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X-posted from H-ASEH (by permission).
Stefanie Rixecker
ECOFEM Coordinator
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Francis Spufford. _I may be some Time: Ice and the
English Imagination_. New York: St. Martin's Press
1997. 372 pp. Illustrations. $ 26.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-
312-17442-X
Reviewed for H-ASEH by Angela Schwarz, <Dr. A.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, University of Duisburg,
Germany
The Ultimate Challenge
There are not many parts of the globe that have
fascinated western and particular English imagination
to such an extent as the polar regions have. Although
at least the Arctic had been a human habitat for
thousands of years on the arrival of Europeans,
explorers, whalers, travellers from the warmer regions
came to envisage the polar world as an environment
utterly and relentlessly hostile to human existence,
the whiteness or rather colourlessness of ice and snow
epitomizing nullity and desolation. That very moment
of seeing and envisaging was the starting-point for
the stylization of the poles as a place of mystery and
ultimate challenge for man, bringing about a lasting
fascination with this challenge and the expeditions of
those who were to accept it.
Francis Spufford aptly begins with the question why,
considering the hostility of this great unknown, men
should have taken it upon themselves to face this
ordeal - to get to the gist of the matter one might
add that the unkown could be the Antarctic just as
well as some South American or African jungle teeming
with dangers for say an early nineteenth-century
explorer. And if some individuals chose to risk their
lives on expeditions only vaguely mapped out
beforehand why should others, sitting snugly in their
armchairs by the fireside, the amenities of life at
arm's length, eagerly devour reports and expositions
of their struggles? To get at people's motives one
must go, as Spufford convincingly argues, beyond
material gain or the mere acquisition of knowledge
about geographical expansion. Rather, one must look at
the imagination, into the collective memory of the
English nation and the images and myths of the polar
regions, of national virtues and of an enterprising
national character.
Consequently, the book unfolds not a polar history of
the Parrys, Franklins, Shackletons and Scotts as it
has already been written many times over, but a
largely unchartered history of "assumptions, responses
to landscape, cultural fascinations, aesthetic
attraction to the cold regions" (p. 6) as they have
influenced ideas of the polar regions from the late
eighteenth up to the early twentieth century. Thus, it
is a book on representations of a landscape and of its
exploration in English culture, in itself a landscape
of the mind full of original observations connecting
Edmund Burke as aesthetic theorist with literati like
Charlotte Bront�, Samuel T. Coleridge, John Keats,
Charles Dickens, the Americans Edgar Allan Poe and
Herman Melville, the Dane Hans Christian Andersen
among others with nineteenth-century anthropologists
like Edward Tylor.
In order to explain the attraction of Victorian women
to narratives of polar exploration Spufford not only
looks into the position of the explorers' wives
staying at home, passive and loyal, as the ideal would
have it that found its most perfect expression in the
image constructed of Sir John Franklin's wife. He sees
a parallel in the virtues demanded from men venturing
forth into the polar world and the virtues attached to
an ideal Victorian femininity, i.e. endurance,
perseverance and resignation. This interpretation may
provoke dissent, it nonetheless deserves to be
examined in a more detailed analysis of female
perception of the travellers in British popular
culture - here only one aspect among many others.
There will be little or no controversy about the very
convincing central argument of the book about motives
that goes a long way at explaining not only
the British fascination with the "icie seas" as Martin Frobisher wrote
in 1576
but the amateurism characteristic of the British expeditions in
contrast to
those of other nationalities. Taking up the challenge of polar nature
was a
continuation of "a bucaneering English past" (p. 184) into the
comparatively
unadventurous industrial present of the Victorian era, was another
enactment of
English pluck, of English virtues, giving reassurance amidst growing
anxiety.
In taking up the ultimate challenge, then, success or survival did not
matter.
The British at home did not accept the explorers' death as the final
triumph of
nature over man, they rather believed that some part of them had
withstood
corruption. Therefore, mistakes or gross incompetence
of men like Franklin or Scott, who died because of
them, could not prevent British polar exploration from
being idealized, its participants from being revered
as national heroes. Reading this "archaeology of the
hazy love affair between the ice and the English" (p.
7) one begins to understand the attraction and its
lure even today.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This
work may be copied for non-profit educational use if
proper credit is given to the reviewer and to ASEH.
For other permission, please contact hbooks@h-
net.msu.edu or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker
Division of Environmental Management & Design
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 84
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
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