The Child’s Resistance to Adulthood in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island: Refusing to Parrot

DR. LIVESEY, one of the organizers of the expedition to Treasure Island in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure story, earns praise from the novel’s characters and critics alike. Critics admire his coolness under pressure, intelligence, and maturity; such traits, they argue, make him an admirable father figure for and able professional mentor to Jim Hawkins. To Alan Sandison, Livesey possesses a “quiet but confident authority” and functions as “ideal father” to the fatherless Jim.¹ Christopher Parkes highlights Livesey’s two professional roles (doctor and magistrate) and casts him as the ideal civil servant who mentors Jim into becoming the late-Victorian “image of a heroic civil servant.”² Patricia Whaley Hardesty, William H. Hardesty, and David Mann call him “an appropriate role model for Jim” who is “established as the voice of reason and education” in Stevenson’s novel.³ This article’s reassessment of Dr. Livesey, conversely, interprets him and the adulthood he models as cruel, greedy, emotionless, and quick to punish those deemed inferior. Rather than following Dr. Livesey’s example, the emotional and empathetic Jim resists and critiques the doctor’s version of adulthood by taking refuge in an eternal and haunted childhood. The relationship between the doctor and Jim, therefore, is one of conflict. Bradley Deane also casts Jim as a “boy who wouldn’t grow up” but argues that Jim’s “never-ending youth” enables Jim to inspire and maintain the empire.⁴ But Jim’s “never-ending youth” does exactly the opposite—it marks him as being uninterested in and opposed to the avaricious schemes pursued by all the adults (gentlemen and pirates) around him.

The “Quick Switch”

Dr. Livesey’s penchant for punishing others, including Jim, becomes particularly clear in the novel’s narrative structure. While most of the novel is narrated by Jim, chapters sixteen through eighteen are narrated by Dr. Livesey. This narrative structure, which consists of a sole, brief switch in narrators, is best termed the “quick switch.”⁵ Critics of Stevenson’s adventure story have struggled to account for the quick switch, and most criticism on Treasure Island ignores it altogether. By carefully considering the quick switch, a place where the doctor’s adult voice suddenly intrudes upon and replaces Jim’s child voice, this discussion challenges critics’ commonly held assumptions about Jim’s unassailable power on the island and mastery in the narrative. The quick switch itself not only manifests the dramatic stylistic and moral contrast between Jim and Dr. Livesey but also functions as one of a series of punishments that the adult doctor inflicts on the child Jim for disobeying him. Just as a switch was a rod used for inflicting punishment on wayward children in nineteenth-century schools, the quick switch points to how narratives can also be used as punishment.

The widespread critical neglect of the quick switch in Treasure Island arises from three main causes. First, it can be easily excused as a solution to the “technical problem” of how to relay what happens to the gentlemen’s party when Jim leaves them to explore the island;⁶ however, Dr. Livesey does not intervene again to report the developments that transpire during Jim’s second absence from the group. Furthermore, rationalizing the temporary switch in narrators by citing its necessity crucially ignores the implications of such a structural solution, no matter what Stevenson’s intentions were in employing it.⁷ The second reason for critical oversight is that it troubles the now common classification of Treasure Island as a Bildungsroman. For example, Sandison’s foundational reading of Treasure Island as a Bildungsroman never mentions the quick switch and relies on Jim’s position as the author-narrator of the text to prove Jim’s earned and increased authority, maturity, and power.⁸ Marah Gubar, one of the few critics of Treasure Island to acknowledge and discuss the quick switch, rightly points out that “Jim’s inability to maintain control over his own story presents a major challenge to the idea that he functions as the undisputed master of his...