'Home is the sailor, home from sea': Robert Louis Stevenson and the end of wandering.

ABSTRACT

This essay considers Stevenson's travel writings in relation to his Gothic imagination. In the early essays, An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, a process of authorial self-construction is at work that anticipates the modern self of his Gothic fiction. His United States travelogue, The Amateur Emigrant, often dwells on the abject in his descriptions of himself and his fellow passengers. In In the South Seas he engages with a culture that still possesses an epistemology relegated in Western culture to the post-enlightenment fears and anxieties that found clearest and most dramatic expression in Gothic fiction.

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Stevenson's stepson, S. Lloyd Osbourne, said of him, 'R. L. S. always said he hoped to die in a ditch' and that 'the picture of him as a white-haired and expiring wanderer' was 'ineffaceably fixed' in his mind. (1) Robert Louis Stevenson's penchant for travel led him eventually to Samoa where, dubbed 'Tusitala' ('teller of tales') he died, at the relatively early age of forty-four, not in a ditch but at his house Vailima, in the midst of a substantial household of which he was the head. He had written from an early age and left behind him a large and varied body of published work. Highly praised by English critics in the twenty years following his death in 1894, his subsequent fall from critical grace was associated with the fact that he had been seen as the writer of boys' adventure stories--now known as Victorian quest romance--an identity that has aligned him with Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle. (2) Following J. C. Furnas's 1952 biography, Stevenson has become the focus of increasing critical interest. (3) Over the last fifteen years, considerable attention has been paid to him as a Gothic writer, particularly as the author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, now considered a key Victorian Gothic text. His narratives of travel, however, have received relatively little attention. Widely travelled Stevenson wrote as he travelled; the published writing, crafted after the event, constitutes a form of self-writing and contributed to his early reputation as a combination of heroic invalid and bohemian wanderer. If not necessarily 'emotion recollected in tranquillity', nor are the travel writings writing to the moment. They are finished products, based on memory and sometimes on reworking of journals kept at the time. (4)

It is the purpose of this essay to bring together Stevenson the Gothic writer and Stevenson the travel writer. In a 1974 article, Michel Butor identifies travel as primarily a written experience. (5) According to him, travel is experienced only when textualized, when mapped by the marker. If life is a journey, 'death halts wandering abruptly' and 'the tomb is the mark par excellence. [...] In burial, the wanderer becomes a tree, a signifying sprout' (p. 6). For Robert Louis Stevenson, travel writing was as much about the creation of an identity for the writer as it was about the experiences of travel. The narrating 'I', although apparently unproblematically the author, is in fact a textual construct. Bradford Torrey's 'galleries of portraits', as he describes the travel writing, is most of all a series of portraits of the artist. (6) His evolving writing identity is one shadowed by Gothic fears, where the fragility of the body is a fellow traveller and death lurks around the corner. I shall be considering the two early pieces, accounts of his travels in Europe, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879); his account of a journey from Glasgow to the west coast of America by ship and train, The Amateur Emigrant (1895), and his account of travels in Polynesia, In the South Seas (published posthumously in 1896).

Jerrold E. Hogle identifies a 'very clear "Gothic period"' in Stevenson's writing: the early to middle 1800s, in which the 'five blatantly "horrific" tales from 1881 to 1886' constitute 'Stevenson's genuinely "Gothic" corpus and show the unique contributions he made to this hybrid genre'. (7) Hogle attributes Stevenson's interest in Gothic writing to his wife's taste for 'crawlers' and also to a belief that it would sell well in short fictional forms. A number of studies of late Victorian culture have identified a subtext of both repressed and overt homosexuality. (8) Elaine Showalter, in her 1990 study of the Victorian fin de siecle, Sexual Anarchy, describes Stevenson as 'the fin-de-siecle laureate of the double life' and argues, as others have done, that the inner 'other' of the night is an eroticized homosexual other. (9) It is not, however, my intention to argue that Stevenson's travel writing reveals a repressed homosexuality but to suggest that it does represent the development of a marginal and sometimes split subjectivity.

