The Blue Lagoon: A Romance | Page 4

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 about poison from Paddy Button. "The Poetry of Learning" chapter echoes Alice's dialogue with the caterpillar. Like the wily creature smoking a hookah, Paddy smokes a pipe and shouts "Hurroo!" as the children teach him to write his name in the sand. The children lose "all count of time," just as the Mad Hatter does. Whereas Alice grows nine feet taller, Dick sprouts "two inches taller" and Emmeline "twice as plump." Like the baby in the "Pig and Pepper," Hannah sneezes at the first sight of Dicky. The novel