Robert Louis Stevenson had an unusually quick mind and restless imagination. He was always on the move—seeking new worlds and ways of thinking. At the same time, he could never fully leave behind the world in which he was raised. This desire for new horizons, coupled with deep affection and loyalty to what had come before, inevitably generated powerful conflicts in his personality. How his efforts to reconcile these conflicts translated into his growth as a person and artist is the focus of this book.
The scientific lens that I use for this investigation of Stevenson’s life and art is the psychological concept of identity. Identity is about finding one’s place in the world, figuratively and literally. The opposite of identity is disconnection. The quest for identity is the journey that an individual takes from confusion to clarity—from dislocation to belonging. I tell the story of Stevenson’s progress along this path.
Psychologists, drawing on the seminal work of Erik Erikson, the architect of identity theory, break down identity into three distinct but overlapping parts. First, there is the personal or psychological that encompasses our private thoughts, values, and beliefs (this can also include the most basic physical dimensions of health, temperament, and disposition). The second is the social—the relationships we hold with family, partners, and friends. The third is the societal—how we fit into social structures of community, religion, politics, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Ideally, identity knits these three together into an integrated whole that allows individuals to feel a sense of unity and purpose in their lives.
Psychologists following Erikson, such as James Marcia, defined identity as a balancing act between exploration and commitment in these three domains. To succeed in the quest for identity, one must challenge assumptions, try on differing ways of being in the world, and take risks (exploration), then ultimately make choices and stand by these decisions (commitment). The status of one’s identity at any one time depends on the depth of our exploration and degree of commitment.
Minimal exploration and full-blown commitment leads to foreclosure. To be foreclosed is to adopt the values of family or society without sufficient reflection—“Foreclosure can be the medical student who comes from three generations of doctors” (Schwartz 2001). In Stevenson’s case, he initially accepted his father’s expectation that he enter the family profession of engineering. However, he only lasted briefly on this path.
No exploration and no commitment yield identity diffusion. Diffused individuals drift along, avoiding engagement with any particular value system, occupational goals, or societal structures. Although Stevenson, during his university years, gave off the appearance at times of a dissolute youth, listless in his studies and uncertain in his occupational path, he was far too passionate in his love of literature, and of life itself, to fall into this category for any sustained period of time.
The combination of intensive exploration and no commitment yields a moratorium status; Stevenson often gravitated to this limbo state. Moving from engineering to law to a writer’s life, constantly testing out different genres of writing (essays, reviews, fiction, poetry, history, memoir), shifting from continent to continent, challenging the social conventions of his culture, he embodied the restless probing of a moratorium identity.
Ultimately, he did arrive at a more stable understanding of himself and the world around him—a combination of extensive exploration and commitment yielded a status of identity achieved. His progress in his quest for identity was abetted by his marriage, success as a writer, and a long stretches of better health in the last years of his life. Yet the very nature of this progress was an acceptance of moral and philosophical uncertainties that characterized the late Victorian era in which he lived. Stevenson’s mature self-understanding was based in what he called knowledge of the “pinpricks of truth” rather than a single “Truth.”
In Erikson’s theory, committed identity leads to the capacity for sustained intimacy in a loving relationship and then with the onset of middle age, generativity. Generativity is the individual’s concern with contribution to the current society and subsequent generations. The most obvious form of generativity is parenting, but Erikson saw the concept in much broader terms than raising children. Social reform, artistic works, philanthropy, and craftsmanship—there are many ways to leave one’s mark on the world.
As Stevenson eventually evolved from youthful bohemian to the roles of stepfather, international public figure, and head of a plantation estate in Samoa, his awareness of both his social responsibility and legacy intensified. Although he was only forty-four at his death, much of his preoccupations were more generative than self-focused in his final years. He worried constantly about his adult stepchildren, Lloyd and Belle (and step-grandchild, Austin), and spilled as much ink concerning the plight of his beloved Samoan people as he did on his own fictional writings. Similarly, he increasingly turned to his Scottish roots, seeking to carve out a place for his native land and language in his poetry, fiction, and historical writing (he was working on an account of his family’s remarkable engineering feats right up to two days before he died).
The final phase of identity theory is life review. Although typically located in the last decades of life, there is evidence that Stevenson was richly engaged in retrospective gazing, perhaps sensing that his chronic poor health would not grant him the luxury of waiting until old age. Both in March of the year before he died (“Rosa Quo Locorum”) and in the immediate months before his death (“Early Memories”), Stevenson worked on unfinished essays that took him back to his earliest days in Edinburgh and his grandfather’s manse in nearby Colinton.
How does the title “The Proper Pirate” fit in this study of identity? The natural inclination of Stevenson’s time was to divide the world into polar opposites. Given his innate emotional intensity and flexibility of mind, this dualism provoked the greatest emotional and intellectual conflicts in his life. Growing up in a Calvinist home in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the second half of the nineteenth century, he was swaddled in divisions—piety versus sin, industry versus idleness, the bourgeois elegance of New Town Edinburgh versus the seedy poverty of Old Town, the “civilized” white world versus the darker “native” world, the child’s world versus the adult’s world.
