments, when Islanders are exposed to Western imperialist influences or adopt imperialist traits, they experience a moral regression. This is exemplified by the character of the
Islander preacher Namu in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ being led astray by Case.
Tarleton tells Wiltshire that Namu ‘had fallen in a sort of dependence upon
Case’ and that while ‘it began, doubtless, in fear and respect, produced by trickery and pretence’ it soon developed into moral degeneration (‘BF’ 220).
We are told that Namu became prodigal, he ‘helped himself in [Case’s] store, and was believed to be deep in Case’s debt’ (‘BF’ 220). Further, he became spiritually corrupt: calling Case ‘my college’ (‘BF’ 219), Namu
‘believed with trembling’ whatever the trader said, leading the preacher to become theologically unsound and culminating in his offering up of ‘a prayer at the hateful scene’ of Underhill’s live burial (‘BF’ 220). While
Namu ‘apart from this novel and accursed influence’ of Case, ‘was a good pastor, and able man, and spiritually minded’ (‘BF’ 221), ‘it was through
Namu Case had wrought most evil’ (‘BF’ 220).
The story which best conveys the idea of white influences corrupting
Islanders, however, is ‘The Bottle Imp’, where the evil associated with the
25 The bottle could be seen as carrying with it the sins (namely greed) of all those who have previously possessed it. Thus, the current bearer of the bottle might take on a Christ-like quality.
99 bottle is literally transferred from the Western world to Islander hands.
Revealingly, at the end of the story the figurative immorality of the bottle becomes literal when the shameful boatswain, whom Keawe manages to convince into buying the ‘devil’s bottle’ from Kokua, stumbles off into the darkness clutching two bottles – the other being a bottle of rum (‘BI’ 102).
Earlier in the night, the sailor had ‘pressed the glass upon Keawe’ and corrupted him into doubting the virtue of his beloved: ‘They’re all as false as water; you keep an eye on her’ says the boatswain, to which, ironically,
Keawe thinks to himself ‘I will show her I am not the man to be fooled’ (‘BI’
98,99). Interestingly, for Keola in ‘The Isle of Voices’ it is not European drink, but an excess of Western food that weakens him: we are told that the food on the ship ‘was extraordinarily rich and plenty, with biscuits and salt beef every day, and pea-soup and puddings made of flour and suet twice a week, so that Keola grew fat’ (‘IV’ 112).
Conversely, when the imperialist characters of Island Nights’
Entertainments adopt Islander traits or come into contact with Islander influences they experience a moral progression. Importantly, this progression is achieved through the redemptive power of shame. In ‘The
Beach of Falesá’, Wiltshire is seen in all ways as the moral inferior of Uma and he feels it keenly. During the wedding scene Wiltshire states ‘She showed the best bearing for a bride conceivable, serious and still; and I thought shame to stand up with her in that mean house and before that grinning negro’ (‘BF’ 195). When Case derides the virtue of the native girls
Wiltshire insists that Uma ‘doesn’t look that sort’ (‘BF’ 192), and at the wedding he says ‘my conscience smote me when we joined hands; and
100 when she got her certificate I was tempted to throw up the bargain and confess’ (‘BF’ 195). The marriage certificate, a symbol of white deception and exploitation (being written out by Case on a trading ledger), so shames Wiltshire that his impulse is to run away: ‘the more ashamed I was, the more hurry I was in to be gone’ (‘BF’ 196).
It is through Uma that Wiltshire develops morally. He recognizes her superiority to his fellow traders and her better influence on himself: ‘it did me good to be done with the captain and see, instead, the creature at my side’ (‘BF’ 196). He says ‘she was a kind of countess really … no even mate for a poor trader like myself’ (‘BF’ 197). Notably, after this recognition of goodness, and immediately after the wedding (or because of it), Wiltshire resolves to throw out all his drink: ‘partly for the girl’s sake, and partly for horror of the [recollection] of old Randall’ (‘BF’ 197). The contrast of the honourable Uma with the shameful Randall literally shames Wiltshire into sobriety: he says the vision of Randall made him ‘sick and sober’ and he warns himself ‘you must not come to be an old gentleman like this’ (‘BF’
193-194). Further, through his love for Uma, Wiltshire both outgrows his exploitative desires and becomes less dishonest: ‘“Uma,” I said, “I would rather have you than all the copra in the South Seas,” which was a very big expression, and the strangest thing was that I meant it’ (‘BF’ 210-
211).26
Further, it is Uma that first recognizes goodness in Wiltshire, then guides Wiltshire through his moral development to eventually become a
26 Interestingly, Kestner views Wiltshire’s moral progression as Wiltshire moving ‘beyond the male homosocial world of “the beach”’: Joseph Kestner, Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880-1915 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010) 152.
101 better man: ‘“You good!” she cried, and ran ahead of me, and stopped and looked back and smiled, and ran ahead of me again, thus guiding me through the edge of the bush, and by a quiet way to my own house’ (‘BF’
196). From the beginning of the narrative Uma acts as Wiltshire’s guide through the local environment, in particular, acting as a truthful interpreter for Wiltshire with chief Maea (in opposition to Case’s role as a deceptive one): we cracked jests together, mostly through [Uma for] interpreter, because he had mighty little English, and my native was still off colour’ (‘BF’ 234). By the end of the story, Uma is revealed as a saviour figure both morally and physically – she literally saves Wiltshire in the bush by warning him that Case is coming to kill him. While Wiltshire does show some moral promise at the start of the story, in particular in respect to Uma, the character of Uma is needed to realize his potential.
Other Islander characters, and characters associated with the
Islanders, also help progress Wiltshire’s moral journey. The Island chief
Maea risks being publicly shamed before the village to rescue Wiltshire from the shame of Uma’s taboo by purchasing trade goods from his store.
While Maea has his own reasons for wanting to economically undo Case, nevertheless, ‘What he had done was to fly in the face of the whole village, and the thing might cost him his authority’ (‘BF’ 234). In response,
Wiltshire begins to show more respect for his Islander rescuer: ‘I tell you I shook hands with that Kanaka like as if he was the best white man in
Europe’ (‘BF’ 234).
The missionary Tarleton is also a saviour figure in the story and appears at the moment Wiltshire resolves to throw out his grog and
102 become a better man. Importantly, Tarleton is aligned with the Islanders of Falesá, not with the whites: Wiltshire says of the missionaries ‘they’re partly Kanakaized, and suck up with natives instead of with other white men like themselves’ (‘BF’ 215). We are told that the missionaries ‘look down upon [the traders], and make no concealment’: ‘they can always find civility for a Kanaka, it’s us white men they lord it over’ (‘BF’ 215, 217).
Like the Islanders, the missionary is described in honourable terms and causes Wiltshire to feel shame and ‘envy’ in comparison: ‘I had on a rig of clean striped pyjamas – for, of course, I had dressed decent to go before the chiefs; but when I saw the missionary step out of his boat in the regular uniform, white duck clothes, pith helmet, white shirt and tie, and yellow boots to his feet, I could have bunged stones at him’ (‘BF’ 215). Like
Uma and Maea, Tarleton also plays a role in rescuing Wiltshire from his public shaming by the Islanders in the form of the Taboo: Tarleton tells
Wiltshire ‘I’ve put you all square with everybody here’ and given his ‘pledge besides that you will deal fairly with the natives’ (‘BF’ 244). In doing so,
Tarleton effectively shames Wiltshire out of his shamefully deceptive and exploitative ways – what Wiltshire refers to as the missionary’s ‘meanish kind of revenge’ (‘BF’ 244). It is pertinent to note here that the role of
Tarleton as shaming redeemer for Wiltshire may be seen as compatible with Stevenson’s ‘self-contradictory responses to different missionaries’,27 discussed in the previous chapter.
27 Roslyn Jolly, ‘Book Review: Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2004)’, Journal of British Studies, 44.4 (2005) 870-871, 870. See also Stevenson’s Vailima prayer ‘For Self-Blame’ in relation to the redemptive power of shame: Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Papers (London: Heinemann, 1927) 16.
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While Wiltshire protests his somewhat forced redemption through shame, his ability to be shamed discloses an underlying, latent morality.
Wiltshire presents himself in the narrative as a simple trader without pretensions of anything nobler. He tells Tarleton ‘I’m no missionary, nor missionary lover; I’m no Kanaka nor favourer of Kanakas – I’m just a trader; I’m just a common, [low], God-damned white man and British subject, the sort you would like to wipe your boots on’ (‘BF’ 216).
Wiltshire’s apparent pride in this unpretentious self-assessment will be discussed below. What is interesting here is the patent inaccuracy of the statement: Wiltshire’s purpose in introducing himself to Tarleton is to ask the missionary to marry him properly to his Islander bride, Uma. He admits to Tarleton later that he is ‘what you call a sinner – what I call a sweep – and I want you to help me make it up to a person I’ve deceived’
(‘BF’ 216). Wiltshire reveals here that he holds himself to certain moral standards (though perhaps not the religious morals of Tarleton) and that he feels he has fallen short of those standards, hence his feeling of shame.
Tarleton suspects Wiltshire’s morality even before his admission: Wiltshire says ‘I’m the sort of man God made me’ … ‘I don’t set up to be a gentleman’ to which Tarleton responds ‘I am not quite so sure’ (‘BF’ 216).
Friedrich Nietzsche’s comment that ‘Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises’ is pertinent here.28 It is Wiltshire’s self-respect, the standards he sets for himself, which allows him to feel shame and, consequently, be redeemed by it. This may be why he says to
28 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886) (Mineloa, NY: Dover Publications, 1997) 46.
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Uma later in the story, ‘I’m a good sort of fellow, Uma, as fellows go, and I guess God’ll con me through’ (‘BF’ 226).
Significantly, Wiltshire’s moral development out of shame is conveyed through his gradual acquisition of local experience and language. Wiltshire’s public shaming by the Islanders forces him to experience their way of life. When he is obliged to make copra with his own hands to turn a profit he starts to appreciate the realities of the imperialist environment from the Islander perspective: he says the copra
‘weighed so light I felt inclined to take and water it myself’ (‘BF’ 223). In the beginning of the story, when Wiltshire is at the mercy of Case’s fraudulent translations, Wiltshire states that it was ‘a cruel shame I knew no native’ (‘BF’ 207). As he suffers under the shame of the taboo he starts to learn the local language (being taught by another, more minor, saviour figure, Father Galuchet (‘BF’ 223)), and it is through language that
Wiltshire is able to alleviate his feeling of shame: ‘as I had begun to pick up native, and most of them had a word or two of English, I began to hold little odds and ends of conversation, not to much purpose to be sure, but they took off the worst of the feeling, for it’s a miserable thing to be made a leper of’ (‘BF’ 224).
It is interesting to note here that the process of easing the painful effect of shame through language is also apparent in Herrick’s written expression of shame in The Ebb-Tide, discussed in the next chapter, and has important self-referential implications for Stevenson’s own authorial process. This is particularly so given that the manifestations of moral shame presented in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ correlate with Stevenson’s
105 biographical experience of moral or religious shame, discussed in Chapter
1 of this thesis.
Arguably, Wiltshire’s moral progression through shame reflects
Stevenson’s ambitions for his readers. By depicting Western imperialism in the Pacific as shameful, Stevenson effectively shames his Western audience. The effect is to provoke in his readership a moral progression, through the redemptive power of shame, similar to that achieved by his imperialist protagonist.
Invasion Inverted: the Supernatural as Shame
Stevenson inverts the invasive supernatural in each narrative of Island
Nights’ Entertainments. Supernatural elements are present in each story, whether fake or not, but the invasive aspect of that supernatural is reversed: in each case the supernatural is controlled by or emanates from the representatives of empire and it is the Pacific Islanders, not the
European imperialists, who are invaded by it. This inversion of invasion displaces the usual role of the supernatural in imperial Gothic fiction as the representation of racist and nationalistic anxieties: the supernatural is no longer native thus there is no longer an expressed threat of racial or social contamination of Europeans by non-whites. Rather, in Stevenson’s tales, invasive supernatural elements take on new representational meaning. Given that such elements are repeatedly manipulated and disseminated by shameful imperialists, arguably, for Stevenson, the invasive supernatural represents anxieties about the potential shamefulness of empire. A reading of the supernatural as an expression of
106 shame about empire is given further weight by the fact that in each tale the supernatural is a powerful, and usually immoral, force to be reckoned with. In each story, the threat of the supernatural must be overcome, either by reformed imperialist characters or by Islander characters, invariably depicted as morally sound. This treatment of the supernatural is yet another example of Stevenson’s didactic use of shame. His message to the reader is quite radical: shameful imperialism in the Pacific must be overcome either by the imperialist invaders themselves or by those they seek to invade.
In ‘The Beach of Falesá’, as pointed out by Jolly, it is with the white men of the ‘beach’ that the true Gothic elements of the story are situated.29 This is shown at the start of the tale in the description of
Captain Randall as a near corpse: ‘Any clean-minded man would have had the creature out at once and buried him’; Wiltshire refers to Randall as
‘that remains of man’ and states that ‘Case and the negro were parasites; they crawled and fed upon [Randall] like the flies’; he describes him as
‘like a nightmare’ (‘BF’ 194). The Gothic of the ‘beach’ is further illustrated in the horrific tale of the live burial of Underhill (a grizzly example of nominal determinism), which is ‘a classic motif of gothic fiction’.30 The murder of Case is described by Wiltshire as particularly macabre:
Wiltshire stabs Case so that the blood flows over his hands ‘hot as tea’, then faints from gun-shot and when he recovers he stabs Case’s corpse with ‘the knife again a half-a-dozen times up to the handle’ (‘BF’ 243).
29 Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’, 42-43. 30 Ibid.
