The Blue Lagoon: A Romance | Page 4

was at this point, perhaps, that Stacpoole
began to view literary success only in terms of sales figures and numbers of editions.
A strange tale of reincarnation, cross dressing, and uxoricide, Stacpoole's third novel,
Death, the Knight, and the Lady (1897), purports to be the deathbed confession of
Beatrice Sinclair, who is both a reincarnated murderer (male) and a descendant of the
murder victim (female). She falls in love with Gerald Wilder, a man disguised as a
woman, who is both a reincarnated murder victim (female) and the descendant of the

murderer (male). Despite its originality, the novel was killed by "Public Indifference"
(Stacpoole's term), which also killed The Rapin (1899), a novel about an art student in
Paris.
Stacpoole spent the summer of 1898 in Sommerset, where he took over the medical
practice of an ailing country doctor. So peaceful were his days in this pastoral setting that
he had time to write The Doctor (1899), a novel about an old-fashioned physician
practicing medicine in rural England. "It is the best book I have written," Stacpoole
declared more than forty years later. He could also say, in retrospect, that the book's weak
sales were a disguised blessing, "for I hadn't ballast on board in those days to stand up to
the gale of success, which means incidentally money." He would be spared the gale of
success for nine more years, during which he published seven books, including a
collection of children's stories and two collaborative novels with his friend William
Alexander Bryce.
In 1907, two events occurred that altered the course of Stacpoole's life: he wrote The
Blue Lagoon and he married Margaret Robson. Unable to sleep one night, he found
himself thinking about and envying the caveman, who in his primitiveness was able to
marvel at such commonplace phenomena as sunsets and thunderstorms. Civilized,
technological man had unveiled these mysteries with his telescopes and weather balloons,
so that they were no longer "nameless wonders" to be feared and contemplated. As a
doctor, Stacpoole had witnessed countless births and deaths, and these events no longer
seemed miraculous to him. He conceived the idea of two children growing up alone on an
island and experiencing storms, death, and birth in almost complete ignorance and
innocence. The next morning, he started writing The Blue Lagoon. The exercise was
therapeutic because he was able to experience the wonders of life and death vicariously
through his characters.
The Blue Lagoon is the story of two cousins, Dicky and Emmeline Lestrange, stranded
on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children, they are cared for by Paddy
Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in
paradise. Frightened and confused by the man's gruesome corpse, the children flee to
another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and
eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage
to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially remarkable:
fifteen-year-old Emmeline, alone in the jungle, loses consciousness and awakes to find a
baby boy on the ground near her. Naming the boy Hannah (an example of Stacpoole's
penchant for gender reversals), the Lestranges live in familial bliss until they are
unexpectedly expelled from their tropical Eden.
The parallels between The Blue Lagoon and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve are
obvious and intentional, but Stacpoole was also influenced by Lewis Carroll's Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which he invokes in a passage describing the
castaways' approach Palm Tree Island:
"One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was flooding into the
lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along far swifter than the sculls
could have driven it. Seagulls screamed about them, the boat rocked and swayed. Dick
shouted with excitement, and Emmeline shut her eyes TIGHT.
"Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf
became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and found

herself in Wonderland."
This direct reference to Wonderland prepares the reader for the many parallels that follow.
When their adventures begin, both girls are about the same age, Alice seven and a half,
Emmeline exactly eight. Just as Alice joins a tea party in Wonderland, Emmeline plays
with her tiny tea set on the beach after they land. Emmeline's former pet, like the
Cheshire Cat, "had white stripes and a white chest, and rings down its tail" and died
"showing its teeth." Whereas Alice looks for a poison label on a bottle that says "Drink
Me," Emmeline innocently tries to eat "the never- wake-up berries" and receives a stern
rebuke and a lecture