Chapter 7
In: Scottish Literature of the South Seas
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The vast ocean and tiny islands of the Pacific are the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson’s most experimental work of fiction, The Ebb-Tide (1894), a novella in which extreme physical immediacy is suffused with a dream-like ideality. This chapter analyses how Stevenson created this effect through narrative and descriptive techniques derived from two intertextual models: the toy theatre of his childhood play, and the emblem literature of his religious upbringing. Memories of Skelt’s Juvenile Theatre nourished the environment of self-reflexive theatricality within which the action of The Ebb-Tide unfolds. Mise-en-abyme motifs, repeated references to artificial lighting, the presence of “imaginary spectators,” and effects of miniaturization and magnification combine to fracture the illusion of the story’s reality, even as the narrative’s “vilely realistic dialogue” (Stevenson’s phrase), and referential detail work to establish it. Enacting a dialectic between the two dominant literary modes of the 1890s, symbolism and naturalism, The Ebb-Tide also engages with the tradition of emblem literature exemplified by the seventeenth-century English poet Francis Quarles, whose poetic practice Stevenson invoked when discussing the compositional challenges of this work. Recognizing the influence of Quarles on The Ebb-Tide helps to illuminate the emblematic, parabolic and metaphysical aspects of the narrative, which pull against, but also strangely animate, its depiction of the contemporary Pacific world. The chapter concludes that the anti-realist influences of Quarles and Skelt, juxtaposed with naturalistic observations of the “wide Pacific” as he found it in the 1890s, enabled Stevenson to produce a new kind of storytelling marked by violent shifts of register, deep divisions of narrative voice, and a constant strain between materiality and ideality.