Illuminations : casting light upon the earliest female travellers to Antarctica

Abstract

This Doctor of Creative Arts thesis (comprising a novel and an exegesis) illuminates the experiences of the earliest women to visit Antarctica. Working within the discipline of polar studies, I pose the questions: how have women been represented in, and excluded from, Antarctic narratives of the continent's early history? Are the experiences of the earliest women to visit the continent "" largely overlooked until now "" intrinsically worthy of attention? What issues should be considered in using historical fiction to recreate their stories? In the exegesis I argue that women have been not only physically, but also narratively excluded from Antarctica by the way the 'grand heroic journey' functions as a master narrative and foundation myth that privileges the masculine hero struggling for survival. I examine early female memoirs of Antarctica, focusing on those by Dorothy Braxton, Jennie Darlington and Pamela Young, to establish how gender preoccupations influence their narratives. The work of polar scholars, including Lisa Bloom, Tom Griffiths and Gretchen Legler, and literary critics Peter Brooks, Annette Kolodny and Ruth Page form the conceptual framework for this argument. Focusing on the journeys of Ingrid Christensen and her female companions to Antarctica in the 1930s, this thesis places their experiences in the context of decades of struggle by women to reach the southern continent. Archival information about Christensen's journeys shows evidence that she was the first woman to land on the Antarctic mainland, rather than Caroline Mikkelsen, as is still widely believed. In the absence of primary documents, Christensen's own experience of travelling to Antarctica remains invisible. I argue that historical fiction is an effective tool for recreating the story of Christensen and her companions and that such fiction is not historical recovery, but a form of imaginative historiography. Works of historical fiction by Ursula Le Guin, Francis Spufford and Mojisola Adebayo, which aim to include previously marginalised voices and engage differently with the heroic 3 narrative of Antarctica, are used to explore the ethics of using real characters and events in historical fiction. The thesis concludes with the historical novel Chasing the Light, a fictional narrative inspired by events from Christensen's four real life voyages to Antarctica in the 1930s. ACCESS TO EXEGESIS ONLY

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English