“She Strode into the Room like a Challenge”: Revisioning Nineteenth-Century Arctic Exploration in Stef Penney’s Under a Pole Star (2016)
The dominant narrative of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration portrays male explorers as heroic figures battling harsh conditions. This exploration was tied to national identity and a masculine ideal, while women’s roles were marginalised and overlooked. Historical novels today are important in re...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Études écossaises
2025
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | The dominant narrative of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration portrays male explorers as heroic figures battling harsh conditions. This exploration was tied to national identity and a masculine ideal, while women’s roles were marginalised and overlooked. Historical novels today are important in revising and challenging such dominant historical and cultural narratives. This article examines a Scottish historical novel, Stef Penney’s Under a Pole Star (2016), outlining the various ways in which it offers a revisionist and feminist representation of Arctic exploration and challenges nineteenth-century gender roles through the portrayal of Flora Mackie, the daughter of a Dundee whaling captain. Flora’s role as Arctic explorer disrupts and challenges notions of the Arctic as a masculine space, while her close friendships with Inuit as contrasted with other explorers’ racist bias lay bare the exploitative colonialist dynamics in European and American exploration of the Arctic. |
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