ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two texts that offer radical revisions of the established narratives: Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness and Caroline Alexander’s Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition. The functioning of time and the enduring presence of the past in the Antarctic is a central focus of McCaughrean’s The White Darkness. Alexander’s text similarly disrupts and subverts the established “Heroic Era” chronotope. In The White Darkness and Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition there is a reassessment of the figure of the Antarctic hero who is at the centre of the “Heroic Era” narrative. The remarkable continuity that exists amongst the majority of retellings of the “Heroic Era” narratives for children ensures that stories such as McCaughrean’s and Alexander’s are both unusual and significant. In focusing on conflict between human protagonist and landscape as antagonist, McCaughrean perpetuates long-established ecophobic perceptions of the Antarctic, and implicitly argues that for a landscape to be viewed positively as beautiful or worthy of admiration, it must facilitate human life.