Hogle comments that the Gothic works he identifies 'reveal the ways he focused the Gothic form on the modern self torn between psychological and social forces pulling it towards the ancient, rural, superstitious past and the rapidly changing, more secular, increasingly urban present' (p. 221). A number of Stevenson's travels take him into contact with the ancient, rural, and superstitious. In writing about these travels, there are discernible Gothic themes. He hints at the existence of self-division and the potential of inner darkness; he exposes the frailty of the body and the abject aspects of corporeality; he acknowledges the contingency and fragility of civilization; he recognizes death in the midst of life. The words of David Punter seem particularly apt here:

Gothic [...] is intimately to do with the notion of the barbaric [...]. Time and time again, those writers who are referred to as Gothic turn out to be those who bring us up against the boundaries of the civilized, who demonstrate to us the relative nature of ethical and behavioural codes, and who place, over against the conventional world, a different sphere in which these codes operate at best in distorted forms. (10)

I suggest that Stevenson's predisposition to experiment with the Gothic predates 'the Gothic period' identified by Hogle and that the narrators of the two earlier travel narratives, An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, indicate a process of authorial self-construction at work that anticipates the 'modern self' of the Gothic fiction. The essay will therefore look first at the way in which Stevenson's early narratives of travel present occasions to construct himself as a writing persona that, beyond being a Bohemian figure, becomes a Gothicized outsider or wanderer.

Stevenson's self-construction as a wanderer places him in a Romantic tradition. This is not so much the questing hero figure (the author as hero in the tradition of Carlyle), as the self as outsider: observing but not participating; not infrequently despised and rejected but relishing the marginality conferred by such treatment. In a recent article, Jay D. Salisbury examines the relationship between Gothic and Romantic wanderers; he is concerned with the figure of the wanderer not merely as the familiar Gothic figure of the Wandering Jew but as 'any figure of a wandering jeu, a movement away from older structures of meaning and ways of knowing and into an encounter with the moment of epistemological uncertainty'. (11) He writes:

The Wanderer is anything born of the dreadful moment between two epistemological systems and before the wandering assumes a direction through structures of meaning productive of what Foucault calls jeux de verite, games of truth. When the Wanderer appears in the Gothic novel it embodies the dreadful uncertainty upon which subjects and structures of meaning found their epistemologies. (p. 46)

According to Salisbury, the Gothic figure of the Wanderer haunts Romanticism: Romantic transcendence always threatens to give way to Gothic dread and the Romantic wanderer is characterized by oscillation between the two. This may seem a rather profound critical paradigm to apply to works such as An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey, which have tended to be regarded by critics and indeed by Stevenson himself as lightweight youthful writing. However, closer examination reveals elements of such Gothic dread even as Stevenson writes the Romantic figure of himself as carefree bohemian wanderer. (12) Rather wide of the mark is the assertion by James Wilson that 'from the beginning, Stevenson had included himself as a figure in the landscape'. (13) On the contrary, he represents himself as passing through but separate from a landscape that he consistently represents as at best 'other' and at worst alien and dangerous.

The Europe of An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes is largely the Europe of the peasantry, as Stevenson's documented journeys take him into rural byways and (in the case of the former, waterways). Alex Clunas notes how these early travel books are 'nonteleological', pretexts for writing rather than the desire to reach a destination, exercises in self invention, in which Stevenson 'feels "free" of "home" and all its associations, its power to make him a familiar object, to ascribe him an identity that lies outside or anterior to his creation of himself--all the ways in which he is defined [...] by his parentage, ethnicity, social class, profession and the like'. (14) An Inland Voyage tells the story of a trip from Antwerp to Paris made in 1877 on the inland waterways, undertaken with a friend (Walter Simpson) in two canoes named the Arethusa and the Cigarette. Metonymically, Stevenson refers to himself and Simpson throughout by the names of their canoes, thus establishing a distance between an authorial identity and a narratorial identity. Early in the journey, marginality is romanticized through reflections on the life of a bargee seen on the Willebroek Canal:

The barge floats by great forests and though great cities with their public buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his floating home, 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were listening to another man's story or turning the leaves of a picture-book in which he had no concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the banks of the canal, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside. (15)