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The Gothic, in the form of the invasive supernatural, is created and manipulated by the shameful representatives of empire throughout the story. Case subjugates the Islander population of Falesá by pretending to have supernatural powers. He uses cheap tricks, such as the forgery of
‘island curiosities’ (‘BF’ 231), and his knowledge of the Polynesian supernatural world to control and exploit the Islanders – turning their traditional belief system against them. Tellingly, he uses the refuse of colonial trade to mimic the native supernatural: his Aeolian harp is constructed using ‘banjo strings’ and a ‘candle-box’ complete ‘with the brand upon the side of it’ (‘BF’ 230), and his chief devil is a waxen
‘pantomime mask’ made using ‘luminous paint’ (‘BF’ 232). He even constructs for his devil a made-man cave, a natural feature often associated with the spiritual world in Polynesian culture, using earth to cover a ‘tarpaulin stretched on boards’ (‘BF’ 232).31 The language Wiltshire uses to describe these contrivances further associates them with Western trade: he refers to Case’s doll-like ‘queer figures, idols or scarecrows’ as
‘bogies … fresh as toys out of a shop’ (‘BF’ 231), and calls the Aeolian harp a ‘concern’ that ‘nobody but damfools give a cent for’ (‘BF’ 235).
Case’s fraudulent use of the supernatural may be seen as representative of the ‘mystique’ of Western imperialism in the South Seas
31 Caves feature prominently in Island Nights’ Entertainments: caves appear in Uma’s story of Lotu’s encounter with ‘devil-women’ discussed below and in ‘The Bottle Imp’ when Keawe, blighted by leprosy, searching for the bottle to cure him, looks ‘up at the black mouths of the caves, and he envied the dead that slept there and were done with trouble’ (‘BI’ 86). Interestingly, as discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis, the link between caves and shame also appears in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Hyde remembers Jekyll ‘as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit’: Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Barry Menikoff (ed.), The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (Ney York: Modern Library, 2002) 313-314.
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– a theme that pervades the stories of Island Nights’ Entertainments.
Stevenson presents Case as generically Western: ‘[n]o man knew his country, beyond he was of English speech’ (‘BF’ 190). The trader’s actions are typical of imperialists in the South Seas: Case is a good ‘forger of island curiosities, a thing by which so many traders turn an honest penny’
(‘BF’ 231).32 ‘And with that’ Wiltshire says ‘I saw the whole business’ – an ambiguous phrase arguably referring to the ‘whole business’ of empire in the Pacific, implying it is nothing more than the dishonest pursuit of profit. Further, as a symbol for imperialism in the Pacific, Case espouses shameful imperious views on white relations with the Islanders, telling
Wiltshire (after his unsuccessful meeting with the chiefs), ‘What we want is a man-of-war – a German, if we could – they know how to manage
Kanakas’ (‘BF’ 205).
Crucially, Case’s reference to German warships reveals what may be one of the author’s key inspirations for the use of the supernatural by whites in Island Nights’ Entertainments. As noted by Jolly, Case is probably referring to ‘the Samoan war of December 1888’ discussed in the previous chapter, ‘when German men-of-war fired several times on native villages’ and ‘either missed their targets or embroiled the Germans in disastrous skirmishes with the natives’.33 Stevenson’s comments on the war in A
Footnote to History are telling. He writes that before the war ‘No native would … have dreamed of defying these colossal ships, worked by mysterious powers, and laden with outlandish instruments of death’,34 but
32 The irony here is striking: an ‘honest’ penny. 33 Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 263. 34 Stevenson, ‘A Footnote to History’ in Stevenson, Vailima Papers, 151.
109 that after the war ‘all Samoa drew a breath of wonder and delight. The invincible had fallen; the men of the vaunted warships had been met in the field … a superstition was no more’. 35 The ‘superstition’ of the warships is clearly echoed in Case’s use of Western technology to create an aura of supernatural power – a mystique eventually destroyed by
Wiltshire.36
Case, the symbol of empire, is repeatedly presented in supernatural terms. Uma describes him as the anti-Christ: she says ‘Tiapolo’ is the
Devil and ‘Ese all-e-same his son’ (‘BF’ 225).37 The trader’s actions support her belief: instead of raising the dead to life, Case orchestrates the burial of the living Underhill; he has a group of what Wiltshire calls ‘disciples’ headed by the corrupt native pastor Namu; he is the creator of false ‘idols’ with unnatural power; and he has the ability to ‘go in the desert among all the aitus’ to perform ‘miracles by the power of prayer’ (‘BF’ 225, 226). This idea is also expressed clearly in the title of the fourth chapter: ‘Devil-
Work’.38 Uma’s story of her own experience of the supernatural reveals the
35 Ibid 185. 36 I note here that the idea of the mystique of the white man is also evident in Stevenson’s fable ‘The Cart-Horses and The Saddle-Horse’, where the ‘Kanaka’ saddle-horse is awed by the foreign cart-horses huge size and naturally assumes their superiority: ‘the saddle- horse had never seen creatures so big. “These must be great chiefs”, thought he’: Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 253. 37 See Hillier’s reading of Case ‘as a Satan figure’: Robert Irwin Hillier, The South Seas Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Peter Lang, 1989) 181. Robbie Goh states that Case ‘embodies the diabolical, Mephistophelean quality of the unscrupulous commercial adventurer’: Robbie B.H. Goh, ‘Stevenson and the Property of Language’ in Ambrosini and Dury (eds), 175. 38 I note here that the chapter titles serve to disrupt the expectations of the reader: Case’s ‘Devil-Work’ is revealed in the chapter as human-work. Fielding makes this point in relation to the first chapter, ‘A South Seas Bridal’, which suggests ‘an anthropological account of a “native” kinship system’ but actually refers to ‘Wiltshire’s phoney and miscengenistic “marriage”’ to Uma: Penny Fielding, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ in Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney, The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 168.
110 depth of connection in the minds of the Islanders between Case and dark supernatural forces: she was chased by a boar that ‘was no boar but a thing that was a man with a man’s thoughts’ and that it came from among the ‘mummy-apples’ – one possible meaning Wiltshire gives for the
Islander pronunciation of Case’s name (‘BF’ 228, 210). Jolly convincingly suggests the boar might represent Case, ‘whom Wiltshire knows to have pursued Uma sexually’.39 Interestingly, once Case is seen in this light, the character of his sidekick and partner in crime, Mr. Black Jack, takes on new meaning: in Scottish folk lore, the Devil often appears as a black man and Stevenson’s stories ‘The Merry Men’ and ‘Thrawn Janet’ both reference this superstition. As mentioned above, Stevenson’s association of the supernatural with images of Western religious or moral shame corresponds with Stevenson’s biographical experience of shame, discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis.40 The depiction of Case as religiously shameful resonates with Stevenson’s discomfort about his own Christian belief.
Consistent with the demonic characterization of Case, is the story’s presentation of Case’s sphere of control: the Island bush.41 Just as he excludes Wiltshire from the Western space of the Island market through the shame of the taboo, Case exiles the Islanders from one of half of their own Island through the threat of the supernatural. 42 Wiltshire’s
39 Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’, 36. 40 This idea was unintentionally conveyed by Stevenson’s mother when she wrote in reference to ‘The Bottle Imp’: ‘the natives suspect that Mr Stevenson has the “bottle” himself’; as quoted in Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 270. 41 See Jolly’s discussion of the supernatural power of the Island jungle in Roslyn Jolly, ‘“Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá”’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 50.200 (1999) 463-482, 463-464. 42 Graham Tulloch sees this uninhabited part of the Island as ‘an empty space into which human evil can flow, as with Treasure Island’: Graham Tulloch, ‘Stevenson and Islands:
111 description of the bush is full of allusions to hell: at night it is preternatural – ‘a kind of a puzzle of turning shadows’ where ‘[t]he floor of the bush glimmered with dead wood, the way the match-box used to shine after you had struck a lucifer’ (‘BF’ 237). Stevenson’s comments on the native bush of the Pacific in a letter to a friend support this reading: ‘[i]n the forest, the dead wood is phosphorescent; some nights the whole ground is strewn with it, so that it seems like a grating over a pale hell; doubtless this is one of the things that feed the night fears of the natives’
(Letters 2: 56).43
The language Wiltshire uses to describe his journey through the bush up to Case’s ‘devil of a temple’ (‘BF’ 232), gives the impression of a voyage through the underworld – like that of Odysseus to Hades in
Homer’s Odyssey. Wiltshire says he ‘set off upon a voyage of discovery’ through the bush (‘BF’ 228), with the ‘trees going up like the masts of ships, and ropes of liana hanging down like a ship’s rigging’ (‘BF’ 229); and that the ‘first land fall I made was when I got through the bush of wild cocoanuts’ (‘BF’ 238). This image is reflected in Uma’s story of the native superstition about the young Islander Lotu and six ‘women-devils’ (‘BF’
226-228). Lotu encounters the siren-like creatures after travelling by boat to a secluded cove surrounded by black cliffs ‘full of the black mouths of caves’ in the middle of which ‘a big brook pours over in cascade’ (‘BF’ 227)
Scotland and the South Pacific’ in William B. Jones Jr (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson Reconsidered: New Critical Prespectives (Jefferson, North Carlonia: McFarland & Co., 2003) 68-82, 79. 43 Claire Harman notes that Stevenson was struck by ‘the way the uncanniness of the forest could communicate itself to even the most rational mind’: Claire Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) 416. Stevenson’s own personal experience of the bush reflected the ‘night fears of the natives’ and is consistent with his ideas on universality discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis: see footnote 51 below.
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– perhaps like the roaring confluence which forms the river Styx. The connection between Wiltshire’s experience in the bush and Uma’s story is expressly stated when Wiltshire is startled by the sound of Case’s Aeloian harp: ‘I called to mind the six young ladies … and wondered if they sang like that’ (‘BF’ 229).
Importantly, just as the land of the dead is a geographical location
Odysseus must sail to, Case’s supernatural space is in the material world.
It is a physical realm, as much a part of his myth of mystique as his
‘candle-box’ and ‘scarecrows’. Wiltshire’s ‘voyage of discovery’, then, may be seen as uncovering the real world source of Case’s phony supernatural power and, figuratively, revealing the shameful fraud of European power in the Pacific.
While the supernatural elements of ‘The Bottle Imp’, in contrast to those of ‘The Beach of Falesá’, are treated as genuine, they nevertheless continue to represent shameful imperialism in the Pacific. The bottle itself is a symbol of the unbridled avarice of Westerners: first purchased by a rich, Christian King, Prester John (‘BI’ 75), the bottle must be sold for
‘coined money’ (‘BI’ 76) – a Western medium of exchange. We are told that
Napoleon and Captain Cook, both symbols of an expansionist Europe, had possessed the bottle (‘BI’ 75). 44 As in ‘The Beach of Falesá’, the supernatural of the story represents a shame that is European in nature and holds the threat of damnation. Like Case, the bottle of ‘The Bottle Imp’
44 The reference to Cook is particularly significant given that his ‘death effectively symbolizes the shattering of the mystique of the white man and of his dream of undisputed authority in the Pacific’. It has been suggested that the native Hawaiians who killed Cook did so when they found out he was not, as they initially believed, the incarnation of their god, Lono: Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 271.
113 is described as a product of perdition: ‘the glass of it was tempered in the flames of hell’ (‘BI’ 74); ‘if a man die before he sells it, he must burn in hell forever’ (‘BI’ 75); and Keawe knows well that he is taking ‘favours from the devil’ (‘BI’ 80). When he finds the bottle for the second time, the Haole who possesses it is described in Gothic terms, as one near death: ‘for here was a young man, white as a corpse, and black about the eyes, the hair shedding from his head, and such a look in his countenance as a man may have when he is waiting for the gallows’ (‘BI’ 88).
Sin and shame in the Pacific are literally passed on from one person to another in the form of the bottle. The real curse of the bottle, that
Keawe took ‘upon his soul’ (‘BI’ 94), is the shameful greed of imperialists.
The implication is that, like a disease, the shame of imperialist greed may be transferred from European to Islander – a reversal of the process of contamination, invasion and regression expressed in the imperial Gothic.
When Keawe’s friend Lopaka first suggests seeing the bottle imp, he says
‘[i]t is only to see the imp himself. There is nothing to be gained by that, and so nothing to be ashamed of’ (‘BI’ 81); this makes clear that as one gains from the bottle the riches and trappings of the Western world so one gains the associated shame.
Once the bottle is viewed as representing the shame of Western greed, the whole tale may be seen as a warning to Islanders against adopting the shameful desires of Europeans. Both Keawe and Lopoka wish for, and are granted by the bottle imp, riches that are Western in nature.
Keawe desires a modern Western house that he models on the house of the American who tricks him into buying the bottle (‘BI’ 78). Keawe says it
114 should be a house ‘like the King’s palace’, which is a Victorian building in
Honolulu emulating a European royal palace (‘BI’ 78). This is an interesting reference given that the short-lived native monarchy of Hawaii tried to model themselves on their Western counterparts, attempting to replicate a modern European state complete with their own printed currency. This may have provided some inspiration for ‘The Bottle Imp’, particularly since Stevenson spent a considerable period of time with the
King of Hawaii when he visited the Islands. Similarly, Lopoka’s desire is for Western trade: ‘I have an idea of my own to get a schooner, and go trading through the islands’ (‘BI’ 78).45
Wherever the bottle travels, it transforms society in the Pacific into an image of the Western world, which initially appears alluring yet is actually shameful. This deception is consistent with both the false nature of the mystique of the white man and the shameful depiction of whites as deceivers, discussed above. When Keawe is attempting to track down the bottle he simply follows the trail of European riches, ‘finding everywhere new clothes and carriages, and fine new houses and men everywhere in great contentment’, though ‘when he hinted at his business their faces would cloud over’ (‘BI’ 88). Keawe recognizes the bottle’s mixed blessings when he receives his house, which comes to him as a bequest from a recently deceased relative: ‘it is a very ill way to serve me by killing my relatives’ (‘BI’ 78). Keawe’s second gift from the bottle is similarly marred: while his outward ‘flesh was whole like an infant’s’, his soul is eternally
45 Interestingly, Fielding points out that the idea that ‘living out one’s desires carries the risk of damnation’ reoccurs throughout Stevenson’s oeuvre. She states that many of Stevenson’s works trace ‘the cost of living all one can, both to oneself and to others’: Fielding, 161.
