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

IntroductionXLVIIatlas, that great crucible of imperialism, is faulty: "Since La Pierre House wasmarked in the atlas, we came to look upon it as the key pin of our expedition butactually it brought us only disillusion, as I shall relate in due course" (8). The"naked grandeur" of wilderness evoked in Service's poems is to be the space ofthe women's adventure, and thus Vyvyan prepares her reader almost from thebeginning to enter a frontier where knowledge is uncertain and landmarks unreliable.'''Our atlas is a liar'," Dorrien Smith states flatly when the women finallyreach an abandoned La Pierre House (139).Vyvyan's disinclination to learn more about the North before publishing ArcticAdventure in 196r compounds this sense of vacancy. In combination with herdisposition as a character sketcher to write about the adventure of men, thisdisinclination leaves the representation of women almost entirely out of herpicture. In particular, women travellers, either before or after 1926, are all butabsent from the book. Instead, Vyvyan leaves the impression that white women, ifthey were there at all, did not constitute a significant presence in the North. It istrue that their arrival had been fairly recent. Under the auspices of the HBC, thenorthern frontier was not open to them. It was thought tl;tat they had nothing tocontribute to fur production, and few people in the nineteenth century travelledin the Arctic for pleasure. White women were thus not allowed into HBC territoriesuntil Frances Simpson (wife of Sir George Simpson, governor of the HBC1821-59) arrived at York Factory in 1830 (see van Kirk; MacLaren, "Touring").Soon after, white women began to accompany their trader, missionary, mountedpoliceman, or government official husbands north of sixty. The Grey Nuns'arrival in 1867 at Fort Providence marked the first institutional participation ofwomen in the spread of European civilization into northern Canada. They werefollowed, over succeeding decades, by other women missionaries and settlers,then by the women of the Klondike stampede, and by teachers and nurses.By choosing to ignore the North's past, Vyvyan distances herself particularlyfrom the women who travelled or settled north of sixty. Elizabeth R. Taylor, whowrote a series of articles about her steamer trip to Aklavik in the summer of r892,was one of the first women to travel in the Arctic for pleasure (Taylor). Both sheand Agnes Deans Cameron emphasized the recent accessibility of the region. Aswell, both expressed delight in discovering that their journeys to Aklavik wouldtake them beyond the reach of organized tourism (specifically Thomas Cook'stours in Cameron's case [4; rev. ed. 5]), beyond society's conventions and the"beaten paths" so familiar to readers of travel literature . Vyvyan's delineation of