The marginal identity of the wanderer is valorized yet even in the glorification of a life of detachment there is a hint of Gothic dread as the prospect of the dissolution of human identity intrudes:

It is an odd thing how happily two people, if there are two, can live in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a whole life in which you have

no part paralyses personal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator [...]. In a place where you have taken some root you are provoked out of your indifference; you have a hand in the game; your friends are fighting with the army. But in a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so large to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far apart from the business, that you positively forget it would be possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around you that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a very short time, you would be one no longer. (pp. 18-19)

For much of the time, the travellers' reception as strange figures is represented in exaggerated terms. At Pont-sur-Sambre, for example, the pair are treated with suspicion by the children of the village:

We were clearly a pair of Bluebeards to the children; they might speak to us in public places, and where they had the advantage of numbers; but it was another thing to venture off alone with two uncouth and legendary characters, who had dropped from the clouds upon their hamlet this quiet afternoon, sashed and beknived, and with a flavour of great voyages. (p. 26) (16)

Stevenson then tells how in this village the two are mistaken for pedlars and treated with due reverence:

You see what it is to be a gentleman--I beg your pardon, what it is to be a pedlar. It had not occurred to me that a pedlar was a great man in a labourer's ale-house; but now that I had to enact that part for an evening, I found that so it was. (p. 29)

The sense of role-playing is never far away for much of the narrative, which becomes a picaresque adventure in miniature.

Yet, as Oliver Buckton has pointed out (p. 34), Death is the unseen companion on the journey (which becomes 'a metaphor for the vagaries of life and the deferral of death') and the canoe a memento mori ('there are people who call out to me that it is like a coffin' (An Inland Voyage, p. 57)). Experience of the Oise in flood brings the two travellers into a life-threatening situation and the narrative transforms the benign waterway into a Gothic scene in which 'Death himself had me by the heels, for this was his last ambuscade, and he must now join personally in the fray' (p. 53). In a moment of oscillation, the light-hearted tone is immediately restored by the bathetic observation: 'On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these words inscribed: "He clung to his paddle"' (p. 53). The seriousness of their plight and the intrusion of dread into this Romantic wandering through the European countryside are duly acknowledged in reflection after the event: 'The devouring element in the universe had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running stream. The bells were all very pretty in their way, but I had heard some of the hollow notes of Pan's music [...]. Nature's good-humour was only skin-deep after all' (pp. 53-54). By the time the travellers reach La Fere, they are 'a pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp India-rubber bag upon his arm' (p. 73). They are given short shrift by the landlady at the inn, prompting a reflection on dispossession that hints at disillusion with the Romantic ideal of the wanderer:

As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels, and you wish society were at the devil. I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality. (p. 74)

'Out of my country and myself I go', Stevenson claims (p. 88). (17) In one sense this is so, but it is true too that Stevenson's wanderer also goes into himself; the inland voyage is also the voyage in. A sense of disassociation is prompted by the hypnotic effects of rowing: 'The central bureau of nerves, what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without disturbance like a Government Office. The great wheels of intelligence turned idly in the head, like fly wheels, grinding no grist' (p. 93). And albeit lightheartedly, the divided self emerges:

What philosophers call me and not-me, ego and non ego, preoccupied me whether I would or no. There was less me and more not-me than I was accustomed to expect. [...] Something inside my mind, a part of my brain, a province of my proper being, had thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or perhaps for the somebody else who did the paddling. I had dwindled into quite a little thing in the corner of myself. I was isolated in my own skull. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my thoughts, they were plainly some one else's; and I considered them like a part of the landscape. [...] 'T is an agreeable state, not very consistent with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a money point of view, but very calm, golden and incurious, and one that sets a man superior to alarms [...]. This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. (pp. 93-94)

The epilogue to this 'dulcet experiment', as Furnas calls An Inland Voyage (p. 378), describes the period of time when the canoes had been left behind. Published some ten years later than An Inland Voyage, the Epilogue is notable for its more emphatic construction of Stevenson the wanderer as an outsider of disreputable aspect:

