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CHAPTER 8
Introduction
· South Pacific domestic realist story
· The complicated relationship between 'home' and 'abroad'
At home with the Victorians: Edinburgh life
Activity 2
The poem 'Foreign Lands':
- Stevenson's poem draws upon two senses of the word 'foreign': foreign as in strange or unfamiliar; in this case, like the 'next door garden' (I. 5) that he has seen for the very first time; but also foreign in the sense of abroad rather than home; in this case, the ships heading out through the Firth of Forth, and the imaginary road leading to 'fairy land' (I. 18).
The poem 'Travel':
- In the poem 'Travel', Stevenson presents a more conventional, exoticised vision of abroad; abroad is everything home is not.
- Stevenson's language in Travel' is insistently visual; he lists and describes all the things encountered in travelling abroad that are not to be found at home - from camel caravans to red flamingos, and from 'Man-devouring tigers' (I. 26) to 'forests, hot as fire' (I. 17). This poem captures the spirit of adventure and romance that was still associated with travel and exploration in the nineteenth century.
Reading 'The Beach of Falesa'
A hybrid form
· 'The Beach of Falesa' is best defined as a novella or a short novel.
· It is a hybrid form -too short to be considered a novel, too long to be a short story.
· The unfamiliarity of the topic and the foreign words in the tide necessitated the addition of a subtide ('Being the Narrative of a South-Sea Trader') to make the story understandable to a mass British readership.
The content matter of the story caused problems:
- One of the central premises of the plot is that John Wiltshire, the Scottish trader in Falesa, tricks Uma into marriage through a false contract, lasting one night.
- Shorter deemed Stevenson's domestic story of the Pacific inappropriate for the sitting rooms of British homes (the story was also illustrated with an image of a bare-breasted Pacific island woman).
*** 'The Beach of Falesa' is a hybrid work not only because it is too short to be a novel and too long to be a short story, but also because of its content: it mixes realism with more romantic and poetic modes; it even gives a central place to the supernatural.
Stevenson: from adventure romance towards realism.
Elements of both the realist novel and the adventure romance in 'The Beach of Falesa'; in the opening section of the story.
Activity 3 important
· The opening paragraph: the poetic and descriptive language used by the first-person narrator, later identified as the Scottish copra trader John Wiltshire.
· The opening paragraph describes his first glimpse of the island, Falesa, as their boat approaches landfall. Wiltshire arrives in a time of transition, 'when it was neither night nor morning', with the moon setting, but the sun not yet having risen.
· His language is full of strongly visual imagery conveying the beauty of the natural world: the 'broad and bright' moon, the pink dawn, and 'the daystar [that] sparkled like a diamond'.
· Wiltshire engages all his senses in describing his first impressions of the island: the smell of the 'wild lime and vanilla', the cool temperature of the breeze blowing in his face, the prospect of hearing new words in a 'tongue [that] would be quite strange to me' (p. 3).
· Stevenson's opening paragraph sets the scene for his British readers, encountering this story about the Pacific on the other side of the world. He draws in his readers by letting them see Falesa for the first time as Wiltshire does, through the perspective of his first-person narration.
Stevenson uses the captain's dialogue with Wiltshire to provide us with the 'back-history' of the trade settlement at Falesa, and indicate the peculiar problems of the place. The captain points out that the windward side of the island is uninhabited, and that John Adams, one of the first white traders on the island, declined into illness and insanity.
In his deployment of such poetic language in the opening paragraph, Stevenson is capturing as closely as possible the magical first encounter so many visitors to the South Pacific have related in fiction, travel writing, correspondence and memoirs.
This opening section of the story draws the reader in through the romance of the first encounter with a Pacific island, and then presents us with a realist account of the problems of previous foreign traders on Falesa. Stevenson draws upon the adventure romance and travel writing traditions and the expectations of his readers before showing them the reality of life on Falesa, which, despite its beauty, is far from being an exotic island paradise.
A new realism
Despite the fact that the plot of 'The Beach of Falesa' deliberately uses the supernatural (the taboo around Wiltshire's house, and the islanders' belief in Tiapolo or the devil), Stevenson's narrative deals with these phenomena in a realist fashion.
Case's cave of evil spirits is exposed as a fraud concocted with luminous paint and Aeolian harps, while Wiltshire maintains a resolute scepticism about the effectiveness of both island beliefs and Christianity.
While Falesa is an imaginary island, Stevenson took great pains to make his representation of island life as accurate as possible, basing many of the attitudes, practices, beliefs and aspirations of the islanders on the Samoans whom he interacted with on a daily basis.
There are two other aspects of realism in Stevenson's story the use of dialect in the narrative, and the circulation of books.
New forms of English
- Stevenson's use of dialect and slang: Stevenson uses many Polynesian (mainly Samoan) ones.
- Stevenson was acutely aware of the differences of dialect, accent and usage in the British Isles.
- Stevenson's story attempts realistically to represent a new, evolving, and still unstable dialect of English, broadly called Pidgin, which emerged as a new language out of the trading relationships on the beach between different communities (Europeans, Americans, Chinese, various Pacific islanders) across the Pacific.