115 damned by the curse of the bottle and his conscience cannot rest (‘BI’ 89).
Further, when Keawe and Kokua travel to Tahiti in search of a purchaser for the bottle their reception by society mimics the true nature of the bottle. At first they are received as honourable: ‘they soon grew to be remarked in the town; and the strangers from Hawaii, their riding and their driving, the fine holokus and the rich lace of Kokua, became the matter of much talk’ (‘BI’ 93). As people learn the truth of their designs, however, they are shamed by society: they ‘became overcast persons who had dealings with the devil. So far from gaining ground, these two began to find they were avoided in the town; the children ran away from them screaming, a thing intolerable to Kokua; Catholics crossed themselves as they went by; and all persons began with one accord to disengage themselves from their advances’ (‘BI’ 93). Tellingly, the bottle has the same effect on Keawe and Kokua as Case’s phony superstitions have on
Wiltshire: public shaming.
Similarly, in ‘The Isle of Voices’ the supernatural is representative of shameful Europeanism. The native sorcerer, Kalamake, is described in racially and socially Western terms. He is racially ambiguous, being an albino, ‘more white to look upon than any foreigner: his hair the colour of dry grass, and his eyes red and very blind’ (‘IV’ 103). He is ‘a man that spared for nothing’ (‘IV’ 104), and uses newly minted Western coinage: we are told that he pays for ‘all manner of luxuries’ with ‘bright new dollars’
(‘IV’ 103). He surrounds himself with Western trappings: in his parlor hangs ‘a photograph of Queen Victoria with her crown’ above ‘a table and
116 a sofa in the European style … and a family Bible in the midst of the table’
(‘IV’ 104).
Further, Kalamake’s powers are used to satisfy shameful greed.
Tellingly, his name combines the Hawaiian words for money (‘Kala’) and death (‘Make’). 46 Further, we are told that the King of Hawaii had
Kalamake ‘twice to Kona to seek the treasures of Kamehameha’ (‘IV’ 103).
This further associates the sorcerer with greed and shame: as Stevenson described, the Hawaiian King, Kalakaua, was ‘perpetually engaged on a treasure chase’ for the legendary fortune of Kamehameha, amassed
‘through his dealings with pirates’ – revealing an obsessive desire for ill gotten gains.47 Along with hundreds of other wizards from around the world, the sorcerer procures his ‘bright new dollars’ from a Pacific Island beach – a striking image of the exploitation of the South Seas by foreign powers. Keola’s head is ‘dizzy with the thought of these millions and millions of dollars, and all these hundreds and hundreds of persons culling them upon the beach and flying in the air higher and swifter than eagles’ (‘IV’ 119). He says of foreigners, ‘to think how they have fooled me with their talk of mints … and that money was made there, when it is clear that all the new coin in all the world is gathered on these sands! But
I will know better the next time!’ (‘IV’ 119).
The irony of Keola’s comment reveals another similarity between the treatment of the supernatural in this story and in the other tales of the collection: the supernatural is deceptive. To the natives of the Isle of
Voices it is unknowable: the foreign sorcerers are invisible to the ‘man-
46 Noted in Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 275. 47 Ibid.
117 eaters’ of the Isle of Voices (‘IV’ 120). As is the case in Falesá, the ignorance of the Islanders as to the true nature of the foreign supernatural helps foment superstition: the Isle of Voices is so-called because the
Islanders ‘day and night … heard [the wizards] talking one with another in strange tongues’ but saw nothing (‘IV’ 116). Importantly, though, Keola’s knowledge of the truth about the voices allows him to manipulate the native cannibals and avoid being eaten by them. Thus Keola’s knowledge of the supernatural, like Wiltshire’s eventual knowledge of Case’s tricks, gives him power over the Islanders and the ability to liberate himself from the Island.
The scene of the natives on the beach fighting the foreign invaders, of whom they are afraid but whose nature and very existence they cannot understand, is a perfect image of the Islanders’ struggle to overcome the mystique of European power in Pacific. Just as Wiltshire literally explodes the fake supernatural power of Case, and Keawe sells the bottle back to a shameful European, and the cannibals of the Isle of Voices fight to claim back their Isle from foreign wizards (after Keola has taught them to destroy the wizards’ magic plants), Stevenson’s message is clearly that the myth of European superiority and the shameful nature of European power that it conceals must be resisted and destroyed – either by Europeans or by the Islanders themselves.
Ironically, while the mystique of the Europeans is a shameful fraud, their very shamefulness – or more exactly shamelessness – in the face of the supernatural reinforces their mystique. Stevenson said ‘I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of talisman against the powers of hell.
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In no other way can they explain the unpunished recklessness of
Europeans’.48 This comment is echoed in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ when
Wiltshire is under the taboo, the Islanders crowd around him ‘waiting for the show, whatever that was – fire to come down from heaven, I suppose, and consume me, bones and baggage’, and when it doesn’t happen they disperse though keep ‘an eye lifting for phenomena over my way’ (‘BF’ 200)
– the scene is a powerful example of shaming by the public ‘eye’. In ‘The
Bottle Imp’ too, when Kokua arranges to purchase the bottle from Keawe using an old man as intermediary, the man states ‘If you meant falsely … I think God would strike you dead’ to which Kokua replies ‘I could not be so treacherous – God would not suffer it’ (‘BI’ 95) – which has obvious implications regarding the American who tricked Keawe into buying the bottle at the start of the story. Arguably, Island Nights’ Entertainments is
Stevenson’s attempt to address this lapse in natural justice. The shaming of the contemporary Western reader in the stories may be seen as an effort by the author to punish the recklessness of empire and explode the mystique of Europeans in the Pacific.
As in the other two stories of the collection, the supernatural in ‘The
Isle of Voices’ manifests as a foreign threat to the natives of the Isle. Just as Case effectively banishes the Islanders of Falesá from one half of their
Island, the natives of the Isle of Voices are excluded from the outer beach of their own island by fear of external, invasive supernatural forces: they believe the seaside of their seasonal home to be ‘beset with invisible devils’
(‘IV’ 116). As stated by Stevenson in In The South Seas, the outer beach of
48 Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Heinemann, 1926) 161.
119 atolls were seen in Polynesian culture as places ‘accursed and deserted, the fit scene only for wizardry and shipwreck, and in the native belief a haunting ground of murderous spectres’.49 Interestingly, the Isle of Voices is physically very similar to Attwater’s island in The Ebb-Tide. It is a typical coral atoll with ‘a break in the line of the land like the mouth of a harbor … and all about … was the ring of the land, with its string of palm trees’ (‘IV’ 114). The image of a hollow island reflects both stories’ concern with moral emptiness – particularly so given that when the tide ebbs, such islands are literally emptied.50
So too is the shameful supernatural in ‘The Isle of Voices’ couched in religious terms. Like Case, and the imp’s bottle, the sorcerer Kalamake is aligned with demonic powers. We are told that there ‘was no man more cunning than that prophet; he read the stars, he could divine by the bodies of the dead, and by the means of evil creatures: he could go alone into the highest parts of the mountain, into the region of the hobgoblins, and there he would lay snares to entrap the spirits of ancient’ (‘IV’ 103).
His ability to ‘go alone into the highest parts of the mountain’ is very like
Case’s ability to commune with the devil in the ‘desert’ of the bush. Keola suspects his father-in-law of being in league with the devil and sets himself the task of discovering ‘for certain that the man is a warlock, and the dollars come out of the Devil’s pocket’ (‘IV’ 104). When Kalamake performs his evil sorcery, he puts ‘the bible under the cushion of the sofa
49 In the South Seas, 130. 50 See Tulloch’s revealing discussion of Stevenson’s use of islands in his work more generally: Tulloch, ‘Stevenson and Islands: Scotland and the South Pacific’, 68-82. Interestingly, Tulloch states that it is in ‘The Beach of Falesá’, not The Ebb-Tide, that ‘Stevenson’s new kind of island most clearly emerges’, an island ‘full of language’, ‘not uninhabited’: 78-79.
120 so that it was all covered’ and brings out ‘from the same place a mat of a wonderfully fine texture’ (‘IV’ 105).51 Interestingly, apart from the obvious imputation of putting aside good to take up evil, the wizard’s actions also reveal the influence of the Arabian Nights on the story, and its fellow parable, ‘The Bottle Imp’: one features a flying carpet and the other a jinni in a bottle.52
Further, Kalamake repeatedly takes Keola to places akin to the underworld (like Case’s realm of power, the Island jungle). The Isle of
Voices is a supernatural place, where no one permanently resides: the native cannibals only inhabit the Isle at a certain time of the year and the foreign sorcerers are transient visitors (‘IV’ 114). When the sorcerer takes his son-in-law to the outer beach of the Isle, Keola says the ‘pang’ of the magic carpet ride ‘was like death’ (‘IV’ 105). The sorcerer also rows Keola out to a part of the sea ‘called the Sea of the Dead’ to drown him (‘IV’ 110).
Further, just like the bush of Falesá, the Isle of Voices is both a supernatural realm and a physical place and Keola travels to the island both through magic and through earthly means – his sailing to the Island echoing Wiltshire’s metaphorical ‘voyage’ through the native bush.
51 I note that the ‘mat of wonderfully fine texture’ may be read as a symbol of Islander supernatural power. Kalamake’s substitution of the Bible, a symbol of Western supernatural power, for the mat may then be read as a conflation of cultures, carrying with it connotations of Stevenson’s belief in universality discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis. The equation of different societies’ emotional experience of the supernatural pervades Stevenson’s South Sea tales. Unfortunately, the limited scope of this Masters thesis precludes further exploration of this idea. See footnote 43 above. 52 The Arabian Nights was a great influence on Stevenson who wrote ‘The New Arabian Nights’, though G.K. Chesterton states that ‘The Island Nights’ Entertainments are not quite so entertaining as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, whether New or Old’: G.K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927) 174. I note also Jolly’s discussion of the German folktale origins of ‘The Bottle Imp’: Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s Pacific Transnarratives’, 15.
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Throughout Island Nights’ Entertainments, shame is equated with the supernatural. Case’s manipulation of the Islander’s notion of ‘taboo’ is a good example of the story’s conflation of shame and superstition.53 Case uses what he describes as the Islander’s ‘tomfool superstitions’ to incite a public shaming or shunning of Uma, and through her his trading rival,
Wiltshire. Stevenson’s explanation of the Islander idea of ‘taboo’ in In the
South Seas reveals just how close he considered it to public shaming: he says taboo is instituted to signify ‘that an act is criminal, immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we say) “not in good form”’.54 The nature of the taboo in the story supports this idea – it operates like public shaming. While under the taboo Wiltshire is the embodiment of the supernatural for the Islanders, yet they are still willing to associate with him beyond the public eye (once free from the risk of being contaminated by his social shame): ‘I found people willing enough to pass the time of day with me where nobody could see them’ (‘BF’ 224). Further, the Christian notion of excommunication, a Western form of religious communal censure or shaming, is similarly linked to taboo: Wiltshire states that
Uma’s taboo was ‘a regular excommunication, like what you read of in the
Middle Ages’ (‘BF’ 213).
As in the ‘Beach of Falesá’, in ‘The Bottle Imp’ the supernatural consistently produces shame. The vision of the bottle imp has a shaming
53 In fact, as noted by McLynn, the story’s genesis was probably Stevenson’s receipt of a letter from the trader Francisco Valleiro informing Stevenson that he had been tabooed for nine months, ‘the longest Taboe ever ben heard of throo the whole grupe of islands’: Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1993) 409. 54 Stevenson, In the South Seas, 43. See Jolly’s discussion of Stevenson’s conception of tapu in Roslyn Jolly, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law’, Journal of British Studies, 45.3 (2006) 556-580, 572-574.
122 effect on Keawe and Lopaka. Lopaka says ‘to tell you the plain truth, the look of him has cast me down’ (‘BI’ 81), while Keawe forces his friend and the bottle out of his house saying ‘since I have seen that little face, I cannot eat or sleep or pray till it is gone from me’ (‘BI’ 82) – revealing his uneasy conscience. Further, both Keawe and Kokua feel private shame as a result of the bottle. When Keawe, in the face of the bottle’s curse, lies moaning with ‘his mouth in the dust’ (a similar expression of shame to that of Herrick in The Ebb-Tide discussed in the next chapter), we are told that Kokua stops herself from comforting her husband because, ‘Keawe had borne himself before his wife like a brave man; it became her little in the hour of weakness to intrude upon his shame’ (‘BI’ 94). Reinforcing the bottle’s role as a symbol of Western shame, Keawe is shamed by the bottle just as he feels shame for being deceived by the boatswain into doubting
Kokua’s virtue: when Keawe returns to find Kokua with the bottle, he is at first afraid, ‘[a]nd then he had another thought; and it was a strange one, that made his cheeks to burn’ (‘BI’ 99). Similarly, Kokua hides the bottle as she would hide personal shame and the loathing she has for it could just as easily be self-loathing: she ‘viewed it with unutterable fear, and now, with loathing, hid it out of sight’ (‘BI’ 98).
Coda to the Supernatural as Shame:
In ‘The Beach of Falesá’, the supernatural is presented as a cheap trick.
