Reanimating Stevenson's corpus

Despite the reanimation of critical and biographical interest in Robert Lou is Stevenson in recent years, the significance of a vital source of narrati ve energy and desire in his fiction has remained buried in obscurity. The r eanimated corpse plays a central role in The Wrong Box, Stevenson's comic m asterpiece of 1889, and also surfaces in other of his fictions including Tr easure Island (1883), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and The Ebb-Tide (18 93-94). The desires brought into play by these narratives of reanimation ar e at once secret and homoerotic in nature, infringing taboos by treating de ath in a comic light, and by reminding readers of what were considered "uns peakable" sexual practices between men. In it disruption of narrative plot, moreover, the reanimated corpse represents an assault on the nineteenth-ce ntury realist aesthetic and has a contaminating effect on the agents of nar rative closure in Stevenson's fiction. Despite the attempts to conceal or d ispose of the unruly corpse, it continues to evoke disturbing desires that, once brought to life, cannot be "buried" by the narratives' strategies of containment. The corpse is thus associated with the indefinite deferral of narrative closure, and with the hollowness of character in the romance styl e that Stevenson preferred over literary realism. Through its effects of ge neric disruption and narrative desire, the reanimated corpse ultimately dem onstrates the impossibility of containing Stevenson's work in any of the "b oxes" traditionally constructed for the classification of narrative fiction .