Lacking a language in common, Uma uses the English-based island Pidgin trading language to communicate with her husband, Wiltshire. Linguistically, in this depiction of the domestic life of Wiltshire and Uma, 'The Beach of Falesa' swaps the categories of home and abroad for its Victorian British readers.
Activity 4
Wiltshire and Uma's domestic life:
· The opening page of Chapter 5 presents some of the complications of Wiltshire's home life.
· While Wiltshire as the narrator speaks in standard colloquial English, Uma's responses (as represented by Wiltshire) show the word order and simple structure of Pidgin English. Stevenson's commitment to realism is at its clearest here in its depiction of an everyday marital argument.
· Far from resigned passivity, and despite her own fears of the aitus (devils) in the windward side of the island, Uma secretly follows Wiltshire into the cave, and the inevitable final bloody confrontation with Case.
This episode of swearing an oath on the Bible (and carrying it with him as a protection against evil spirits) precipitates Uma's unconditional support for Wiltshire, and demonstrates their marriage in the spirit as well as the letter of the law.
'The Beach of Falesa' reminds us of the increasing interconnectedness brought about by trade and empire. This interconnectedness, as Wiltshire and Uma's domestic life shows, brought with it problems as well as opportunities. Chief among these perceived problems was the prospect of the mixing of the races and the dilution of British values and certainties that may occur as a result.
Stevenson in the South Pacific
· Critic Mary Louise Pratt has used the term 'contact zone' to refer to 'social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery-, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today' (1991, p. 33).
· In 'The Beach of Falesa', the entire narrative is played out on this contact zone. While Stevenson's engagement with Pacific culture and its contact zones was emotionally and creatively positive, not all encounters were quite so unproblematic. for example, Stevenson's depiction of Wiltshire's first encounter with his adversary Case, which takes place on the contact zone of Falesa's leeward-facing, and un-tabooed, beach.
Activity 5 important
· Wiltshire's initial response to Case is one of instinctive racial and national solidarity. Wiltshire is deprived of contact with his countrymen: 'I was sick for white neighbours', he tells us (p. 4).
· Stevenson's first-person narration allows us to see Case through Wiltshire's eyes. The initial excitement at meeting a fellow Briton on Falesa is replaced by a growing sense of uncertainty about Case's social, national and moral standing.
· While Wiltshire notices that Case is clearly highly educated and an 'accomplished' accordion player, he is also quick to point out Case's chameleon-like ability to adapt to circumstances and situations.
· Wiltshire's own racial solidarity gives way to the recognition that Case does not represent the values or principles of home.
Wiltshire's engagement with Case highlights one of the central problems that European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century presented for fixed ideas about race and nationality.
- On the one hand, British traders, missionaries and settlers were expected to be ambassadors of British virtues, and to remain faithful to those values however long they spent 'abroad'.
- On the other hand, their increasing distance and dislocation from the values of 'home', and the fact that the contexts of social class and kinship meant far less, resulted in the inevitable dissipation of the racial and national attitudes that they had brought with them.
· In 'The Beach of Falesa', Case has spent so long in the Pacific that he no longer has a discernible nationality beyond the fact that he is English-speaking.
· Racial and national categories, as with the ideas of home and abroad, were increasingly destabilised by the realities of trade, imperial expansion, and emigration and settlement
Ironically, the further the British ventured from home, the more strictly they tried to live by the ideals and principles of the mother country; and yet, making a new home abroad invariably meant creating a new, mixed way of life.
Activity 6
· Wiltshire's life on Falesa: for Wiltshire has since moved away from the island, and has had children with Uma who are nearly grown up. Despite her increased weight and tendency to give away the profits of the station, Wiltshire describes her as an 'A 1 wife' (p. 71); however, he ascribes her faults not to her character, but to her race ('that's natural in Kanakas' (pp. 70-1)).
· Wiltshire's own racial prejudices are clear throughout the story; he is dismissive of the islanders for their alleged lack of logic, and frequently uses racially offensive terms ('Kanaka').
· In addition, he makes it clear that he does not want his daughters to marry Pacific islanders, despite their own mixed ancestry
· Wiltshire is unapologetic about his prejudice; he accurately reflects the unthinking prejudices of many Victorian British traders, settlers and emigrants.
· However, he has been successful in making a home for himself and his family in the Pacific. Revealingly, Wiltshire no longer refers to Britain as home, but rather as 'a white man's country' (p. 71).
Conclusion
· Set in an exotic, fictionalised and unidentifiable location, with a plot involving an interracial romance, the supernatural and a fight to the death between good and evil, The Beach of Falesa' was as far from the domestic world of most late Victorian readers as can be imagined.
· Stevenson combines elements of the adventure story with romance and travel narrative, while Wiltshire's sometimes sardonic first-person narration helps maintain the reader's interest.
· However, 'The Beach of Falesa' is also a domestic story — the account of Wiltshire's establishment of a life with Uma — written in an increasingly realist style.
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