Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915

Joseph A. Kestner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138262218
• eBook ISBN: 9781317099963
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Making use of recent masculinity theories, Joseph A. Kestner sheds new light on Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Beginning with works published in the 1880s, when writers like H. Rider Haggard took inspiration from the First Boer War and the Zulu War, Kestner engages tales involving initiation and rites of passage, experiences with the non-Western Other, colonial contexts, and sexual encounters. Canonical authors such as R.L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner are examined alongside popular writers like A.E.W. Mason, W.H. Hudson and John Buchan, providing an expansive picture of the crisis of masculinity that pervades adventure texts during the period.

Chapter 1
Voyaging

The texts examined in this study concentrate on the masculinities of their protagonists and the formation of masculine identity through adventure fiction. J.A. Mangan argues:

Central to the evolution of the male image was the Victorian ideal of ‘manliness’ … as embracing qualities of physical courage, chivalric ideals, virtuous fortitude with additional connotations of military and patriotic virtue. In the second half of the nineteenth century … the concept underwent a metamorphosis. To the early Victorian it represented a concern with a successful transition from Christian immaturity to maturity, demonstrated by earnestness, selflessness and integrity; to the late Victorian it stood for neo-Spartan virility as exemplified by stoicism, hardness and endurance … ‘Manliness’ symbolised an attempt at a metaphysical comprehension of the universe. It represented an effort to achieve a Weltanschauung with an internal coherence and external validity which determined ideals, forged identity and defined reality. (1–3)

Hence, the texts examined in this book record a process of masculinisation which differed from that prevalent earlier in the nineteenth century. ‘A neo-Spartan idea of masculinity was diffused throughout the English speaking world with the unreflecting and ethnocentric confidence of an imperial race’ (3).

Norman Vance contends that ‘“manliness” can be summarized as physical manliness, ideas of chivalry and gentlemanliness, and moral manliness, all of which tend to incorporate something of the patriotic and military qualities which “manliness” may also connote’ (10). This process of masculinising is key for culture because as Arthur Brittan notes, ‘The fact that masculinity may appear in different guises at different times does not entitle us to draw the conclusion that we are dealing with an ephemeral quality which is sometime present and sometime not’ (2). Masculinity describes the codes of male behaviour in culture that construct male subjectivity.

For males a key phase of this process of constructing male subjectivity is initiation into codes of masculine behaviour. Often these initiations occur apart from the influence of women or family or even the father, who may have his role usurped by an alternative male figure who may or may not accord with the father’s prerogatives. This other individual may be a sea captain, an older man or a renegade male. Part of the attraction of the adventure genre is that it provides males a way out of and beyond the domestic and legal constraints of shore life or the home country.

Hence, voyaging is often a mechanism of both escape and initiation in many adventure texts. Lionel Tiger has observed:

That initiations are frequently bizarre, cruel, and of profound significance to both members and aspirants suggests the importance of the initiation process and the exclusivist and selective principle it functions to defend. The fact that membership is often voluntary perhaps underlines the important role of these societies in the social lives of their members. The usually unisexual composition of the groups emphasizes the special part they may play in members’ and communities’ socio-sexual equilibrium. (126–7)

The texts considered in this chapter focus on initiation into masculine paradigms in homosocial spaces. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins signs on the Hispaniola at the urging of the local squire after Jim’s father dies. In the course of his voyage, he encounters a number of surrogate fathers, several of whom are criminal and all of whom are inadequate. In contrast to the Hanoverian setting of Treasure Island, Rudyard Kipling locates his Captains Courageous on an American fishing vessel in the late nineteenth century. There, a spoiled son of an American Captain of Industry abandons his arrogant ways in the classless environment of the ship. Two loners are the focus of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Together, especially in the case of one of the men, the men cement a tenuous friendship and save England from the threat of a German invasion. Joseph Conrad’s tales ‘Youth’, Typhoon, and The Secret Sharer concern voyages which entail initiations and transformations for some of the men on the ships.

