Robert Louis Stevenson's Thrawn Janet: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis
- M. Grant Kellermeyer
- Mar 27, 2019
- 8 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Robert Louis Stevenson was raised in a devout Presbyterian household, his father was a devoted Tory, and his family was proud of his trajectory to join the law profession, but in 1867 he attended Edinburgh University, and his parents’ love was deeply tested as their son became increasingly attracted to what they considered radical philosophies.
Things came to a boil in 1873 when his father was crushed to learn that his son – a self-described “red-hot socialist” – had embraced atheism, and belonged to a radical students’ club, whose constitution was founded on the chief principle to “disregard everything our parents have taught us.” The Stevenson family was genuinely loving and close, and Stevenson later admitted – with humble self-awareness – that his rebellious decision to spurn his upbringing and mock his parents crushed them. After being confronted by his father with a copy of the club’s irreverent constitution, a sour, self-loathing Stevenson wrote:
“What a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure.’ As my mother said ‘This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.’ O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.”
University proved to be both a source of growth and misery, placing him at odds with his devout and devoted family, and with the internalized Calvinist morality that so frequently shook his self-confidence. This cognitive dissonance between his adopted secular nihilism and his inherited Protestant moral center generated his best literature, which largely followed cultural conflicts between material selfishness and spiritual discipline. Despite his youthful radicalism, Stevenson was at heart a cynic, and by 26 he looked back with wistful nostalgia at his secular militancy:
“For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men [...] Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better—I dare say it is deplorably for the worse.”
He wrote these words in 1877, four years before penning the following ghost story – one of his creepiest tales. At its heart is the sorrowful isolation of disjointed existence: a protagonist who is ultimately neither acceptable to his humanist mentors nor compatible with his religious upbringing – a castaway, cut adrift between two stable continents, and floating alone at the command of purposeless currents.
SUMMARY
The story begins with an unnamed narrator reflecting on the strange life story old Reverend Soulis – a grim, unhappy, fire-and-brimstone preacher in a bleak Scottish parish. His sermons are filled with awe and terror and attract the wonder of the countryside. The strangest part of it, however, is that Soulis was not always such a saturnine old cynic – in fact, when he first came to the windswept village of Balweary he was considered something of a radical. Fresh out of seminary in 1712, the young man attracted public scorn for the huge truck of books that he carried into the parsonage (sagging, so they feared, the weight of countless theological heresies), and for hiring old Janet as his housekeeper. Janet was an earthy, fleshy old crone whom the locals suspected of witchcraft, and their fear of her was so intense that Soulis once had to rescue her from a mob of vengeful women bent on dunking her.
To soothe the crowd of women, Soulis asks Janet to publically rebuke the devil and his works (thinking little of what he considers a superstitious practice), but Janet only does so with nervous fear, as if her words are sealing her fate. The next day Janet frightens the townspeople by walking down from the ominously-named “Hanging Woods” with her throat wrenched in a nasty twist and her head cocked to one side – as if she had been hanged. Even worse are her bulging eyes, macabre rictus grin, and the husky, inhuman voice that ushers from her wrung throat. The locals believe that Satan has punished her for disowning him, but Soulis rejects such superstitious nonsense and becomes closer to Janet than ever.
One day, while meditating near the local cemetery, Soulis is frightened to see a coal-black man loitering around the gravestones, refusing to respond to the preacher’s calls. He asks Janet if she has seen such a figure, but she denies it with her garbled voice sounding as if she is gagging on a pony’s bit. Believing that he has just spoken with Satan, Soulis – who had considered the devil a medieval vestige destined to evolve out of modern theology – tries to calm his thoughts by repeating prayers and scriptures to no avail. Watching Janet wash clothes in the river across from his study, he is struck by the impression that her face is that of a corpse – that she is an undead revenant walking around in cold clay.
That night, a wild storm sweeps the countryside: the sky is darkened by unnaturally-colored thunderheads, and the night is illuminated by spears of lightning. Soulis tries to sleep but his thoughts are troubled by disembodied voices, glowing orbs, and baying hounds. Just as he is pondering the connection between the coal-black stranger and his misshapen housekeeper, Soulis hears a violent struggle coming from Janet’s room and runs to investigate the cacophony. He waves a candle around her room and is about to depart when he sees her body hanging from a thread tied to a nail: eyes and tongue bulging grotesquely, feet swaying above the floor.
Horrified, he locks himself in his room and tries, but fails to pray. After a while he is further dismayed by the sound of flabby footsteps on Janet’s floor, the sound of her door opening, the sound of those footsteps descending the stairs, and the sound of a hand blindly feeling its way along the hall. Running outside with a candle, he stops in the middle of a road and turns around; there, illuminated by the flicker of lightning and the bobbing candle flame, he sees Janet with her crooked neck and her twisted rictus grin, standing before him, and coming nearer.
