Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body (review)

In a pithy dismissal of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific writings, Oscar Wilde remarked that "in Gower Street, Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times about Germans" (qtd. in Buckton 24). Unlike Wilde, Oliver S. Buckton understands Stevenson's works integrally, deftly linking the disparate sites of Britain and Samoa to demonstrate the interwoven threads of Stevenson's fiction and travel writing. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson's wide-ranging analysis takes us from travels by donkey in the Cevennes to voyages by yacht in the Gilbert Islands, from a dead body traveling round England to diseased ones crossing the Pacific, from the eighteenth-century adventures in the Scottish Highlands in Kidnapped (1886) to Europe's late-nineteenth-century political scramble for Samoa in A Footnote to History (1892). Through his compelling juxtapositions, Buckton questions the use of hemispheric distance as a proxy for aesthetic categorization and asks us instead to consider the interrelations of Stevenson's works from these geographically disparate sites and generically diverse texts. Rather than the division between a privileged romance and prosaic reality that Wilde invokes, Buckton argues convincingly for the continuities and resonances across Stevenson's corpus by bringing into proximity the well-known and the under-read.

Buckton's exemplary reach across genres, texts, and geographical spaces in Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson is facilitated through his use of the title's key term: cruising. Playing on the necessity of the sea voyage to visit and move around the Pacific, Buckton deploys the term to specify the connection between the acts of travel and writing. Through this conjunction of the spatial and the aesthetic, Buckton presents cruising as a "narrative practice that has travel as an essential stimulus and features disruption and motion as part of the compositional process" (5), such that Stevenson's travels, rather than being biographical backdrop or marginal exotica, are central to a textual analysis of his work.

While cruising is an apt term given the focus on Stevenson's travels in the Pacific, its homosexual resonances also open the way for a series of readings of samesex desire as an undercurrent to Stevenson's writing. Here cruising signals an escape not only from cultural and aesthetic mores, but also from sexual conventions: or, "Stevenson's travel writing is in an oppositional relationship to the contemporary attempts to define, categorize, and discipline sexual identities in the late nineteenth century" (14). Buckton establishes the association between travel and the homoerotic in his opening analysis of The Wrong Box (1889), in which the apparent animation of a corpse through its travels stands in for the reanimation of proscribed sexual desires; he draws our attention to that which should be buried according to the social and legal codes of the time, yet perversely continues to circulate. shadowing the leisure, pleasure, and sensuousness implied by cruising are dead and dying bodies, analyses of which are scattered throughout Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: the corpse in The Wrong Box, Pacific Islanders afflicted by european diseases, murdered and murdering pirates (or, in The Ebb-Tide [1894], a murderous missionary), the correlation of Pacific Islanders with cannibalism, and the ill health of Stevenson himself.

The textual and touristic pleasures of cruising jut up against political realities when the European's romanticized South Seas, a construction of the West, is placed face to face with the results of imperial practices and presence in the South Pacific. Buckton is attentive to the colonial implications of Stevenson's presence in the Pacific, noting both Stevenson's empathy with the colonized Pacific Islanders and his simultaneous occupation of imperial privilege and authority. The colonial dynamics are evident in Stevenson's collection of letters, In the South Seas (1896), in which he compares Highland scots and Pacific Islanders through their shared tribalism and colonization. In a gesture of both identification and diminution, Stevenson...