It is this complicated companionship that I will be exploring through three central themes: the hostile environment the traveller encounters, the disregard for conventional divides between species that he exhibits in the narrative, and the various lenses through which he interprets his own relationship with his donkey.Īlthough this novel does indeed convey the peaceful atmosphere of a walking tour, an incredibly violent undercurrent also manifests throughout. It is obvious, then, that the relationship between the master and the donkey is a problematic one, where he keeps betraying his own attachment to her despite professing nothing short of hatred for her. However, despite how important the donkey is to the novel, its narrator hardly ever has a word of love for her: he complains about her, and hurts her, and begins the novel by calling her a “self-acting bedstead” (p. What is more, the adjective “modest” comes from the Latin modestus, to keep measure, and Modestine’s (slow) pace is indeed a very central theme of the novel. Her very name is linked to what she brings to the adventure: she is modest in the sense that she is unassuming (she is repeatedly compared to a mouse), but also that she was the cheapest article the traveller acquired before beginning his journey.

She marks both its beginning and its ending, as the novel covers the span of twelve days that Stevenson spent traveling with her. This donkey, Modestine, is in fact one of the most important characters of the novel. However, the very typography of the title puts more emphasis on the traveller’s main companion, the donkey, than on the environment he is traveling through. It belongs upon first glance quite easily to “the Romantic ideal of the walking tour, with its key ingredients of freedom and the accidental” 1.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey (in the Cévennes) is often considered to be one of his more light-hearted, youthful writings.

Modestine the donkey