‘Frail Warrior’: Stevenson as Manly Invalid at Saranac Lake

Abstract

Although “frail warrior” appears a contradiction in terms, the epithet captures how Robert Louis Stevenson’s admirers sought to reconcile a late-nineteenth-century ideal of physical manliness with the reality of the adventure writer’s debilitating illness. This construction of the writer’s public image is evident in accounts of his stay at the Saranac Lake, NY, tuberculosis sanatorium during the frigid winter of 1887–1888. The institution’s distinctive wilderness setting for medical treatment enabled a heroic model of disabled masculinity, one that is framed by American national identity. This archetype informs the author’s posthumous reputation and shows how gender and nationality shape metaphoric thinking about illness and authorship.

1. Introduction

Robert Louis Stevenson rarely described his chronic pulmonary illness in depth or detail. In 1885, he wrote to William Archer that his medicine and bloody handkerchiefs defined neither his outlook on life nor essential self: “I should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the world to these unimportant privacies” (Booth and Mehew 1995b, p. 148). Biographers and reporters, however, freely discussed the effects of what they assumed was consumption on his temperament, relationships, and fiction.1 This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in accounts of his convalescence at the Saranac Lake, NY, tuberculosis sanatorium during the frigid winter of 1887–1888. Founded by New York physician Dr. Edward Trudeau only two years before the writer’s stay, the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium was modeled on the successful German high-altitude hospital of Prussian physician Hermann Brehmer. Stevenson’s celebrity as the recently published author of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in addition to curiosity about the Brehmer rest cure in cold mountain air, prompted great interest among admirers and artists.

Contemporary representations of Stevenson highlight and often seek to reconcile contradictions inherent in the figure of the manly invalid, or the “frail warrior”, as one biographer named the Scotsman. Victorians largely considered tuberculosis a feminine disease, despite the condition striking men and women in equal numbers.2 Given Stevenson’s reputation as adventure writer, the boyish vigor and autonomy that many readers associated with his fiction were at odds with subjection to a medically managed sanatorium stay, even if that treatment occurred within an Adirondack wilderness. Stevenson’s chroniclers manage this tension in imaginative ways that bring gendered constructs of authorial autonomy, mobility, and work into relief. Visual and textual portraits of Stevenson’s failing body are thus a significant archive for thinking through complex and sometimes contradictory representations of what Athena Vrettos has called the “imaginative construct[s]” for locating “in the body the source of sexual and social divisions” (Vrettos 1995, p. 3). I maintain, however, that we must also attend to representations of climate when considering a tubercular patient such as Stevenson, one of the many phthisis sufferers prescribed a “change of air” regime in the late nineteenth century. Conceptually freed from the confines of the sickroom, their healing was informed by a sense of place, and in the case of a transatlantic wanderer like Stevenson, framed by national identity. Indeed, the Scotsman’s U.S. biographers consistently assert the superior health-giving properties of a rugged American terrain. The Saranac Stevenson is thus a case study in late-Victorian understanding of how gender shapes metaphoric thinking about the authorial body, disease treatment, and the climate of a “healthy” nation. In turn, these aspects would inform the author’s literary reputation and reception.

2. Late-Victorian Manliness and Invalidism

Historians and critics agree that no single model of masculinity dominates an era or locale; rather, multiple gender constructs inform cultural representation. Disability scholars and activists note, however, that we should avoid an overly simplistic and static model for disability and masculinity. Russell Shuttleworth, Nikki Wedgwood, and Nathan J. Wilson, for instance, recommend that sociologists recognize distinct forms of impairment and their intersection with gender in the “dilemma of disabled masculinity” (Shuttleworth et al. 2012). I suggest that we also attend closely to space and place—the sickroom, sanatorium, laboratory, hospital, or “healthy” climate—as setting for the staging of chronic illness.