Soulis charges the corpse in God’s name to return to grave, if dead, and hell, if damned, and the stiffened body – weeks dead by now – collapses in a cloud of ash. Soulis shrieks in terror and runs into the night, and several of his parishioners claims to have seen the black man – Janet’s demonic puppeteer – sulking away in the dim light of morning. The narrator closes by noting that after recovering from a raving fit, Soulis was a changed man.
ANALYSIS
“Thrawn Janet” can be read as Stevenson’s confession—or a kind of penance—written to his parents, or to the stern, internalized Presbyterian voice that haunted his conscience. The Reverend Soulis, with his telling name (suggestive of “soulless”), his intellectual hubris, and his disdain for the “ignorant” parishioners he serves, becomes a natural stand-in for a younger Stevenson.
Like the rebellious author and his iconoclastic university friends, Soulis is eager to expose the narrow-mindedness of his community and their clinging to superstition. His defense of Janet is not born purely of charity but of prideful resistance to what he sees as bigotry. In aligning himself with her—the obvious outcast—he seeks to prove himself above his flock’s provincial fears. But this identification gradually isolates him from the community and exposes him to intimate danger.
The story is strikingly Hawthornesque. It depicts a religious community menaced from within, a minister estranged from his flock, a Satanic “Black Man” in the shadows, and a social outcast who proves to be exactly what she seems: a tormentor in human guise. Like Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, Soulis is undone by the very outsider he seeks to shelter, and like Chillingworth, Janet is both diabolical and pitiless. The association between the young minister and the “loose woman” is deliberately unsettling: Janet’s reputation as a breeder and abandoner of bastards makes her a scandalous inmate for the manse, and their shared bedroom has darkly suggestive undertones. Symbolically, the skeptical minister has taken a witch to bed, just as Stevenson and his skeptical circle once “bedded down” with disbelief in evil itself. The result, for both, is torment.
II.
Janet is not an ethereal vision but a grotesque, corporeal revenant. Scottish and Gaelic folklore often collapses the distance between the natural and supernatural, and Stevenson draws on this tradition: Janet shuffles about like a zombie, washing the minister’s clothes with dead hands. At night she hangs, not from the stout rope that killed her, but from a single thread of darning yarn—as though she were no more than a garment worn by the Devil during the day and hung up after use. It is grimly appropriate that this witch shares a room with Soulis’ divinity books: his humanist skepticism has not protected him, but rather abetted the powers of darkness. Janet and the minister’s books make for apt bedfellows: both are useless against evil if they blind him to its reality.
The Black Man’s appearance—whether an actual devil, a hallucination, or a dark-skinned wanderer—shatters Soulis’ rationalist worldview. It is as devastating to him as it would be for a devout evangelical to discover that God was a myth. His inability to utter the Lord’s Prayer, the most foundational Christian text, signals that he has lost even the last fragile thread tying him to his faith and childhood piety.
At the same time, he cannot retreat into intellectualism: his planned book vanishes from his mind, leaving him literally unable to recall who he is. In this moment of terror, his philosophy collapses. The rational minister finds himself unarmed. Stevenson presents here a vision of human nature that rejects both the orthodox Christian division of body and soul and the materialist’s denial of the soul altogether.
In “Thrawn Janet,” body and spirit are interwoven: Janet is a corpse animated by will, and Soulis is a living man with a deadened heart. Both are suspended between realms—Janet between earth and hell, Soulis between earth and heaven. Evil, Stevenson insists, is not an illusion that enlightenment can dismiss but an inescapable reality of human existence. To deny it is to invite it.
III.
The turning point of the story is Soulis’ desperate appeal to God and the surrender of his personal pride and intellectual hubris. He admits that he cannot explain or master Janet’s condition and releases her to forces beyond his comprehension. This humility—not knowledge—breaks her spell. But his victory is incomplete. The confrontation leaves him permanently “thrawn,” twisted in spirit as Janet was twisted in body. His face becomes ironlike, his eyes wild and spectral, his words dreadful to his hearers. He is transfigured into a living sermon, like the Ancient Mariner, the Wandering Jew, or Hawthorne’s minister in the black veil—forever caught between life and legend.
Soulis cannot return to his youthful skepticism, nor can he rejoin his devout congregation. Instead, he inhabits a philosophical purgatory, alienated from both reason and faith. Each year he preaches his dreadful discourse, testifying not to his mastery of evil but to his helplessness before it. Then he returns to his manse by the river—a liminal space between intellect and wonder, community and solitude—like a ghost returning to its grave.
“Thrawn Janet” thus dramatizes a crisis familiar to Stevenson and his generation of university skeptics: the disillusionment of discovering that evil is no myth. The story insists that human beings cannot think or educate their way out of it. Evil is not merely superstition or ignorance but a part of existence, something that must be acknowledged, feared, and grappled with. Soulis’ fate is to live as a warning: that to deny evil’s reality is to invite its fellowship, and that wisdom—however grim—lies in recognizing the darkness we would prefer to ignore.