ABSTRACT
The missionary context of the South Seas also offers the opportunity to consider the role of darkness in the formation of Robert Louis Stevenson's imagination. As if taking his cue from the missionary insistence on 'lighting up the darkness', Stevenson develops his images and his prose from a background of shade and shadows. In his South Seas writing Stevenson positions both himself and his reader in a landscape oriented by lights shining in the darkness. Because Stevenson had an enduring infatuation with patterns of light and darkness, he was naturally drawn toward light's protean attendant, the shadow. Instead of focusing upon the lantern slides, Stevenson engaged the peripheral play of light, darkness, and shadow that repeatedly took hold of his imagination. He was fascinated by the ways in which the lightening and darkening of the church arrested their movements, and how one by one they broke away to watch the images and then regrouped to disappear down a dark road.