Within this spectrum of gender identities and disabilities, most accounts of the Saranac Stevenson invoke a model of physical masculinity. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin persuasively show that American and British models of heroic manhood had much in common after each country emerged from its respective Civil or Crimean war. Variously termed “heroic masculinity”, the “soldier hero”, or “Neo-Spartan virility”, this form of manliness privileges bodily health. Disseminated in British public schools, brigades, and organizations such as the Scouts, this ideal was also adopted by many middle-class Americans on the East coast. Physical manliness, they write, “came to exercise a quite remarkable influence on both sides of the Atlantic” (Mangan and Walvin 1987, p. 6).

Whereas an earlier ideal of masculinity tended to emphasize Christian values and gentlemanly conduct, heroic masculinity was primarily a secular concept that appears to exclude bodily infirmity. Its core attributes are “physical vigor, energy and resolution, courage, and straightforwardness” (Tosh 2005, p. 335). Claudia Nelson has described how this shift to physical manliness is evident in Victorian fiction for boys. Whereas “the manly boy of the 1850s and 60s may well reach his greatest heights by addressing his Creator from a sickbed … by the closing decades of the century … the manly invalid had come to seem a contradiction in terms” (Nelson 1989, p. 526).

Stevenson’s admirers confronted this tension as they shaped his public image. A throng of reporters greeted Stevenson and his mother, wife, stepson, and maid when the celebrity author of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde arrived in New York in August of 1887. Several weeks later, Stevenson wrote to Sidney Colvin that “my reception here was idiotic to the last degree; if Jesus Christ came, they would make less fuss” (Booth and Mehew 1995c, p. 5). The articles emphasized that the author’s current stay in America was for his health, not pleasure or adventure.3 Despite a wearying transatlantic journey, Stevenson had just settled within his New York City hotel room when an American sculptor sought to capture his likeness for posterity.

3. Sculpting the Authorial Body

The bas-relief portraits of Stevenson that bookend his stay at the Saranac Lake Baker Cottage are images that appear progressively more manly in the decades preceding and following his 1894 death. American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Irish-born artist best known in the late 1880s for Civil War memorials, cast his first portrait of the author in 1887, just before Stevenson traveled to the Saranac Sanitarium. Introduced to the writer by their mutual artist friend, William H. Low, Saint-Gaudens delighted in his conversations with the famed author during several sittings in Stevenson’s New York City hotel room. The sculptor’s son, Homer, would later maintain that his father had previously seen his sitters as mere objects to interpret. But after each session, within the sculptor “grew … a desire to comprehend the mental significance of the man before him and to bring it to light through his physical expression and gesture” (Saint-Gaudens 1913, p. 373).

If Saint-Gaudens sought to capture the physicality of his subject, then the artist’s choice to depict the adventure writer in bed may seem puzzling.4 The initial rectangular and gilded copper portrait (see Figure 1) shows the author in a nightshirt as he works amidst rumpled bedsheets, holding a sheaf of papers balanced on his knees in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Compositionally, his sunken chest and concave posture signify infirmity, and several large pillows hold the figure upright. His frame appears to meld with the bed, as the pillows visually echo the curve of his spine. It is difficult to imagine him easily exiting this cocoon to engage with visitors. Nor does the image imply a working man: smoking, like leisurely reading, is an act of consumption, not authorial production. In fact, Stevenson does not actively read the papers in his hand, but rather gazes into space.

Textually, Stevenson’s poem inscribed in the upper left field of the table, “To Will H. Low”, strikes a note of introspective vulnerability as it meditates on a gradual loss of strength and vitality while aging. In ironic contrast to the image of the author’s frail body, Stevenson’s verse imagines the artistic life as an embodied and physically strenuous quest. Beginning with the line, “Youth now flees on feathered foot”, the verses reinforce devotion to a beauty that will never be fully realized by the artist, no matter how he longs to capture it. The artist is an Earth-bound seeker who must physically track beauty in “wet wood and miry lane”, while “unborn beauty” glides above the physical world, an ethereal ideal. The artist will “pant and pound in vain”, on “leaden foot”, and “stumble on” until death closes the pursuit. The verses acquire additional poignancy when juxtaposed with the image of Stevenson in bed. If writing is like walking because both require bodily stamina and exertion, then untold artistic visions will remain unrealized.5

