"Ordered South": The Spatial Sense of the Invalid in Robert Louis Stevenson's Early Travel Essay.

By Nineteenth-Century Prose

Release Date: 2004-03-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines

Description

In his essay, "Crabbed Age and Youth," Robert Louis Stevenson poses the question, "What if there were no centre at all ... and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?" and then offers an answer: "There is no centre to the maze because ... the centre is everywhere." For Stevenson the traveler, the issue of a center, a fixed point of departure or destination, a definable periphery, is directly related to his deteriorating physical and emotional state. In the 1874 essay, "Ordered South," Stevenson presents the reader with an example of the spatial and temporal subjectivity of the invalid as he travels by train from an unspecified "north" to an unidentified "south." Though the traveler's mind receives and interprets the many visual images before him as the train, a moving longitudinal line, splits his physical and psychological world in two, the illness that compels him south determines his distorted relation to all things and forces a retreat into imagined time and space. Ultimately, Stevenson speaks with his own voice as he recognizes the need for the man, the artist, the invalid, to map his own horizons and locate his own "centre": the "everywhere" of the creative mind. **********

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