‘Ordered South’: The Spatial Sense of the Invalid in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Early Travel Essay

Abstract

Says Stevenson’s “Crabbed Age and Youth” poses the question, “What if there were no centre,” but that “the whole world [is] a labyrinth without end or issue?” and then offers an answer: “There is no centre to the maze” because “the centre is everywhere.” Claims that for Stevenson the traveler, the issue of a center is directly related to his deteriorating physical and emotional state. Claims that in “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.” Although 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. Concludes that Stevenson speaks with his own voice as he recognizes the need to map his own horizons and locate his own “centre”: the “everywhere” of the creative mind.