Constructed girlhood is one of the subjects I return to most often. At Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, however, I have bravely crossed to the other side to talk about Stevenson, boyhood, and the making of the imperial subject.
It is occasionally good to swim in unfamiliar waters. Stevenson, at least, had the decency to provide an island — Venice, somewhat less obligingly, provides canals.
Back home, or
into the footnotes?
The Event
- Conference
- (Un)natural Stevenson: Wild Transgressions across Literature, Ecology, Science and Gender
- Hosted by
- * Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia; * Host 2;
- Where & when
- Where — xx Xxxxxx 202x
- Official Links
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* Conference
* Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia
Research summary - Naturally Wild, Properly Schooled: Stevenson, Boyhood, and the Making of the Imperial Subject
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Black Arrow offer thrilling adventures, but they also help shape late-Victorian ideas about what boys are ‘naturally’ like – and what sort of men they should become. Read as popular entertainment reaching a mass audience, these stories reveal a paradox at the heart of their appeal: boys appear naturally wild, yet their adventures steadily guide that wildness towards roles suited to their social class and useful to Britain’s empire. Courage, disobedience, violence, and loyalty become both signs of masculinity and qualities requiring discipline. Jim Hawkins’s rule-breaking leads to treasure and greater maturity; David Balfour’s Highland adventures turn Scottish turbulence into an education in ‘proper’ Britishness. Rebellion becomes a route into the established social order, allowing boys to experience a carefully directed future as an exciting discovery of their own potential.
That process extends beyond the stories themselves. Serial publication, publishers’ introductory and promotional material, illustrations, pricing, and market positioning reveal how ‘natural boyhood’ is packaged and sold. Comparing Stevenson with fellow adventure writers G. A. Henty and R. M. Ballantyne places his fiction within a wider commercial culture that makes imperial citizenship feel like a path boys might choose for themselves. Maps, toy telescopes, and adventure outfits marketed alongside or in response to such books carry this promise from reading into play. These objects give tangible form to the connection between boyish adventure and colonial mastery, making empire appear an almost inevitable playground for masculine development.
Stevenson’s islands and Highland wildernesses also serve as training grounds for power over the natural world. Learning to survive includes learning to dominate and reorder the landscape, anticipating forms of environmental control in colonial settings. Meanwhile, the absence or marginalisation of female characters exposes the gendered limits of this freedom: adventurous self-discovery belongs chiefly to boys. Across these narratives and their commercial surroundings, supposedly ‘savage’ impulses are channelled into the manners and authority of the gentlemanly imperial subject. The boy who seems spontaneously wild is ultimately schooled to uphold hierarchies of gender, class, and race – while that schooling is made to look like the natural course of growing up.