R. L. Stevenson’s Samoan Gothic: Representing Late Nineteenth-Century Plantations

Abstract

Samoa's plantation landscape haunts Robert Louis Stevenson's 1892 text, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. Stevenson represents the German-run plantations as sites of gothic terror, which are haunted by the ghosts of indentured laborers. In this essay, I examine Stevenson's accounts of German plantation culture alongside corollary narratives from Samoa's three commercial newspapers: the Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette (1877-81), the Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser (1858-96), and the Samoa Weekly Herald (1892-1900). By juxtaposing some of Stevenson's primary texts and local newspaper coverage, I not only identify the divergent discourses that shaped the perceptions of laborers but also reveal how the novelist constructed a form of gothic to participate in debates regarding the ethics of plantation labor in Samoa.