Robert Louis Stevenson continues to enjoy popular fame for his adventure tales, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and for his gothic crime story, Jekyll and Hyde. The popularity of these books, combined with some of his own statements and his unconventional and adventurous life, have given him a reputation as a whimsical and lightweight writer who stood aside from mainstream Victorian life. Recent criticism, especially of Jekyll and Hyde, has done much to redress this, and to show Stevenson as an essentially Victorian figure. It has not, however, shown the extent to which Stevenson internalised ideas of deviation from the normal and envisioned himself as constrained by a degenerative ethos. Stevenson's fiction came to be formed in a matrix of deep anxiety caused by chronic illness, social and familial pressure, censorship, and onerous financial burdens. The thesis assesses Stevenson's fictional works in light of his belief that he was deformed, both as an artist and as an individual, by what he saw as the degenerative power of the age in which he lived. Drawing heavily on Stevenson's correspondence, and that of his personal and literary circle, this work contends that the associated motifs of deformity, disguise and degeneration are widespread in Stevenson's fiction, and that they frequently refute the prevailing cultural attitudes of his time. The thesis explores representations of deformity in a variety of forms, including physical, social and artistic depictions. It shows that Stevenson, one of the most experimental and broad-ranging writers of his era, was forced by the dictates of an age increasingly obsessed with control and delineation to produce fiction that conformed to rigid codes of genre and style. It demonstrates that when Stevenson violated these codes - as he did with heightening determination - he was forced either to temper or to abandon the works he had created. Finally, the thesis assesses Stevenson's Pacific fiction in relation to his failed escape from - as he saw it - the oppressive and corrosive effects of the Old World, and it considers how, ultimately, notions of deformity overwhelmed the writer entirely.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/253053 |
| Creators | O'Callaghan, Amanda Catherine |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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