The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration by Shane McCorristine

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration by Shane McCorristine Elsa Richardson Keywords Shane McCorristine, Elsa Richardson, Britain, England, nineteenth century, polar exploration, Franklin expedition, Far North, spectrality, Northwest Passage shane mccorristine. The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration. London: UCL Press, 2018. Pp. 326. In his account of a failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage, the explorer William Edward Parry recalled overwintering in a harbour of Melville Island. With the ships anchored in thick ice and their men idle, boredom quickly became a problem to be staved off with time consuming routines and ingenious entertainments. Theatrical performances were staged, calisthenics classes were held on deck, and a barrel organ was produced for the crew to dance to. In spite of these precautions, the eerie stillness of the dark landscape induced a kind of collective somnolence, where melancholic moods developed and reveries took on a life of their own. Here with the sound of wolves howling in the distance, the Aurora Borealis lighting the sky overhead, and everywhere the vast emptiness of a frozen world, is the spectral North to which Shane McCorristine’s new book attends. Long imagined as a remote and unmapped region, against which heroic adventurers could test the limits of their endurance, narratives of exploration also trafficked in the strange and the sublime. Excavating stories of clairvoyance, ghosts, mummies, and shamans from archival documents, memoirs, and fictional texts, McCorristine argues for the supernatural as a constitutive element of the Arctic imaginary in Victorian Britain. In the process, he asks that we take dreams more seriously, that we recognise that they are “not simply abstract and disembodied experiences for people, but forms of practice” (49). To dismiss Parry’s strange reveries as marginal to the real business of imperial exploration—maps, men, and nations—would be to overlook the ways in which that history was shaped by dreams, superstitions, visions, and other enchantments. The Spectral Arctic builds on a growing field of humanities research dedicated to histories of the uncanny and the unexplainable. Investigating subjects like spiritualism, mesmerism, mysticism, and the occult, scholars from a range of disciplines including literary studies, philosophy, sociology, and geography, have identified the supernatural as key to understanding the history of modern Britain. These highly varied studies find common ground in their challenge to the disenchanted reading of modernity first made famous by the [End Page 304] sociologist and political economist Max Weber, by which rationalisation and intellectualisation have been credited with forcing magic, religion, and spirituality from the public realm. Over the last two decades historians have chipped away at the idea of disenchantment to reveal the magical imagination at work in the operations of capitalism and the structures of modernity itself. In his first book, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-seeing in England, 1750–1920 (2010) McCorristine explored the idea of the haunted self, but his new work moves away from ghostly subjectivities to attend to the “cultural production of the spectral” instead (43). Describing the Arctic as a space where “intense bundles of dreams, bodies and spirits gathered,” his interest lies in how the region was constructed in the popular Victorian imagination (12). One of the strengths of this approach is that it privileges voices silenced by the standard narrative of polar exploration. Western women, excluded from exclusively male expeditions, appeared in Arctic ballads, poetry, and fiction as the objects of love and sexual longing, as enduring emblems of home and country. They were, according to McCorristine, “spectrally present” not only in the form of literary representations, but also as disembodied witnesses to the search for the Northwest Passage (176). At the centre of The Spectral Arctic is the ill-fated Franklin expedition: its disappearance in 1848, the recovery missions launched, the influential appeals of Lady Jane Franklin, the sad discovery of shallow graves, evidence of cannibalism, and the unravelling of a national fantasy. Newspapers from the period covered the search in detail and some featured extraordinary reports from young women who claimed to have visited the expedition. Placed into a mesmeric trance, more than a dozen clairvoyant women travelled to the...