For years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without suspicion; the police, everywhere but in his native city, looked askance upon him; and (although I'm sure it will not be credited) he is actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo. If you will imagine him, dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made trousers fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking eagerly around him as if in terror of pursuit--the figure, when realized, is far from reassuring. When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley) to his exile in Roussillon, I wonder if he had not something of the same appearance. (18)

Furthermore, this stage of the journey takes the wanderer through a dangerous landscape: the Franco-Prussian war recently ended, 'that country-side was still alive with tales of uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hair-breadth 'scapes from the ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and invaded' (p. 251). In the Epilogue, he decribes with some relish the way in which he is ascribed the identity of various abject characters: a beggar, a dealer in pornographic photographs--and how he is detained by the gendarmerie for several hours for no greater crime than looking a suspicious character. The Gothic aspects of the experience are highlighted as he writes about how he is thrown into a 'receptacle for vagabonds' and confined in a 'cellar [... ] some feet underground [...] only lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered with the leaves of a green vine' (p. 254).

A year on from Stevenson's voyage on the inland waterways, he set out alone for a walking tour in the Cevennes and, in the tradition of Sterne, soon acquired a donkey. Pronounced by a contemporary reviewer to be 'very slight, though with a slightness that many will find agreeable', (19) Travels with a Donkey is seen by Gordon Hirsch as a 'reaction to developing mass tourism' and as recalling 'the Romantic ideal of the walking tour, with its key ingredients of freedom and the accidental' (p. 275). Stevenson himself represents his walking tour as being undertaken for the sake of travel itself:

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. (20)

These frequently quoted sentences tell only part of the story. For Stevenson, the 'great affair' was to write. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, however, offers a less than flattering self-portrait of the Romantic wanderer. The narrative offers an array of Gothic ingredients: the landscape's sublime ruggedness is worthy of Ann Radcliffe; its history is steeped in the blood of religious persecution. Yet its concerns dwell far more on the inconveniences of travel than on Romantic epiphany and more on comic self-deprecation of nervousness than on Gothic dread. There is no doubt that the landscape through which the wanderer travels is described as Gothic in aspect and history. Signs of barbarism are all around him and he does not hesitate to comment. Across the Lozere, he finds himself in 'the Cevennes of the Cevennes', an 'undecipherable labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand Protestant mountaineers on the other' (p. 214). Yet he seems untouched by the experience, emerges unscathed ('the whole descent is like a dream to me' (p. 216)), and a couple of pages later is entertaining the reader with a description of the charms of the beautiful 'Clarisse', waiting at table 'with a heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow' (p. 219). As in the earlier piece, this is more about Louis the traveller than it is about the Cevennes. To quote C. L. Furnas:

No writer--except possibly the author of Old Calabria--was ever handier than Louis at keeping the reader comfortable whilst immersed in obscure geography and history. You enjoy the Donkey about as much regardless of whether Camisards are garments or strong winds. But, once become interested in the heretics of the Massif Central for themselves as well as in Louis the hopeful traveller, and you at once perceive with what dry and scanty husks you were fobbed off. It is the poorest reporting because it was never intended to be reporting at all, which is fair enough. (p. 303)

The writer of Donkey seems remarkably insulated from a landscape the geography and history of which he describes in Gothic terms. A little later in the same chapter, the reader is regaled with some of the more gruesome episodes of Pont de Montvert' s history, the violence and atrocity born of religious intolerance; a few pages later and he subjects his own sense of danger, born of a night in the open, to mockery, comparing himself with 'a hunted Camisard' (pp. 225-26).

