Homosocial Relations, Masculine Embodiment, and Imperialism in Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide

Homosocial Relations, Masculine Embodiment, and Imperialism in Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide Guy Davidson University of Wollongong, Australia ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S novella The Ebb-Tide (1894) presents perhaps the most intensively elaborated and intensely anxious treatment of masculine identity and relations between men in an oeuvre enduringly preoccupied with these interimplicated issues. In its representations of fractured masculine subjectivities and a homosociality fraught with compounded aggressive and libidinal impulses, Stevenson's work may be located within a wide range of fictions that dramatize the late nineteenth-century "crisis" within masculinity.1 More specifically, in The Ebb-Tide, which is set in the colonized Pacific, an account of the instabilities of conventional masculinity overlaps with an account of the instabilities of the imperialist project. In this essay, I suggest The Ebb-Tide's representation of masculine crisis might be understood as a manifestation of what Christopher Lane has named "colonial jouissance." In his wide-ranging study of British colonialist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lane points to the frequent invocation of forces, located both outside and within the imperialist masculine subject, which simultaneously drive and threaten to dissipate the "labor and power" essential to the imperialist project: "an unremitting dread of external defiance and internal unmaking propelled Britain's drive for global mastery," Lane contends .2 The experience of cultural and environmental alterity made dangerously evident the fragility of a masculine subjectivity more readily naturalized at home, so that the colonial subject "was obliged... to compete with a correponding impulse to self-dispossession whenever he bid for a country's possession."3 In The Ebb-Tide, I suggest, the Pacific setting enables extreme modes of "internal unmaking." The threat of self-dissolution that always shadowed the "aggressive self-mastery" 123 ELT 47 : 2 2004 of Victorian bourgeois masculinity is realized in the perverse energies of homoeroticism, hysteria, and masochism, and potently conveyed through persistent imagery of somatic trauma and dysfunction—of male bodies being overwhelmed by involuntary impulses.4 Along with this representation of failed self-discipline, a certain "external defiance" carried in the novella's representation of racial and classed differences between the male characters contributes to a critical perspective on imperialism and the forms of masculinity it elicited. However, while the novel both explicitly and inadvertently undermines certain orthodoxies and hierarchies integral to the imperialist project, it also often relies to a significant degree on these same structures in order to tell its story, suggesting a complex range of investments and disinvestments in imperialist ideology on Stevenson's part. ♦ ♦ ♦ The Ebb-Tide is a bleak tale featuring disease, social degradation, psychic turmoil, and religious fanaticism, which Stevenson invariably referred to in his correspondence using adjectives such as "grim," "grimy" and "gloomy," and which he compared to the work of Zola.5 And certainly its thoroughgoing pessimism, and its characters' morally shabby treatment of one another, suggest an affinity with metropolitan naturalism—an importation, as critics have suggested, of the perspectives of naturalism into the adventure novel. But in its emphatic concern with the futility of "human" existence, the novella also discloses an affinity with the existentialism which was subsequently to form an important thematic strand within literary modernism. As such, The Ebb-Tide, the last of Stevenson's works to be published during his lifetime , marks the culmination of a gradual shift in Stevenson's career away from exuberant literary romance—exemplifed by works such as Treasure Island (1883) and The Black Arrow (1888)—to a disaffected, distinctively modern mode of writing, a shift which has been generally seen as prompted by his experience of the depredations of colonialism in the Pacific, where Stevenson was based for the last six years of his life.6 For instance, Patrick Brantlinger writes that Stevenson's major Pacific fictions—the tale "The Beach of Falesá" (1893), as well as The Ebb-Tide—are "accounts of the contemporary results of empire quite at odds with Stevenson's romances of historical adventure," "as skeptical about the influence of white civilization on the primitive societies as anything Conrad wrote," and that they "read like botched romances in which adventure turns sour or squalid, undermined by moral frailty." 124 DAVIDSON : STEVENSON...