The Island in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide and Joseph Conrad’s Victory, or the adventure of an enclave

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse in what ways the desert island can be considered as a form of enclave, and interrogates its literary function, through the comparative study of two novels that partly take place on islands, namely The Ebb-Tide by R.L. Stevenson, and Joseph Conrad’s Victory. It first examines the characteristics shared by the island and the enclave, by drawing on Foucault’s heterotopia in order to establish a typology, and to study the fundamental ambivalence of the insular enclave. Indeed, its being simultaneously enclosed and porous in turn affects the characters’ identities, the narrative’s structure and its generic status, which are all characterised by the same ambivalence. The enclaved insular space then seems to be the ideal place for the creation of a new form of adventure that draws on the Romance tradition to which the desert island motif is linked, only to better deconstruct it. Finally, the article highlights that the very spatial structure of the enclave plays a crucial role in the creation of a new poetics of adventure that relies on its important dramatic potential.