When the sculptor exhibited the finished plaster (see Figure 2), recast as a circular medallion at the National Academy of Design in 1889, critics focused on the image rather than text as they sought to reconcile the image of a lauded adventure writer with a man incapacitated by a debilitating disease. The reviewer for The Art Amateur laments the sculptor’s evident lack of inspiration, writing flatly that he “has represented the writer as invalided, which does not seem to have been necessary … the principal character in the figure is in the hands, which are evidently those of a sick man” (The Gallery: The Academy Exhibition 1889, p. 127). The use of the past participle “invalided” suggests that Saint-Gaudens has imprisoned the author within a state wholly defined by disease. The writer for the Sun was more positive, emphasizing that anyone who knows conditions under which the great author “does his work” will find the representation “natural” and “artistically right”. He approves that the draped cloth is “frankly confessed as blankets” (The National Academy Exhibition 1889, p. 14). The commentator only laments that the new circular form of the portrait gives it a mere “decorative look”, a regrettable alteration of the earlier, more architectural composition of his subject in the horizontal full-body rendering. He concludes by approving of the “exquisitely tender if virile handling of this relief” (The National Academy Exhibition 1889, p. 14). While this reviewer acknowledges the traditionally feminine traits of decoration and sensitivity in the artwork, he also takes care to emphasize the manly traits of productive work and forthrightness.

Saint-Gaudens’s revision of this image for the 1904 horizontal bronze on display at St. Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh demonstrates the portrait’s transformation from intimate likeness to a public memorial (see Figure 3). Two years after the author’s death, a Scottish executive committee was formed to solicit funds for a Stevenson memorial located on the west wall of the kirk. It offered Saint-Gaudens the commission because he was the only artist of international renown who had modeled the artist from life (Docherty 2020, p. 90). The bed is now cast as a couch, and the cigarette has been replaced by a quill. Moreover, the traveling rug, itself signifying mobility in time and space, now exhibits a more classic and decorous drape than the bunched bedding of the earlier version. Stevenson’s appearance is still that of an invalid, yet the image is of a man editing, annotating, or composing—a writer at work who might nonetheless, if he chose, receive guests with some degree of respectability. Moreover, the inscribed prayer from Stevenson, opening “Give us the grace and strength to forbear”, invokes a model of the Christian gentleman, a figure of upright forbearance.

When sculptor Gutzon Borglum memorialized Stevenson’s stay at Saranac Lake eleven years later, he not only moved the invalid out of bed, but outdoors. This is perhaps fitting for an artist best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. Commissioned by the American Stevenson Society, his 1915 tablet (see Figure 4) is mounted on the veranda of the Saranac Lake Baker Cottage, where Stevenson occasionally paced. The monument’s location reinforces the porch as a liminal space between the domesticated sickroom and harsh wilderness. Moreover, the author is now literally upright, his formerly slight frame of the Saint-Gaudens portrait now substantial in buffalo fur coat. He appears to hold the coat closed with his hand on a lapel. This suggests that he had not bothered to button his parka during a winter so cold that temperatures regularly dipped below his thermometer’s lower threshold, minus forty degrees Fahrenheit.

The accompanying inscription records Stevenson’s explanation to a friend of his inspiration for The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale, first conceived in December of 1887: “It was winter; the night was very dark; the air clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. For the making of a story here were fine conditions. ‘Come’, said I to my Engine, let us Make a Tale” (Stevenson 1891, p. xxiii). A bracing and unsullied American landscape is now a muse that enables the author to activate the generative machine (his genius or wit in Scots usage) that resides within him. Whereas many Stevenson readers are familiar with the author’s claim that his brownies, or inner mischievous elves, provided his inspiration, this account of creativity casts the forbidding Saranac climate as site of a genius loci that provides the wintery setting for Stevenson’s novel.

