Salt and Scud : The Rhetoric of the Sea in Robert Louis Stevenson's Works

Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson, who is well known for Treasure Island (1883) and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), was born in a family engaged in lighthouse engineering for generations. Under the influence of his family business, the sea had been familiar to the Scottish writer since his childhood although he did not succeed it. For this reason, it is no wonder that he should foreground the sea as the main setting in some of his works. However, Stevenson’s representation of the sea can never be limited to direct descriptions of it. In fact, Treasure Island, which includes the scene of sailing on the sea, also indicates the geographical and metaphorical intrusion of the sea into the land by using the word “salt”. In addition, focusing on his rhetoric uncovers the fact that even his fiction without the sea as a setting is interspersed with elements of the sea. As an instance, Jekyll and Hyde is a metropolitan-Gothic novella which is set in the late-nineteenth-century London, but there are actually found in the text several expressions associated with the sea such as “salt” and “scud”. Furthermore, two key imageries—dry and wet—play pivotal roles in the text especially in terms of characterisation and descriptions of fog. Therefore, analysing these expressions will not only lead to a better understanding of the novella but also enable us to interpret it as an ocean-Gothic. Finally, turning out eyes toward The Wrecker (1892), one of his later Pacific fiction and a collaboration work with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, we can confirm that the three works share in the same kind of rhetoric and also clarify how obsessive Stevenson had been about the sea for a long time in writing as well as real life.