R. L. スティーヴンソンの生涯 : 父性との葛藤

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Soseki Natsume, a Japanese writer of the Meiji era (1867–1916),had great respect for Robert Louis Stevenson, noticing ‘simplicity andvigour’ as well as ‘rapidity and directness’ in his writings. For more thana century, Stevenson has been popular with readers, with his strikinglyimaginative works being characterised by a lucid style and well plannedstructure. However, our attention is drawn not only to his literature, butalso his extraordinary life. As a paradigm of a rebel against middle-classsurroundings, his life itself can be considered a topic for study. In this essay,I should like to explore the way he led his life, referring to some of hisliterary works.Born on 13th November 1850 at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, he was theonly child of Thomas Stevenson, a civil engineer who designed lighthousesand harbours, and Margaret Balfour, the daughter of a church ministerat Colinton, a village four miles from Edinburgh. Troubled by bronchialillness, at the age of 2, Louis began to be nursed by Alison Cunningham,a sturdy fisherman’s daughter aged 30 years old, who came from Fife.The Stevensons moved to 1 Inverleith Terrace in 1853 and moved again,four years later, to 17 Heriot Row in the New Town. After 18 months atEdinburgh Academy, where Louis’s formal education began at the age of11, and a short stay at a boarding school in Middlesex, he attended MrThompson’s institution in Frederick Street, Edinburgh.From 1867, Louis often spent his holidays at the cottage that his familyrented at Swanston, on the outskirts of the city, and which they used forthe next 14 years, giving him the opportunity to ramble over the PentlandHills and wander far and wide. In the same year, he entered EdinburghUniversity to study civil engineering with the aim of following in his father’s footsteps. Absenting himself from classes and lectures that failed to ignitehis intellectual curiosity, he frequently explored the city and sought itsenjoyment.He was inspired by the observation that the city had two different faces.Whereas the New Town, where Stevenson’s home was located, was orderlyand respectable, the Old Town, with its dubious inns and the brothels in theback alleys, looked squalid and even menacing.Demolishing the argument that Louis at this time met a prostitute called‘Claire’ whose real name was Kate Drummond and cherished affection forher, J. C. Furnas (1952) insisted that ‘Claire’ was the pseudonym Louis gaveto Mrs Frances Sitwell, with whom Louis began a friendship around 1874.However, Forbes Macgregor (1989) argues that ‘Claire’ was the daughterof a blacksmith who lived in Swanston and passionately loved Louis.Apparently, he still believes in the episode based on Katherine Osbourne’sletter, cited in The True Stevenson by George Hellman (1925).According to James S. Bennet’s note printed in Robert Louis Stevenson(1969) by Compton Mackenzie, Louis’s unfinished novel, i.e. Weir ofHermiston (1896), induces him to think of the days that Louis spent atSwanston Cottage and observes that there are similarities between his storiesand his actual experience. Louis must have fallen in love with a certaingirl, who is called ‘Christina Elliot’ in the novel and who was part of thehousehold at Buckstane Farmhouse, where Mrs Romanese entertained Louisand his bohemian friend Sam Bough with tea and scones.Mr Bennet’s remarks bring us to examine the setting and charactersdepicted in Louis’s brief novel The Story of a Lie (1879), in which Esther,the daughter of a bohemian painter, and Dick, the personification of theauthor, develop a deep love for each other amid a moorland setting. MrNaseby, Dick’s father, a squire who resembles Adam Weir, the Justice-Clerkin Weir of Hermiston, is reminiscent of Louis’s father Thomas, who believedin the conventional moral values of the society of the time and was opposedto his son’s marrying a girl of a different social status.In my view, ‘Claire’ is representative of the girls Louis met anddeveloped relationships with during his youth, regardless of whether anyone of them actually bore that name.Louis’s weak health allowed him to abandon the pursuit of his father’scareer and change courses to read law, but his ambition was to earn a livingfrom writing. After graduating from university, he left for an artists’ colonyat Grez, near Barbizon, where he met Fanny Osbourne, an American marriedwoman ten years older than him, whom he would eventually marry.Until the end of life, his early life in Scotland lingered in Louis’sconsciousness, and provided him with the material for his major works,most notably Weir of Hermiston. He could not shake off the memories ofhis quarrels with his father, the sensuous joy he experienced with women,and the dissociation of personality caused by a struggle between his tenderfeelings and Victorian morality. When he started his career as a writer, heproduced The Story of a Lie, recollecting the affairs that he embarked uponwhile at Swanston Cottage. In his last novel, he once again picked up thistheme and depicted similar characters. Sadly, the intensity of imagining andreconstructing the emotions he had experienced in his youth dealt him afatal blow, and he died of a sudden brain haemorrhage in Samoa in 1894.

R. L. スティーヴンソンの生涯 : 父性との葛藤

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