Robert Louis Stevenson And The Theme Of The Double

'Ambivalence, ambiguity, duality, dichotomy, bifurcation - these are the kinds of nouns customary when analysing Stevenson' writes Frank McLynn in a recent biography, noting also that 'the Stevensonian divided self is overdetermined at a number of levels'.[1] Robert Louise Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 of strict Calvinist parents, and it is this religious background that offers the first clue to his lifelong preoccupation with duality. Calvinism posits a number of radical oppositions, such as predestination and free will, faith and works, grace and nature.…