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LOST SHIPS: PERFORMANCE AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Graduate Studies Of The University of Guelph By HEATHER DAVIS-FISCH In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July, 2009 O Heather Davis-Fisch, 2009 Library and Archives Bibliothèque et ?F? 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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protège cette thèse. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent être imprimés ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformément à la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privée, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont été enlevés de thesis. cette thèse. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada ABSTRACT LOST SHIPS: PERFORMANCE AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION Heather Davis-Fisch Advisor: University of Guelph, 2009 Professor A. Filewod This thesis is an investigation of performances that emerged in response to the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, which went missing in the Canadian Arctic in 1845. 1 am concerned with two questions arising from the relationship between performance, loss, and remains: How do performances emerge as the remains of what has been loss? How can past performances be known through their remains when critical aspects of performance are lost as time passes? Franklin's 1845 expedition is unique in the annals of polar history because it ended in almost total disappearance: no journals or ship's logs from the expedition were ever retrieved, and the lone legible paper that was found provides little indication of what disaster befell the expedition. Most histories of the Franklin expedition use material and narrative fragments in order to reconstruct what happened to the men; however, reconstructions often fail to address the experiences of the men who abandoned the ships or the way that those left behind at home understood the expedition's absence. This project examines how those impacted by the expedition's disappearance expressed their experiences of loss through performance. By considering four sites of performance, one can trace how performance first facilitated the search for the missing men and then allowed the loss of the expedition to be melancholically engaged with and mourned. Performance initially held open the hope that the search could succeed, first in the shipboard pantomime, Zero, or Harlequin Light, which imaginatively transformed the Arctic into a familiar domestic space and then in the work of American explorer Charles Francis Hall who "acted Inuit" in order to demonstrate that survivors might still live. The second pair of examples consider how performances responded to the impossibility of knowing what actually happened to the expedition, first by examining how the experiences of the expedition's final survivors were preserved in the gestural performances of Inuit who came into contact with them, then by considering how the melodrama The Frozen Deep overwrote the incomprehensible disappearance of the expedition by producing a coherent narrative, allowing the British public to mourn the loss of Franklin and his men. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is my pleasure to thank a number of people who have shaped this dissertation and my work as a scholar. First, I would like to thank my advisor Alan Filewod for his challenging questions about spectatorship, performance, and theatre history, for his rigorous mentorship, and for his enthusiasm for this project over the last four years. My advisory committee members, Danny O'Quinn, Michelle Elleray, and Ute Lischke, have provided thoughtful criticism of this project, shaping my research and writing practices, and have shared each of their areas of expertise, enriching this dissertation immeasurably. Susan Nance, Smaro Kamboureli, and Paul Mulholland provided insightful feedback on this project during its early stages and encouraged me to think more deeply about my research methodology and theoretical approaches to this material. I would like to thank Stephen Johnson, Ann Wilson, and Mark Fortier for their careful readings of the final draft of this project, for their engaging and thought-provoking questions about the implications of this work, and for their suggestions for further ways to develop this project. My fellow graduate students at Guelph have been invaluable resources and caring friends. My parents, Keitha and Michael Davis, my brother Ian, Kim, Gary, and Andrew Fisch, and Tamara Hatton have encouraged me throughout the last four years and have provided support for this project in too many ways to list. Finally, I would like to thank Scott Davis-Fisch for his unconditional love and support and for reminding me everyday that there is a world outside of books. ? TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations iii Introduction: What Happened to the Franklin Expedition? 1 What Happened to Franklin's Men? 8 History and Loss 25 Performance Remains 36 1 . Harlequin in the Arctic 45 Austin's Happy Family: Transforming Discipline 51 Domesticating the Arctic 59 Harlequin Heads North 69 Imagining Inuit 83 2. Eating and Fucking: Charles Francis Hall Imagines "Going Native" 104 "Acting Inuit" 112 "Becoming Savage" 130 Mimesis and Franklin 166 3. All the Dead Voices 174 The Crack in the Ice 178 Cracking the Ice 1 95 Survival 202 4. The Designated Mourner 205 The Contents of the Kettles 209 Melodramatic Certainty 227 Mourning an Effigy 246 Imperial Spectatorship 260 The Frozen Deep in 1 866 270 Conclusion: Franklin Remains 277 Works Cited 280 11 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "Scene from the Pantomime of 'Zero'" 76 Source: Illustrated Arctic News, pp. 55 Library and Archives Canada "Kallihirua" 84 Source: KaIH: The Esquimaux Christian, A Memoir, pp. 2 Library and Archives Canada "A scene from 'Frozen Deep'" 235 Source: The Illustrated London News, 17 January 1857, pp. 51 Reproduced with permission of the Mary Evans Picture Library in Introduction: What Happened to the Franklin Expedition? What wouldpapers mean to them? Cryptic marks, latitudes, signatures, journals, diaries ofdespair, official reports Nobody needs to read, l 've seen the realjournals You left us -you Franklin, you Crozier. l 've seen the skulls ofyour men in the snow, their sterile bones Arranged around cairns like compasses, Marking out all the latitudes and longitudes Ofmen. ~ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Terror and Erebus 132 On 12 January 1854, the Admiralty informed Lady Jane Franklin that it would remove her husband from its books on 31 March of the same year. This administrative decision effectively declared Sir John Franklin and the 128 men under his command dead. Lady Franklin protested the decision by trading the mourning clothes she had worn for years to signify his disappearance for garish pink and green dresses that suggested her denial of his death. In 1845, Franklin's expedition had disappeared into the central Arctic while attempting to chart the Northwest Passage. After dozens of search expeditions failed to find evidence of what happened, most people in England assumed that after close to a decade in the Arctic, Franklin and his men were dead. Jane Franklin, however, wanted proof of her husband's fate. Her protest, intended to spur further search attempts, was understood as a "complex piece of social semaphore" which indicated that "though she had mourned his absence readily, she declined to mourn his death until evidence of it was forthcoming" (Spufford 1 19). 1 By putting on a colourful dress, Lady Franklin made her missing husband appear: she conjured up a ghost. Unknown to Jane, John Franklin had died in 1847. Her performance contradicted this unknowable fact by producing a fictional reality in which he was still alive. A widow of her social standing and with her sense of matrimonial duty would never have flaunted convention by refusing to appropriately mourn her husband. Wearing pink and green dresses, therefore, visually signified that she was not a widow and that her husband was still alive. Her body, clothed in dresses appropriate to a married woman rather than a widowed one, called another body - her husband's living one - into presence. The uncanniness of the performance - its eerie ability to temporarily evoke a living Franklin - generated passionate responses. Lady Franklin's stepdaughter, Eleanor Gell, was so shocked that she wrote to an aunt that she trembled for her stepmother's mind, adding that her stepmother was "fast losing public sympathy by her strange conduct" (McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's 331). The performance raises important questions about the relationship between material remains and affective memory, demonstrating that Jane Franklin's relationship with her missing husband was marked by her melancholic attachment to him.