writing of Catriona is Alison Graeme in The Master of Ballantrae (1889), but although she is a pivot for the rivalry of the brothers James and Henry she is subservient to it. Catriona is at the forefront of at least part of the novel that bears her name.
Stevenson was inhibited in writing about relations between men and women, for he felt that in order to do so honestly entailed exploring sexuality and sexual behaviour. In the 1880s to tackle this with any frankness was difficult: the climate of opinion was against it. In Catriona he solves the problem. In a Victorian context it is a highly unconventional tale: a young girl and a young man share a home, the situation contained, but not defused, by innocence on the one hand and a highly developed sense of responsibility and respectability on the other. David sets out to be ‘wise for the pair of us’. Stevenson is able to describe an awakening sexuality without compromising either of his characters, for David is not only too prim he is also too bashful to confess his love, and in fact his wooing is done for him by Alan Breck.
Catriona and Alan have much in common; they share not only a Highland background but the same pride and touchiness. The Highland girl we meet first in Edinburgh, out of her element in the city streets, has a vulnerable dignity, and this is part of the attraction for David. But Stevenson does not build on that. In fact, the Catriona of the latter part of the novel is less self-possessed, less appealing—in fact, less adult. The reason that Stevenson allowed his heroine to become more dependent and more of a child, once transported even further from her home, is not hard to find: a more sophisticated and mature young woman would have been only too aware of the impropriety of sharing lodgings with a young man. In those circumstances it would have been difficult for Stevenson to throw his two young people together and allow them to learn about each other.
Stevenson creates an intriguing situation, but he is not able to explore it fully, nor to draw it successfully into the main current of the story of David Balfour. What is crucial is that David cannot shake off his Highland adventure, that although at the end of Kidnapped he cheerfully embraces his future as a man of property with a profession, his link with the landless and the outlawed will never be severed. Catriona, of course, becomes part of this link. But at the end of the novel she has been placed firmly in the context of David’s new and sober existence, and it is Alan Breck, ‘a little, lean, lively gentleman in a scratch-wig and a wrap- rascal’, who visits late at night and has the Balfour family ‘drinking the king’s health across the water’.
Catriona, though part of the novel takes place in Holland, is as much about Scotland as Kidnapped, and David Balfour is as much about Stevenson himself as about the son of a village schoolmaster accidentally caught up in the turbulence of Scottish history. But if David Balfour is that part of Stevenson which recognized that the passionate contentions of Scotland’s history were barriers to progress, Alan Breck is the part that responded to every possibility of commitment and courage. Stevenson was fascinated by what he saw as the split personality at the heart of the Scottish character and the Scottish experience. In other novels and stories he described antipathy and mutual destruction. In Kidnapped and Catriona he was able, after a fashion, to reconcile opposites. Catriona herself does play a part in this reconciliation, but in the end it is the friendship and the unlikely alliance of David and Alan that dominates.
Catriona was the last complete novel of Scotland that Stevenson wrote. When he died, in 1894, he was part way through Weir of Hermiston and had written fragments of two other Scottish novels. St Ives was also left unfinished. Although he was also writing about his experiences in Samoa and the Pacific, and writing with extraordinary perception and sympathy, his thoughts and his imagination returned continually to Scotland. All his life he had struggled to confront and explain his own background and the country that had shaped him, and the need to do that did not diminish with distance. He looked at the harshest and most uncompromising features of his heritage with generosity, sensitivity, affection and irony, and all of these are present in Catriona.
Jenni Calder
TO CHARLES BAXTER, WRITER TO THE SIGNET.
My dear Charles,
It is the fate of sequels to disappoint those who have waited for them; and my David, having been left to kick his heels for more than a lustre in the British Linen Company’s office, must expect his late re-appearance to be greeted with hoots, if not with missiles. Yet, when I remember the days of our explorations, I am not without hope. There should be left in our native city some seed of the elect; some long-legged, hot-headed youth must repeat to-day our dreams and wanderings of so many years ago; he will relish the pleasure, which should have been ours, to follow among named streets and numbered houses the country walks of David Balfour, to identify Dean, and Silvermills, and Broughton, and Hope Park, and Pilrig, and poor old Lochend—if it still be standing and the Figgate Whins—if there be any of them left; or to push (on a long holiday) so far afield as Gillane or the Bass. So, perhaps, his eye shall be opened to behold the series of the generations, and he shall weigh with surprise his momentous and nugatory gift of life.
You are still—as when first I saw, as when I last addressed you—in the venerable city which I must always think of as my home. And I have come so far; and the sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me; and I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny.
Vailima, Upolu, Samoa,1892
R. L. S.
OF THE EARLIER ADVENTURES OF DAVID BALFOUR AS SET FORTH IN ‘KIDNAPPED’
ALEXANDER AND Ebenezer Balfour, brothers, of the house of Shaws near Cramond in the Forest of Ettrick, being in love with the same lady, and she preferring the elder brother, Alexander, it was agreed between them that Alexander should take the lady, and Ebenezer, as amends for his disappointment, the estate of Shaws. Alexander and his wife removed to Essendean, where they lived obscurely, Alexander in the character of village schoolmaster and where an only son was born to them, namely David Balfour, the hero of this history. David, brought up in ignorance of the family affairs and of his own claim on the estates, and losing both parents before he was eighteen, was left with no other fortune than a sealed letter from his father addressed to his uncle Ebenezer, which was handed him by the minister of Essendean, Mr Campbell. Proceeding to deliver it, David found his uncle living childless and a miser at Shaws; who received him ill, and after vainly endeavouring to compass his death, had him trepanned on board the brig Covenant, Captain Hoseason, bound to Carolina, to the end that he might be sold to labour in the plantations. But early in the voyage, the Covenant, running through the Minch, struck and sent to the bottom an open boat, from which there saved himself and came on board one Alan Breck Stewart, a Highland gentleman banished after the ’45, and now engaged in smuggling rents from his clansmen, the Appin Stewarts, to their chief Ardshiel, living in exile in France. Hoseason and his crew, learning that Alan had gold about him, conspired to rob and murder him; but David, being made privy to the plot, put Alan on his guard and promised to stand by him.
Favoured by the shelter of the round-house, and by Alan’s courage and skill of fence, the two got the better of their assailants in the attack which followed, killing or maiming more than half of them; whereby Captain Hoseason was disabled from prosecuting his voyage, and came to terms with Alan, agreeing to land him on a part of the coast whence he might best make his way to his own country of Appin. But in attempting this the Covenant took ground and sank off the coast of Mull. Those on board saved themselves as they best could, David separately; being first cast on the Isle of Earraid, and thence making his way across Mull. Alan had passed before by the same road, and left word that David should follow and rejoin him in his own country at the house of his kinsman, James Stewart of the Glens. On his way to keep this tryst, David found himself