Women against a Background of White: The Representation of Self and Nature in Women's Arctic Narratives
Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: The polar regions, perhaps the most alien and hostile of natural environments on earth, aroused great popular interest during the nineteenth century. Even though by mid-century it became clear that the Arctic would not offer the fortune earlier explorers had hoped for, explorers continued to pit their ships and their bodies against the brutal conditions of Arctic cold and darkness in attempts to complete the Northwest Passage and to reach the North Pole. The accounts of these voyages were a highly popular form of literature throughout the nineteenth century, a form that has only recently been rediscovered and submitted to literary study. Typical of this literature is a peculiar mix of hardy adventure and exuberant national pride: explorers imagined their quests as demonstrations of national power; they claimed the lands they discovered for their countries and often named them after their wealthy patrons; and they prided themselves on maintaining their national identities—on not going native. Because of the physical duress involved in the conquest of the Arctic and because exploring was regarded as the conquest of virgin territory, nature in the far north was perceived by Americans and Europeans as a particularly masculine arena. By the final quarter of the nineteenth century, however, white American women were beginning to encroach upon this territory of the masculine imagination and to propose variations on this masculine construction of nature in the Arctic. As they moved North, to work as missionaries, teachers, and journalists and to accompany husbands who were military men and government officials, American women recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and travel books—some published in their time, others published only recently. In this
Author: Linda S. Bergmann
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2145225779