Melodramatic Imperial Writing by Hultgren Neil;

Author:Hultgren, Neil;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press

“The Bottle Imp”: A Cue from an Old Melodrama

Stevenson’s stern response to family affection in Hawaii and his work within the melodramatic mode are of interest in part because they appear uncharacteristic in relation to his other writings. Stevenson’s adoption of essentialist terms such as native mind and the Polynesian to describe Hawaiians is surprising when read against his other anthropological observations from In the South Seas (1896).26 As Julia Reid argues, Stevenson’s writing (the fictional and anthropological) “disturbs the hierarchical relations between the civilized and the primitive.”27 Along parallel lines, Oliver Buckton contends, “The nature of Stevenson’s travel had the effect of undermining clear-cut distinctions between nations, landscapes, and races.”28 At first glance, Stevenson seems to maintain a strict hierarchy of civilization in his encounter with leprosy in Hawaii. Though, as John Kucich asserts, Stevenson “transparently identified with the lepers” he met on Moloka’i,29 this identification is mixed with criticism in other instances. The emotionality of Stevenson’s writing on leprosy was also out of the ordinary and seemed to make the author himself anxious. For instance, Stevenson defended the reputation and practices of Belgian Catholic priest Father Damien (born Joseph de Veuster, 1840–89), aid to the Hawaiian lepers on Moloka’i and eventual victim of leprosy himself, in a vitriolic pamphlet, Father Damien: An Open Letter to Reverend Dr Hyde of Honolulu from Robert Louis Stevenson (1890). By penning his pamphlet against a Presbyterian minister, C. M. Hyde, who had criticized Damien, Stevenson felt he was risking his reputation: “He was quite clear in his own mind that he had written a libel” that could lead to his family’s financial ruin.30 In this instance, as in the travel letters and fiction, Stevenson’s textual responses to what he observed in Hawaii frequently raise the question as to why a writer so often praised for a restrained prose style should experiment with the melodramatic mode, a register that many critics and writers understand as an inadvertent loss of stylistic control or a blunt tool of expression. On the surface, melodrama’s excess, its high emotional pitch, and its tendency to flirt with the sentimental all seem atypical for an artist who described a work of art as “neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.”31

Yet the melodramatic mode’s obsession with morality is important to consider in light of Stevenson’s subject matter, just as melodrama’s heightened emotions were essential to Stevenson’s understanding of his connection with Polynesian audiences. Peter Brooks has considered the importance of the “moral universe” that the melodramatic mode tries to bring to light.32 By attempting to correct excessive emotionality through certain moral prescriptions in his writings on leprosy in Oceania, Stevenson made calculated use of melodrama’s aesthetic effects. “The Bottle Imp” examines and uses the melodramatic mode’s excesses of didacticism, sensational incident, and pathos to grapple in folktale form with the moral questions Stevenson considered while encountering leprosy in Hawaii.33

Stevenson self-consciously relied on the melodramatic mode. His note about the genesis of “The Bottle Imp” indicates that he was not writing a melodrama but working within the melodramatic mode.

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