Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) - Life, Features and Themes

Study He was in part tutored at home, then he began to study natural sciences but abandoned 242i82c them and studied law. Then started to devote himself to literature.

Journeys France, Italy, Germany, USA, a cruise to the South Sea (Samoa): in search of a warm climate.

Health He soon began to suffer respiratory illness (tuberculosis and continuous Haemorrhages).

Love He married Fanny Osbourne, and American lady separated by her husband : his parents didn't accept this marriage.

Features and Themes

Novel as evasion from everyday life into adventure.

He was a bohemian writer rejecting his parents' religion and bourgeois respectability.

He was a detailed writer.

He was against realism and naturalism. He considered aesthetic awareness (the goal of the artist)

The conflict between Good and Evil: The double.

Psychological narrative he wrote psychological novels rejecting fears and doubts of his age in an endlessly open allegory.

He was influenced by the Gothic Novel.

Exoticism he used the fashion of exoticism (Treasure Land)

His masterpiece had an oniric origin.

The passage from adolescence to manhood.

He inherited the Scottish Presbyterian believe in predestination.

Narrator on 1^st person One character spearing in 1^st person, no omniscient narrator.

Interaction between setting and characters.

He wrote thrillers in the fashion of the time. He was influenced by the Detective stories of Conan Doyle ("Sherlock Holmes")

He was influenced by the Darwin's studies.

Calvinistic oppression with sin.

Works

Treasure Island

The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll is a respected London physician. He studies on the theory according to which a man has 2 physical beings corresponding to the 2 personalities. He starts experimenting with drugs and he finds a dose that transforms him in a repulsive and violent person called Hyde and another dose that allows him to return to his previous condition. As Hyde he shows the evil side of his personality and he kills Sir Danvers Carew, as Jekyll he live his normal life, horrified by Hyde's actions. One day he becomes Hyde without the use of drug, when he realized that he had no control over the dark side of his personality, he poisons himself. Only in the end the truth is revealed with 2 letters: one written by Dr. Lanyon, Jekyll's rival scientist, one written by Jekyll himself and found by Utterson, his friend.

Influenced by Flaubert.

Genesis: one night he had a nightmare in which he saw a man, in a laboratory, who, after had swallowed a drug, turns himself into a different being. When he awoke, he tried to write down this dream and he created a "Terror story". But after his wife suggested to him to write a story with an ethical message so he re-wrote it completely.

Critic to the Victorian male-oriented society.

Symbolism:

Names Stevenson studied the name of his protagonists. Jekyll came from the Anglo-Saxon word "Je kill", Hyde suggests something secret.

Door Jekyll's house has 2 doors: a front door opening on a respectable square and a back door full of cracks which is a connection with the unconscious and hell.

House the front is typically Victorian and respectable, the back is sinister and without windows, symbolized the duality of the protagonist.

Weather fog, cloudy sky and night conveyed a sense on real and symbolical darkness.

Mirror symbol of dualism.

Themes:

Ethical theme it's dangerous to indulge in sin as it may master may.

Double Stevenson was obsessed with the fear of losing his own personality and he analyzed the problem of men's double nature in his works, interpreted sometimes by 2 characters (a good one opposed to a bad one) or by only 1 character. The Doppelganger literature developed only in 19^th cent because the Enlightenment stated that all that was "non-reason" (folly, irrationality..) was outside ourselves, while only with the Romanticism was discovered that the "non-reason" was within ourselves.

Evil connected to the theme of the double.

Kidnapped.

The Black Arrow.

The master of Ballantrae.