C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

XUITHE LADIES, THE GWIGH'IN. AND THE RATHornby, Harold Adlard, and eighteen-year-old Edgar Christian to set off eastfrom Great Slave Lake on an ill-considered crossing of the Barrens, which endedin their deaths by starvation the following spring (Christian), Similarly, the tripup the Rat by the four American undergraduates took place less than three weeksafter the women's (Platt), yet no prior permissions for it were either sought orgranted. The significant level of planning and institutional involvement in thewomen's journey also included the advice of RCMP officers and of missionaries.Despite Vyvyan's insistence on the freedom to be found in the empty wilderness,her travels, like those of other women, were often hedged about with much morecultural and institutional constraint than those of men. Vyvyan and DorrienSmith might have wished to be "independent women," as Chapter 3 calls them(14), but, given the way in which she sought corporate assistance in her planning,it seems clear that she accepted the fact that their itinerary would be prepared andtheir role as travellers defined by men who regarded them as ladies.TH E NARRATIVEVyvyan's book exhibits two distinct narrative impulses and lacks another. Becauseshe is an adroit character sketcher, individuals populate her book, and she findsadventure in conversation with them. Alternatively, however, she finds exhilarationin transcending human community, reaching beyond it to communedirectly with wilderness. These two impulses render her work contradictory attimes. The impulse that her writing lacks is an interest in history. Either shesketches the present or aims beyond it at the eternal, but she seldom brings anhistorical context to her writing.Vyvyan is most comfortable sketching characters. This is clear in the fieldnotes and is only heightened in the book. In fact, with her ear for dialogue andeye for colour, she punctuated all her travel narratives with portraits of thosewhom she encountered on the way. In the literature of Canada by Englishwomen, she thus follows in the wake of Susanna Moodie, whose own narratives ofemigration and travel, Roughing It in the Bush (185Z) and Life in the Clearings (1853), allbut dispense with travel in order to feature the sketch. Published under hermaiden name of Rogers, Vyvyan's first two books, Cornish Silhouettes (1924) andEchoes in Cornwall (I9Z6), appeared before and during her arctic travels. Both areprimarily collections of rural sketches. So it is perhaps not surprising to find that