As noted by Brantlinger, Stevenson originally intended a genuine treatment of the supernatural in the story, but later reshaped it ‘into a cheap hoax’ – aptly described as ‘a realist, parodic’ treatment of the
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Gothic.55 Interestingly, both ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ also attempt to bring the supernatural into the real world – reflecting
Stevenson’s comment that all the stories of the collection have a ‘queer realism’ (Letters 7: 436). The fantastical aspects of the two tales are juxtaposed against the use of real world places and names, effectively situating the supernatural within the colonial world of the Pacific
Islands.56 As Fanny Stevenson comments about ‘The Bottle Imp’, such details create ‘reality effects which seem to belie its fairy-tale status’.57 The same effect is created in both stories through a narrative style which heightens the texts’ realism: for instance the narrator of ‘The Bottle Imp’ tells us a character ‘named the name of a man, which, again, I had better not repeat’ (‘BI’ 88).58
There are two important aspects of Stevenson’s parodic or realistic treatment of the supernatural in the stories of Island Nights’
Entertainments. First, Stevenson’s parodic treatment of the supernatural does not diminish its power for the reader. On the contrary, aside from
55 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic’, 248. As Jolly states, ‘the story plays with these fiction modes’ or imperial romance ‘only to debunk and discard them’: Jolly, ‘“Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá”’, 463. As stated by Eigner, Stevenson ‘worried for several days over the … supernaturalism in The Beach of Falesá until he finally converted his real and terrible wizard into a cheap stage magician with Aeolian harps taken from Ferdinand Count Fathom and phosphorescent paintings from Melmoth the Wanderer’: Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) 35. 56 Jolly states that the story merges high romance ‘with exact representation of modern Pacific manners and mise-en-scène’: Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s Pacific Transnarratives’, 15. 57 Prefatory Note to Stevenson, Island Nights’ Entertainments (London: Heinemann, 1924). Hiller notes that in ‘The Bottle Imp’, ‘Stevenson duplicates the technique he uses in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, juxtaposing a single aspect of the supernatural with otherwise intense realism of details’: Hillier, 75. 58 See Jolly’s discussion of the varying reception of such statements by Western and Samoan audiences: Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s Pacific Transnarratives’, 17.
124 further emphasizing the deceitful nature of imperialist characters,59 the revelation of the supernatural as a manmade fabrication serves to heighten the horror of the supernatural for Stevenson’s contemporary western audience. 60 By making the supernatural merely natural he removes such anxieties from the realm of fantasy, where the reader may have dealt with them in the relative comfort of fiction, and presents them in the world of the everyday. In this way the supernatural is made powerful and more terrifying for Stevenson’s audience. When given a physical, real world explanation, the supernatural ceases to be a mere representation of imperialist shame and becomes literally the shameful deception and exploitation of Islanders by the representatives of empire.
Secondly, the supernatural, whether fabricated or not, remains a powerful, immoral force in the story that must be fought against and overcome.61 In ‘The Beach of Falesá’ the supernatural as a trick still holds power for those who use it: Case’s ‘Devil-Work’ is fake, being mere forgeries of ‘island curiosities’, yet the fear it instills in the Islanders is real. His childish tricks provide Case with power over the whole population of the Island, a power exemplified most clearly in the coin trick Case uses to undo missionary Tarleton. The missionary knows that it was ‘a
59 Similarly, Simmons argues that “Stevenson’s ‘realism’ results in brutal honesty about the destructive impact of the incursion of whites”: Diane Simmons, The Narcissism of Empire (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2007) 60. 60 A similar effect to that achieved by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. 61 Compare Kiely’s suggestion that Stevenson’s realist treatment of Case’s supernatural makes ‘the conflict with evil’ in the story ‘a simple and amoral matter of entertaining agitation’: Robert Keily, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964) 175. Jolly argues convincingly, however, that ‘in concentrating on the fraudulent nature of Case’s shrine and magic … critics ignore the real evil Case commits, that is, the murder of at least two of his rivals at Falesá’: Jolly, ‘“Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá”’, 466.
125 common conjuring trick’ which he has ‘seen performed at home a score of times’ but is powerless to refute its truth (‘BF’ 221). After the trick is performed a shudder runs through the native crowd and the missionary himself stands amazed (‘BF’ 221). While Case’s devilry is mere fraud, there is ‘something in it’, as another of Stevenson’s missionaries discovers in the parable ‘Something In It’.62
Wiltshire remains scared of the Island bush even when he has disproved its supernatural reputation for himself: ‘I thought it was a dreary walk, and guessed, when the disciples went up [to Case’s makeshift devil temple], they must be badly scared’ (‘BF’ 237). As Jolly states, in spite of himself, ‘Wiltshire experiences the bush as an uncanny space’.63
Further, when Uma surprises him in the bush he momentarily sees her as
‘a devil-woman … and there went out of me a yell so big that I thought it was my death’ (‘BF’ 238). Wiltshire denies the existence of the supernatural, and is technically correct in doing so, but is nonetheless affected by it: ‘Don’t think it was Uma’s yarns that put me out … it’s a thing that’s natural in the bush, and that’s the end of it’ (‘BF’ 229).
Wiltshire’s comment that the uncanny aspect of the bush is ‘a thing that’s natural’ not only suggests that what is mistaken for the supernatural may simply be reality, but that reality may be more terrifying than unreality. When this idea is applied to Case’s tricks, the representation of white mystique in the Pacific, terror becomes (as
Conrad’s Kurtz famously put it) ‘horror’. Wiltshire is horrified by the man- made shape of the unexplainable phenomenon of Case’s Aeolian harp: ‘if
62 Jolly (ed.), South Sea Tales, 255. 63 Roslyn Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’, 40.
126 the thing had looked like a pig or a woman, it wouldn’t have given me the same turn. The trouble was that it seemed kind of square, and the idea of a square thing that was alive and sang knocked me sick and silly’ (‘BF’
230). It is European tricks, or technology, which makes Wiltshire ‘sick’, not the boars or devil-women of Polynesian legend.
Further, by removing the supernatural from the realm of superstition, Stevenson enables this powerful force to be overcome.
Wiltshire is able to literally destroy Case’s supernatural power by blowing up his phony devil: he resolves that ‘Tiapolo had to be smashed up before next day’ (‘BF’ 236). Tellingly, the effect of Wiltshire’s destruction of Case’s fraudulent power is to light up the ghostly darkness of the bush ‘so that you could see to read’ (‘BF’ 240) – the phrase also implying the similarity between Wiltshire’s exploding of Case’s myth and the author’s exploding of the myth of European prestige more generally in the Pacific through the act of writing the story.
Stevenson’s message to the reader is clear: the myth of the mystique of Europeans deceitfully conceals the shameful truth of imperial exploitation in the Pacific – it is a lie that must be destroyed and, crucially, because it is a lie, it can be. The potential for the destruction of shameful imperialism in the South Seas is vividly conveyed in the fates of Case and his shameful companions Captain Randall and Black Jack: Case is murdered by a fellow trader; Randall has his hand blown off by his own shoddy trade goods when fishing while intoxicated with dynamite;64 and
64 We are told that ‘either the match burned too fast, or Papa was full, or both, but the shell went off (in the usual way) before he threw it, and where was Papa’s hand? Well, there’s nothing to hurt in that: the islands up north are all full of one-handed men’ (‘BF’: 244) –
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Black Jack, in similarly ironic fashion, is eaten ‘at some kind of a corroborree’ by ‘men of his own colour’ (‘BF’ 244).65 Such endings for the
European characters of his stories may be seen as authorial wishful thinking – Stevenson again addressing what he saw as the ‘unpunished recklessness of Europeans’.
Similarly, in ‘The Bottle Imp’, the bottle is finally returned to a
European for good – the drunken boatswain tellingly claiming ownership over it: ‘this is my bottle now, and you can go and fish for another’ (‘BI’
102). The message is that such shame belongs to the imperialists of the
Pacific – from them it came and to them it should return. As the boatswain says, after Keawe warns him that ‘the man who has that bottle goes to hell’: ‘I reckon I’m going anyway’ (‘BI’ 102). Fanny Stevenson wrote in her preface to the Tusitala edition of the Island Nights’ Entertainments, ‘I do not understand what civilizing effect the story of The Bottle Imp was supposed to have on the natives, but I cannot think it quite fulfilled the expectations of the missionary who translated it’.66 Arguably the ‘civilizing effect’ was meant for another, more distant audience.
Subversion Subverted: Shame and the Imperial Gothic
Stevenson’s subversion of the imperial Gothic subgenre is substantial but not total. While the jingoistic and racial anxieties usually expressed in imperial Gothic fiction are undermined and confused by competing
tellingly, Randal suffers the same punishment as a thief in the Arabian Nights (see footnote 53 above). 65 It is important to note that the character Black Jack is considered by Wiltshire to be one of the ‘whites’ of Falesá. He tells us ‘a negro is counted a white man, and so is a Chinese! A strange idea, but common in the islands’: ‘BF’ 193. 66 Prefatory Note to Stevenson, Island Nights’ Entertainments (London: Heinemann, 1924).
128 anxieties over the moral shamefulness of empire, the anxieties underlying the imperial Gothic are not completely absent from the stories of Island
Nights’ Entertainments.67 The residual anxieties of the imperial Gothic are conveyed through Stevenson’s imperialist characters’ feelings of shame associated with both racist fears and angst over the failure of masculine strength. As shown in Chapter 2 of this thesis, Stevenson’s attitudes to imperialism were complex and at times conflicted, shaped by his own
Stevensonian shame. Accordingly, Stevenson’s treatment of the imperial
Gothic in Island Nights’ Entertainments is complicated by competing anxieties born of conflicting types of shame.68
In ‘The Beach of Falesá’, Wiltshire’s moral progression assisted by
Uma’s virtuous influence remains incomplete. At the end of the narrative, when speaking about his children’s future, Wiltshire expresses a mind divided: ‘there’s nobody thinks less of half-castes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I’ve got. I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with Kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find [them] whites?’ (‘BF’
245). The love Wiltshire feels for his children is complicated by residual, racist shame about their heritage.69 In one sense, Wiltshire’s family is the
67 The focus of this thesis is on Stevenson’s complex expression of shame vis-à-vis imperialism in the South Seas. It attempts neither to convict nor exonerate Stevenson of racial or social prejudice in his fictional or non-fictional anthropological writings. It is interesting to note, however, Malzahn’s comment that ‘The Beach of Falesá’ ‘has received widely divergent ratings on the political correctness scale’: Manfred Malzahn, ‘Voices of the Scottish Empire’ in Ambrosini and Dury (eds), 160. 68 This argument is compatible with Malzahn’s opinion that ‘labeling of the text or the author as either colonialist or anticolonialist’ are ‘undue simplifications that ignore contradictory elements in the plot as well as in the narrative structure’ of ‘The Beach of Falesá’: Malzahn, 161. 69 Jolly states that Wiltshire’s anxiety about his children’s future ‘makes explicit the topic of miscegenation – the silent heart of the story, and the core of its challenges to generic, moral, and ideological conventions’. Consistent with the argument put forward in this
129 very embodiment of Stevenson’s notions of universality, but in another, they are the personification of imperial Gothic’s angst over racial and social contamination.70 Both these competing ideas are summed up in
Wiltshire’s expression of the competing emotions of love and shame he feels for his family: ‘I was in love with [Uma]’, he says with surprise,
‘Kanaka and all’ (‘BF’ 210-211).
Wiltshire’s racist attitude towards Islanders is summed up early on within the context of his meeting with the Island Chiefs: he tells the reader, ‘They haven’t any real government or any real law, that’s what you’ve got to knock into their heads; and even if they had, it would be a good joke if it was to apply to a white man. It would be a strange thing if we came all this way and couldn’t do what we pleased’ (‘BF’ 207). As argued above, the juxtaposition of such comments of arrogance and impunity against, for example, the honourable description of the Islander
Chiefs serves to heighten the shamefulness of the attitudes of imperialist characters; however, such attitudes are never fully condemned. Wiltshire, even at the moment of being rescued from the shame of the taboo by the
Island chief Maea, will not allow himself to deviate from his imperialist goals or become too attached to those he is exploiting – he strongly disabuses Maea of any notion that they might be ‘friends’, saying ‘no such foolishness. I’ve come here to trade, tell him, and not to make friends’ (‘BF’
235).
Chapter, Jolly also states that Wiltshire’s rhetorical question ‘I’d like to know where I’m to find [them] whites?’, implicitly requires the reader ‘to compare their attitudes to racial issues such as miscegenation … with those of Wiltshire himself’: Jolly, ‘“Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá”’, 480. 70 For by the end of the story, Wiltshire has realized such fears by, in effect, ‘going native’.
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Wiltshire holds a belief in his superiority over the Islanders and their natural subservience to him. He says, ‘I know how to deal with
Kanakas: give them plain sense and fair dealing, and – I’ll do them that much justice – they knuckle under every time’ (‘BF’ 206). He is continually concerned, especially at the beginning of the tale, not to show any weakness in front of the Islanders for fear of undermining his ascendancy.
He foolishly resolves to consult Case about the taboo instead of Uma because he believes ‘it’s a bad idea to set natives up with any notion of consulting them’ (‘BF’ 205), and when the Islanders are publicly shaming him as a result of the taboo, he says ‘I felt I was getting daunted, and began to be afraid I looked it, which would never do’ (‘BF’ 199).
Further, throughout the story, Wiltshire expresses a racist shame about desiring Uma which conflicts with his moral shame about deceiving her: ‘I was ashamed to be so much moved about a native, ashamed of the marriage too, and the certificate she had treasured in her kilt; and I turned aside and made believe to rummage among my cases’ (‘BF’ 197).
Consistent with the fear of racial contamination shared by so many other builders of empire, Wiltshire says ‘I had made my vow I would never let on to weakness with a native’ being ‘one of those most opposed to any nonsense about native women’ (‘BF’ 198, 196). Wary of allowing himself to become weakened in some way by Uma, he tells himself to be tough with her: ‘I must make a stand at once, and bring her to her bearings’ (‘BF’
196).