What makes Stevenson’s work endure is how he came to transcend his culture’s tendency to split the world into what the English poet William Blake called “contraries.” Stevenson anticipated the moral ambiguities that characterized the modern world of the twentieth century and frame our current century. As he summed up his credo to his close friend Sydney Colvin:
Everything is true; only the opposite is true too, you must believe both equally or be damned …
Few writers have ever been more associated with the problem of internal moral conflict than Stevenson. Jim Hawkins dearly loves Long John Silver, but he must face the fact of the older man’s brutality and venal core. Dr. Jekyll begins with the experiment of a divided self, but soon finds that control over his darker half is no longer possible. David Balfour, the dutiful Presbyterian Lowlander, depends for his life on the rebel Highlander, Alan Breck Stewart. The young boy, protagonist of A Child’s Garden of Verses, relishes the night dreams that bring him to adventurous lands, but fears the specter of “bogies” invading his bedroom. These are the most famous instances of Stevenson’s dualistic themes, but this obsession with the “goodness in badness and the badness in goodness” plays out over and over. As the literary critic Leslie Fiedler once put it, it is the imaginative trope that defines his writing.
My goal has been to go to the root of Stevenson’s fascination with these dualities and follow his quest to carve a path to moral action, freed from their shackles. Giving up his family’s vocation, abandoning its religious practices, pursuing a married woman, and writing about the seductive power of evil—these were transgressions worthy of a pirate’s soul. Still, he never fully broke from his parents; he remained devoted to his native country; he championed loyalty and decency in all of his writing; he led his family in prayer sessions in his final years in Samoa. The puzzle of how to fit transgression and propriety within the same single person—how to live with and accept these contradictions, how to be a proper pirate—is what makes Stevenson a fascinating psychological study.
To conduct this psychobiographical investigation of Stevenson’s identity, I rely on a relatively new field in the science of psychology—narrative psychology. Approximately thirty years ago, led by a brilliant recent PhD from Harvard, Dan McAdams, a group of young psychologists took Erikson’s work in a new direction. Drawing on innovative work in philosophy, linguistics, sociology, and the humanities, these theorists and researchers put the stories we tell ourselves and share with others—our narratives—at the center of our efforts to make meaning of our lives.
For identity theorists, this meant that the quest for identity—our effort at self-exploration and commitment—is expressed through micro-stories (the specific memories we recall about our lives) and the macro-story (the autobiographical narrative we construct that follows the chronology of our life events). We come to know ourselves through memories and the overarching life narrative we fashion from these experiences. As McAdams put it, “Identity is the life story.”
Much of my own research and writing has centered on this process. How do individuals engage in story-making, and how do they come to select the memories that form the critical episodes in their stories? Narrative identity research is the formal study of these questions. According to this approach, every individual, not just writers, tries to find order and meaning in his or her life experiences by incorporating them into a rough chronology or life story from childhood through adulthood. This life story is the narrative someone might tell if asked to imagine writing a memoir or autobiography. The object of narrative identity research is to track the plotlines, settings, characters, and significant episodes of this story in order to identify an individual’s underlying conflicts and core concerns.
Stevenson made many efforts at fashioning a life story that would give a coherent account of his experiences, but he never got much further than his childhood and university years. In these reminiscences, he emphasized his moral struggles and the confusion of goodness and badness that characterized him from an early age. Whether he would have finished a full narrative of his life if he had lived longer is hard to know, but his particular attention to moral complexity suggests that he might have made it a unifying theme of his life story.
Even though Stevenson never completed his memoirs, his essays and letters are a treasure trove of significant reminiscences. Evocative emotional memories, especially those that are repeatedly recalled, are like the corner pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—they can guide the psychologist to what matters most in the larger story of identity. Stevenson’s memories—childhood night terrors and frequent illnesses, joyous times outdoors at his grandfather’s home and in the hills of his family’s summer cottage, his pleasure in writing at night while on engineering field trips, his moments of first love for a woman much older than himself, painful confrontations with his father—all these and others help to configure his life’s enduring concerns.
In addition to a person’s life story and memories, narrative identity researchers rely on another powerful concept in understanding an individual personality. Significant memories that share a similar sequence of events and emotions can become linked into abstract patterns or templates. Think of these patterns of events and emotions as scripts that inform how we organize our responses to the world and make sense of our interactions.
One of Stevenson’s most repetitive scripts from his childhood featured a sequence of giving himself over to his imagination, subsequent shame, and ultimately, physical collapse in response to this tension. Throughout this volume I refer to this script as his “Escape from Shame” script. A second script emerging in his young adult years captured moments in which he (or the characters he created) argued for moral honesty in the face of sanctimonious hypocrisy. I call this his “Honor in Honesty” script. Variations on these two scripts followed him over the course of his entire life. In many ways, the second script was a redemptive answer to the constricting cycle that the first created.
