This essay serves as an in-depth analysis and elaboration of the topics dealt with in the presentation held in the seminar titled “From South Seas Fiction to Pacific Island writing” about Robert Louis Stevenson. Thus, it follows that this work is concerned with the life of RLS, but also with his literary work and how the former has influenced the latter. Moreover, Treasure Island will be explored and contextualized against the backdrop of the genre Adventure Fiction. For said purpose it is necessary to briefly define the most common aspects of the genre at hand. These common aspects will be explored and RLS’s literary works in the genre and his personal approach shall be outlined later on.
Inhalt
1. Robert Louis Stevenson
1.1 Biographie
1.2 Characterization
2. Adventure Fiction
2.1 Treasure Island as an example of Stevenson’s approach to adventure fiction
3. Conclusion
Bibliography:
1. Robert Louis Stevenson
This essay serves as an in-depth analysis and elaboration of the topics dealt with in the presentation held in the seminar titled “From South Seas Fiction to Pacific Island writing” about Robert Louis Stevenson. Thus, it follows that this work is concerned with the life of RLS, but also with his literary work and how the former has influenced the latter. Moreover, Treasure Island will be explored and contextualized against the backdrop of the genre Adventure Fiction. For said purpose it is necessary to briefly define the most common aspects of the genre at hand. These common aspects will be explored and RLS’s literary works in the genre and his personal approach shall be outlined later on.
1.1 Biographie
„Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born on the 13 November in Edinburgh, [Scotland] to Thomas Stevenson […] and Margaret, daughter of Lewis Balfour, minister of Colinton Church”1 From 1858 until 1867 RLS attended various schools, but was mostly home schooled due to his poor health condition. This will have a huge impact on his life and writing. The kind of education he received at this time formed his mind and his understanding of the world in a way traditional schools couldn’t. In 1867 he took up engineer studies, which he abandoned again in 1871. During this period, he also changed the spelling of his name due to a strong disliking of a prominent political figure at the time which he shared with his family. Arguably, his motives cannot be made out abundantly clear, for it could also be based on the Francophilia which is a character trait of the “bohemian the young Stevenson aspires to be”.2 In 1873 he abandons his parent’s home to visit relatives in France. This decision was made due to his ill health, which demanded a climate more soothing to his sickness and in part due to rising tensions between his parent’s religiousness and his own agnostic worldview.3 Subsequently he constantly switches homes and travels, until he meets his future wife Fanny Osbourne in 1876 in Grez, France. In 1877 he travels to London, Paris and, in the end, Grez where he and Fanny Osbourne eventually become lovers. It is the same year when RLS publishes his first piece of fiction: “A Lodging for the Night”.4 Fanny and RLS marry in 1880 in San Francisco, after she got divorced from her former husband Sam Osbourne. In 1881 RLS writes Treasure Island, which begins as an attempt to entertain his stepson. It is then published bit by bit in the magazine Young Folks under the alias of Captain George North. In 1883 it is published again under his own name in book form. During the 1880s the Stevensons move a lot to find a climate which suits RLS’s illness best. In 1887 his father dies and he, his wife, their children and his mother move to Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. When RLS makes a deal for a series of travel articles for a newspaper syndication in 1888, it enables him to charter a yacht and take his whole family for a cruise into the Pacific. In 1889 they reach Samoa on the trading schooner the Equator. In 1890 they purchase some land on Samoa and start building a home at Vailima. As time goes by he publishes The Bottle Imp (1891) and The Beach of Falesá (1892). He also concerns himself with local politics until the British Government issues a regulation which seems designed to gag Stevenson. After a war rages on Samoa in 1893 the island is restored to order in 1894. RLS dies in 1894 of cerebral haemorrhage on 3 December. He is buried on top of Mount Vaea, above Vailima.5
1.2 Characterization
The most striking part of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life is the fact that he was constantly struggling with health issues connected to his lung functions. He was sickly throughout his whole childhood and had numerous bad relapses throughout his adult life. Stevenson himself refers to this early phase of his life as the “wild and bitterly unhappy days of my youth.”6 His sickness however didn’t only stop him from doing what other children his age where able to do, it also sparked an interest in arts and stories. His nanny Alison Cunningham whom he dearly called “Cummy” spiked this interest by exposing him to frightening tales, ghost stories and the supernatural in literary form. This served his lust for adventure and activity a great deal which he could scarcely transform into real life adventures. Thusly, he was mostly confined to experiencing tales of fiction and horror from the safe space of his bed. So, it is safe to say, that RLS developed a strong liking for adventure and especially danger, as a contrast to him staying in bed, which he couldn’t wholly satisfy.7 This situation creates and serves as a symbol of Stevenson’s dualistic personality which shows itself in quite some ways. It seems the image of having two opposing forces within himself is a prominent one for RLS from early on. At first this presented itself in the contrast between his longing for thrilling new experiences and the actual faculties of his body. Moreover, it appears that RLS integrated two different perspectives on life into his very own personality: His father’s tendency towards melancholy and earnestness and his mother’s cheerful and rather carefree perspective.8 Both formed his character immensely. The former towards a serious, contemplative view of life, the latter towards a rather buoyant, child-like treatment of his immediate surroundings and the world. Alberts contrasts these two parts and refers to the first one as moralist nature and to the second one as an artistic nature.9 This interpretation of his character shall however be handled with care. The author links his observations about Stevenson’s character to his genetic family heritage. This might prove to have a repulsive effect on the modern reader who dealt differently with such topics if he approached them.10
In RLS there seems to be a close connection between his artistic nature and the concept of childhood. Stevenson himself “explains in an early essay on “Child’s Play” that what most distinguishes the child from the adult is his ability to exist in a tidy, make-believe world which has almost no reference to concrete reality”.11 He puts emphasize on the child’s ability to ignore reality in order to dwell in its on imagination. The imagination takes the spot of the real world and engages the child’s mind completely. According to RLS as quoted by Kiely, “’Children are content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance […]; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned about realities’”12 This statement aimed at describing children in general helps a great deal to grasp Stevenson’s own understanding of a well working mind which is free to make exhaustive use of its imagination. Simplifying and disregarding facts in such a way is “according to Stevenson’s earliest aesthetic theory, an essential trait for all artists.”13 Subsequently, Stevenson himself deemed it necessary to remain a child if he didn’t want to grow out of art. Eventually “Wordsworth’s and Keat’s faith in the powers of the mature imagination” helped Stevenson to overcome this assumption.14 However, it will be shown that RLS more often than not put a special emphasis on youth and the imagination in his writings.
