Walking and Weeding in a Shrinking World: The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson

Abstract

“There, where I was, I just put down the sound to the mystery of the bush; where no sound now surprises—and any sound alarms” – Robert Louis Stevenson, The Vailima Letters “So now Guam is an island that has completely silent forests; it’s really astonishing to walk into a forest on Guam and hear nothing but the wind whistling through the leaves.” – The Sound of Silence—What Happens to a Forest with No Birds?: An Interview with Haldre Rogers A considerable amount of recent critical attention has been paid to Robert Louis Stevenson’s colonial imagination (Colley, 2004; Jolly, 2009; Hayes, 2009; Dryden, 2011; and Phillips, 2012). Of these studies, Ann C. Colley’s book stands out for situating Stevenson’s writing in the context of missionary work in the South Pacific, as well as for drawing our attention to the complicated nature of his relationship to British imperialism. Colley correctly encourages readers of Stevenson’s South Seas tales to pay close attention to the particulars and relativities that may undermine the imperial framing of his work (7).1 And she does a fine job (along with Jenni Calder) of linking Scotland and Samoa, with her suggestion that Scotland’s past provided Stevenson with access to the South Seas, but also placed him in an ambiguous position as someone who felt at once like an “intrusive colonial” and, as a Scot, a “victim of English cultural imperialism” (5).