‘The region of beauty and delight’: Reimagining the Polar Sublime

Abstract

The public fascination with the Arctic and the Antarctic during the late eighteenth century and Romantic period will be familiar enough to most readers of Romantic-period literature from the prominent role played by the polar regions in two of the period’s best-known works: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).³ This contemporary fascination with the poles can be explained, at least in part, as Peter Kitson has observed, by the fact that throughout the Romantic period, the Arctic and the Antarctic remained two of the least-known parts of the world and hence could typify for the European imagination ‘the otherness of sublime nature’.⁴ In this respect, the place of the polar regions in the European imagination complements descriptions within eighteenth-century British philosophical aesthetics, by figures like Edmund Burke, of the role of the obscure or the hidden in generating sublime effect.⁵ As Eric Wilson puts it in The Spiritual History of Ice, ‘of all the landscapes in nature, those that are frozen are perhaps the most sublime. The reason: the blankness of ice.’⁶ However, the unknown-ness of the poles is only part of the story to be told here because while it is true that no European explorer reached the North or the South Pole until the twentieth century, it is also true that by the start of the Romantic period, European literature had long been replete with speculation and sheer excitement about what and who might eventually be discovered there.

Lands doomed by Nature to perpetual frigidness; never to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays; whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe. Such are the lands we have discovered; what then may we expect those to be, which lie still farther to the South?

— James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777)²

The chapter title is taken from the would-be polar explorer Robert Walton’s description for his sister of what he hopes to find at the North Pole, in the first letter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, 2 vols (London, 1818), i, p. 2.