Childishness, Primitivism and the Primitive as Child in the Anti-Imperialist Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

My thesis examines the connection between childishness and primitivism in four key works by Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped, "The Beach of Falesa", The Ebb-Tide and A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. In particular, I discuss Stevenson's depiction of "primitive" peoples - the Scottish Highlanders of Kidnapped and the Pacific Islanders in the other works - as childish or childlike. While this is a trope that was typically used to justify imperial domination by "adult" Europeans (by writers such as H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, for instance), for Stevenson the case is somewhat different because of the extent to which he valorises childishness. The "Introduction" places Stevenson's anti-imperialist deployment of the primitive-as-child trope in the context of romanticism and primitivism more generally, trends which idealised children and primitives in response to the degrading forces of industrial capitalist development in Europe. The first chapter shows how Stevenson's idealised notion of childish Highlanders in Kidnapped is used to valorise them at the expense of the sedentary and conformist "adult" world of the Lowlands. In the second chapter, I show how Stevenson similarly valorises the childish native characters in "The Beach of Falesa" and The Ebb-Tide, while at the same time he dismantles the notion that European colonisers of the Pacific possess any "adult" authority whatsoever by depicting the latter as being in the grip of infantile delusions. In these late fictional works, the idealised childishness of the natives, characterised by growth and vitality, is contrasted with European infantilism, which signifies the cultural regression and insularity that Stevenson saw as closely connected with imperial activity. My final chapter shows how these two opposed notions of childishness-as-growth and childishness-as-decay/insularity inform Stevenson's non-fiction anti-imperialist work, A Footnote to History. My thesis aims to show that Stevenson was not so constrained by imperialist cliches and rhetoric as some critics have argued; rather, I suggest that his sympathy for the victims of colonisation allowed him to dramatically undermine this rhetoric.