The Lives and Modernist Death of Captain Scott

Abstract

This paper considers three representations of the life and death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his last expedition to the South Pole: his Journals (1913), D. H. Lawrence's rewriting in his novel Women in Love (1920), and the film Scott of the Antarctic (1948). The edited Journals preserved a military image of Scott befitting the Edwardian ideal of the gentleman-adventurer, facilitating a Christianised image of heroic self-sacrifice transfiguring death. Against this masochistic code of English masculinity, Lawrence models the death of Gerald Crich in the Alps on Scott's Antarctic death to expose the emotional failure of stoical manhood invested in muscular Christianity. Scott of the Antarctic realises ambivalently both the Edwardian and the Modernist versions of Captain Scott's life and death, reflecting the changing views on Scott's moral status. Ealing studios intended to convey parallels to the Dunkirk spirit of collective endurance. However, the film script, reflecting on post-war bereavement, also gives voice to the relational cost. Furthermore, through Ralph Vaughan Williams' score, the film continues Lawrence's critical response to Scott's quest for individual transcendence, by conveying the ‘death-force’ at the heart of the Antarctic sublime.