Stephen Chalmers, the principal biographer of Stevenson at Saranac Lake, celebrates the Borglum memorial for its perspicacity. The sculptor, he writes, “got beneath the surface and behind the mask as Saint-Gaudens … never did. It has charm, it has strength, and it has pathos. It is the invalid, but the invalid who can say, ‘O Pain! Where is thy victory?” (Chalmers 1916, pp. 9–10). Chalmers concludes that we must look beyond the seemingly frail appearance of the man, for his body is as a “block of iron painted to look like a lath [strip of wood]” (p. 10). Stevenson’s deteriorating health is thus a mere façade masking an essential strength and solidity.

Disability studies provide a compelling reading of this image of the mask in relation to the incapacitated body. Dana Fore reads Stevenson and his fictional rendering of double lives in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and “The Body Snatchers” as manifesting Stevenson’s adoption of a “super crip” identity. The author’s stoicism and good cheer is a façade, a performance, “to prove his ‘normality’ to those around him” (Fore 2010, p. 34). Employing Stevenson’s own language and Borglum’s image, Chalmers undertakes a similar project. Stevenson now flourishes in severe weather and vanquishes an ever-present enemy, pain. It takes a fellow artist, however, to get “behind the mask”, which means reimagining the conventional contradiction between ill health and physical manliness within the interpretation of text and image. In addition to these visual portraits, textual accounts of Stevenson in New York will further construct an image of masculine courage in the face of illness.

4. Stevenson as the “Frail Warrior” at Saranac Lake

When the writer and his family disembarked in New York City in September 1887, they initially planned a sojourn in Colorado for Stevenson’s health. After learning about the pioneering work of Dr. Edward Livingstone Trudeau, however, they decided on a winter in Saranac Lake, New York, a remote mountain hamlet near the Canadian border. Himself afflicted with tuberculosis, Trudeau founded the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium at Saranac Lake because the cold mountain air benefitted his own condition. Unlike a traditional European sanatorium, such as Davos in Switzerland where the Stevenson family resided in the two winters of 1880–1882, Trudeau’s institution included a laboratory for the study of tuberculosis, the first in America to research the disease. Encompassing clinic and sickroom, lab and wilderness, Saranac Lake offers an array of settings for framing chronic illness.

French scholar and biographer Jean-Marie Carré coined the epithet “frail warrior” for Stevenson in his 1930 biography of the same name. This appellation posits a model of heroic masculinity in which disease itself is the enemy, a metaphor that will dominate accounts of Stevenson’s stay at Saranac Lake. Carré describes the author’s “helpless body” as an “undefended place where the great enemy of disease could overpower him at will” (Carré [1930] 1973, p. 119). Stevenson himself could occasionally further the image of consumption as adversary by naming his disease “Bluidy Jack”, as if a lung hemorrhage was the sudden attack of a pirate. This private name for the disease, however, was not evident in his public writings. Rather, construction of his public image as heroic invalid is captured in such works as a 1916 poem by American MD Samuel Brickner, who himself suffered from tuberculosis and died at the Saranac Lake sanatorium in the same year. The poem accompanies a commemorative calendar and opens with a comparison of Stevenson to “some Ulysses wandering far” (Brickner 1914, l. 1). What, it asks, “though his body, long and lean and frail/Lay scourged beneath his enemy’s constant flail?” (Brickner 1914, ll. 5–6). Brickner’s poem proceeds to assure readers that the enemy of illness could not “restrain” (9) the writer, as inspired showers of words poured forth from his pen. Other chroniclers echo this image of the writer as warrior who vanquishes illness by celebrating optimism and strength in his writings. F. W. O. Werry, secretary of the Saranac Stevenson Society, for instance, exclaims in his 1909 article for Journal of the Outdoor Life, “Wounded as this soldier was, and struggling under disabled conditions, as he continually did, yet his song is the song of the victor, and his watchword is one of encouragement to us all” (Werry 1909, p. 2).