It is possible that a confrontation--or indeed, identification--with the violent, dark underside of the landscape is displaced into the descriptions of Stevenson's relationship with the donkey, Modestine. Certainly, these display a capacity for cruelty that contemporary reviewers found unpalatable. A reviewer in The Spectator comments:

Mr Stevenson in other works has shown so refined a taste, that it is strange how he can dwell on the sufferings that he owns to have inflicted on his companion. Raw legs and bleeding skin do not move him in the least. (21)

This echoes a similar comment from the novelist Grant Allen:

I should have liked Mr Stevenson better if he had beaten his donkey less unmercifully, and above all, if he had not used that wooden goad, with its eighth of an inch of pin. This is not the place to discuss the question of 'no morality in art:' but most Englishmen will perhaps feel pained rather than amused by the description of the poor Modestine's many stripes, or of her forelegs 'no better than raw beef on the inside.' (22)

Notwithstanding the implication that those of other nationalities will be untroubled by such casual cruelty, this draws attention to Stevenson's representation of himself as someone on the margins of social acceptability.

His later travel writings, however, are characterized by a more humane narrative voice. Unlike the journey through the Cevennes, announced as travel for travel's sake (but seeming to be for writing's sake), the accounts of Stevenson's travels to and in the United States were occasioned by a genuine need to travel and with an end other than the experience itself in sight. In August 1879, he set out from Greenock on the Devonia to join Fanny Osbourne in Monterey, where she was living while considering a divorce from her husband. His account of the voyage across the Atlantic and of his journey across the United States in an emigrant train was written in 1879 and 1880. 'Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco' was published in abridged form in Longman's Magazine in 1883. Ready for publication in 1888 but withdrawn, the account of the voyage did not appear until they were published together in the 1895 Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's works. Even then, the apparently full version of The Amateur Emigrant was carefully edited on the advice of family and friends and the full text was not published until 1966. (23) The Amateur Emigrant is characterized by the retreat of the introspective narrative voice. It demonstrates a realist concern for physical detail, so much so that the edited passages were presumably considered too strong for the reading public. The narrator of this travelogue is not a man travelling for travel's sake, nor with a view to finding material for a book; this is a man who has other reasons for being where he is but is compelled to render his experiences in writing, quite clearly a traveller writing because he is a writer rather than a writer travelling because he wishes to write. This man relates differently to his surroundings and those he encounters, finding with them a common humanity. Certainly, the title The Amateur Emigrant sets him apart to some degree and, far from being taken as a pedlar, his speech and manners mark him as a gentleman. His ability and propensity to write is viewed by others as a useful skill rather than a defining characteristic (the purser gives him the task of writing out the passenger list). He may not be of the emigrants but he is certainly with them. (24) Echoing An Inland Voyage, 'Out of my country and myself I go', asserts the Stevenson of The Amateur Emigrant (p. 72). This is not life viewed at a distance from a canal barge or a canoe, nor the self-absorbed world of the solitary traveller with his donkey. Instead, Stevenson's Gothic sensibilities lead to him dwell on the abject in his descriptions of his fellow passengers and on his own bodily discomfort. Those passages omitted and published only in James Hart's edition some sixty years later point particularly to Stevenson's frank encounters with bodily functions. His description of a sick man does not shy away from detail, for example: '"Take care of your knee," I said to O'Reilly. "I have got mine in the vomit"' (p. 49). In an expression of empathy, he then expresses his admiration for the sick man who offers him his handkerchief to wipe the knee, seeing it as an act of chivalry: 'We all know about Sir Philip Sidney: here is a Roland for his Oliver'.

The whole of his account of a visit to a chemist's on Broadway is omitted from earlier versions. He describes his own bodily discomfort arising from a complaint the name of which, he states, he will never divulge. The symptoms are described as follows: 'My wrists were a mass of sores; so were many other parts of my body. The itching at times was overwhelming; at times, too, it was succeeded by stinging pains, like so many cuts with a carriage whip' (p. 98). The affliction, however, while serving to set him apart from polite society identifies him with the huddled masses of other emigrants:

There is every reason to believe that I am not the only emigrant who has arrived in the Western world with similar symptoms [...]. Should any person be so intoxicated by my descriptions of an emigrant's career, as to desire to follow in my footsteps, here is a consideration which may modify if not eradicate the wish. But I have since been told that with a ring of red sublimate about the wrist, a man may plunge into the vilest company unfearing. (p. 99)

This is possibly a discomfort too far for the Stevenson who wanted to 'come down off this feather bed of civilization'. The description of the episode is not so much evocative of Romantic wandering but more aligned to naturalism. The frailty of the body becomes very personal yet the emphasis placed on it reflects some of the Gothic anxiety of the age. (25)