John Peck stresses the significance of initiation as one major subject of sea stories: ‘The story of initiation … focuses on the testing of a young man in an unfamiliar situation … A young midshipman, put to the test, proves that he has the qualities that will make him a true sailor … . Being at sea can be seen as the real situation and the voyage the true condition of humanity. Voyaging consequently acquires a positive meaning’ (13–14, 15). In all cases, these texts by Stevenson, Kipling, Childers and Conrad show adventure writers using the genre to analyse rites of passage for their protagonists. In some instances, such as in Treasure Island, the protagonist remains wretched. In others, such as Typhoon, an initiation may be imperfect. In others, such as Captains Courageous, there is passage but also progress. In assessing these voyages of initiation, one should bear in mind Conrad’s declaration in Notes on Life and Letters: ‘The mere love of adventure is no saving grace. It is no grace at all. It lays a man under no obligation of faithfulness to an idea and even to his own self’ (189).

Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883)

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was serialised from October 1881 to January 1882 in the magazine Young Folks. Substantially revised, it appeared in book form in 1883. The novel is the quintessential adventure narrative, including voyaging out; residence in a strange territory, here an island; murderous plotters; lost treasure; daring escapades. It is also the rite de passage of its young hero, Jim Hawkins, who works at his father’s inn, the Admiral Benbow. After his father’s death, Jim becomes a cabin boy on the Hispaniola when he sails with the wealthy landowner Squire Trelawney and the physician Dr Livesey to find the treasure on Treasure Island.

The novel, narrated for the most part by an adult Jim, recounts Jim’s search for a father and his having to choose among a range of potential father surrogates, including Livesey, Trelawney, Captain Smollett and even the dreaded, psychopathic one-legged pirate Long John Silver. The novel records a contestation of masculinities. As Fraser notes, the novel is ‘the founding text in the revival of quest romance’ (26).

This rite de passage occurs on board the homosocial space of the Hispaniola. As many critics have noted, Jim’s mother disappears soon after the opening of the narrative. It is a man’s world, and it is there that Jim must find an identity. The narrative embraces a strong imperialistic ethos, where both the pirates and the more respectable men (Livesey, Trelawney) believe they have the right to seize the territory, exploit the land and grab the treasure. All the men are proto-imperialists. Joseph Bristow (1991) claims that the squire and the doctor have ‘dubious morality guiding their actions. Both men are as wealth-grabbing as the despicable seamen in their plotting for the gold’ (113).

Peck labels the novel ‘an exceptionally nasty book’ (153). Still, it is typical of the kind of adventure fiction appearing in the 1880s, as Peck observes: ‘It seems to embody more than one aspect of a change of mood in Britain that can be dated from the early 1880s. A taste for action and adventure is rediscovered’ (158).

As Martin Green has noted in The Robinson Crusoe Story, the adventure novel is concerned with national power, potestas, and this power is completely marked as masculine. Most of Treasure Island is not about treasure-hunting but about power; only two of the thirty-four chapters involve the hunt. As Green observes, adventure is a way of eschewing inherited masculinism and moralism. Kiely notes its ‘exhilarating sense of casting off’ (68).

In Treasure Island, Hawkins is forced to achieve an identity, but this process is riddled with ambiguity, including the fact that Jim commits murder and remains haunted by the experience as a nightmare, both literally and ontologically. Manhood is achieved, but only by extreme transgression. The treasure represents Jim’s independence, identity and selfhood, yet he is haunted by it.

The opening chapters of the novel are filled with men with damaged bodies. The men are mutilated and inadequate. These include Billy Bones with a scar on his cheek; Black Dog, ‘the emissary of Flint’s crew’ (Hardesty 3), who is missing two fingers; Pew, who is blind; Long John Silver, one-legged; and Jim’s sickly father. These mutilations are marked from the beginning of the text and signal the crisis of masculinity Stevenson wishes to present, even though he locates the narrative in the eighteenth century. Jim notices the ‘sabre cut across one cheek’ (1) of Billy Bones. At first, Jim fantasises about his status: ‘He had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast; [he] seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike’ (2).

Later, Jim realises: ‘I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms’ (3), anticipating by decades Conrad’s The Secret Sharer. Being advised to watch for a man with one leg, Jim soon has ferocious dreams of this individual, all strongly implying castration fears: ‘Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over the hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares’ (3).

