“Your leg will stand it?”: One-legged Man’s Transgression in Treasure Island and The Sign of Four

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which transgressive masculinity is represented in the damaged male bodies of Long John Silver in Robert Lois Stevenson’s Treasure Island and of Jonathan Small in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Doyle, who evidently had the crippled Silver in his mind when he created Jonathan Small, used him to rearticulate and elaborate the degenerated morality and masculinity. Among Britons, there was increasing concern about degeneration, an upshot of the military and economic difficulties the British Empire experienced in the mid-nineteenth century. The nation felt that its power ought to be reasserted, a project that inevitably attends a recuperating morality and masculinity. Out of such a milieu, Doyle and Stevenson create not only morally sound characters, such as Sherlock Holmes who represents the ideal of Victorian masculinity, but also their antitheses such as Silver and Small. The latters’ lameness signifies more than a lack of morality; it embodies criminality itself. Silver and Small’s villainy and its inevitable outcome are expressed through their prostheses. A symbol of their failed masculinity, the artificial leg turns into a murderous tool, and ultimately, ensures their defeat. Tracking down these criminals thus coincides with the project of rehabilitating masculinity in Treasure Island and The Sign of Four. Even when Silver and Small are captured and the treasure found, however, the problem of masculinity remains unresolved. The problem is, like the disappeared Silver or Watson’s free-floating wound, always there to reappear and trouble what is imagined to be normative masculinity of the times.