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Revaluing Women and Marriage in Robert Louis Stevenson's Short Fiction Katherine Linehan Oberlin College CRITICS HAVE LONG TENDED to see Robert Louis Stevenson's fiction as lacking in its treatment of women and love, especially before his push towards franker treatment of sexual passion in the 1890s. They recurrently speak of the paucity and woodenness of female characterization in his work, whether they trace it to inhibitions imposed by the Victorian publishing code or whether they judge that his imagination simply rises to much its best level in evoking the boyishly escapist world of all-male adventure, friendship, and criminal intrigue.1 Only within the past decade has this view begun to change. Recent commentators have speculated about the significance of repressed sexuality in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and about the role of sexism in The Beach ofFalesá. Barry Menikoff has urged recognition of the fact that "romantic love is one of Stevenson's most persistent subjects."2 The quantity of Stevenson's attention to male-female relationships is indeed readily defensible, especially once one looks beyond the famous triumvirate of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson put marriage or courtship at the center of three novels {Prince Otto, David Balfour, and the unfinished Weir ofHermiston) and over a dozen works of short fiction. His early nonfiction includes essays on marriage ("Virginibus Puerisque") and romantic infatuation ("On Falling in Love") as well as biographical sketches of John Knox and Robert Burns, assessing their characters in terms of their treatment of women. However, the quality of Stevenson's fictional rendering of women and love is a trickier matter. He himself felt that he struggled to breathe fife into his female characters;3 and indeed the women in his stories repeatedly seem to be crowded out to a significant extent by the centrality of 34 LINEHAN : STEVENSON men. Male protagonists stand insistently at the center of plot action and characterization, creatures of greater vitality and individuality than the women who appear as satellites to them. Male characters also dominate narrative perspective. Stevenson's first-person narrator-protagonists are always male. His third-person narrators typically stay tracked on the mind of the male protagonist; and they often assume, even if in a joking tone, a conspicuously male-oriented outlook. "There must be something permanently mercantile in the female nature," comments the narrator of "Providence and the Guitar" at a moment when two impoverished artist-husbands exchange a glance of understanding over their wives' concern for financial security.4 In "The Misadventures of John Nicholson," the jilted heroine's sternness towards her errant lover occasions this narratorial aside: "She was lost in none of those questionings of human destiny that have, from time to time, arrested the flight of my own pen; for women, such as she, are no philosophers, and behold the concrete only. And women, such as she, are very hard on the imperfect man."5 Against the background of such narrative tendencies, it is not hard to see why many critics read Stevenson as at heart edgily suspicious of the settled realities of relationships between men and women, even if willing from time to time to play along with the plot of budding young love. For them, insinuations among Stevenson's narrators of men being hedged in by female pettiness speak for the author's deepest feelings about relationships which have moved beyond the first flush of romance. For corroborating evidence they would be ready to quote (as Henry James, for one, does) the sardonic warning about marriage offered in "Virginibus Puerisque": "To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel . . . there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good."6 What this view of Stevenson overlooks is the way that his attraction to carefree male fellowship contends throughout his adult life against a principled concern to promote male maturity of vision about the social and psychological realities of relations between the sexes. The 1870s found Stevenson, then still in his twenties, reading early George Meredith and late George Eliot novels and cultivating intimate friendships with two spirited, intelligent women painfully estranged from their husbands.7 Presumably these influences help...

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