One January morning, Black Dog appears. Almost immediately, he tells Jim he has a son almost like Jim, setting up another father/son pair. Jim’s father dies, and the next instant blind Pew arrives, delivers the Black Spot to Bones, who has a stroke and dies. Jim and his mother open Bones’ chest and find coins from many nations. Jim has taken a packet belonging to Bones and brings it to Dr Livesey and Squire John Trelawney. As greedy as the pirates, Trelawney and Livesey decide to outfit a ship and sail from Bristol to Treasure Island. The captain is Alexander Smollett.

Jim’s fantasies about the forthcoming venture and adventure are based on imperialist assumptions:

I brooded by the hour together over the map, all the details of which I well remembered. Sitting by the fire in the house-keeper’s room, I approached that island in my fancy, from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spy-glass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures. (36)

The strangeness begins when Trelawney engages Long John Silver as ship’s cook. Trelawney believes him a ‘man of substance’ (38) although Silver’s wife ‘is a woman of colour’ (39). Jim, however, immediately recognises a pirate when he sees Silver: ‘I thought I knew what a buccaneer was like’ (42). Later, Livesey also declares Silver is ‘honest’ (50). Jim already exceeds these two fathers in perception, albeit not in status.

Jim is soon proved correct on the Hispaniola. Getting into the apple barrel, Jim is on the verge of sleep when a man rests on it. It is Silver. Then the terror begins:

The barrel shook as he leaned his shoulders against it, and I was just about to jump up when the man began to speak. It was Silver’s voice, and, before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity; for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone. (56)

The apple barrel represents the locale of the knowledge of good and evil. It is also the womb, from which Jim emerges in a re-birth – to knowledge of good and evil, to maturity and to self-reliance. For Jim, the voyage is now completely one of self-discovery. Whatever innocence Jim has left is destroyed when Jim overhears Silver plotting a mutiny. To Jim, Silver becomes ‘an abominable old rogue … I think, if I had been able, that I would have killed him through the barrel’ (58). Silver describes his group as ‘gentlemen of fortune’ (58).

Jim must now masquerade before Silver. ‘He did not know, to be sure, that I had overheard his council from the apple barrel, and yet I had, by this time, taken such a horror of his cruelty, duplicity, and power, that I could scarce conceal a shudder when he laid his hand upon my arm’ (64). The Squire can scarcely believe Jim when he tells of the plot: ‘And to think that they’re all Englishmen!” (67) he declares. Hence, Stevenson enlarges the issue of masculinity beyond Jim’s maturation to question the probity of England itself. Wandering the island, Jim at first feels ‘the joy of exploration’ (73), but soon he witnesses Silver kill Tom with his crutch and then his knife. Jim labels Silver a ‘murderer’ (76).

It is part of this Bildungsroman that Jim must wonder: ‘Could anyone be more entirely lost than I?’ (77). Echoing the Robinson Crusoe narrative, alone Jim meets the marooned Ben Gunn, who was with Captain Flint when the treasure was buried. He has been abandoned on the island for three years. While Robert Fraser’s position that ‘male bonding is at work [in the novel] in a particularly efficient way’ (25) has validity, Stevenson complicates the situation because it is also the case that Jim Hawkins, from the time of the death of his father, is agonisingly isolated.

Chapters 1 to 15 have been narrated by Jim. Chapters 16, 17 and 18 are narrated by Livesey. He recounts how he, Trelawney, and their party had managed to occupy the fort in Captain Flint’s stockade. Like an imperialist land grab, the men ‘flew British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island’ (98). Jim resumes the narration in Chapter 19 to recount several exploits. The men in the stockade repulse an attack by the pirates. As Hardesty et al. argue, having Livesey narrate these chapters allows a demarcation between the youthful Jim of the first part of his narration and the adult Jim of the remainder (5).

The Hispaniola constitutes the all-male homosocial space of initiation, as Fraser observes ‘a floating male society’ (21). Yet, as Fraser continues, the Island becomes another ship, ‘with its three mountain tops – “Foremast Hill”, “Spyglass Hill”, and “Missenmast Hill” – standing for the masts on deck. The stockade at the south end of the island is placed in exactly the same position as the captain’s quarters on the schooner, immediately behind the missen hill or mast – that is, figuratively behind the wheelhouse… The buccaneers, in the meantime, situate themselves further to the north, in an area of the terrain equivalent, in nautical terms, to the foc’s’le’ (21).