Wiltshire also continues to admire the virtues of masculine strength and daring, even in his opponent, Case. Wiltshire says of Case, ‘I must say
131
I rather admired the man’s ingenuity’ (‘BF’ 232). His admiration is echoed by one of the possible meanings he gives for the Islander’s name for Case:
‘extraordinary’ (‘BF’ 210). Case is described as courageous and capable:
‘He had the courage of a lion and the cunning of a rat’ (‘BF’ 190), with the potential to be a first rate empire-builder: ‘leave Case alone; he had the brains to run a parliament’ (‘BF’ 207). Wiltshire admits that his attitude to
Case is conflicted: ‘Case never set up to be soft, only to be square and hearty, and a man all round; and, to tell the truth, he puzzled me entirely’
(‘BF’ 203).
I note here that Wiltshire’s inconsistent attitude towards Case echoes Herrick’s confused reaction to the strongman, Attwater, in The
Ebb-Tide, discussed in the next chapter of this thesis. Interestingly, Case and Attwater share a number of similarities. Both are members of the elite
(Case, we are told, ‘came from a good family and was splendidly educated’,
‘was accomplished’ and ‘could speak, when he chose, fit for a drawing room’ (‘BF’ 190), while Attwater was Cambridge educated) 71 and both display moral ambiguity combined with almost superhuman power (Case’s demonic control of Falesá mirroring Attwater’s God-like dominion over his island).72
Wiltshire continues to define himself through the honour of strength. He describes with pride that while Case ‘was quick with his hands … he had neither the height nor the weight, being a flimsy creature alongside a man like me’ (‘BF’ 215). Wiltshire, far from viewing his violent
71 Hinchcliffe and Kerrigan (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, ‘The Ebb- Tide: A Trio and Quartette’, 73. 72 See also the discussion above regarding Kalamake’s demonic powers in ‘The Isle of Voices’.
132 nature in a shameful light, considers his strength a redeeming feature: after he beats Case in front of Tarleton, Wiltshire smiles to himself knowing that the missionary will ‘know I’m a man, anyway’ (‘BF’ 215).
Wiltshire’s strength vis-à-vis the Islanders is also a matter of identity formation: when the chiefs apparently won’t lift the taboo on him he says
‘I won’t take it at their hands … I ain’t that kind of a man. You don’t find me turn my back on a parcel of Kanakas’ (‘BF’ 207). Further, when
Wiltshire finally kills Case, he scorns the weakness and cowardice of his victim, in an apparent attempt to further justify the murder: Case ‘threw up his hands together, more like a frightened woman’ and ‘fastened his teeth in my forearm like a weasel’ (‘BF’ 242).73
The idea of manly honour is complicated in the story by Wiltshire’s moral shame discussed above. For instance, when Wiltshire seeks to redress the wrong he has done to Uma by having Tarleton marry them properly, he says ‘Now, what would any man do in my place, if he was a man?’ … ‘if he was what I would call a man and you would call a man, Mr
Tarleton’ (‘BF’ 217). Nowhere in the text, however, is Wiltshire’s admiration of imperialist strength and courage roundly condemned. Wiltshire’s pride is palpable in his frank and unpretentious self-introduction to Tarleton as
‘just a common, [low], God-damned white man and British subject, the sort you would like to wipe your boots on’ (‘BF’ 216). Wiltshire’s honesty is received with sympathy and a certain respect from the missionary.
73 For further complexity on Wiltshire’s character, see Jolly’s compelling reading of ‘The Beach of Falesá’ as affiliated with ‘the feminine realm of domestic fiction’ – particularly in relation to the reversal of adventure fiction’s ‘flight from marriage’: Jolly, ‘“Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá”’, 463 and 472. Interestingly, Kucich reads ‘the climatic fight between Wiltshire and Case’ as exemplifying ‘the homoeroticism sometimes embedded in colonial homosocial bonds’: Kucich, Fictions of Empire, 20.
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Tellingly, Wiltshire addresses the reader here directly, saying ‘I spoke to that man as free as I would to you’ (‘BF’ 216). This, coupled with Tarleton’s forgiving reaction to Wiltshire’s unapologetic shamefulness, can be seen as an attempt to solicit a response from the reader similar to that of
Tarleton’s, disclosing a certain sympathy and respect from the author of
Wiltshire’s strongman identity. Wiltshire’s shameless declaration of his shameful nature is, ironically, treated as honourable – making ambiguous his comment that he was ‘rather pleased with myself for the way I had managed the talk, for I like a man to keep his self-respect’ (‘BF’ 216).
The honour of strength also defines Wiltshire’s actions – yet another example of shame defining narrative progression in Stevenson’s work. The fear of being seen as shamefully weak compels Wiltshire to go through with the shameful wedding to Uma: ‘I could never have held my head up in that island if I had run from a girl upon my wedding-night’ (‘BF’ 195).
Ironically, it is this same type of shame that drives him to defeat Case in revenge for hurt done to Uma: ‘He had knocked over my girl, I had got to fix him for it’ (‘BF’ 241).
Wiltshire’s conflicted reactions and stunted moral progress are amplified by the fact that the story is internally focalized through his flawed character. The reader is thus encouraged to adopt his contradictory perspective. As Malzahn states, the story presents ‘a complex structure in which reader responses are first elicited and then obstructed or sabotaged by contradictory injunctions’.74 Fielding similarly asserts that ‘readers of the story are not exempt from’ Stevenson’s manipulation of
74 Malzahn, 162.
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‘expectations’.75 Importantly, then, Stevenson’s shaming of the reader, and the resultant redemptive or transformative effect of that shaming, is weakened and confused.
Stevenson’s shaming of the contemporary reader is further complicated by Case’s manipulation of the narrator Wiltshire’s racist imperialist beliefs and anxieties. At first, so as to deceive Wiltshire, Case encourages Wiltshire’s attitude of superiority towards the Islanders, saying
‘I don’t know where the impudence of these Kanakas ’ll go next; they seem to have lost all idea of respect for whites’ (‘BF’ 205). When Case is attempting to distance himself from Wiltshire and the associated shame of the taboo, he appeals to the selfish attitude of the white trader: ‘I’ll go as far as I dare for another white man; but when I find I’m in the scrape myself, I think first of my own bacon’ (‘BF’ 208) – an attitude Wiltshire himself had earlier espoused with gusto: ‘I don’t blame any man looking out for himself, tell them, for that’s human nature’ (‘BF’ 206). Further, once Wiltshire has discovered Case actually means him ill, Case openly shames Wiltshire using his own racist views against him: ‘You haven’t got one pound of copra but what you made with your own hands, like a negro slave’ (‘BF’ 233).
Other racist imperial anxieties are also present throughout the text.
Stevenson’s treatment of Islander characters as honourable, often descends into an imperialist, paternalistic vision of the Islanders – their kindness becomes vulnerability, their innocence, naivety. The Islander belief in the supernatural power of Case’s forged ‘curiosities’ is repeatedly
75 Fielding, 168.
135 presented as akin to a child’s inexperience. When convincing Chief Maea of Case’s trickery, Wiltshire says ‘[t]ell him the place is a blooming toyshop! Tell him in England we give these things to the kids to play with’
(‘BF’ 235). Uma, in particular, is described as childlike. Wiltshire says she has a ‘strange, blindish look, between a cat’s and a baby’s’ (‘BF’ 192), and that he sees her as ‘a kind of a baby besides that I was sorry for’ (‘BF’
211). She leads him to his new home after the sham wedding ‘like a child or a kind dog’ … ‘She played kitten with me’ (‘BF’ 197). When Wiltshire leaves her alone at the station he comes home to find her ‘trying on a lot of trade goods like a baby’ (‘BF’ 209), and when he reprimands her we are told she ‘shook with sobbing like a little child’ (‘BF’ 210).
Even stories supposedly designed for an Islander audience describe
Islander characters as children. In ‘The Bottle Imp’, when Keawe naively attempts to smash the bottle it jumps on the floor ‘like a child’s ball’ (‘BI’
174). In carrying out her scheme to buy the bottle from her husband,
Kokua trembles ‘like an affrighted child’ (‘BI’ 96). The old man who acts as middleman calls her ‘Poor child!’ and tells her ‘I left your husband weeping like a child; tonight he will sleep easy’ and later that night Keawe
‘slumbered like a child’ (‘BI’ 96). In ‘The Isle of Voices’, Keola is defined by his inexperience and credulity in relation to the omniscience and deviousness of his father-in-law, Kalamake. When Keawe petulantly exclaims ‘I am no child’, Lehua tells her husband ‘you are a baby in my father’s hands; he will take you with his thumb and finger and eat you like a shrimp’ (‘IV’ 108). The humiliation and shame of this propels Keola to foolishly demand a gift from the dangerous sorcerer, in response to which
136
Kalamake leaves Keola in the sea to drown: we are told Keawe ‘swam indeed, but he swam as puppies swim when they are cast in to drown’ (‘IV’
111). Most revealing of all though is Stevenson’s description of the native inhabitants of the Isle of Voices fighting the invisible, foreign wizards:
‘Have you see a child when he is all alone and has a wooden sword, and fights, leaping and hewing with the empty air?’ (‘IV’ 120). The Islanders, presented as children, are fighting what they cannot see and what may simply be their own fiction.
This scene from ‘The Bottle Imp’ arguably reveals a paternalistic motivation for Stevenson’s debunking of the mystique of the white man.
Sborgi points out that the story’s association of the Islanders ‘with animals, nature, and innocence’ and with ‘children’ could just as easily be found ‘in a study of Victorian anthropology’.76 Stevenson’s patronizing endeavour can, however, most clearly be seen in Wiltshire’s view of
Islanders as gullible children naturally susceptible to belief in the fantastical generally: he says ‘It’s easy to find out what Kanakas think.
Just go back to yourself any way round from ten to fifteen years old, and there’s an average Kanaka’ … ‘There are some pious, just as there are pious boys; and the most of them, like the boys again, are middling honest and yet think it rather larks to steal, and are easy scared and rather like to be so’ (‘BF’ 232).77 From this point of view, Stevenson’s use of shame to debunk the myth of European mystique could be seen as a condescending quest to save Islanders from themselves – an idea echoed in Wiltshire’s
76 Ilaria B. Sborgi, ‘Stevenson’s Unfinished Autopsy of the Other’ in Richard and Dury (eds), 151. 77 As noted by Cooper, for Stevenson, ‘[g]oing back to himself at any age was always easy’: Lettice Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd, 1949) 85.
137 comment to Uma discussed above: ‘You’re a trump, and that’s what’s wrong with you’.78 Whether or not Stevenson’s motives are paternalistic, however, the narrative irony generated by the flawed character-focalizer in
‘The Beach of Falesá’ discussed above, together with the ambivalent treatment of jingoistic and racial anxieties generally in Island Nights’
Entertainments, disrupts Stevenson’s subversion of the imperial Gothic and adds complexity to his use of shame as a tool for critiquing imperialism.79
As shown above, shame is central to Stevenson’s subversion and inversion of the central themes of imperial Gothic literature. Further, as discussed in Chapter 2, Stevensonian shame was a defining influence on Stevenson’s understanding of imperialism in the Pacific. It is not too much of a stretch then to suggest that the author’s ideas about the emotion shame, discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis, played a pivotal role both in his decision to subvert the imperial Gothic and in the incomplete nature of its execution. Arguably, a driving force behind Stevenson’s subversion was his belief that the atavistic, emotional self was universal. Such a belief in the universality of emotions like shame is incompatible with the anxieties about racial superiority upon which the imperial Gothic is predicated: thus, leading naturally to a subversive treatment of such literature. Yet,
78 I note that Stevenson’s didactic shaming of his European audience may be seen in the same light: as preachy and patronizing. I note also that Stevenson’s paternalistic attitude to Islanders accords with his actions as head of the household at Vailima, discussed in the pervious chapter. 79 I note that the conflict caused by opposing and incompatible kinds of shame experienced by Wiltshire creates a more psychologically authentic character, while at the same time modifying Stevenson’s didactic aim in shaming the reader.
138 paradoxically, the atavistic nature of such ‘rude terrors and pleasures’ prevents imperial Gothic notions, like the dichotomy of ‘progress’ and
‘regression’,80 from ever being fully debunked. Stevenson’s conception of emotion as part of ‘humanity’s primitive heritage’,81 aligns too well with the atavism of imperial romance. This chapter has shown how the conflict inherent in this paradox plays out in Stevenson’s Island Nights’
Entertainments. The author’s expression of the conflicted nature of shame, and his use of it, will be explored further in the next chapter in relation to
Stevenson’s novella, The Ebb-Tide.
80 Stevenson, ‘Pastoral’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits (The University of Adelaide: ebooks@Adelaide, text derived from 1912 Chatto and Windus Edition) ch. 6 [no page numbers]. 81 Julia Reid, ‘Stevenson, Romance, and Evolutionary Psychology’, in Ambrosini and Dury (eds), 218.
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Chapter 4
‘A mind divided’: Shame in The Ebb-Tide
The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette (1894) could have been designed as a discussion and illustration of shame in literature. Shame appears prominently in the novella and is used by Stevenson to explore attitudes to imperialism. This is achieved, first, by presenting in his story an image of shameful Western imperialism in the Pacific. Shame is used to develop his imperialist characters, to drive narrative progression and to shape the language of the text. It is significant that the manifestations of shame presented in the story correlate with Stevenson’s biographical experience of shame, discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis. Secondly, Stevenson extends this self-referential depiction of shame in the novella to include his Western audience. The portrayal of shameful imperialism in the text is used to actively shame contemporary readers back ‘home’, mirroring the author’s shaming of his readership in his South Seas non-fiction writing discussed in Chapter 2. Thus, Stevenson’s use of shame develops in his fiction writing from a literary device informed by individual experience and personal ideas on emotion into a powerful political tool.
The reason for this political use of shame may be found in Stevenson’s beliefs about emotion, as discussed in Chapter 1. Thirdly, Stevenson’s shaming of the reader is complicated by his characters’ shaming of each other. This self-referential delineation of shame as a manipulative tool renders Stevenson’s discussion of imperialism ambiguous, not least
140 because the central manipulator of shame in the story is the equivocal character Attwater.
