From Kathryn Schulz’s “Literature’s Arctic Obsession”:
Almost invariably, the poles appear in these works [of nineteenth-century English literature] as the place where nature reveals its horrifying indifference to humanity; where humanity itself falls away, leaving men to descend into madness and violence; above all, where the dream of universal mastery goes catastrophically awry.
That ominous vision bears virtually no resemblance to Conan Doyle’s second account of the Arctic. … This time, the search for the North Pole was “a challenge to human daring,” those who conducted it were men of “indomitable pluck, wonderful self-abnegation, and devotion,” and the Arctic itself was “a training school for all that was high and godlike in man.”
… As the later Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson noted, John Franklin’s entire crew died of starvation and exposure in an area where, for generations, the Inuit had raised their children and tended their elderly. It was possible to live and even thrive in the Arctic—but, steeped in the racial prejudices of colonial England, almost all of Britain’s polar explorers declined to imitate indigenous ways of travelling, hunting, eating, and staying warm. Everywhere else in the former British Empire, English chauvinism led to the death of untold numbers of native people. In the Arctic, English chauvinism led to the death of untold numbers of Englishmen.
The Victorian English imagination takes it in turns to romanticize and demonize the lands and the peoples they conquer. When the land is not as immediately hospitable as they had hoped or imagined it to be (cf. the imaginary “Hyperborean” warm and ice-free sea theorized to exist beyond the 80th parallel), it changes from a trans-oceanic paradise ripe for the picking of resources and scientific knowledge, into a forbidding hellscape whose only aim is to crush out life. This duality of perspective is repeated again and again in the annals of British colonialism (Pacific Islands, India, early America) where both greedy enjoyment/extraction and violent fear of the Other are not at all mutually exclusive.
Of course, the Victorian obsession with nature as symbol or nature as “vehicle for philosophical or religious themes,” rather than nature as existence or fact, hamstrung explorers’ ability to take the dangers of the Arctic at simple face value and to successfully use the technologies already developed by the people who lived there.