Jim, however, must test himself in extreme circumstances. He now faces the ultimate challenges in his rite de passage: ‘The scheme had an air of adventure that inspired me, and the thought of the water-breaker beside the fore companion doubled my growing courage’ (129). Jim rows out to the Hispaniola and sets it adrift. Later, when the ship is adrift, Jim manages to board it by the bowsprit. Jim takes command of the ship: ‘I was greatly elated with my new command. I … was quieted by the great conquest I had made’ (135).

Pursued by the vicious coxswain Israel Hands, Jim finds himself in the position of kill or be killed: ‘I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment – I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim – both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry, the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds and plunged head first into the water’ (142).

This is Jim’s supreme transgression in the text, but Stevenson appears to argue that maturation and manhood may well involve these extremes. Jim is terrified at first. He has a ‘horror’ of falling from the cross-trees, but then ‘I was once more in possession of myself … . I was my own master again’ (143). Stevenson stresses this emergence of a new identity. Jim records: ‘The habit of tragical adventures had worn off almost all my terror for the dead … . For the rest, the Hispaniola must trust to luck, like myself’ (144–5).

Returning to the stockade, Jim finds it occupied by Silver and his men. Silver tells Jim he is ‘the picter of my own self when I was young and handsome’ (150); Silver addresses Jim as ‘my son’ (151). Jim must finally confront this renegade father. Stevenson suggests there is a parallel between Silver and Jim in their use of violence and maybe even potential identity. When Jim recounts how he foiled the pirates’ plans, some of the crew wish to kill Jim, but Silver saves him.

When the pirates go to find the treasure, they discover it gone. Ben Gunn had removed it to his cave. Trelawney and his party find the treasure. At a West Indies port, Gunn assists Silver to escape. The Hispaniola then returns to England, where everyone receives ‘an ample share of the treasure’ (191). Stevenson devotes no time to the spending of money since, as Fraser notes, ‘the spending of money is a landlubbing tale’ (21).

The universe of Treasure Island contains much violence. Christopher Harvie contends this represents great cultural anxiety at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘There is a sense in which Treasure Island could be seen as a sort of social parable: an embattled microcosm of civil society – squire, doctor, captain and retainers – being menaced by the lower orders under brutal and materialistic leadership. That establishment is saved by chance and Jim Hawkins’ (120). Harvie observes the many instances of civil violence around the time of the novel’s publication, such as the 6 May 1882 ‘murder of the Irish Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish and his senior administrator, Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park, Dublin’ (121). There is some belief that the Treasure Island in fact represents Ireland. There is also speculation about whether the pirates represent the lower classes, anxious for the vote, reform and power. The novel may also represent fears of socialism and of international terrorism.

Stevenson complicates Jim’s assumptions about manliness by presenting a class-ridden society in Treasure Island. Though low-born, even Jim is conscious of class from the very beginning, when he comments about Dr Livesey: ‘I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk’ (5). Although Supervisor Dance saves Jim and his mother from the pirates, when Dance asks Jim for the packet of evidence, Jim prefers to give it to Livesey. Dance responds: ‘Perfectly right … perfectly right – a gentleman and a magistrate’ (29). Jim records that the Squire treats Dance in a ‘condescending’ manner (30).

Seeing the pirates cowering before Livesey, Hawkins analogises them to ‘charity school-children’ (165), which reflects again his snobbism. The eighteenth-century hierarchy is marked in the death of Tom Redruth, Squire Trelawney’s gamekeeper. Trelawney asks the dying Tom to forgive him ‘for taking him to the tropics’ (Jackson 30). Tom asks: ‘Would that be respectful like, from me to you, squire?’ (94).

Stevenson’s ironic comment on Jim’s class consciousness is to have Silver declare Jim a gentleman ‘for a gentleman you are, although born poor’ (165). Even at the conclusion of the novel, Captain Smollett recognises Jim’s class consciousness: ‘You’re a good boy in your line, Jim; but I don’t think you and me’ll go to sea again. You’re too much of the born favourite for me’ (185). Before the voyage began, Jim had aligned himself with the Squire against Captain Smollett, when the latter had ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Masculinities and Adventure Fiction
• 1 Voyaging
• 2 Mapping
• 3 Invading
• 4 Loving
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index