The Price of Paradise: Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and British Expansion in the Pacific

The fourth chapter turns to British settlers in the Pacific whose attempts to create ideal colonies reveal the weaknesses inherent in the British concept of themselves as a “superior” civilizing force. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters and The Beach of Falesá, he questions the right of the British to colonize or settle in the South Seas as part of a “civilizing mission.” By examining the effects of the invasive settler, explorer, and trader on the island landscape, Stevenson linked the health of the islanders and the state of the islands, presenting European invasion as a violent and potentially dangerous “disease.” While Stevenson focused primarily on the interactions between British and Pacific islanders, Joseph Conrad instead focused on the ways in which life in the Pacific impacted British individuals in his later and largely overlooked Pacific works, Freya of the Seven Isles and “Because of the Dollars. Conrad’s work reflects an increasingly dark vision of British settlement in the Pacific, one that depicts British men and women as weak and degenerate.