The persistent use of military language in these accounts evokes Susan Sontag’s (1978) influential analysis of metaphoric thinking about disease in her Illness as Metaphor. Sontag singles out martial metaphors as harmful to sufferers because they stigmatize a disease and put the onus of recovery on the patient. Language of soldiers, war, and adversaries, she shows, dominated the discourse on cancer in the twentieth century. In contrast, tuberculosis, the most feared and poorly understood disease of the nineteenth century, accrued a different and often contradictory set of symbolic meanings. It could signify sensitive refinement and working-class squalor, creativity and languor. Stevenson’s chroniclers, however, use military metaphors extensively for the tubercular patient, which indicates greater investment in a form of manliness rather than common tropes of consumption.

Indeed, Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, took great pains to protect the author from charges of effeminacy when addressing the Saranac Stevenson Society in 1915. Echoing other celebrations of his stepfather’s bravery, listeners heard that Stevenson’s “life was a tragedy of ill health redeemed by a heroic courage” (Chalmers 1916, p. 65). Osbourne seeks to correct a popular assumption that the author’s shawls and cloaks, “his strange attire”, are an “affectation” (Chalmers 1916, p. 63), which likely suggests an anxiety about associating his stepfather with an effeminacy attributed to Oscar Wilde and aestheticism. Osbourne assures his audience that Stevenson dressed this way because these garments shielded him from the fatigue of dressing. Osbourne insists that “he was a man absolutely devoid of pose, and hated and derided it in others” (Chalmers 1916, p. 63). Those who loved him, he continues, cannot abide such published accounts as the novelist wearing a lady’s fur coat in Piccadilly, with a bunch of daffodils about his neck. He explains that Stevenson only wore his hair long in the cottage because of a fear of contracting a cold that would result in a prostrating hemorrhage. Osbourne concludes this defense by asserting that “it is hard to conceive of a more successful form of disparagement [than affectation], nor one better calculated to rouse dislike and scorn” (Chalmers 1916, p. 65). In this remarkable configuration of masculinity and illness, Stevenson merely makes rational and expedient decisions in his choice of clothing and hair length. That is, his physical weakness does not undermine his manliness, but rather vindicates it. As guardian of his stepfather’s image, Osbourne will have the authorial body perform illness before femininity.

On some level, Osbourne must have realized that a masculine framework for his father’s illness was necessary for a positive reception. Literary reaction against the author’s exalted reputation, what one unsigned reviewer for The Glasgow Herald called a “Stevenson cult” (1898) began in earnest around 1914, but earlier revisionist accounts may certainly be found. One such detractor, George Moore, levels a charge of superficiality that later critics, including Stephen Crane, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, would echo. Moore writes in 1888 that “I think of Mr. Stevenson as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale, weak hands, or leaning to a large-plate glass window, and scratching thereon exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil … his talent is vented in prettiness of style”. (Moore 1886, pp. 171–72) This is the frail and childlike Stevenson as mere stylist. John Jay Chapman later reinforced this image of an author arrested in childhood: “He became a remarkable, if not a unique phenomenon, —for he never grew up. Whether or not there was some obscure connection between his bodily troubles and the arrest of his intellectual development, it is certain that Stevenson remained a boy till the day of his death” (Chapman 1898, p. 223). Osbourne’s seemingly overdetermined fixation on his stepfather’s appearance is more explicable within this critical context. What is at stake is the critical legacy of the man and his work. What some may see as “prettiness of style” is in fact a reasonable precaution in dangerous conditions.