Shameful Imperialism: Characters, Narrative and Language
In this section I will survey the importance of shame at the level of character, narrative and language. Shame is used to define and develop the characters of empire throughout The Ebb-Tide. The degradation that
Stevenson ascribed to his Western characters is evident in a letter he wrote while writing the story in 1893:
There are four characters, and three of them are bandits – well two of them are, and the third is their comrade and accomplice. It sounds cheering, doesn’t it? Barratry, and drunkenness, and vitriol, and I cannot tell you all what, are the beams of the roof.1
The novella opens with the protagonist, the poetically named Robert
Herrick, wallowing in the shame of a career of failure brought about by perpetual carelessness and incompetence. 2 His Oxford education notwithstanding, he has been reduced to living on a beach in Tahiti, and sleeping in a disused jail cell (ET 6). His two companions, Davis and
Huish, are disgraceful in his eyes, and he cannot disguise from himself that merely consorting with them sinks him further (ET 7, 24). He and his companions on the beach are human flotsam, driftwood left by the retreating tide, their situation strongly suggesting their moral and spiritual decline. The title of the novella draws indirectly on ‘Dover Beach’
1 Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95) 8: 76. Subsequent references to this work are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘Letters’. 2 Peter Hinchcliffe and Catherine Kerrigan (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, ‘The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette’ (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995) 5. Subsequent references to the novella are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘ET’.
141 by Matthew Arnold, in which the ebbing tide symbolizes the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the retreating ‘Sea of faith’.3
Life on the beach – the combination of beggary,4 being the recipient of charity from despised Islanders, then being unceremoniously driven off like stray dogs – produces in Herrick an agony of shame, described by
Stevenson in vivid terms:
The beachcombers beat their inglorious retreat along the shore; Herrick first, his face dark with blood, his knees trembling under him with the hysteria of rage. Presently, under the same purao where they had shivered the night before, he cast himself down, and groaned aloud, and ground his face into the sand. ‘Don't speak to me, don't speak to me. I can't stand it,’ broke from him (ET 17).
His body resonates with shame. Herrick confesses that in another day or two, battling to survive on the beach, he would have been prepared to kill for a dollar, to save himself from hunger (ET 40).
3 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Ed. (New York/ London: Norton, 1983) 794: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Adrian Poole notes that ‘the title ironically inverts the lines recalled by its epigraph: “There is a tide in the affairs of men”’ from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3, where ‘Brutus goes on – “Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”’: Adrian Poole, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, Adrian Poole (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 268. 4 See Donovan for an interesting discussion of the ‘narratological and thematic effects’ achieved by Stevenson’s use of song ‘when Captain Davis sings to the Polynesians for his breakfast’: Stephen Donovan, ‘Stevenson and Popular Entertainment’ in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (Madison Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) 79.
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Herrick’s shame-tortured narrative is matched by Davis’ crushed account of losing his ship and drowning six people, because he was too drunk to sail and too drunk to know it: ‘”There,” he said more quietly,
“that's my yarn, and now you know it. It's a pretty one for the father of a family. Five men and a woman murdered”’ (ET 19). Both Davis and Herrick ring variations on shame; both carry with them the moral burden their shame represents; Huish alone is vicious enough to be unconscious (or uncaring) of his own depravity. Huish, we are told, has ‘no redeeming grace’, he ‘called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins and laughed at the discrepancy … he was wholly vile’ (ET 7).
Interestingly, the sources of shame experienced by his characters are common to Stevenson’s personal experience of shame discussed in
Chapter 1 above. Herrick and Davis suffer acute professional shame and are forced to endure an associated financial ignominy. Further, as Guy
Davidson argues, the story emphasizes the instability of masculine self- hood and how it may ‘dissipate in various forms of shame’.5 Davidson’s reading of the characters’ physical manifestations of shame in the novella, in particular ‘the blush’ (or a ‘face dark with blood’), as an involuntary bodily function ultimately opposed to masculine identity,6 acquires added emphasis when viewed in light of Stevenson’s own feelings of physical inadequacy in the face of his engineering ancestors’ masculine prowess.
Most relevant to Stevenson’s personal experience, though, is the moral
5 Guy Davidson, ‘Homosocial relations, masculine embodiment, and imperialism in Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide’, English Literature in Translation 1880-1920, 42.2 (2004) 123-141. Similarly, Kestner argues that the story’s ‘great legacy is to interrogate masculinity in a completely existential manner’: Joseph Kestner, Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880-1915 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) 152. 6 Ibid 134.
143 and spiritual shame of the characters. As Alistair Fowler states, the story is ‘deeply involved in his [Stevenson’s] quarrel with God’,7 a reading most clearly demonstrated by the conflicted character Attwater, discussed below.
The characters’ shame both drives and impedes narrative progression. For example, the three drifters, two of them desperate to prove that they are capable of some sort of success, manage to convince the French authorities that they can sail a schooner, the Farallone, the
European crew of which have died of smallpox. The French simply want to get rid of the pest-infected ship and of the tramps, killing two birds with one stone, and are happy to take the trio at their doubtful word (ET 27,
28); yet the initiative to act here can be seen as motivated by shame.
Herrick’s agony of shame in contemplating Davis’ plan to steal the
Farallone and sail it to Peru causes him to contemplate suicide and he suggests Davis join him: ‘both of us together … a few strokes in the lagoon
– and rest!’ (ET 29). Davis, however, convinces Herrick to join him in barratry by suggesting an escape from ignominy: after they sell the schooner and her cargo of champagne, Herrick may ‘go home (as like as not) a millionaire’ (ET 28, 30). While Herrick consents to the plan he suffers personal mortification as a result: ‘I’ll do it: a strange thing for my father’s son. But I’ll do it’ (ET 31). 8 The ‘shameful misconduct and shocking disclosures’ of the voyage the trio then embark on in the
7 Alistair Fowler, ‘Parables of Adventure: The Debatable Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson’ in Ian Campbell (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction: Critical Essays (Manchester: Carcanet, 1979) 116. 8 A significant comment in light of Stevenson’s own personal shame in relation to his father, discussed in Chapter 1 above.
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Farallone have, however, a surprising effect on Herrick: they ‘nerve and strengthen him’. By agreeing to Davis’ plan, Herrick believes that ‘He had sold his honour; he vowed it should not be in vain; “it shall be no fault of mine if this miscarry”’ (ET 50). Thus, by believing himself to have given up the last vestiges of pride, Herrick is less self-divided and is, for a brief moment, shameless. This enables him to take the initiative in a crisis: as a squall comes down on them while the Farallone is under full canvas, he takes control by slapping the drunken Davis violently on the shoulder and vividly shaming the stupefied Captain into reacting to the imminent disaster:
You lost the Sea Ranger because you were a drunken sot,' said Herrick. 'Now you're going to lose the Farallone. You're going to drown here the same way as you drowned others, and be damned. And your daughter shall walk the streets, and your sons be thieves like their father (ET 52).
Such appeals to character motivation drive the plot forward; yet there is at the same time a profound overall sense of stasis in the novella that may be viewed as a product of shame. The self-divided nature of shame has a paralyzing effect on the characters (similar to its effect on the characters’ speech discussed below) and, consequently, on the action of the story. Herrick, in particular, is constantly bound by indecision caused by self-division (particularly in contrast to Attwater’s shameless hyperbolic agency). For example, in his failure to decide between helping his two ship mates rob and murder Attwater and saving Attwater’s life, he sees no way out of his indecision but through self-destruction. Yet even his attempt at suicide is confounded by internal conflict: ‘He was aware instantly of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to life with
145 a single and fixed resolve’, and it dawns on him that there is ‘no escape possible … He must stagger on to the end with the pack of his responsibility and his disgrace’ (ET 109) – surely an allusion to Bunyan’s pilgrim with his burdens/sins on his back.
Further, the trio ultimately make nothing of their chance to escape their stagnant existence. As Robert Kiely points out, the ‘story trails off ironically and inconclusively’: 9 Attwater remains undefeated, his rule continuing unchecked, while Herrick and Davis are left ‘on the beach’ where they began, 10 the unbelieving Herrick cynically mocking Davis’ forced conversion (ET 129-130).
Some have seen this stagnation as a result of the author’s own personal malaise: ‘For The Ebb-Tide’s trio … a general failure of enterprise is signaled by the exhaustion of narrative possibility that marks their aleatory or shallow creative endeavours’. 11 Even Stevenson’s lack of numbering for the chapters of the novella creates for the reader the impression of a series of incidents ‘loosely bundled together’ and ‘thus denying a sense of order or progress’. 12 This lack of progress further reinforces the sense of moral and spiritual vacuum associated with the image of the ebb-tide.
9 Robert Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965) 185. 10 As stated in Chapter 3, white settlements in the South Sea Islands were referred to simply as ‘the beach’, which also served as ‘a collective term for whites’: Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ in John Kucich, (ed.), Fictions of Empire (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003) 189. 11Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 160. 12 Poole, 264.
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One of the most interesting aspects of Stevenson’s treatment of shame in ‘The Ebb-Tide’ is the close attention paid to the relationship between shame and language. The section titles of the novella (musically named ‘The Trio’ and ‘The Quartette’) effectively describe the language of the story which presents a trio, and then a quartet, of voices each influenced by varying degrees of shame. Stevenson provides each of the three members of ‘The Trio’ section of the novella with a clearly distinguishable voice and timbre. Herrick’s upper-class English, educated speech is strikingly different from the cockney outpourings of Huish, and
John Davis’s New England tones and vocabulary are different again. Even brief examples make this clear: ‘I hope I shall die very soon; but I have not the least objection to killing you before I go … Take care – take care, you little cad! …’ (ET 63). Herrick’s education gives him access to forms of language which the more limited instrumentation of the other two shut them out of. Thus he uses slang characteristic of the public school boy
(‘You little cad!’), and he has the ability to use the walls of the prison to make notes of his passage in foreign languages (German and Latin) and even in music, where he writes the theme from Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony as an expression of triumphant self-assertion (ET 24).
But Herrick is also capable of producing written expressions of shame beyond anything the others can manage. Davis seeks and finds a surprising way to let Herrick confess shame and seek absolution: he borrows pencils and paper, and proposes that each of them should write home by the mail brigantine (ET 18–19). While the shameless Huish uses the writing materials to boast and lie, Herrick at once realizes that he is
147 being offered access to a kind of confessional – a way of relieving the torment of shame through language. At first he struggles and tries to avoid writing, but is kept to the point by Davis. The letter he produces is one of the clearest expressions of shame in the novella, a vivid statement of utter disgrace, addressed to the woman who had loved him and whom he had abandoned:13 ‘This is my last farewell to all, the last you will ever hear or see of an unworthy friend and son. I have failed in life; I am quite broken down and disgraced’ (ET 19). The confession of lack of worth, lack of manhood, the self-blame for repeated failures, and the suffering that rings through the letter, are completely convincing images of despair.
Interesting, too, is the effect shame has on Herrick’s spoken language or ‘voice’ in the trio. When the beachcombers ‘beat their inglorious retreat’ and Herrick ‘casts himself down’ upon the sand, we are told ‘his tongue stumbled among the words’ and ‘suddenly bowing his face in his hands,
[he] choked into a sob, the first of many, which now convulsed his body silently and now jerked from him indescribable and meaningless sounds’
(ET 17). Convicted by his own moral code, Herrick has nowhere to lodge an appeal, and is unable even to communicate the agony of his position other than by screams, tantrums, and peremptory demands that the others should not try to speak to him. Language itself, chief outcome of reason, has failed him. The other two are mystified, but it is clear that shame has deprived him of rational speech. What is more, it renders him incapable of expressing his personality (his identity), which Stevenson
13 In light of Stevenson’s troubled relationship with his father, it is interesting to note that Herrick first considers writing to his father but dismisses the idea: ‘”I’ll give my father up,” returned Herrick with a writhen smile. “I’ll try my sweetheart instead for a change of evils”’: ET 19.
148 communicates to his readers through Herrick’s speech-patterns and vocabulary.
Huish’s language by contrast is much more limited than Herrick’s but also more self-confident, aggressive and shameless: ‘Oh, so you tyke his part, doo you? you stuck-up sneerin' snob! Tyke it then. Come on, the pair of you … I never took a blow yet but wot I gave as good’ (ET 62-3). Davis, the American captain, is more varied in utterance, as his fantasy of going home to see his children shows: ‘First of all, I would bring up at the market and get a turkey and a sucking-pig … Then I'd bear up for a toy- store, and lay out twenty dollars in assorted toys for the piccaninnies ...’
(ET 12). The American vocabulary of this passage, with its references to dollars, turkeys and piccaninnies is replaced by nautical terms when the captain is trying to assert his authority on board the stolen schooner
Farallone (ET 38).
Importantly though, the modulated language of the Captain, like
Herrick’s verbal language and unlike Huish’s, is influenced by shame:
‘“What do you bring in me for?” broke from the captain. His voice was indeed scarce raised above a whisper, but emotion clanged in it … “if you had been drunk … and lost six lives – I could understand your talking then! … I never dared go home again’’’ (ET 19). The shame the Captain feels over losing his ship and the resultant inability to rejoin his family and community interferes with his use of language. Similar to Herrick, the
Captain’s command of language breaks down so that his speech becomes scarcely audible, inarticulate and segmented.
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The three tramps do indeed constitute a musical trio. But there is another voice in this novella to be remarked on: the language of the impersonal narrator is a major part of the music. It sounds steadily, like a ground-bass, rhythmical, unmoved, running beneath the utterances of the trio, and oddly mirroring some of them. As Peter Hinchcliffe points out, the narrator is of the English ruling class, his voice very like those of Herrick and Attwater.14 And like many of the characters, he seems to mock and demean the Islanders, saying in Chapter 5 that he will spare the reader their ‘unwieldy dialect’ (ET 48). 15 This almost universal scorn of the
Islanders is arguably designed to evoke shame in Stevenson’s readers, and this inflicted shame is perhaps the most important part of Stevenson’s use of the affect since it alerts the reader to the shame of imperialism.
