Looking Outward

Annual Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association

October 11-14, 2018

Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront Hotel, Florida

Panel: Arctic agency in Victorian art and literature

This panel revisits the peak period of British imperialism in the Arctic in the nineteenth-century. Responding to the conference topics ‘looking at others’ and ‘looking outward from other locales’, the panel explores the possibility of an alternative history of the Arctic that places at the centre the perspectives and experiences of marginalized others, in particular indigenous peoples, but also those of animals. In the nineteenth century, the western Arctic became increasingly tied to the British Empire through continued travel, exploration, whaling, settlement, trade and administration. Despite significant differences between the various localities subject to colonialism, there are two characteristics that are valid across the western Arctic region: 1) the period represented a boom in European textual and visual productions concerned with the Arctic; 2) this body of works was dominantly produced by Western men frequently attached to colonialist ventures, with the effect that perspectives and experiences of others, including women and Arctic peoples, were largely excluded. Revisiting a selection of texts and images created by Victorian individuals, the contributions to this session examine descriptions emerging from contact zones (Pratt 1992; Haraway 2008) – that is places, situations and contexts understood as spaces of interaction between Europeans and Arctic indigenous peoples and between humans and animals. The focus will be on 1. uncovering instances of transculturalism and animal agency. 2. describing the character of these instances and the role indigenous epistemologies and ways of relating may have played in the exchange. 3. examining the influence animal contact and indigenous thought and perspectives may have had on Victorian writers and artists.

The panel comprises four papers that move from considerations of representations of Arctic peoples in a variety of sources and social contexts to analyses of animal representations in Arctic expedition narratives. Analysing the journals and letters by whaling wives who sailed to the Arctic, Sophie Gilmartin’s paper addresses a neglected part of Polar history – namely, instances of Western female presences and perspectives. Focusing on the accounts of Margaret Penny and Viola Cook, Gilmartin considers how whaling wives both conformed to and at times potentially undermined concepts of gender and race in an alien environment. Examining the cultural productions associated with three of the John Franklin search expeditions, Eavan O’Dochartaigh’s paper discusses the interethnic relationships that developed in the Arctic contact zone. Pointing to the explorers’ dependence on local knowledge, she argues that their subsequent representations of indigenous people, which included descriptions of interpersonal relationships, challenged conceptions of the Arctic as a masculine and sublime space, instead revealing degrees of indigenous agency and control. With her analysis of a portrait of the Inuk Qalasirssuaq, Ingeborg Høvik’s paper addresses another case of human interaction in the cultural contact zone. Challenging Gerald Vizenor’s understanding of colonialist portraits as essentially devoid of information about the indigenous sitters, Høvik examines the potential of the portrait as a source to Qalasirssuaq’s history that also involves traces of his voice and agency. In the final paper, Sigfrid Kjeldaas presents a discussion of the human-animal contact zone in the Arctic. Through comparative analyses of a selection of expedition narratives, she examines how explorers’ representation of Arctic animals changed as the nineteenth century progressed. Her discussion also involves a consideration of how the British and North-American explorers’ contact with indigenous peoples may have brought out alternative and more ecological understandings of Arctic nature.