Writing the Journey: June 1999 | Department of English

"Antarctica and the Question of Women"

Anka Ryall
Department of English, University of Tromso
Anka.Ryall@hum.uit.no

Among the subjects for future study listed in the final chapter of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's classic of Antarctic exploration, The Worst Journey in the World (1922), is "the question of women in these temperatures." Until very recently, however, most explorers seem to have accepted the view of his contemporary, Ernest Shackleton, that there could never be room on polar expeditions for "the opposite sex." Even after women have not only been admitted on but, as in the case of the Norwegian Monica Kristensen, been leaders of Antarctic expeditions, they still tend to refer to themselves as uneasy interlopers on a masculine territory. Kristensen, for example, opens her book about her 1986-87 South Pole expedition with a moment of misgiving, a sudden sense that as a female she does not belong on the ice and will ultimately become a burden to her male companions. Although few other women writing about Antarctica express similar doubts about their personal ability to cope, they all in various ways describe having to deal with male nostalgia for the lost innocence of the womanless white continent.

In contemporary women's narratives about journeys to or in Antarctica, the southern ice is a landscape inevitably mediated by a masculinist heroic tradition based on the exclusion of "the opposite sex." Not only is this tradition represented by male narratives of exploration and comradeship in extremity. The landscape itself has been irrevocably transformed by the physical remains of the expeditions and camps described in these texts. Women's only approach to Antarctica is therefore through identifications with male explorers and male narratives that may sometimes be reconstituted as models for their own literary appropriations of the continent.

In this paper I will use Homi Bhabha's concept of identification as a process emerging "in-between disavowal and designation" in order to investigate "the question of women" in Antarctic literature. My focus will be on two recent texts by British writers, Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita (1996) and Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica (1997), and on their ambivalent identifications with two famous male precursors, Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Ernest Shackleton.

Anka Ryall
Department of English
University of Tromso
N9037 Tromso
Norway
Anka.Ryall@hum.uit.no

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Updated May 23, 1999