Travelling across America on the emigrant train on the second stage of his journey, this characteristically late-Victorian Gothic anxiety is revealed in his description of the shunting carriages:

As the dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without fresh air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on the mountains of offence. I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train. (p. 133) Fear of the dissolution of a human identity requires a conscious effort of assertion of its existence, it would seem. The reference to monkeys gives a particularly post-Darwinian twist to the Swift allusion and anticipates some of the anxieties that were to find expression more powerfully in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which Stevenson was to publish in 1886. (26) Crossing the desert of Wyoming involves crossing territory with a barbaric history more recent than that of the Camisards. His retrospective account includes a letter written by the long dead brother of his landlady in San Francisco. Aged eleven at the time, Martin Mahoney gives an account of an incident with Indians that resulted in the death of his brother. After transcribing the letter in full, Stevenson comments, 'The little man was at school again, God bless him! While his brother lay scalped upon the deserts' (p. 132). Here is more empathy than is to be found in the whole of Travels with a Donkey; this Stevenson is on his way to meet his future wife and to embark on a life as a family man.

It was as a family man that he set off on a series of voyages around the South Seas in 1888 in search of a climate that would favour his fragile health. His description of what he encountered on the various islands in the South Pacific was published posthumously as In the South Seas in 1896. Neither about the voyages themselves nor, apparently, about its author, this book represents a different approach to much that Western culture finds barbaric and abject. Stevenson's experiences in the islands brought him into close contact with a culture already subjected to the effects of colonialism but, in spite of an overlaying of Christianity, possessed of an epistemology that had been relegated in Western culture to the post-enlightenment fears and anxieties that found clearest and most dramatic expression in Gothic fiction. However, as Vanessa Smith points out, Stevenson's writing 'abandoned the exotic imperatives of romance' in favour of a new aesthetic: 'ethnographically authoritative accounts of island cultures'. (27) This is the writing persona of In the South Seas: observant, measured, and distant yet returning with evident fascination to practices abjected by Western culture.

Stevenson's accounts of island cultures include, for example, a full description of the evidence he saw of cannibalism, a practice considered most barbaric and abject by most societies: 'Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing so surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue, will so harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it.' (28) Yet he sustains a critical distance from revulsion and even appears to achieve some sympathetic understanding. Explaining it as a feature of island cultures otherwise starved of meat, he evaluates cannibalism in the context of the spectrum of human cruelty and finds it less odious than might be expected:

They were not cruel; apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to cut a man's flesh when he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him while he lives; and even the victims of their appetite were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly despatched at last. In island circles of refinement it was doubtless in bad taste to expiate on what was ugly in the practice. (p. 80)

In comparison, the slaughter of a pig is represented as an act of cruelty yet it is 'upon such "dread foundations" that the life of the European reposes' (p. 80).

For Oscar Wilde, Stevenson's settling in an exotic location spelled the end of his career as a romantic novelist: 'I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer. In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times about the Germans.' (29) Allowing for characteristic Wildean exaggeration, there is a grain of truth in this comment. Fascinated by The Coral Island as a boy, he did resist making his South Sea experiences the stuff of romance fiction, although the short stories collected as South Sea Tales offer another kind of fiction. Instead, Stevenson looked again to Scotland as the locus of romance and succeeding in producing, among other works, the Gothic romance The Master of Ballantrae. It is certainly true, however, that Stevenson seems no longer concerned to represent himself in the travel narrative as a romantic wanderer and, in the words of Rod Edmond: 'In the South Seas moves from travel to settlement. [The] final part [...] is better focused than the earlier ones. Stevenson looks more closely than before at the particularities of native lifeways and begins to experience cross-cultural transaction from the point of view of the settler rather than the traveller. (30)