Shaming the Reader
The use of shame in The Ebb-Tide develops from a literary device into a potent political tool to talk about imperialism. Stevenson skillfully persuades the reader that the voyage of the stolen Farallone can be seen as ‘a microcosm of imperialist society, directed by greedy but incompetent whites, the labour supplied by long-suffering natives’, who are mocked and exploited.16 Shame in the tale is not confined to the characters: it rapidly develops and spreads to include ourselves, the readers. As the
14 ET, Introduction, xxiii. The similarities between the voices of the narrator, Herrick and Attwater are interesting given the common elements of Herrick’s and the author’s personal shame and the confused reaction of Herrick and the narrator to Attwater, discussed below. 15 Notwithstanding the narrator’s comment that the ‘reader shall be spared’ the Islanders’ dialect and communicated with ‘in less embarrassing English’ (ET 48-9), the language of the Islanders appears throughout the ‘Trio’ section of the novella. The significance of this in relation to the reader is discussed below. 16 Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: South Sea Tales, xiv.
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OED puts it, shame affects those ‘whose honour or disgrace one regards as one’s own’. The plot becomes a mechanism by which Stevenson instills in his Western contemporary readership a sense of collective shame. Analysis of the text, in terms of this active use of shame, throws a significant new perspective on Stevenson’s methods as narrator and on his portrayal of ‘a microcosm of imperialist society’.
Stevenson’s shaming of the reader is evident in the relations between the shameful trio of Europeans and their Islander crew: 17 relations characterized by passivity and silence from the Islanders, and bullying and mockery from the Europeans. This bullying particularly takes the form of depriving the Islanders of their names and giving them new ones, designed to render them ridiculous or demeaned, by suggesting that they are women or slaves. Davis, who can produce several verbal registers at will, leads the brutal charge:
‘Here, you! What's YOUR name?’ he [Davis] cried to one of the hands, a lean-flanked, clean-built fellow from some far western island, and of a darkness almost approaching to the African. ‘Sally Day,’ replied the man. ‘Devil it is,’ said the captain. ‘Didn't know we had ladies on board’… ‘What's your name?' said the captain. ‘What's that you say? Oh, that's no English; I'll have none of your highway gibberish on my ship. We'll call you old Uncle Ned, because you've got no wool on the top of your head, just the place where the wool ought to grow’ (ET 35).
The final mocking words are drawn from an American minstrel song, ‘Old
Uncle Ned’.18 The offensive allusion places relations between Islanders and
17 From the opening lines of the novella, Stevenson presents Europeans as shameful: ‘Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease’: ET 3. 18 Stephen C. Foster, ‘Old Uncle Ned’ in Percy Buck (ed.), Oxford Song Book: Volume 1 (London, 1916) 184: There was an old nigger And his name was Uncle Ned
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Europeans on the Farallone in terms of those that characterized the
American slave system in the South. The Islanders, despite their ignorance of English, are conscious of the mockery being inflicted on them, and in subsequent conversation with Herrick they take the first opportunity of asserting their real names and their dignity, while rightly describing their European masters as ignorant:
‘Ah, no call me Uncle Ned no mo’!’ cried the old man. ‘No my name! My name Taveeta, all-e-same Taveeta King of Islael [My name is David, like David King of Israel]. Wat for he call that Hawaii? I think no savvy nothing’ (ET 48).
Yet it is part of the Islanders’ moral superiority that they are stoical, tolerant and passive under scornful and unfair treatment and, as a result, the abusive Europeans are brutalized and rendered more shameful by inflicting it. Only after ‘a close relationship has sprung up’ between
Herrick and the crew does Taveeta reveal ‘his simple and hard story of exile, suffering and injustice among cruel whites’ (ET 47).
Contact with the Islander crew serves to remind Herrick of moral good, and lifts his spirits and his sense of self-worth (ET 55). This is telling, as it is through Herrick (an alter-ego in so many ways for
Stevenson himself) that the reader is also associated with shame. In contrast, contact with his fellow Europeans merely depresses Herrick, and sinks him further into shame: ‘He was a thief among thieves. He said it to himself. He could not touch the soup. If he had moved at all, it must have been to leave the table, throw himself overboard, and drown – an honest man’ (ET 39).
But he’s dead long ago, long ago; He had no wool on the top of his head In the place where the wool ought to grow.
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Stevenson continues his shaming of the reader through the language of the Islanders. The difficulty of making out what the Islander speech means, places the reader in a position similar to that of the
Islanders being addressed in incomprehensible English. The effect, for a contemporary reader, is an inversion of colonial positions, a coming face to face with the unknown – a proto-modernist technique evident in the prose of Joyce or the drama of Beckett. Here Stevenson is using language to play with his audience, positioning them as the ‘Other’ so that they might feel shame for their feelings of superiority.
The Islanders are also, as Stevenson makes clear, better Christians than the Europeans – an important contrast in light of Stevenson’s own personal experience of shame:
Upon the Sunday each brought forth his separate Bible … and they would all join together in the singing of missionary hymns. It was thus a cutting reproof to compare the islanders and the whites aboard the Farallone. Shame ran in Herrick's blood to remember what employment he was on, and to see these poor souls – and even Sally Day, the child of cannibals, in all likelihood a cannibal himself – so faithful to what they knew of good. (ET 48)
The reference to the Islanders as cannibals, yet still the spiritual betters of the ‘whites’, exaggerates the shameful racial comparison for the contemporary reader. Thus, to the shame of the story’s contemporary audience, the Islanders gradually prove to be the moral superiors of their
European masters in every regard.
Self-Referential Shame Complicates Imperial Critique
Stevenson’s use of shame in relation to his reader, however, is complicated by his characters’ use of shame in relation to each other. Stevenson’s
153 characters shame each other throughout the text, echoing Stevenson’s own use of shame as a manipulative tool. This self-referential use of shame complicates Stevenson’s critique of imperialism in The Ebb-Tide, making ambiguous his examination of attitudes to empire.
A clear example of Stevenson’s characters’ use of shame to influence each other is the shaming of Herrick by Davis into writing his confessional letter home, discussed above. Davis tells Herrick that if he fails to write the letter ‘it’s about the high-water mark of being a brute beast’ (ET 18).
Here shame is used in a positive way by Davis to help Herrick find relief from his ignominy. This process of being shamed into writing about personal shame for constructive ends may be viewed as self-referential.
The Ebb-Tide, replete with elements of Stevenson’s own personal shame, might be seen as a confession similar to Herrick’s letter and perhaps serving the same purpose. Both are personal works of fiction – Davis takes pains to emphasis that their letters home are ‘lies’ (ET 18-19); both are shameful confessions motivated by shame; and both write ‘home’ to the literal and figurative heart of empire.
I note here, that the contrast, discussed above, between the inarticulate shame of Herrick’s spoken language and the vivid written expression of shame in the letter, takes on new significance in the context of the self-referential meaning of the letter. The act of writing is presented by Stevenson as an important avenue for expressing the otherwise inexpressible. This metatextual comment by the author has interesting implications for his views on the role and function of literature, discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis: Stevenson’s belief in writing’s ability to tap into
154 deep, universal emotions, correlates with his presentation of the authorial act in The Ebb-Tide as a means of emotional articulation.
The self-referential use of shame in the story is, however, most clearly demonstrated by the character of Attwater. The domineering, powerful and spiritually aware Attwater continually forces the other characters who have come to his Island towards an existential crisis, and he does so by strapping them on what Herrick calls ‘the rack’ of shame (ET 86). Attwater skillfully uses shame to manipulate Herrick, in particular, for his own ends. By the time the trio becomes a quartette, Herrick is already vulnerable: he is ashamed of the assumed identity he has adopted (‘Mr
Hay’) to hide his even deeper shame of personal failure from family and friends. The perceptive Attwater sees through this man whose self-respect is in tatters and uses his power to torture his prey. Herrick’s agonized cries are described as ‘strangling’ (ET 86). His language is urgent and pleading; but Attwater coolly turns the screws and tortures Herrick with promises of ‘mercy’ and redemption if he submits to Attwater’s influence:
‘Do we not all despise ourselves?’ cried Herrick. ‘Do not you?’ ‘Oh, I say I do. But do I?’ said Attwater. ‘One thing I know at least: I never gave a cry like yours. Hay! it came from a bad conscience! … ‘Not Hay!’ interrupted the other, strangling. ‘Don't call me that! I mean... For God's sake, can't you see I'm on the rack?’ ‘I see it, I know it, I put and keep you there, my fingers are on the screws!’ said Attwater. ‘Please God, I will bring a penitent this night before His throne. Come, come to the mercy-seat!’ (ET 86).
Attwater plays too on Davis’ ‘bad conscience’, forcing him at gun point to confess his shame and have his ‘peace made with heaven’ (ET 127), until in the end Davis is reduced to Attwater’s ‘spoiled darling and pet penitent!’
(ET 130). Only the shameless and ‘indomitable Huish’ is immune to
Attwater’s manipulation, and he tellingly meets his end ‘in hell’s agonies,
155 bathed in flames, a screaming bedlamite’ from the effects of vitriol, before
Attwater’s ‘merciful bullet stretched him dead’ (ET 126).
Attwater’s employment of shame, more than any other, complicates
Stevenson’s discussion of imperialism, chiefly because Attwater, as Roslyn
Jolly points out, is presented by Stevenson as a walking symbol of imperialism.19 His exploitation of ‘his’ island (to which he has no legal right) takes the form of a brutal and cruel rule over the native people of the place (ET 75). When discussing Stevenson’s description of Attwater’s island, which displays the red ensign of England, Jolly quotes from the parliamentary debate on 22 April 1872 over the Pacific Island Protection Bill and notes that many British politicians thought that the British flag was
‘disgraced’ and ‘shamed’ by the traffic in labouring bodies in the South
Pacific20 – a traffic in which Attwater is engaged (ET 95). The shameful imperialism practiced on Attwater’s island, not unlike Prospero’s island in
The Tempest, mirrors European Imperialism throughout the Pacific.
Further, Attwater sees and identifies himself as an imperial power, even though he now rules over just a handful of islanders, the rest having died of smallpox (a disease which he brought to the island) (ET 73), and he repeatedly refers to his island and its inhabitants as his ‘colony’. Since finding the island, he says ‘I have had a business, and a colony, and a mission of my own. I was a man of the world before I was a Christian; I'm
19 Roslyn Jolly, ‘Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson's Pacific Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35.1 (2007) 157-173. 20 Jolly, ‘Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson's Pacific Fiction’, 157-173, 168-169. In the debate Mr Serjeant Simon ‘protested against the British flag being disgraced by the toleration of this nefarious traffic [of Islanders] under the pretext of the exigencies of emigration’ stating that ‘[i]t was really the worst kind of slave trading’, see Hansard’s, 22 April 1872, 1670, ‘Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill’, 81.
156 a man of the world still, and I made my mission pay’ (ET 84). As the
Biblical language in the last sentence indicates, Attwater’s dominance over the island also has a spiritual dimension: it is not just his colony but his
‘mission’. He converts as well as rules (‘I will bring a penitent this night before His throne’) and rules in order to enrich himself seemingly spiritually as well as economically: he has, as he puts it baldly, ‘a business, and a colony, and a mission of my own’. He is king, priest, treasurer, and maybe even deity, with the power to forgive Herrick and
Davis, and send Huish to hell. Attwater’s rule offers Stevenson a powerful symbol of shameful imperialism.
Importantly, and paradoxically, the shame attached to Attwater is made potent by his utter shamelessness – a shamelessness continually conveyed through the language of Attwater and the narrator. We are told that Herrick sees in Attwater an ‘Iron cruelty, an iron insensibility to the suffering of others, the uncompromising pursuit of his own interests, cold culture, manners without humanity’ (ET 83). This catalogue of vices is a description of imperialism at its worst, the shamefully shameless imperialism that Stevenson was to see in the vile actions of the European powers in Samoa.21
Stevenson’s critique of imperialism is further complicated by the fact that Attwater, the symbol of imperialism, is an ambiguous character.
Stevenson told Colvin in February 1894 that he had ‘A little indecision about Attwater’ (Letters 8: 250), an indecision borne out in the confused
21 Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, 79.
157 reactions of the other characters to Attwater and the ambivalent treatment of Attwater by the text.
The trio’s reactions to Attwater, particularly those of Herrick and
Davis, are ambivalent and confused. Attwater, as his own priest and king
(and perhaps his own God), is above the law, and he doesn’t hesitate to flog or shoot dead any of his subjects who offend against his rule.22
Herrick’s attitude to Attwater is affected accordingly and he both admires and condemns him. On first meeting Attwater, Herrick states that he is both ‘attracted and repelled’ (ET 77). Attwater’s manipulatively favourable treatment of Herrick above his companions shames, angers and pleases
Herrick:
Herrick was embarrassed; the silken brutality of their visitor made him blush; that he should be accepted as an equal, and the others thus pointedly ignored, pleased him in spite of himself, and then ran through his veins in a recoil of anger (ET 73).
The oxymoron ‘silken brutality’ illustrates Attwater’s duplicitous insinuation into Herrick’s personal space. Herrick is not unintelligent: he knows what Attwater is doing and it is little wonder that he blushes with shame. Nevertheless, he is also flattered ‘in spite of himself’ and thus falls prey to this self-righteous bully.
Herrick’s reactions to Attwater are complicated by the fact that he knows his two shipmates are planning to rob and murder Attwater, adding killing to their other crimes, and Herrick is painfully trying to decide which side in the coming struggle he will join (ET 87). He gets to know
22 As is made clear by Attwater’s story (or parable) of administering justice among his Islander slave labourers in ‘The Dinner Party’: ET 98.
