Frozen voices : women, silence and Antarctica

This chapter explores a different kind of Antarctic silence: the silencing of certain stories and voices. It’s the silence of the earliest female travellers to Antarctica. The voices of the earliest female travellers are silent and their stories remain untold, partly because there’s no place for them in the dominant Antarctic narrative of exploration and conquest. Reimagining them through fiction is one way - though with potential pitfalls - to ‘unfreeze’ those stories. The history of Antarctic exploration is about the adventures of men, particularly those in the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ from approximately 1897 to 1922. The great names of polar exploration, like Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson, are well known and the mythology of their exploration, successes and failures still fascinates people today. The themes of their exploration narratives concerned heroism, conquest, suffering and male bonding