Antarctic Navigation

The cover blurb for Bloomsbury's edition of Elizabeth Arthur's Antarctic Navigation (1994) compares the book to a "Victorian novel"--which, I fear, is shorthand for "a very long book."  And, at 790 pages of main text, long it certainly is, if not especially Victorian.  That being said, the reviewer is at least on the right track.  While neo-Victorian novels have been all the rage for some time now, Antarctic Navigation offers an interesting alternative: a post-Victorian novel.  By "post-Victorian," I don't mean the novel's own chronological position (we're all post-Victorians now, strictly speaking...), but rather its representation of the heroine's quest as an engagement with Victorian narratives and ideologies--narratives and ideologies that the novel suggests may be shaping twentieth-century American behavior.

Morgan Lamont, our heroine, becomes obsessed at an early age with, first, ice, and, next, Robert Falcon Scott.  Despite--or, perhaps, because of--a childhood marred by her parents' divorce and her mother's subsequent remarriage to the hyper-rationalist chemist "Doctor Jim," Morgan at first lackadaisically follows in her father's footsteps, studying history at the University of Michigan.  But, in a manner familiar to many would-be Ph.D.s, Morgan's other desires undermine her scholarly pursuits.  Eventually, with the help of her long-lost grandfather the multimillionaire paint magnate, Morgan manages to live her dream: recreating Scott's failed expedition.  Or does she?

Scott, of course, is a late-Victorian and Edwardian figure, and Morgan's interest in him is partly developed by early twentieth-century "boy's books" about Scott: "In this case, my particular book concealed the extent of the lifelong fears and doubts which Scott suffered from, and which followed upon the sudden and total disruption of his youth; it concealed his lack of a typical Edwardian faith in progress, and his questions about authority and uncritical patriotism, and even his inability to believe in a divine power" (69).   Morgan's retrospective analysis highlights both her adult awareness of how silences in narrative shape our understanding of heroic character and the allure of such heroism to her younger self.  Moreover, as the older Morgan realizes, this pattern of things hidden--designed to promote a combination of nationalism, imperialism, and Christian faith--is aimed at an explicitly male audience; as she recognizes when she reads about Scott's wife, the man explores and the woman adores.  The process of shaping the ideal boy turns up again when Morgan discusses the Boy Scouts with her rather anti-Semitic grandfather, who is feeling grumpy about Michael Rosenthal's The Character Factory: "He says that factories manufacture uniform products.  Detailed specifications.  Particular uses.  Serviceable citizens.  In that case, of the Empire, Great Britain.  America was a little different.  Still, and all, unquestioning obedience to unstructured authority" (402).  William Lamont was a Boy Scout and is a factory owner, so his objections to Rosenthal's objections--what's wrong with authority?--derive from lived experience; despite the bigotry which underlies his grouchiness about Rosenthal's analysis, the novel doesn't want us to simply dismiss William's opinion as of no use.  Antarctic Navigation links dialogue and morality: its most villainous characters try to impose non-negotiable regimes.  Nevertheless, the novel quietly endorses Rosenthal's critique.  Late-Victorian and Edwardian narratives of heroic character were shaping boys for empire, even though the heroic characters themselves dissented (or sometimes deviated) from those narratives. 

Morgan, of course, is not a boy, although she is a 6'1'', 160-lb. woman with one leg shorter than the other (the result of an operation to repair a clubfoot).  While the novel is not as overtly feminist as it is environmentalist, it does celebrate unintentionally or intentionally marginalized figures: the explorers who set out on the Ninety South expedition, intended to replay Scott's own expedition, are a somewhat odd lot.  Like John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Arthur believes that nations need their eccentrics.  In addition, the Ninety South expedition celebrates collaboration, rather than the Great Man theory of leadership; each character contributes his or her expertise to the mix, instead of simply deferring to a charismatic power.  And, given how things turn out, that's all for the best.  Morgan is nominally the head of the expedition, but her decisions run the gamut from questionable to suicidal: she betrays her lover, endangers the sled dogs, develops snow blindness out of sheer foolhardiness, breaks her arm because of same, and finally winds up being towed along after the fracture becomes badly infected.  Like the title character in Ivanhoe, Morgan spends a good chunk of the novel out of commission. 

Yet what at first looks like Morgan's stupidest decision turns out, in fact, to be profoundly correct: she chooses not to replay the Scott expedition.  Morgan's initial plan was antiquarian, an attempt to redo Scott's expedition exactly as Scott did it--right down to replicas of the wooden sleds.  In an epiphany that, at first glance, looks like cowardice, Morgan realizes that treating history in this fashion could be literally fatal: "No one else knew so well as I did what we were facing, for the simple reason that no one else had read the accounts of the Terra Nova expedition quite as carefully as I had.  Aside from my personal frustrations, and my personal fears, I had a duty to try to avert a catastrophe, if I saw it coming, and now I really did" (579).  Morgan's choice (badly handled, as is par for the course) quietly echoes her late father's decision to destroy his historical research--but whereas he burns the manuscript (and his house) in response to his own impending death, Morgan alters the "rules" of her expedition so as to simultaneously honor history and avoid following it, lemming-like, to her own death.  As one of her colleagues bluntly points out, Morgan's decision destroys the expedition's stated purpose and appears to make it, for all intents and purposes, worthless.  But, Morgan discovers, it does no such thing.  "Already, I and the other members of the Ninety South Expedition are a legend at McMurdo, not so much for what we did as for what we didn't do; we didn't have air support, we didn't take radio comms, we didn't go into South Pole Station" (755).  In a sense, replicating Scott's expedition would mean killing both her colleagues and Scott's memory; by choosing a different path to her future, Morgan engages in her own dialogue with the dead.   And, in turn, the Ninety South Expedition becomes yet another exemplary story.    As she argues near the end, "Don't settle for someone else's story.  Find yours.  Create a truth which is your truth.  And remember that while the facts remain the same, the truth is always changing" (776).