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Attwater better when he is shown over the island, but Attwater is not what he had expected:
Herrick was like one in a dream. He had come there with a mind divided; come prepared to study that ambiguous and sneering mask, drag out the essential man from underneath, and act accordingly; … But to find the whole machine thus glow with the reverberation of religious zeal, surprised him beyond words; and he labored in vain … to adjust again, into any kind of focus with itself, his picture of the man beside him (ET 83).
Herrick is trying to square his conscience: if he can sufficiently despise
Attwater, Herrick could join in killing him. But Attwater’s character refuses to adjust ‘into any kind of focus with itself’. He ‘glows’ with
‘religious zeal’ that confounds Herrick, who studies Attwater’s ‘ambiguous’ character ‘in vain’.
Though Attwater displays despised characteristics (such as an ‘iron insensibility to the suffering of others’), he surprises Herrick by showing himself to be cultured, and by recognizing in Herrick a fellow Oxbridge graduate: an unexpected link which makes Herrick blush almost femininely with embarrassment (ET 73). By contrast, Attwater is a strongly masculine figure, domineering, masterful, physically large and powerful, ruler of his island, the dealer out of food, judgement and death. He is ‘a huge fellow, six feet four in height and of a build proportionately strong’
(ET 71). His masculinity, deeply admired by Herrick, reinforces Attwater’s role as a symbol of imperialism. Davidson sees such masculinity as essential to the practice of imperialism and reads Stevenson’s attack on the identity of masculinity through shame as a moral attack on imperialism more generally.23 This is helpful ballast for my argument,
23 Davidson, ‘Homosocial relations’, 123-141, 138.
159 which sees Stevenson’s attitude to imperialism not only nuanced by homosocial relations and conflicted masculinity but also further complicated by religious and ethical issues.
Moreover, Attwater is nowhere unequivocally condemned in the narrative. We are told that Herrick is ‘intrigued, puzzled, dazzled, enchanted and revolted’ by him (ET 87), while Davis openly conveys his respect for Attwater’s ability to ‘run’ his slave-labor ‘single-handed’ without ‘the law behind’ him, exclaiming ‘By God, you’re a man; and you can say I said so’ (ET 96). G. K. Chesterton’s reaction to Attwater typifies many reader responses: ‘I do not object to the author creating such a loathsome person as Mr Attwater; but I do rather object to his creating him and not loathing him’.24
The perverse admiration of Herrick and his companions for such immoral, or arguably amoral, behaviour and the lack of a guiding ethical stance in the narration reveal Stevenson’s own conflicted views on such imperialist activity. While Stevenson expressed a shame over imperialism in his writing (discussed above), he was, after all, not only Tusi Tala,
‘Teller of Stories’, but also lord of his own small fiefdom of Vailima with
Samoan workers and dependents. Here he proudly displayed the British
Flag on his roof and entertained officers from British warships and trading vessels that called at the nearby port of Apia.25 His allegiance to the
British Crown was clear.26
24 G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927) 133. 25 Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2004) 6. 26 It should be recognized, however, that there are stark differences between Attwater’s island fiefdom and Stevenson’s Vailima. Both fly the British flag but Attwater does so
160
Thus, in The Ebb-Tide we see Stevenson acknowledging the efficacy of a strong imperialist model while also expressing an anti-imperialist shame and confusion about the moral and religious bases of such practices. It should be noted, however, that by not condemning Attwater, Stevenson may not simply be exploring his own conflicted personal and political attitudes, but may be making a comment on the reader’s lack of condemnation of colonial practices, thereby provoking change as a result.
Given the ambiguity of Attwater, it is unsurprising that the character has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Some critics have argued that Stevenson’s intention was to present Attwater as heroic, 27 while others have viewed him as wholly villainous.28 Possible sources for his character are ambiguously located in both European and Pacific Islander models. Jolly points out that the character of Attwater appears, in part, to be based on the Scottish missionary to New Guinea, James Chalmers, whom Stevenson ‘admired almost to the point of hero-worship’.29 Buckton draws attention to the influence of King Tembinok of Apemama of the
Gilbert Islands on the character Attwater, in particular citing Stevenson’s description in In the South Seas of Tembinok’s tyrannical rule over his subjects through the use of the Winchester rifle, echoing Attwater’s own
illegally. Attwater’s island was appropriated; Stevenson’s land was purchased. The establishment of Vailima was not an act of piracy and no slavery was practiced there. Nevertheless, the parallels are substantial enough to support a reading of Stevenson’s own conflicted view of imperial exploits. 27 See Alistair Fowler, ‘Parables of Adventure: The Debatable Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson’, 122; Robert Irwin Hillier, The South Seas Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Peter Lang, 1989) 133-136. 28 Chesterton, 133. Also, for informed discussions of Attwater see Kiely, 181-184, and Edwin Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) 214-218. 29 Roslyn Jolly, ‘The Ebb-Tide and The Coral Island’, Scottish Studies Review, 7.2 (2006) 79-91, 84.
161 use of the Winchester to deal out justice on his Islander subjects and
Herrick’s companions.30
At a deeper level, Frank McLynn sees Attwater as a ‘barely disguised portrait’ of Stevenson’s father: he ‘represents in hyperbolic form all that
Louis most feared and despised in his father’. 31 Villa highlights
‘Stevenson’s tendency to shift onto his fictional fathers and father substitutes the burden of guilt and transgression that pertains primarily to the younger man’s own involvement in the Oedipal quagmire’.32 This is certainly true in the Ebb-Tide: Herrick’s companions (with whom Herrick is complicit) are planning to murder Attwater, but here Attwater is represented as the shameful party.
Building on this analysis, it may be argued that Stevenson’s feelings associated with his troubled relationship with his father, sketched in
Chapter 1 of this thesis, helped to inform his images of exploitive imperialism – vividly demonstrated when the ‘pious’ and ‘paternal’ 33
Attwater tries to convert Herrick to Christianity. However, regardless of whether we accept one or more of the arguments on Attwater’s origins, it is clear that through Attwater Stevenson is able to explore the complexities of a shameful imperialism, complexities that reflect his own ambivalence and that of his readers.
30 Olivers S. Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007) 171-172; Oliver S. Buckton, ‘Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: The South Seas from Journal to Fiction’, in Ambrosini and Dury (eds), 207; see also, Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Heinemann, 1926) 300-301. 31 Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1994) 467. Attwater as a father figure has been taken up by a number of critics, most notably Kiely, 183, and Eigner, 214. 32 Luisa Villa, ‘Quarreling with the Father’, in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (eds), 114. 33 The adjectives are those of Villa, 116.
162
This Chapter has argued that shame is a central element of Stevenson’s critique of European imperialism in The Ebb-Tide. Shame, I have suggested, is in its very nature bound to divide and undo the personality of a shamed character like Herrick, and therefore exercises a powerful attraction on the mind of a writer who repeatedly depicted his major characters as tormented doubles, self-reflective and self-accusing. This authorial preoccupation with shame has been shown in Chapter 1 to derive from deep in Stevenson’s family history; it is an affect imbued in him by agonizing struggles with his own loved and admired parents and then, as discussed in Chapter 2, rationalized as a conscious shame to be used in narrative and political critique. Conflict between shamed and shameless characters appears to drive a narrative dynamic that allows
Stevenson to engage with and shame his reader. The ambiguous Attwater is both admired and loathed, a shameless colonizer who elicits a mixed audience reaction. It is in The Ebb-Tide’s anti-hero Herrick, however, that we encounter a potentially positive authorial use of shame. Here
Stevenson presents a character driven by shame, a shame that reveals a deep disgrace and self loathing but that also allows the narrator to critique an ostensibly shameless imperialism with genuine moral sensibility and admirable, if nuanced, anti-imperialism.
163
Conclusion
‘The Beach of Falesá’ and The Ebb-Tide have been called ‘the first colonial fictions in the [English] language’.1 Certainly they have something of the epic quality that Stevenson was trying to achieve in his writing: paradoxically, although the narrators, characters and events of his South
Seas stories are anything but heroic, the ‘hybrid forms of life created by
European colonialism contained the potentials for an epic subject’.2 As
Stevenson himself realised (when he joked to Henry James, ‘I am an
Epick Writer with a k to it, but without the necessary genius’),3 he had achieved in his South Seas tales fictional representations of real significance to Western culture and the collective memory of mankind.
This thesis has argued that it is through the use of shame, in particular
Stevensonian shame, that the author has been able to achieve such a powerfully complex record of the momentous social and cultural ruptures caused by nineteeth-century imperialism that inform the postcolonial world we live in today.
Few of Stevenson’s contemporaries, however, recognised the significance of his South Seas fiction. They were disconcerted by the new narrative style: ‘[t]his is not the Stevenson we love’. 4 And they were
1 Richard Ambrosini, ‘Boundary-Crossings of R.L. Stevenson’, in Richard Ambrosini, and Richard Dury (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (Madison Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) 34. 2 Ibid. 3 Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95) 7: 449. Subsequent references to this work are included in the text with the abbreviation ‘Letters’. 4 From an unsigned review, Speaker, 29 September 1894: in Paul Maixner (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 459.
164 baffled by the grotesque nature of the subject matter, what Sidney Colvin had thought even ‘too grim to appear in book form’ and what one reviewer referred to as ‘the fag ends of certain useless and degraded lives’.5 But the disturbing subjects and realistic treatment in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ and The Ebb-Tide challenged readers back ‘home’ with the realities of imperialism in the Pacific. The subject and style of his South
Sea writings reinforced Stevenson’s shaming of the reader examined in this thesis, imbuing his work with an affecting power essentially bound to social and cultural critique. The power of the work was recognised but it was also seen as alarmingly confronting: ‘It is strong with a strength that is almost, if not absolutely, savage.’6 One percipient critic, however, recognised the significance of Stevenson’s realistic depiction of colonial life in the South Seas:7 in the Fortnightly Review (1894) Stephen Gwynn writes of Stevenson ‘peopling a definite field in our imaginations’ for
‘future generations’;8 and in another essay, four years later and following
Stevenson’s death, he sums up the South Seas writing:
It was only after Stevenson went to Samoa that his work became closely and obviously related to his own experiences; first, to his material environment; lastly, and in its highest development, to the spiritual adventures which had left their marks upon his youth.9
5 Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980) 186; and Roslyn Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: South Sea Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) xxviii. 6 Maixner (ed.), 458. 7 Noted by Jolly, South Sea Tales, xxxi-ii. 8 Stephen Gwynn, ‘Mr Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Study’, Fortnightly Review, 56 (1894) 776-792, 778. 9 Stephen Gwynn, ‘The Posthumous Works of Robert Louis Stevenson’, Fortnightly Review, 69 (1898) 561-575, 563.
165
This close relationship between ‘his work’ and ‘his own experiences’ underlines the argument of this thesis. It is in the space between his new
‘material environment’ and the ‘spiritual adventures’ associated with his
Calvinist heritage and family ethics (that ‘had left their marks upon his youth’) that shame can be seen to operate. We have seen that the various sources of shame experienced by Stevenson and expressed in his letters are complex, often contradictory, and appear to find focus in the turbulent relationship with his father, which may be the reason for his increasing fascination for this particular emotion.
This essay has argued that Stevenson used shame as a tool to critique attitudes to imperialism in his fiction writing of the South Seas.
Shame was one of the determining emotions of Stevenson’s life and work.
Chapter 1 of this thesis has traced the way this affect entered his writing not simply as a personal unconscious preoccupation but also as a conscious authorial exploration, informed by ideas about emotion gleaned from contemporary Darwinian evolutionary theory. Stevenson believed that through primordial emotions, such as shame, the writer might connect with and influence his readership. Thus the stage was set for the use of shame as a mechanism to incite social change.
Chapter 2 then explored the way in which Stevensonian shame – that is, both his emotional experience and intellectual understanding of shame mapped in Chapter 1 – informed Stevenson’s response to empire.
The conflicted nature of Stevensonian shame rendered the author’s attitudes to imperialism complex, informing his engagement with competing fin-de-siècle anxieties about empire.
166
Crucially, as foregrounded in Chapter 2 in relation to his Pacific non-fiction writings, and shown in-depth in Chapters 3 and 4 in relation to his fictional South Sea tales, Stevensonian shame not only shaped
Stevenson’s often-contradictory response to empire but, consequently, informed his use of the emotion in his work to grapple with the social and political questions raised by Western imperialism in the Pacific.
Thus, shame developed in his work from a preoccupation or fixation into a literary device used by the author to examine and critique attitudes to imperialism.
This thesis has demonstrated the defining role of shame in the character, narrative, language and moral stance of Stevenson’s South
Seas fiction. From the unresolved critique of imperial Gothic in Island
Nights’ Entertainments to the ambivalent treatment of Attwater in the The
Ebb-Tide, shame impelled and shaped Stevenson’s complex understanding of and reaction to imperialism in his work. And this shame is not confined to the author, his narrators, or his characters: it develops and encompasses us as readers. Herrick’s confession ‘on the rack’:10 'Do we not all despise ourselves?' – personal though it is in the immediate context of The Ebb-Tide and addressed as it is to Attwater, that ‘strangling’ embodiment of imperialist power – is designed to ring in the reader’s ears, convicting all those who prey upon innocent others.
The language here reaches out towards the voice of a collective shame to provoke the remedial action and redemption so poignantly invoked in
10 Peter Hinchcliffe and Catherine Kerrigan (eds), Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, ‘The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette’ (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995) 86.
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Stevenson’s prayer ‘For Self-Blame’ written by ‘the house chief’ for his household at Vailima:11
‘Let us feel our offences with our hands, make them great and bright before us like the sun, make us eat them and drink them for our diet … Help us at the same time with the grace of courage, that we be none of us cast down when we sit lamenting amid the ruins of our happiness or our integrity: touch us with fire from the altar, that we may be up and doing to rebuild our city’.12
11 From Fanny Stevenson’s Preface to Stevenson, Vailima Papers (London: William Heinemann, 1927) 1. 12 Ibid 16.
168
169
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