Abstract
Of course, not all those who sailed away from the shores of England to live a life in exile left unwillingly. Robert Louis Stevenson is one notable example. When he first went to America, for instance, he did so by choice. This circumstance, however, did not prevent his feeling at once hopeful and homesick, and did not stop him from alternating between wanting to continue his journey and wishing to return home. This vacillation was to remain with him and complement what was already for him an acute sensitivity to the antithetical character of experience — his inclination to remark upon his own contrary impulses and to dwell between contentment and longing, approval and disapproval, collectivity and individuality, the present and the past.1 Because of this orientation, Stevenson readily acknowledged the Janus-like glances of the nostalgic moment and simultaneously engaged what is and what was or recalled what had been both painful and blissful, terrifying and golden. At times, though, Stevenson seems to have wanted to break away from this perspective by succumbing to the abstracting and contracting powers of longing that for the moment allowed him to transcend his contrary impulses and to lean upon expressions of patriotism. This submission, however, never lasted long, for Stevenson soon qualified the consequent synthesis by returning his attention to those ambiguities that all too easily reasserted themselves. Stevenson’s exile, his nostalgia for Scotland, and his intermittent nationalism offer poignant examples of an engagement with a yearning that never completely escapes a consciousness of duality.2 Longing is never simply savored as a sweet sadness; it is fraught with disturbing ambiguity.
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Notes
Stevenson’s biographers often comment upon his mixed feelings towards his native land. See D. Daiches, ‘Stevenson and Scotland’, Stevenson and Victorian Scotland, ed. J. Calder ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981 )
and I. Bell, Dreams of Exile. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1992). In his biography, Bell refers to Stevenson’s tendency to look both ways at once, of his Janus-like perspective. See also McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography pp. 47–50 for a discussion of Stevenson’s ambiguous attitude towards Edinburgh.
Richard Holmes in ‘On the Enchanted Hill’, The New York Review of Books (8 June 1995) 14–18 also refers to Stevenson’s tendency to alternate between ‘journeys and homecomings’.
R. L. Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant, introd. J. Raban (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984 ) p. 15.
R. L. Stevenson, Kidnapped ( New York: Bantam Books, 1982 ) pp. 105–6.
B. Booth and E. Mehew, eds., The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson 18541894, II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, 1995 ) p. 130.
On one occasion Stevenson complained about the Scottish weather in a 7 November 1874 letter to Katharine De Mattos. Ibid., II, pp. 80–1: Edinburgh is much changed for the worse (ah oui Madame, c’est encore possible) by the absence of Bob [Stevenson’s cousin, Robert Stevenson]; and this damned weather weighs on me like a curse. Yesterday, or the day before, there came so black a rain squall that I was frightened — what a child would call frightened, you know, for want of a better word — although in reality it has nothing to do with fright. I lit the gas and sat cowering in my chair, until it went away again. On another occasion Stevenson’s wife, Fanny Osbourne, remarked, humorously and disparagingly, on the Scottish tolerance for bad weather. See Mrs. R. Stevenson, ‘Prefatory Note’, Treasure Island (London: William Heinemann, 1924), p. xix: It was a season of rain and chill weather that we spent in the cottage of the late Miss M’Gregor, though the townspeople called the cold, steady, penetrating drizzle ‘just misting’. In Scotland a fair day appears to mean fairly wet. ‘It is quite fair, now’ they will say, when you can hardly distinguish the houses across the street.
L. Osbourne, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924) p. 72. In addition, c. 12 March 1881 Stevenson wrote from Davos to Sidney Colvin: My dear Colvin, My health is not just what it should be; I have lost weight, pulse, respiration etc., and gained nothing in the way of my old bellows. But these last few days, with tonic, cod-liver oil, better wine (there is some better now) and perpetual beef-tea, I think I have progressed. To say truth I have been here a little overlong. I was reckoning up; and since I have known you, already quite a while, I have not, I believe remained so long in any one place as here in Davos. That tells on my old gipsy nature; like a violin hung up, I begin to lose what music there was in me; and with the music, I do not know what besides, or do not know what to call it, but something radically part of life, a rhythm, perhaps, in one’s old and so brutally overridden nerves, or perhaps a kind of variety of blood that the heart has come to look for. See Booth and Mehew, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson III, p. 161.
R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, An Inland Voyage, The Silverado Squatters, introd. T Royle (London: J. M. Dent, 1904 ) p. 215.
Havel discusses this paradigm in ‘On Home’, The New York Review of Books (5 December 1991) p. 49.
R. L. Stevenson, Memories and Portraits ( New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897 ) p. 90.
I. Strong and L. Osbourne, Memories of Vailima ( New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902 ) pp. 136–9.
R. L. Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Body Snatcher and Other Stories, ed. J. Meyers ( New York: New American Library, 1988 ) p. 126.
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© 1998 Ann C. Colley
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Colley, A.C. (1998). R.L. Stevenson’s Nationalism and the Dualities of Exile. In: Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373112_4
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