White Horizon

Jen Hill

Description

Bridging historical and literary studies, White Horizon explores the importance of the Arctic to British understandings of masculine identity, the nation, and the rapidly expanding British Empire in the nineteenth century. Well before Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, polar space had come to represent the limit of both empire and human experience. Using a variety of texts, from explorers' accounts to boys' adventure fiction, as well as provocative and fresh readings of the works of Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, Jen H ill illustrates the function of Arctic space in the nineteenth-century British social imagination, arguing that the desolate north was imagined as a "pure" space, a conveniently blank page on which to write narratives of Arctic exploration that both furthered and critiqued British imperialism.
Acknowledgments

1. Heart of Whiteness

2. National Bodies: Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson and John Franklin’s Voyage to the Polar Sea

3. A Propitious Hard Frost:The Arctic of Mary Shelley and Eleanor Anne Porden

4. A Pale Blank of Mist and Cloud: Arctic Spaces in Jane Eyre

5. Arctic Highlanders and Englishmen: Dickens, Cannibalism, and Sensation

6. Ends of the Earth, Ends of the Empire: R. M. Ballantyne’s Arctic Adventures

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Reino Unido
• 19th century
• Ireland
• United Kingdom
• History of Europe
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791479469
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WHITE HORIZON

T HE A RCTIC IN THE N INETEENTH C ENTURY B RITISH I MAGINATION

J EN H ILL

White Horizon

SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Pamela K. Gilbert, editor

White

Horizon

The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination

Jen Hill

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2008 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Cover: Ice floes in the Arctic, c1913. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,Washington, D.C. 20540. Reproduction no. LC-USZ62-101009

A portion of Chapter 2 appeared inNineteenth-Century Studiesand is used with permission of the University of California Press and the Regents of the University of California.“National Bodies: Robert Southey’sLife of Nelsonand John Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea.”Nineteenth-Century StudiesVol. 61, no. 4, pp. 417–448. Copyright © 2007 by the Regents of the University of California.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu

Production by Kelli Williams-Leroux Marketing by Fran Keneston

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hill, Jen. White horizon : the Arctic in the nineteenth-century British imagination / Jen Hill. p. cm. — (SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7229-3 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Arctic regions—In literature. 3. Geography in literature. 4. Explorers in literature. 5. Adventure and adventurers in literature. 6. Imperialism in literature. I.Title.

PR868.A72H56 2007 823'.80932113—dc22

2007008098

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Heart of Whiteness

National Bodies: Robert Southey’sLife of Nelson and John Franklin’sNarrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea

THREEA Propitious Hard Frost:The Arctic of Mary Shelley and Eleanor Anne Porden

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

A Pale Blank of Mist and Cloud: Arctic Spaces inJane Eyre

Arctic Highlanders and Englishmen: Dickens, Cannibalism, and Sensation

Ends of the Earth, Ends of the Empire: R. M. Ballantyne’s Arctic Adventures

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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Acknowledgments

upport for this project came from many sources. At Cornell Uni- versity I received generous travel, study, and research support from S the English Department,The Graduate School,The Mellon Foun- dation, The School for Criticism and Theory, and the Shin family. A Junior Faculty Research Grant from the University of Nevada, Reno, and appointment as Lincoln and Meta Fitzgerald Distinguished Profes- sor of the Humanities made completion of the manuscript possible. I am also indebted to the faculty, staff, and resources of Cornell Uni- versity Libraries, the Scott Polar Research Institute, the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, the Derbyshire County Council Archives, the British Library, and Getchell Library at the University of Nevada, Reno. My thinking continues to be shaped by many individuals whom I encountered at Cornell. I especially thank Dorothy Mermin, who as director of my dissertation helped me become a scholar. Harry Shaw, Paul Sawyer, and Mark Seltzer encouraged my work in its earliest incar- nations. The generosity of Michael Koch and Stephanie Vaughn is evi- denced on every page.Thanks are due also to Benedict Anderson, A. R. Ammons, Laura Brown, Walter Cohen, Mark Dimunation, Lamar Herrin, Timothy Murray, Reeve Parker, Katherine Reagan, Neil Sacca- mano, and Shelley Wong. At the University of Nevada, Reno, I have been encouraged by members of the Consortium for British Isles and Empire Studies, including Stacy Burton, Dennis Dworkin, Louis Niebur, Aaron Santesso, and Tom Nickles. I would also like to thank Kathy and Phil Boardman,

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Dennis Cronan, Jane Detweiler, Ann Keniston, Susan Palwick, and Ann Ronald, as well as deans Bob Mead and Heather Hardy. Gwynne Mid- dleton, Sarah Hillenbrandt, and Jack Caughey helped prepare the manu- script. I cannot calculate my debt to the Center for Child and Family Development, in particular to Mary Schuster and Geri Thweatt. This book is better for the careful considerations and encourage- ment that many people gave the manuscript. My reading ofJane Eyre arrived in conversation with Bethany Schneider, and it is unclear where her ideas end and mine commence. David Agruss, David Alvarez, Leah Rosenberg, and Kate Thomas also helped shape my arguments. Nancy Henry and Noah Heringman provided excellent and clarifying com- ments, as did a few anonymous readers, and Philip Rogers supplied thoughtful and generous connections with his own work. Mark Quigley helped me talk through and realize final versions of the argument. My parents Frances and David Hill have always supported my endeavors, as have my sister Ali Hill and her cheerful family, Chris,Will, and Nick Ford. Finally, I wish to thank Larry and Ella Cantera, who have encour- aged, supported, persevered, and laughed with me in times both charmed and challenging. I dedicate this book to the memory of John D. Hill: brother, friend, teacher.

C h a p t e r

O n e

Heart of Whiteness

n the opening pages ofHeart of Darknessnarrator names two of, the the great “knights” of British exploration, Sir Francis Drake and Sir I 1 John Franklin. Readers can still place Drake, but most modern edi- tions describe Franklin in a brief footnote as a nineteenth-century explorer who commanded an ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. Joseph Conrad’s contemporaries needed no such note: for them, the reference to Franklin and his ships theErebusand Terrorevoked both nineteenth-century geography at the height of its promise and, more importantly, the eclipse of that promise, and the recognition of the limits of British exploration that was the legacy of Franklin’s spectacular failure. While the invocation of a doomed polar explorer at the outset of Conrad’s great critique of imperialism serves to foreshadow Marlow’s own horrific voyage up the Congo, the reference maps Arctic geography onto the national imagination, enfolding a liter- ally white space into the heart of darkness.Thus, when Marlow speaks of white spaces on the map, a meditation on Arctic exploration and the limits of the European imperial project lingers behind Conrad’s image. In 1844, Sir John Franklin was awarded command of the Arctic exploration shipsErebusandTerrorand given an Admiralty mandate to find the Northwest Passage. The expedition’s departure was a kind of mass spectacle, with newspaper articles detailing its preparations and the public thronging to see the ships before they embarked in the spring of 1845. Franklin and his 130 men departed and, after calling in at Green- land on their way to the frozen seas, were never heard from again, despite numerous and concerted efforts to find them. The mystery of

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