Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Consumerism and Stevenson's Misfit Masculinities

Consumerism and Stevenson’s Misfit Masculinities               At the end of the nineteenth century, a matrix of mutually reinforcing cultural values privileged a masculinity characterized by responsibility, industry, and new money. And yet, as Martin Green notes in Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, despite the glorification of a mature, productive masculinity, it was “a striking feature of late Victorian culture that its emotional focus was on boys” (Green : ). Adventure literature such as Stevenson’s often offered men a temporary escape into the world of their childhood, thereby giving them a safe site of release that would make sure the hegemony was maintained in the world of day-to-day business. Not surprisingly, when Stevenson began imagining the exciting exploits that would make up Treasure Island, his father was as eager as his twelveyear -old stepson to give input (Dillard : ix). Stevenson’s support for boyish virility over bourgeois adult masculinity is even apparent in works that cannot be easily characterized as youthoriented , such as the  story collection New Arabian Nights. Not only do these stories have none of the exotic adventure of the dangerous and uncivilized that can be found in Treasure Island () and Kidnapped (), but they also lack the novels’ central symbolic protagonists—fledgling boys like Jim Hawkins and David Balfour. As I hope to demonstrate, however, the absence of the adolescent rascals accentuates the actual presence of their youthful qualities and values in adult culture. The pervasive “shrugof -the-shoulders fatalism” among the urban males in Stevenson’s work (Saposnik : ) suggests a deeper cultural grumbling at the constrictions  of the economic model of the masculine ideal, one that was not to be allayed by an evening of cerebral swashbuckling. In New Arabian Nights, the disgruntled young professionals that populate the stories challenge the naturalized conflation of commercialism with masculine virtue, a merger that Stevenson saw fostering the derogation of not only certain types of literature as juvenile but also certain types of men.1 Middle-Class Masculinities Generally speaking, as individuals move toward adulthood, their social and economic responsibilities increase, and so too do the constrictions on their gender identities. In Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam discusses the concept of tomboyism and the understandable desire in young females “for the great freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys” (Halberstam : ). The phenomenon is socially sanctioned when read as a reflection of a girl’s “independence and self-motivation” but becomes punishable when it appears to be “the sign of extreme male identification,” a concern that is drastically heightened when a tomboy reaches puberty. In “Virginibus Puerisque” Stevenson locates the same regulatory system in his era and critiques its confinement of girls within the “glass house” of a false doctrine defined by women’s intrinsic innocence and purity.2 In the essay, Stevenson implies that, while girls are being prepared for an adult life of subordination and accommodation, the energy and spirit of boys is harnessed to support the traditional family model and the economic system that it serves. But, as Stevenson asks, “our boyhood ceased—well, when? not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period” (Stevenson : ). “How are you,” Stevenson asks of the bachelor , “the apostle of laxity, to turn suddenly about into the rabbi of precision ; and after these years of ragged practice, pose for a hero . . .?” (). While a girl loses rights to freedom and daring, a boy is forcefully encouraged to channel his liberties into the economic system such that he ultimately contributes not only to his own prosperity but also to that of the capitalist hegemony. It is young men, therefore, who most obviously suffer from the conflict between these age-associated masculinities. James Eli Adams () has demonstrated the growth during the Victorian era of a masculine ideal that supported bourgeois values by combining the gentlemanly restraint generally associated with the upper class with a business-minded mental rigor located, it was suggested, among Denisoff: Consumerism and Misfit Masculinities  white-collar workers. Many people who remembered with nostalgia a childhood of boyish adventure, however, would have found the persona of the gentlemanly professional too constrictive. This led the image of the boy to personify, as Martha Vicinus puts it, “a fleeting moment of liberty and of dangerously attractive innocence, making possible fantasies...