• Corpus ID: 161445452

CHILDISHNESS, PRIMITIVISM AND THE PRIMITIVE AS CHILD IN THE ANTI- IMPERIALIST WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

@inproceedings{Petterson2010CHILDISHNESSPA,
  title={CHILDISHNESS, PRIMITIVISM AND THE PRIMITIVE AS CHILD IN THE ANTI- IMPERIALIST WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON},
  author={T Petterson},
  year={2010}
}

• T. Petterson
• Published 2010
• History

ion of anyone or anything that stands in his way” (Hayes 174). Attwater shuts his eyes to the suffering of the natives he exploits, treating them “as something closer to dolls or toy soldiers than human beings” (175); indeed they are no more human to him than the pearls themselves, which Attwater describes as “„Gewgaws‟” (ET 210), a word defined by Bogle Petterson 64 the Oxford English Dictionary as a “gaudy trifle, plaything, or ornament” (my emphasis). His attitude exemplifies Aimé Césaire‟s view of colonisation as “thingification” (Discourse 21); although Attwater criticises the more conventional South Seas missionaries for their superficial obsession with natives‟ clothes (ET 203), he goes on to tell Herrick: “„I dislike men, and hate women; if I like the islanders at all, it is because you see them here plucked from their lendings, their dead birds and cocked hats, their petticoats and coloured hose‟” (205). 20 Attwater echoes Wiltshire‟s disdain for “native talk”, but much more emphatically, telling his guests: “„The native who talks, like the woman who hesitates, is lost. You set him talking and lying; and he talks, and lies, and watches your face to see if he has pleased you‟” (218). Unlike Wiltshire, Attwater has resisted any engagement with the natives on a human level, as is suggested by his mythologised view of himself: “„I gave these beggars what they wanted: a judge in Israel, the bearer of the sword and scourge‟” (204). Attwater views his surroundings entirely through the filter of mythology; he has named his island Zacynthos, after an isle in Virgil‟s Aeneid, and appears to conceive of himself as the actor in a grand, divine stage-play. At the dining table, he tells his white guests that despite the emptiness of the smallpox-ravaged island, “„we sit in this veranda on a lighted stage with all heaven for spectators! And you call that solitude?‟” Yet when he does not receive an answer, he admits: “„These are the diversions of a lonely man, [. . .] and possibly not in good taste. One tells oneself these little fairy tales for company. If there should happen to be anything in folk-lore, Mr Hay?‟” (214). Religion is thus a comforting “fairy tale” which, childlike, the despot tells himself in order to make his life more enjoyable. Yet Attwater describes his religion as “„a savage thing, like the universe it illuminates; savage, cold, and bare, but infinitely strong‟” (204) – like armour, or like Attwater‟s diving suits, which, indeed, his native servants wear as armour during the confrontation between 20 Stevenson criticised those missionaries who were chiefly concerned with such altering of native clothes: “for the cool, healthy and modest lava-lava or kilt, Tartuffe has managed in many [. . .] island[s] to substitute stifling and inconvenient trousers” (ISS 32). Bogle Petterson 65 Attwater and Davis and Huish (244). Folk-lore is the shell which insulates Attwater from native society, and this detachment makes him as monstrous as the suits themselves, which he refers to as “„marine monsters‟” (202) and which, near the end of the novel, appear to Davis as “demons” unleashed from hell (244). Attwater is perhaps the most mono-maniacal character in any of Stevenson‟s works, but the other white characters in The Ebb-Tide – the beachcombers Davis, Herrick and Huish – are each, to a greater or lesser degree, cut off from their surroundings, imprisoned within their own metaphorical diving suits. Their insularity takes the form, in each case, of childish attachment to the mythology of Western civilisation. “Superstition rules all men”, we are told by The Ebb-Tide‟s third-person narrator; “semi-ignorant and gross natures, like that of Davis, it rules utterly” (242). Wiltshire, describing his fear of native devils in the woods of Falesá, perceptively remarks: “We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many traders take them up, splendidly educated white men, that have been book-keepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country! It‟s my belief a superstition grows up in a place like the different kinds of weeds; and as I stood there, and listened to that wailing, I twittered in my shoes” (“Falesá” 166). 