Scripts and life stories are not hatched sui generis from each single individual. We borrow scripts from our culture’s dominant themes, filter them through our own personality and social interactions, and emerge with idiosyncratic versions. The themes of moral duality and Victorian hypocrisy were swirling in the culture of his time, but Stevenson, as a Scottish writer, facing a shortened life span, and fueled by an unusually fervent imagination, made them his own. In doing so, his personal and artistic development serves as a perfect bridge from the late romantic and aesthetic movements of the last decades of the nineteenth century to the grittier modernism of the twentieth century.
Are we aware of our own scripts, as well as the full meaning of the memories or the life story that we narrate? The line between conscious and unconscious life is fungible; we may know a great deal about particular memories and scripts that affect our lives, and in other cases we may be rather oblivious. Unwanted emotions, especially fear, anger, or shame, can also blind us to parts of our stories. Stevenson was fascinated by the question of conscious versus unconscious forces in personality; he wrote about this tension in some of his most forward-looking and self-revealing essays. In many ways his development as a writer reflected his growing capacity to translate the conflicts expressed in his scripts into central themes of his work.
Long ago, Freud argued that the way out of possession by an unwanted recurring conflict (what he called a “repetition compulsion”) was to turn the unconscious into conscious—in this way we might gain control over the internal forces that defeat us. Stevenson’s evolving art increasingly reflected conscious mastery over the shame and passivity that tormented his early years. His triumph over the limitations of his initial shaming script is a powerful argument for the possibility of personality growth and change. The trajectory of Stevenson’s life is a healthy movement away from passivity toward a greater embrace of action—from an inward self-doubt to an enhanced concern with the outer world and the lives of others around him.
The roles others play in our life story are another essential ingredient of narrative identity. We never craft our life stories in a vacuum. There is always an audience inside and outside our heads. There are the responses we imagine and the ones we actually receive, what the sociologist George Mead called the “generalized other.” Family, friends, a society that praises or blames—this is the running commentary in our brains for all our efforts at self-creation; anticipatory and instant feedback for all the tales we weave.
Stevenson’s life story is filled with many voices—encouraging, condemning, cajoling, and quarreling:
His high-strung saturnine father, Thomas; his placid, optimistic mother, Margaret; his American pistol-toting wife, Fanny; the quintessential Victorian gentleman who mentored his literary career, Sidney Colvin; the one-legged, larger-than-life poet, collaborator, and model for Long John Silver, W. H. Henley; his hero-worshipping stepson Lloyd Osbourne; — and many others. Each of these personages took possession of a part of Stevenson’s psychological and imaginative worlds—they figure in his personal narrative, but also his fictional universe—his own story and the stories that he turned into books.
So let’s begin this study of Robert Louis Stevenson’s quest to define his identity in his life and imaginative art. Tracking this journey necessarily means a selective biography—one that zeroes in on critical moments of psychological conflict and crisis. Similarly, I have given particular focus to his most famous works, Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. In these chapters, I provide detailed analyses of these works in order to illuminate connections between his identity struggles and creative breakthroughs not highlighted in prior studies.
From childhood, Stevenson’s imagination took flight, fanned by his nurse Cummy’s tales of both religious zealots and ghostly spirits. Alternately uplifted and shamed by his penchant for fantasy, he progressed from recipient to practitioner—from listener to storyteller to writer—before he reached his teens (although it was far too soon to let this cat fully out of the bag). To live in Chapman’s “realm of gold” in a family where the men did not just read of sea adventure but worked in turgid waters and changed the very contours of the oceanscape, was not an uncomplicated problem. Stevenson himself summed up the dilemma of being a “dreamer,” among a “family of engineers.”
Say not of me, that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled to sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child.
But rather say: In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coast its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.
—Underwoods, poem XXXVIII
Dedicated until death to his love of writing, could Stevenson ever make peace with this “childish” play—this removal of himself from the industrious world of his fathers? Currents of practicality and artistic aspiration competed in his efforts to justify his chosen craft. Stevenson experienced persisting tension to earn an independent living from his writing and provide for his wife and family. This tension affected the kind of writing he chose to do and accounts for the many genres he sampled. His greatest remuneration came from his gothic “crawlers” and his boys’ adventure books rather than the high art he aspired to create. Nevertheless, he pushed himself in his last years to write innovative and unpopular fiction that broke new ground in its realistic and harsh critique of colonialism.
Compounding his doubts about his worthiness to be a “Stevenson,” his persistent bouts of illness caused debilitating pain and frustrating dependence on others. In better health during his Samoan years he assumed more responsibility and autonomy over his life. Revered by his island compatriots for his active defense of their rights, he had traveled a long way from the sickly boy who lived in his head. And yet that same fertile imagination that had soothed and agitated him from childhood encompassed ever-greater multiplicities as it shifted into the modern world. It took away all the comforting categories of his Victorian culture and led him to carve his unique path toward an enduring art. That he embraced this challenge made him far from childish and moved him closer to the self-acceptance that is the ultimate goal of any individual’s quest for identity.