In The Beach of Falesá, Robert Louis Stevenson doesn't really deviate all that far from literary realism. Although there are many strange, exotic, and unusual elements in the story, most, if not all of them, derive from the charlatan Cade's attempts to convince the island-dwellers that he has demonic powers.
In that sense, any departures from the conventions of literary realism are entirely artificial, in keeping as they are with Cade's shameless conning of the island-dwellers for his own benefit. To be sure, the people who live on the island, even without Cade in their midst, would practice certain customs that Victorians would find somewhat strange and exotic. But the depiction of these customs would, in itself, constitute a kind of literary realism of its own, as it would involve a truthful, unvarnished account of ancient practices in which the island-dwellers have engaged for centuries.
In examining literary...
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realism, it's important to realize that, although it is a concept devised by Western critics and scholars, it is nonetheless equally applicable to the depiction of different societies and cultural traditions. That being the case, one can seeThe Beach of Falesá as, in its essentials, a work of literary realism, albeit one that incorporates strange elements which illustrate the character of a particularly devious and manipulative con man.
Robert Louis Stevenson does not stray far from realist principles in The Beach of Falesá, but the text also demonstrates many elements of the romantic adventure stories for which the author is most well known. Stevenson sets the tale in a remote Pacific location that his British and American readers would mostly like consider exotic. The main character, Wiltshire, is an innocent with a romantic nature in the sense of desiring to escape from the tedium of ordinary, European life by making a living in the islands. In another sense, he is a romantic in terms of his search for love. His naïveté is confirmed as he unwittingly violates local customs and finds himself tricked by Case.
The author incorporates gothic elements as well, as the character of Case seems so evil that he could be diabolically possessed. The exotic aspects of the adventure are combined with the gothic features in emphasizing Case's mysterious powers in the realm of magic, as he can apparently channel supernatural forces.
As the story develops, however, the author veers back to a realist approach, making Case a more mundane villain. He not only prides himself on tricking and manipulating others, but will not stop short of killing off his rivals. As he sets himself against Wiltshire, a basic man versus man conflict thus undergirds the plot.
How does Stevenson use gothic elements to deviate from realism in "The Beach of Falesá"?
"The Beach of Falesá" is one of R. L. Stevenson's more naturalistic works, set in the present day and without the swashbuckling adventure of Kidnapped or the path-breaking science fiction of the The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's a straightforward story about deception and vindication, but with an underlying message about the difficulties inherent in cross-cultural relations between Europeans and Pacific Islanders and, at least implicitly, about the injustice of imperialism.
The novella is gothic only in the sense that the island people are imposed upon by a man named Case who has tricked them into believing that he has supernatural powers or that he is, or controls, a "devil" whom they call Tiapolo. Case is a trader who is the rival of the narrator Wiltshire, and he has turned the "natives" against Wiltshire by convincing them that the girl Wiltshire has married has had a taboo placed upon her.
Case's power stems from his having set up a series of auditory and visual tricks deep in the island forest. A "Tyrolean harp" creates eerie sounds when the wind blows through it, and statues covered in "luminous paint" have been placed in a kind of demonic jungle shrine to frighten the islanders, who are stereotypically portrayed as ignorant and gullible. It is a veneer of the gothic and preternatural Stevenson presents in the tale, and in the end, Wiltshire succeeds in blowing up Case's "temple" and killing this manipulator, though at the cost of Wiltshire's breaking his own leg and having to start anew as a trader in a different location.
What could be labeled gothic, at least metaphorically, however, is the frightening ability of a man such as Case to perpetrate such a deception. In some ways Stevenson can be seen to have anticipated Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Like Kurtz in Conrad's novella, Case has set himself up as a kind of god over the "natives." In both cases it is an especially perverse form of colonialist dominance being carried out by an unscrupulous and borderline psychotic individual. Whether or not these kinds of ruses were successful in reality, there is surely something gothic in the very idea of them as attempts to use superstition and vulnerability to bolster the power dynamic that existed between colonizer and colonized.
In Stevenson's treatment, Wiltshire, though his speech and attitude are racist, can be seen as subverting this dynamic, by legitimizing his marriage to Uma and by destroying Case's phony religious impositions upon the island people. "The Beach of Falesá" is thus a seminal progressive work, though it makes its points in a roundabout way and unfortunately expresses or seems to uphold the negative stereotypes so commonly held at the time by Europeans about nonwhite peoples.