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

Introduch"onXLVupstream, fighting every step. Often we would be motionless, just holding ourown.I was bent almost double in the foam, when suddenly I was jerked off myfeet. Between me and the sky was a wall of water. I was being dragged downstream,my back bumping over the boulders. I was utterly helpless, with overme a slab of seething foam like a coffin lid. (434)Plucked out of the water by skipper McTosh, Service drags himself onward. Theirhired guides desert them. They find they are lost. Service saves the day by discoveringthe faintly pencilled name of a Klondiker on a tree. This leads the partyover the Divide to the "Glory" of the promised land: '''But for my exploringspirit you would have rotted away the winter with the snot-nosed Eskimos'," hebrays to his companions (437-38). The Rat has been conquered, and by aconsummate, if now dated, character sketcher.Vyvyan places her own accomplishment as a traveller in the context of the annalsof adventure by men, and she wrote her journey into the traditional adventurenarrative of the North. Heather Smyth's analysis ofArcficAdventure notes an oppositionbetween a rejected (feminine) domesticity and the (masculine) adventurepersonae that Vyvyan creates for herself and Dorrien Smith (ro-r2): they prefermale company and stories, and reject the title "ladies" (77, this edition).Moreover, both women, but particularly Dorrien Smith, demonstrate masculinecharacteristics: Gwen is stoic and courageous, with strong fists (r3) and hornyhands (r29), and with a gruff manner (49) and diction flavoured by the sea (7r,II7). Almost equally, however, the women's performance of the role of wildernessadventurer is made provisional by their limited wilderness skills and by Vyvyan'sfinal admission that gender is one of the qualities barring them from becomingtrue northerners: "We felt a great longing to turn back and spend the rest of ourdays wandering about the unknown, cruel, magnificent land. If destiny hadordered our sex, our background and our characters differently, we might haveindulged such longings and become, in due course, old-timers" (r78).However, adventure for Vyvyan also lies bryond humans, not just among themost colourful ones. This sketcher of local colour also craves the vastness of theNorth and the experience of unpeopled nature. Lured by the spell of the Yukonas Robert Service had imagined it, Vyvyan longed to see what others have called"the back of beyond." To understand the essence of humanity was clearly onlyone goal. To experience the power of wilderness, to come, as her autobiography