The first part of In the South Seas, however, is redolent of death. The opening sentence sets the tone: 'For nearly ten years, my health had been declining; and for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect' (p. 3). Thus, the dying wanderer approaches in the Marquesas a culture that collectively faces extinction and seems more resigned than others to it, although he notes that 'this proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to the Marquesan' (p. 29). However, he also observes that the 'belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites' explains a fact, otherwise amazing, 'that no Polynesian seems at all to share our European horror of bones and mummies' (p. 171). Such staples of Gothic fiction, abject signs of the dead body, are therefore accommodated in the rhythms of life and death in this culture. Other features of superstitious dread, relegated by an 'enlightened' Western culture to a Gothic sub-culture, are part of the fabric of Polynesian society. The fear of ghosts is very real: 'In their despondency there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian' (p. 30). The spirit world is believed to be immanent and in the clinging to old beliefs in spite of the overlay of Christian conversion, Stevenson sees parallels with his own culture.

All men believe in ghosts. [...] All men combine with their recent Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the old island deities. So, in Europe, the Gods of Olympus slowly dwindle into village bogies; so to-day, the theological Highlander sneaks from under the eye of the Free Church divine to lay an offering by a sacred well. (p. 164)

In this alien culture, Stevenson sees much that echoes the dark side of Western culture, beliefs that seem to speak of a common experience of dread: 'The Polynesian varua inu or aitu o le vao is clearly the near kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire' (p. 170), he comments. While maintaining the tone of the open-minded ethnographer, the Stevenson of In the South Seas none the less identifies with the superstitions of the Polynesians and recognizes that such beliefs or those like them are only beneath the surface of Western 'civilization'.

In his account of one episode, he appears to point to the validity of Polynesian practices and beliefs. At a time when contemporary Western culture was being thrilled by fictional accounts of mesmerism, (31) he tells how, at Apemama, he is cured from a cold by the 'devil-work' of a sorcerer, who succeeds in sending him instantaneously to the verge of sleep with a tap from a palm branch on his hat brim. Having resisted mesmerism on other occasions, he cannot account for this nor for the disappearance of his cold on waking. If this be the power of the sorcerer, what epistemological shift would require the Romantic wanderer turned careful ethnographer to accommodate its truth? The question hovers over In the South Seas.

In the South Seas would possibly have been Stevenson's last travel narrative, even had he lived. Now a settler rather than a traveller, he devoted himself in his last years in the 1890s to the writing of fiction and to the history and politics of his adoptive land. In any event the ultimate end of travel that is death overtook him 1894. The epitaph engraved on his tomb, derived from a poem written much earlier, lays down the mark of one whose travelling has ceased. The misquotation in the penultimate line, when 'home is the sailor, home from sea' is engraved as 'home is the sailor, home from the sea', draws attention to both the primacy of writing and its contingency. (32)

(1) Cited in Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by R. C. Terry (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1996), p. 82.

(2) See, for example, Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling and Conan Doyle (London: Northcote House, 1998). For a discussion of Stevenson's critical reception in the twentieth century see Richard Ambrosini, R. L. Stevenson: La Poetica del Romanzo (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001), Chapter 7.

(3) Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Faber, 1952).

(4) During the walking tour of the Cevennes, for example, Stevenson kept a journal, written in September and October 1878. The journal was published in its entirety as The Cevennes Journal: Notes on a Journey through the French Highlands, ed. by Gordon Golding and Robin Hill (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1978).

(5) 'Travel and Writing', Mosaic, 8 (1974), 1-16.

(6) 'Robert Louis Stevenson', Atlantic Monthly (June 1902) <http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/theatlantic/> [accessed 26 July 2002].

(7) The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. by Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 220-21. Hogle identifies the five tales as: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 'Thrawn Janet', 'The Body Snatchers', 'Markheim', and 'Olalla'.

(8) See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).

(9) Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 106. See also William Veeder, 'Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy', in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 107-60. Oliver S. Buckton sees the trope of the reanimated corpse as a key figure in the forms of narrative desire in Stevenson's fiction. Lost and misplaced bodies are seen as a game in which 'what is at stake [...] is the representation of the corpse as a reminder both of the mortality--the potential for decay--of the body and of what were considered as "unspeakable" sexual practices between men' ('Reanimating Stevenson's Corpus', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 55.1 (2000), 22-58).