American biographers further insisted that the rugged Adirondacks provide a healing environment superior to those provided in the Pacific or on the European continent. Will Low told the Stevenson Society that the writer’s uncle claimed that Samoa, to which Stevenson and his family retired after their time in America, had a climate that “enabled him to get better in a certain way, but did not enable him to build up, to increase his strength” (Low 1923, n.p.). In his History of the Adirondacks, Alfred Lee Donaldson conceded that Stevenson’s subsequent life in Samoa was a site of adventure and romance, yet we must see Saranac Lake as “the shadowed portal through which he issued from his winter prison into the dazzling sunshine of eternal summer” (Donaldson 1921, pp. 281–82). Other reports suggest Stevenson’s fundamental incompatibility with life in England or on the Continent. This is particularly evident in anecdotes that emphasize his discomfort with polite society, such as he had to endure in the Davos sanatorium in Switzerland and occasionally braved when distinguished visitors from New York City traveled to visit the now-famous author in his cottage. As if to illustrate that Stevenson was at heart a man more like local rustics than the cosmopolitan crowd of New York City, Chalmers made much of the fact that Stevenson amused himself in Baker Cottage by tootling on a penny whistle, a humble American instrument (Chalmers 1916, p. 5). A journalist also asserted that Americans love optimists and those who strive against great odds, which is why they embraced Stevenson (Chapman 1923). The extent to which his physical and mental well-being improved at Saranac Lake, then, became as much a source of local and national pride as a medical issue.

This is Stevenson as the courageous invalid who perseveres in his writing career, an image widely articulated after his death. Within his own lifetime, Stevenson had literary models for this archetype. He admired the bravery of fellow Scotsman, Sir Walter Scott, for instance, who contended with the effects of childhood polio throughout his life and continued his prodigious literary output even after a series of strokes. Stevenson had another masculine prototype in his friend, W. E. Henley. Henley’s poem “Invictus” and sonnet sequence In Hospital, both written in the 1870s, celebrated a manly courage and autonomy undefeated by physical infirmity, traits also evident in the character of Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The novelist wrote to Henley that “I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver … the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound [man], was entirely taken from you” (Booth and Mehew 1995a, p. 102). This account of the notorious pirate lays equal stress upon his effect on “sound” men as his personal characteristics of “strength” and “masterfulness”. As would be the case in representations of Stevenson’s own illness, the depiction of disabled masculinity must also illustrate how able-bodied men react to that construct. Their dread and subordination are a compelling counterpoint to the expected responses of pity or condescension.

We might also look back to Harriet Martineau’s celebrated convalescence in the 1830s for an archetype of the invalid whose freedom from social responsibilities enables insight and literary output. Alison Winter shows how Martineau’s account of her rich creative life in her sick room established, in the critic’s words, “the ill person’s privileged access to moral, spiritual, and philosophic truths” (Winter 1995, p. 604). For Stevenson at Saranac, however, his bedroom rarely figures as either a space of inspiration or site of healing. He must rather move out on to the porch of Baker Cottage, or, if these qualities were to be accessed indoors, that was because the house was so poorly insulated that it was virtually open to the elements. Due to the cottage’s location on a hill, Stevenson dubbed it “a house in the eye of many winds”, an epithet that his chroniclers frequently mention (Booth and Mehew 1995c, p. 24). In the realm of literary eulogy, Lawrason Brown’s poem posits that “earth was [Stevenson’s] house and heaven his roof” (Brown 1914, p. 9). Erasing the structure of Baker Cottage altogether allows Brown to resolve the problematic nature of Stevenson’s manliness. Chalmers flatly states that Stevenson “did not fish. He did not hunt. He lacked the principal virtue of a man in the wilderness—physical strength” (Chalmers 1916, p. 5). Yet for Chalmers, the poor insulation of Baker Cottage makes the sickroom itself a space of braving the elements. In the tributes of Brown and Brickner, the domestic dwelling of the cottage itself figuratively recedes to reveal the rugged terrain and open sky of the wilderness.

