La Belle-Jenny (Partie carrée, T. Gautier) et l’Hispaniola (Treasure Island, R. L. Stevenson) : l’hétérotopie en mirage ?

In this article, we focus on how the motif of the ship is diverted in two adventure novels, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Gautier’s Partie carrée. In both works, the same phenomena occurs: ships, defined by Michel Foucault as the perfect heterotopia, have only a semblance of existence. They serve as vehicles for the imagination, primarily as means of transportation to the upcoming heterotopia that is the island. Time and geography are annulled upon leaving the port, and sailboats only regain tangible reality upon approaching the coast. Thus, the ship, an ambivalent object, makes it possible to ignore the dangers of the sea—she is then both the incarnation of a maritime universe and a means of detachment from it. Finally, the vessel is a malleable element of the narrative, which the authors duplicate at will, in a logic of fruitful embedding that contributes to this fragmented heterotopia.