The Queer Time of Lively Matter: The Polar Erotics of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “The Moonstone Mass”

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Notes

¹ Chauncey C. Loomis notes a similar connection between manhood and nationalism in relation to the British search for the Northwest Passage in the nineteenth century when he writes, “Many government officials, the press, and the public came to believe that somehow British manhood and British power were on the line in the continued search for the passage” (95). See also Simpson-Housley, Spufford, and Wijkmark.

² Loomis notes here that Shelley makes the Arctic a setting “in which human pride shows its folly in the face of the immensity and inscrutability of Nature” (99).

³ The influence of Poe on Spofford is also remarked by R. J. Ellis, who argues that he provides a plausible model for her “development of the domestic gothic, both in terms of his extreme style and in terms of his exploration of the unconscious” (274).

⁴ My assertion here is congruent with Lisa Logan’s assertion concerning Spofford’s “The Amber Gods” that it “makes visible those narratives that American literary romanticism and, until recently, its study, have buried: Agendas of colonization and expansionist imperialism mounted against racialzed and gendered Others” (36).

⁵ The moonstone mass can be correlated with the feminine in two respects: first, through the conventional association of gemstones with femininity, and second through the Kristevan association of monumental time with the feminine (see Kristeva and Freeman). My position, however, as I develop below, is that the queer space, time, and matter of the polar region as rendered by Spofford undoes conventional binary oppositions, including masculine/feminine.

⁶ Spofford’s extravagant prose, criticized by Henry James in his review of her 1864 novel, Azaria: An Episode, is discussed both by Luciano and Dalke as part of her resistance to conventional narrative conventions. Spengler connects Spofford’s effusive renderings of color and light to her interest in ninteenth-century debates on vision and optics.

⁷ The image of the frozen Eskimo here recalls the narrator’s silent companion, Glipnu, who disappeared beneath the ice earlier in the tale. Beyond this, it gestures toward the erasure of colonial violence that Luciano and Logan discuss and reintroduces what Luciano refers to as the “wounds of historical time” (273) in the midst of the narrator’s excursion into the deep time of geological history. On race in Spofford, see also Ellis.

⁸ Along these lines, Tuan comments concerning polar explorers in general, “In the desire to plunge into an alien space that severely tested the body there was probably also an unrecognized desire for death” (147).

⁹ I use “untimely” here in the Nietzschean sense developed by Elizabeth Grosz as that which places us outside the constraints, limitations, and “blinkers” of the present (5).