While biographers might successfully elide the writer’s confinement in his sickroom, they must nonetheless contend with his status as sanatorium patient and an attendant loss of agency in the role of patient. Since so many Trudeau papers burned in an 1893 fire, it is difficult to reconstruct the exact nature of Trudeau’s regimen for his famous patient. It is clear that the physician diagnosed Stevenson with a case of “arrested tuberculosis” after analyzing his phlegm, ordered medicines from New York City, and would have likely taken his temperature frequently. Perhaps a more specific regime strikes Stevenson’s historians as irrelevant. They often note with alacrity that Stevenson refused to follow doctor’s orders in any case. “He did what he wanted to do”, writes Clayton Hamilton, “regardless of consequences” (Hamilton 1915, p. 441). The author smoked incessantly and refused to eat regular meals. Nor did Stevenson have any interest in the physician’s lab work or accept his invitation to visit other consumptives on the ground, telling Trudeau that “you know I am sensitive and I cannot bear sick people” (Brown 1914, p. xx). These chronicles embrace the writer as a “bad” patient, a man who is under medical care but in no way medically managed.

Nonetheless, several contemporaneous and posthumous accounts also depict Stevenson as working side-by-side with his doctor to alleviate the great scourge of consumption. For instance, Brickner’s verse renders Stevenson as toiling through his days, with “that great physician by his side” who grants the author a “Lantern lit with hope” that Stevenson then passes to fellow sufferers via his fiction and essays (Brickner 1914). The writer’s work is further cast as a form of medical aid in an anecdote recounted by Chalmers. He tells how a patient arrived at Saranac. When he was asked if he had been prescribed any medication by his New York physician, the man produced a prescription reading “Fresh air, fresh eggs, Read Robert Louis Stevenson”. (Chalmers 1916, p. 54). In these formulations, Stevenson supports yet remains independent from medical authority, which is only possible through separating the author’s embodied self from his body of work. While the man may thwart medical counsel, his texts model a resilient cheer that functions like a doctor’s prescription and can only hasten a patient’s recovery.

At the same time, we need to note what these enactments exclude in their construction of the manly invalid. For much of his stay at Saranac Lake, Stevenson was surrounded by women. Yet the reader may be justifiably surprised to come across a chance mention of the Stevenson servant, Valentine, a consistent resident of Baker Cottage. She only makes an appearance when writers wish to emphasize the household’s frigid living conditions. In these stories, she woke up one morning to find the handkerchief under her pillow frozen. It is hard to imagine that she would not have attended to Stevenson’s bodily needs, and perhaps received instruction from Dr. Trudeau, especially regarding meals. Moreover, the author’s strong-willed, American-born wife, Fanny, often cast in other reports as a type of frontier woman, rented the cottage and visited, but she receives scant attention in the contemporary biographic record. The author’s mother does make an appearance, but it is to press her son into making a speech at a local dinner.

As visual and textual depictions of the authorial body seek to reconcile masculinity and chronic illness, they occlude woman’s traditional authority in the home and sickroom. The writer’s Saranac biographers may have posited new ways to think about the dilemma of late-Victorian disabled masculinity, yet they do so by eliding feminine knowledge or authority. And thus, we are left with the most enduring image of Stevenson from Saranac, a gaunt man huddled in a great Buffalo skin fur coat, in the dark and cold, alone.

5. Conclusions

Stevenson’s illness transcended mere medical diagnosis. The author as a “frail warrior” was a repeat textual and visual performance made possible by reimagining conventional relations between masculinity and poor health, a body of work and the authorial body, wilderness and sickroom. Stevenson and the artists who depict him both reflect and alter evolving models of authorial manliness during his lifetime and in the decades after his death. While the author’s physical weakness is a matter of concern for his admirers immersed in a culture of physical manliness, they employ metaphoric thinking that nonetheless stresses Stevenson’s autonomy and productivity. The Adirondacks is a crucial setting for this representation, as the rugged conditions test his spirit, provide inspiration, and offer healing, all central to his legacy as “the frail warrior”.