‘Re-writing the Heroic Map: a Discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Problematisation of the Nineteenth Century Hero and Cultural Otherness.’

Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson’s work such as Treasure Island (1883), stories of the South Pacific and his travel writing, problematised the English adventure story for boys, as epitomized by G.A. Henty, in terms of moral and spiritual subjectivity and culture, moving towards Modernism and post-colonial positioning. Henty’s work is ‘realist’ yet the adventure itself is fantasy – a shift into exoticism through notions of high adventure and heroism. Stevenson again employs realist techniques entering realms of the imaginary and fantasy through the dream sequence and the adventure story in Treasure Island, creating a psychological complexity. The reader thus reads through ‘realism’ and yet engages in fantasy and a more complex moral and psychological positioning. Stevenson’s stories of the South Pacific (admittedly not written for the child reader) take the reader into the exotic, into the ‘otherness’ and present representations of the cultural mix of the Islands, producing a different ‘problematised’ conceptualisation of ‘heroism’ when compared with the model derived from Henty. This paper discussed the implications of Stevenson’s ‘challenge’ to received notions of heroism and morality, and a re-positioning of cultural otherness. Stevenson’s ‘challenge’ to heroism looks forward, for example, to the Modernist works of Joseph Conrad e.g. Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim where entry for the hero into this complex ‘other world’ questioned the model of the Henty hero to the core.