© 1999 by Oxford University Press
Stevenson's 'sterling domestic fiction', 'The Beach of Falesá'
This article explores the relations between genre, gender, geography, and race in Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Beach of Falesá'. It argues that, while the story is a generic hybrid, its deepest and most consistent affiliations are with the feminine realm of the domestic novel. Moving away from Gothic modes of imaging colonial space and from adventure modes of defining masculinity, the story traces its narrator-protagonist's embrace of marriage, domesticity, and fatherhood. This trajectory reverses Stevenson's much-publicized stance on genre and gender in the romance-realism debates of the 1880s, disrupts the conventional polarization of the domestic and the exotic in the Victorians' fictional mapping of their world, and challenges Victorian notions of racial as well as fictional purity - for the story's moral centre is its protagonist's commitment to a mixed-race marriage and family. The marriage between the English Wiltshire and Polynesian Uma, defying the European taboo on miscegenation, initiates a series of transgressions which call into question the boundaries that separate romance and realism, adventure and domesticity, masculinity and femininity, white skin and brown. The Wiltshires' mixed-race children hypostasize the hybrid text 'The Beach of Falesá': they are the material foundation for all the generic and ideological crossings proposed by this 'sterling domestic fiction'.