21 His susceptibility to local superstitions endears Wiltshire to the reader, as it allows him to transcend his racism, at least momentarily. The superstitions or fairy tales in The Ebb-Tide, however, are all imported from Europe and not one of the characters in the novel has “gone native”. Davis and Huish‟s superstitions consist mainly of conventional, racist views of the Pacific. When, early in the novel, the destitute trio each write a letter “home”, it becomes evident that not one of them is capable of telling the truth about their lives in Tahiti – Davis, in fact, refers to the letter-writing as “„lying‟” (ET 139). Huish‟s letter to a Northampton barmaid is an example of standard colonial fantasies about the domination of supposedly inferior races: “„I wrote to her, and told her ‟ow I had got rich, and married a 21 Stevenson wrote excitedly to Colvin when he felt he was “beginning to be sucked in” by local “superstition” while clearing bush on his estate (Vailima Letters 9). Bogle Petterson 66 queen in the Hislands, and lived in a blooming palace. Such a sight of crammers! I must read you one bit about my opening the nigger parliament in a cocked ‟at. It‟s really prime‟” (142). Later, when they meet Attwater, Huish and Davis are awe-struck by his apparently absolute control of his native slave-labourers; Attwater seems to exemplify the mythic colonial ideal, the white man who achieves godlike power simply by virtue of his whiteness. Davis declares, “in a glow of admiration”, that Attwater “„must be a holy terror!‟” to be able to control his workforce single-handedly. Indeed, as Jolly observes, the second part of The Ebb-Tide is far from realistic, as Attwater‟s island possesses a “dreamlike atmosphere” (85) in which such imperial romance motifs are presented in a subversive, expressionist manner (in particular, Jolly argues that the novel is an unconscious “rewriting of [R. M. Ballantyne‟s] The Coral Island as an act of iconoclasm” (87-8)). Davis eventually succumbs to the myth that Attwater has woven around himself and, as he and Huish prepare to murder Attwater, there suddenly comes over Davis, from deep down in the roots of his being, or at least from far back among his memories of childhood and innocence, a wave of superstition. This run of ill luck was something beyond natural; the chances of the game were in themselves more various; it seemed as if the devil must serve the pieces. The devil? He heard again the clear note of Attwater‟s bell ringing abroad into the night, and dying away. How if God . . . ? (my emphasis 233) There is no direct evidence within the narrative to suggest that Attwater has achieved dominance over the natives of his island by any means other than sheer, brutal force; it is Davis, a white man, whose superstitions lead him to attribute divine powers to Attwater. When he and Huish approach the island on their “David and Goliath” mission to murder Attwater, Davis sees two faceless, metallic creatures – two of the surviving natives, dressed in diving-suits – and “his mythology appeared to have come alive, and Tophet to be vomiting demons” (244). Bogle Petterson 67 The fact that Huish attempts to justify murdering Attwater by comparing their rivalry to that of “„Dyvid and Goliar‟” is highly significant. While aboard the Farallone, Herrick holds “long nocturnal conversations” (167) with the ship‟s cook, an old man who reveals that his name is “„Taveeta, all-e-same Taveeta King of Islael‟” (168). Taveeta tells Herrick “his simple and hard story of exile, suffering and injustice among cruel whites” (167) – that is, a genuine tale of David versus the Goliath of empire. Huish and Davis refer to Taveeta belittlingly as “Uncle Ned”, after failing to understand his real name, which Davis dismisses as “„highway gibberish‟” (156), and they prove just as oblivious and indifferent to the plight of Pacific islanders in general. For the latter, the biblical allusion has a real and tragic resonance, and the noble Taveeta is fully deserving of his name, but for the whites the myth is reduced to an analogy in a vicious and childish rivalry. When Davis initially objects to Huish‟s underhanded, ignoble plan to murder Attwater with a bottle of vitriol, Huish argues in the language of a boy preparing for a schoolyard battle: “„Now, see ‟ere, ducky,‟ said Huish, „this is my bean feast, I believe? I‟m goin‟ up to that man single-‟anded, I am. ‟E‟s about seven foot high, and I‟m five foot one. ‟E‟s a rifle in ‟is ‟and, ‟e‟s on the look out, ‟e wasn‟t born yesterday. This is Dyvid and Goliar, I tell you!‟”(237) The white characters of The Ebb-Tide repeatedly show themselves to be unworthy of their own mythology, which they have thoroughly perverted and debased to the level of the infantile. Herrick, though much more educated than his two companions, is no less imprisoned by childish fairy tales. He carries “a tattered Virgil in his pocket” (124) which brings back memories of his “irrevocable youth” in England (125). As a thoroughly textual creature, Herrick presents a striking contrast to Wiltshire: whereas the former is fluent in Latin, the latter cannot even read Roman numerals (“Falesá” 175) and says “Tyrolean harp” instead of Aeolian harp (167); Herrick is deeply literary – when he first sees Bogle Petterson 68 Attwater‟s island, he “torture[s] himself to find analogies” (ET 188) – while Wiltshire‟s narrative is decidedly spoken, in plain language. These differences are significant because, for Stevenson, “[t]he culture of the Pacific region had developed outside” “the frontiers of Roman civilisation, which he identified with modernity and the west” (Jolly, “Robert Louis Stevenson and Samoan History: Crossing the Roman Wall” 126-7). In his Pacific travel book, Stevenson wrote that