An Arctic Leviathan: Gothic Fantasies of Regression and Ecological Concerns in Dan Simmons's "The Terror"

The article explores the philosophical, anthropological and spiritual meanings attached to the polar sea and its creatures in a recent novel by Dan Simmons, "The Terror" (2007). A fantastic reconstruction of the ill-fated expedition of John Franklin and Francis Crozier, Simmons’s novel deflates the celebratory rhetoric of Victorian polar narratives and offers a neo-Victorian gothic story that strips off the thin veneer of Western civilization. Trapped as they are in a hostile seascape, the English protagonists fall into an abyss of cultural and moral degeneration. The trigger of their descent into violence, anarchy and cannibalism is apparently the terror unleashed by a supernatural monster, an arctic Leviathan rising up from the ice to hunt them. Initially described as a devilish predator, the “Thing” reverses the hierarchy of species by arousing its preys’ worst instincts of survival. This condition of chaos is given theoretical validation by the novel’s intertextual references to Hobbes, Poe, Melville and Victorian evolutionism. In the last part of "The Terror", however, the role of the Leviathan is complicated by the emergence of alternative worldviews founded on Inuit spiritualism and eco-criticism, which cast a shadow on some ideological foundations of Western philosophy, science and spirituality.