(10) The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1996), ii: The Modern Gothic, pp. 183-84.

(11) 'Gothic and Romantic Wandering: The Epistemology of Oscillation', Gothic Studies, 3.1 (April 2001), 45-59 (p. 46).

(12) For Gordon Hirsch, this early travel writing demonstrates an 'ability to create and convey an image of himself as a somewhat bohemian, humorous and introspective traveller' ('Robert Louis Stevenson', in British Travel Writers, 1876-1909, ed. by Barbara Brothers and Julia Gergits, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 174 (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1997), p. 270).

(13) 'Landscape with Figures', in Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Andrew Noble (London: Vision; Toronto: Barnes and Noble, 1983), pp. 74-96 (p. 77).

(14) '"Out of my Country and Myself I Go": Identity and Writing in Stevenson's Early Travel Books', Nineteenth-Century Prose, 23.1 (1996), 54-73 (p. 58).

(15) Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage, Tusitala Edition (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 8. Further references are given in the text.

(16) Bluebeard seems an incongruous figure to invoke here. Does Stevenson perhaps mean Blackbeard, a legendary pirate?

(17) This is a quotation from an essay by William Hazlitt, 'On Going on a Journey', who attributes it to an unnamed poet.

(18) 'Epilogue to An Inland Voyage', Scribner's Magazine, 4 (July-December 1888), 250-56 (p. 250).

(19) Anonymous review in Atlantic Monthly, 44 (November 1879), 652 <http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/ theatlantic/> [accessed 26 July 2002].

(20) Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, Tusitala Edition (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 178. Further references are given in the text.

(21) Unsigned review, The Spectator, 27 September 1879, repr. in Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage ed. by Paul Maixner, (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 70.

(22) The Fortnightly Review (July 1879), repr. in Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, p. 66.

(23) Stevenson's writings relating to his travels to and in America were published in full as From Scotland to Silverado, ed. by James D. Hart (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). Quotations from The Amateur Emigrant are taken from this edition.

(24) Not all contemporary critics looked at these narratives in this way. An unsigned review in The Scotsman from 1892 commented: 'Always there is a deal of deliberate posing in the personal talk of the voyager along the canals of Northern France, and on the moorlands of the Cevennes. Mr Stevenson may have been as limp as possible in that shed on the quays of New York; he may have been as disreputable as he pleased before the Commissary of Chatillon-sur-Loire, but in his account, at least, of these experiences he seems as carefully draped in his shabby garments as ever Chatham was in his bandages and flannel. To make a literary effect is his object above all things--or that at least is the impression which the reader carries away from him--and to achieve that end one feels that the writer's own personality is freely and studiously utilised [...]. To make a literary effect--that is Mr Stevenson's object, and he avows it in the most un-English fashion, and utterly without shame' (The Critical Heritage, p. 381).

(25) A number of critics have drawn attention to a fin de siecle anxiety concerning the body, perhaps most notably Kelly Hurley whose book The Gothic Body; Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siecle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) explores the way in which such anxiety finds an oleaginously monstrous form in the literature of the period.

(26) David Punter explores the way in which fears of degeneration prevalent at the time find expression in Gothic literature, for example such texts as H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau, as well as Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in The Literature of Terror, ii, 1-26.

(27) Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 13.

(28) Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, Tusitala Edition (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 79. Further references are given in the text.

(29) Letter to Robert Ross, 6 April 1897, in Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 246, cited in Smith, p. 14.

(30) Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 168.

(31) George du Maurier's Trilby with its sinister figure of the mesmerist, Svengali, was published in 1894.

(32) Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Requiem', in Robert Louis Stevenson: Collected Poems, ed. by Janet Adam Smith (London: Hart-Davis, 1950). Smith explains that although the poem is dated 1884, the first draft was composed in San Francisco, in 1880 when Stevenson, who had gone to California to marry Fanny Osbourne, was seriously ill. David Daiches includes a photograph of the plate on Stevenson's tomb, with its misquotation, in his Robert Louis Stevenson and his World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 111.

SUE ZLOSNIK

Manchester Metropolitan University