Abstract
<p align="LEFT"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">This paper examines Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s verse play </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Terror and </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;"><em>Erebus </em></span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">by considering the play’s representation of technology in light of its own </span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">poetic technologies. </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Terror and Erebus </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">is a play for voices that features four </span>characters: Franklin, Crozier, Rasmussen, and Qaqortingneq. As the character Rasmussen searches for the traces of the lost expedition, imagining the voices of the explorers in their final hours, his investigation reveals how the “white technologies” used to explore the Arctic succumb to the environment without the indigenous knowledge possessed by the Inuit who inhabit the Arctic. The paper shows how MacEwen’s literary vision contrasts recent coverage of efforts to locate the Franklin ships which have ignored or down-played Inuit testimony. Working from Rasmussen’s transcriptions of Qaqortingneq’s voice, MacEwen represents Inuit knowledge and technology as both an alternative to the model of scientific discovery underwriting the Franklin expedition and as source of the authoritative account of what happened to Franklin and his crew.</p>
Highlights
While Terror and Erebus receives a mention in most studies of the North in Canadian literature4, the analysis offered in Margaret Atwood’s Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature remains, to my knowledge, the most detailed close reading of the play
The religious imagery articulates the men’s despair as they await death, in Crozier’s words “crucified / before an ugly Easter.”. While these references are typical of the Christian images found in MacEwen’s early poems, they indicate her faithful use of sources, in this case, the dates inscribed on the document left in the cairn at Victory Point which was discovered by Hobson, a member of Leopold M’Clintock’s expedition in search of Franklin
By comparing the explorer’s body to the scientific method used to guide the journey, MacEwen compares the earth’s geography to the “complex, crushed geography of men.”. This association is further developed through the imagery of bones and instruments the explorers leave scattered across the land, and Franklin himself is imagined by Rasmussen as “spreadeagled like a star” and “a human constellation in the snow.”
Summary
Speaks Knud Rasmussen at the beginning of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Terror and Erebus, a work that reimagines the Franklin expedition as a journey to the end of science.
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