'On the Rack': Shame and Imperialism in Robert Louis Stevenson

Shame features prominently in the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson yet it has not previously been the subject of a major study. This affect and its nuances reach back into the childhood and heritage of the writer, and forward through his most iconic novels to his stories of the South Seas (especially The Beach of Falesá and The Ebb-Tide) that are the focus of this investigation. This thesis argues that Stevenson uses shame as a tool to critique attitudes to imperialism in his fiction writing of the South Seas. It shows, first, that he had a particular understanding of shame, conscious and unconscious, that was informed by both his personal experience of shame and his ideas on the role of emotion in literature – what may be called ‘Stevensonian shame’. Secondly, Stevenson’s experience and understanding of shame is shown to shape his understanding of Western imperialism in the Pacific within a wider context of conflicting contemporary attitudes to empire. Thirdly, Stevenson’s understanding of imperialism, informed by shame, is presented as central to his use of the emotion in his South Seas writing, in particular his fiction, as a device to examine and project his attitudes to imperialism thereby challenging and moulding the attitudes of his contemporary readership.The thesis is structured to reveal the growing power of shame to provide Stevenson with a natural approach to understanding his own character and to developing his conception of the moral universe, especially in relation to his experience and writing in the Pacific. The first two chapters provide background and analyse ‘Stevensonian shame’ as it relates to the author’s understanding of empire, demonstrating the shift of shame in his work from preoccupation to occupational tool. Chapters three and four provide in depth explorations of Stevenson’s use of shame in his South Sea tales: ‘The Beach of Falesá’, ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments), and The Ebb-Tide, demonstrating conclusively that Stevenson’s notion of shame is a significant part of his nuanced critique of Western imperialism. The thesis shows that it is the complex and conflicted rendering of shame in the South Seas narratives that generates their ambiguity in relation to imperialism, and that also enables Stevenson to instil in the reader at ‘home’ a sense of collective shame