Another big influence on the young Stevenson was his parents’ and his nanny’s strong Christian believe, which manifested itself in a dualistic approach to religion. He grew up in a religiously loaded environment and was familiar with the stories from the bible. He was constantly exposed to religious teachings through his nanny and developed a vast knowledge of the Christian teachings. “In his later teens, [however] he had begun to break away from the traditional Christian beliefs, which his mother embraced rather emotionally, and his father adhered to in their harshly dogmatic Calvinistic form”.15 This leaves RLS with a vast knowledge about the matter but uninterested in making the church a constant part of his life. In himself he created the countermovement against a one sided, namely the religious, approach to human existence, which resembles his character’s dualistic structure.
Robert Louis Stevenson combines an active moral consciousness and an artistic approach towards life and subsequently to writing. This interpretation of his character mirrors certain tendencies in his works to present his protagonists with great moral choices in a slightly super-natural world, which could spring from a child’s imagination. The inexplicable is simplified, sometimes mystified to make sense of the actions and the characters in the story. He doesn’t stick to a realist approach but integrates seemingly metaphysical riddles, superstition and even the super natural itself into his writings.
2. Adventure Fiction
The genre of adventure fiction is one best characterised by its fast-paced plot, its focus on action, the use of an opposing force the protagonist must work against and by its presentation of events outside the protagonist’s everyday life.16 Often times the story is about the hunt or search for valuable items. The literary works are aimed at engaging the reader and at presenting some thrilling, exciting stories. They take the reader, like the protagonist from his safe space at home and throw them into a new, unfamiliar situation. Both share a journey which begins with unusual and maybe frightening experiences, leads them through hardships and lets them emerge stronger and wiser than before.17
RLS’s adventure stories are best categorized as “early imperialist adventure novels”.18 Bushell’s work deals with the special use of the map in Treasure Island and in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. These two novels are of particular interest to the author because of their “generic status” within the genre.19 The so called imperialist adventure novel gained popularity in the second half of the 19th century when Britain was colonising parts of the South Seas. British reality changed in a way that was hard to grasp for the people. The mere knowledge about the locations of British colonies wasn’t enough to be able to develop an idea about what life was like there. Life in the colonies was exotic and different than life in Britain itself. This is to say that it made for interesting new settings and new stories. What is meant however by Bushell’s statement that “[…] the presence of maps in adventure fiction is directly linked to the underlying ideology of empire that generated imperial mapping in the real world?”20 Clearly the longing to expand imperial influence, to learn about other parts of the world, but also to make profit in doing so are alluded to here. Hence, the underlying ideology is one of curiosity and of greed at the same time. These two sides of the imperial expansion can be found in most adventure fiction stories. The story revolves around a protagonist who is thrown into an unknown, unforeseeable situation which changes his life drastically. His personal view of the world is challenged and broadened at the same time. In the end the protagonist successfully solves the task at hand and safely returns home to Britain. Bushell adds a critical perspective by quoting Martin Green who “describes adventure tales as the ‘energizing myth of English imperialism’, […] [which] ‘charged England’s will with the energy to go out into the world, and explore, conquer, and rule’”21 This view emphasises the genre adventure fiction as a means to reinforce political interests. The stories transport and reinforce the British imperialist self-concept, while they satisfy the readers curiosity for exotic places and thrilling stories. Whether RLS was consciously reproducing said ideals or even challenging them shall be analysed in the following chapter.
[...]
1 W. Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson : a literary life (Houndmills: Houndmills : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p.12.
2 Ibid. p. 13
3 Cf. Ibid.
4 Cf. Ibid. p. 14
5 Cf. Ibid. p. 15
6 G. S. Balfour, The life of Robert Louis Stevenson / by Graham Balfour (London: Methuen, 1901), p. 41.
7 Cf. H. Alberts & R. L. Stevenson, Der Optimismus des englischen Dichters Robert Louis Stevenson (Marburg: Marburg : Hamel, 1928), p. 15.
8 Cf. Ibid
9 Cf. Ibid
10 Ibid
11 R. Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the fiction of adventure (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 54.
12 Ibid
13 Ibid
14 Ibid
15 Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson : a literary life, p. 4.
16 Cf., D'Ammassa, Don. Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction. Facts on File Library of World Literature, Infobase Publishing, 2009
17 Cf., T. Heath, Boys' adventure books and late Victorian imperialism. University of Alberta, 1992. P. 4
18 S. Bushell, 'Mapping Victorian adventure fiction: silences, doublings, and the Ur-map in Treasure Island and King Solomon's Mines.(Critical essay)', 57, 4 (2015), 611, p. 611.
19 Cf., ibid
20 Cf., ibid
21 Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire by Martin Green quoted in ibid
- Quote paper
- M. A., M. Ed. Felix Krenke (Author), 2017, Robert Louis Stevenson. Life, Writing and Adventure Fiction, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1007986
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