ROMANCES OF UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: SPATIALITY, TRADE, AND FORM IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S PACIFIC NOVELS

Abstract

In the late 1880s, around the time he decided to settle on the Samoan island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson's writing began to take a strikingly different shape as he attempted to infuse it with the flavor of his new surroundings. “When Stevenson traveled to the margins of the empire,” John Kucich observes, “he suddenly found new ways of organizing his narratives” (59). His novel-length Pacific works The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide(1894), both nominally co-authored with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, made a marked departure from the dominant models for representing imperial space and themes provided by his own Treasure Island (1883) and by H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), and they were generally met by critics with bemusement and disappointment. One reviewer of The Ebb-Tide began by observing, “It certainly has no claim to a place with those romances which are already ranked among the classics of our tongue,” and concluded sorrowfully: “This is not the Stevenson we love, but it is something to be read and remembered, nevertheless” (qtd. in Maixner 458, 59). While recent critical interest in Stevenson's Pacific fiction has tended to focus on works such as “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and the portrayal of cultural encounter, The Wrecker in particular continues to be held in low regard. As Stephen Arata summarizes, [M]ost critics have dismissed it as overly diffuse, shapeless, and more than a little self-indulgent – the closest thing to a loose baggy monster that Stevenson ever produced. Frank McLynn's assessment is representative: while The Wrecker, he says, is “in some ways the oddest and most intriguing” of Stevenson's novels, it is finally a failure because it lacks a “proper story structure” and because “there are far too many diversions and irrelevancies that clog the action.” (par. 7) Yet the fact that The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide are not only Stevenson's two longest Pacific-themed works of fiction, but are also marked by similar structural elements and thematic preoccupations, suggests the value of reconsidering their centrality to his engagement with the increasing western domination of the region in the last decades of the century.