The Lure of the "Frozen Deep": Nineteenth-Century Variations of a Gothic Trope

Through a comparative analysis of Romantic and Victorian stories of Ant/Arctic adventures, the article explores the development of polar imagery in nineteenth-century literature – from Coleridge’s early depiction of the ice-bound Mariner in “The Rime” to Wilkie Collins’s elaborate troping of the “frozen deep” later in the century. As the article demonstrates, the challenges met by polar explorers inspired narratives of transgression that acquired multiple meanings. By drawing on Kristeva’s and Blumenberg’s theories, Mariaconcetta Costantini analyzes specific variations of what proves to be a disquieting nineteenth-century trope. She first examines the transition from Romantic spiritualism to Victorian realism resulting from the symbolic reconfiguration of polar space and travelling. Emblematic, in this regard, is Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein", whose setting and characterization reveal an epistemic shift from sublime terror to psychic perturbation. A related object of scrutiny is the process of genre-crossing that marks the distinction of mid-century polar narratives. In describing the dissemination of the Gothic within their mimetic structure, Costantini argues that these hybrid narratives become vehicles for fantasies of abjection, which are most evident in Collins’s conceptualization of the “frozen deep”. Psychologically disturbing, the uncanniness of this metaphor is shown to be philosophically ‘modern’, since it connotes the life-journey in terms of ontological instability.