Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, and: Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries (review)

Both the subject—Robert Louis Stevenson—and the genre—the single-author study—of these two volumes have seen their academic fortunes considerably revived in recent years. Stevenson's status in the academy has risen in tandem with deconstruction's positive revaluation of those qualities by which, according to Julia Reid, Richard Ambrosini, and Richard Drury, his work is best defined: liminality, ambivalence, and boundary transgression. That such features should be singled out for praise in the relatively conservative and author-centric venue of the single-writer study is itself a curious phenomenon, one whose implications require more than the space of this review to explore. I want to focus instead on the strengths and occasional limitations of the single-author focused explications of fin-de-siècle ambiguity that these books undertake.

Reid's goal in Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle is to reconcile the various parts of the Stevenson canon that have typically been viewed as aesthetically and politically divergent—specifically, his Scottish and his South Seas writings—by focusing on their shared fascination with, and profound ambivalence about, evolutionary theory. Indeed, according to Reid, it is this thematic concern with evolution that provides the unifying key to his entire oeuvre: "running through Stevenson's work . . . is his skepticism about evolutionary hierarchies. Unsettling the binary relations between savagery and civilization, the unconscious and the conscious, and past and present, his writings portray the persistence and irruption of precivilized states of consciousness in the modern world" (11). I find myself of two minds about this approach. The research Reid has undertaken to stake this claim is rigorous and undeniably impressive; she traces Stevenson's interest in evolutionary psychology and eugenics not only through his published works and letters, but also through rare archival finds, such as Fanny Stevenson's handwritten annotations in the couple's copy of Francis Galton's Records of Family Faculties (1884). Never before has the full extent of Stevenson's complex and career-long engagement with fin-de-siècle scientific culture been so exhaustively demonstrated. But I wonder if the exclusive focus on Stevenson's scientific skepticism here might not homogenize the thematic diversity of his work and create an overdetermined sense of the author's exceptionality in regard to his attitudes on evolution. Reid is right to claim that Stevenson expressed anxiety about degeneration and doubt about progressive evolution, but he was hardly alone in this—so did Olive Schreiner, H. G. Wells, Grant Allen, and H. Rider Haggard, to name but a few of the many late Victorians to whom Reid's overarching thesis would also apply. A greater inclusion of these other voices would have allowed Reid better to situate and distinguish Stevenson among a by-now well-established tradition of late-Victorian literary dissent from the popular script of teleological cultural and physical evolution. Reid makes passing reference to these other writers throughout her study, but rarely allots much interpretive space to their literary meditations on devolution and atavism. Reid does an excellent job of putting Stevenson in conversation with other scientists; she would have been even more successful, however, had she placed Stevenson in greater dialogue with other late-century romancers.

As the title of their anthology, Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries, suggests, Ambrosini and Drury are also keen to assert the transgressive and radical qualities of Stevenson's work. This focus is wide enough to encompass the volume's eclectic mix of thirty papers collected from the 2001 Stevenson conference at Gargnano. There are a number of truly excellent and innovative essays here, the standout piece being Stephen Arata's "Stevenson, Morris, and the Value of...