The New Woman

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the seventh verse of “Barcelone” by Boris Vian and half of the first chorus of “Privé" (Private) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            Just before 11:00 I logged onto Blackboard for my Introduction to Canadian Poetry lecture.

            Professor Kamboureli wished us a happy fall and apologized for background behind her in the webcam. She said her home is under construction. 

            She announced that there is a discussion board up for us to add comments. 

            She will be posting a survey soon for us to anonymously give feedback on the online course format. 

            She waves a fly away. 

            The lecture was on Thomas Wharton’s Icefields. 

            The colonial plot, rendered ironically invites post colonial critique. 

            There is a double idiom. A hybrid ethos. 

            The narrative has different contexts that jump backwards and forwards in time. 

            The genre is western modernity with a theme of mobility. There are other modernities outside of the west. Mobility is important in western modernity. There are explorers and tourists moving through the story. Byrne comes and goes and so does Freya. There is also a natural mobility in the flow of the glacier. Another product of modernity are the Greek and Italian labourers. Mobility both enables and disables. It can be positive but also intrusive. It allows expression and movement but those on the move can negatively affect others. Trask is one who makes things happen but with some negative effects. The terrain elicits encoded mobilities. The landscape can collapse and threatens hypothermia. We read the rhetoric of damage. Mobility as a dream of progress causes damage. 

            Who belongs here and who doesn’t? 

            During the Grand Tour of the Enlightenment young noblemen visited Italy. Trask's Glacial Tour echoes the Grand Tour. 

            Byrne is Trask’s nemesis. 

            The sublime turns Byrne into an amateur glaciologist. Byrne’s mobility focalizes the story. His near death experience in the crevasse, his vision of and search for the angel becomes the narrative focus. His search bears the imprint of nervous self consciousness. He adopts an analytical and self reflexive approach. He measures the rate of flow of the glacier so he can calculate when it will arrive at the terminus. This affects his own mobility. 

            Byrne’s seeing and witnessing is open to logic but he is also open to that which is beyond logic. The possibility of an angel frozen in the ice translates the colonial trope of his mobility into proto-environmentalism. 

            Frank Trask is moved by the techno sublime. He is an agent of the Industrial Revolution and manufactures sublimity. For him mobility equals commerce. He is self made. He has mobility but he is rooted in the landscape without belonging to it. He also wants to make Byrne profitable. Trask wants to extend the Grand Trunk Railroad to the icefield and the sublime. “Trains carrying away the black diamonds of coal to a world hungry for energy … refrigerator cars packed with glacier ice so that travelling dignitaries could dine on fresh lobster ..." 

            I commented that the phrase “black diamonds of coal" is ironic because individual pieces of coal are not as valuable as diamonds. Lobster is out of place in the mountains. 

            “Freight trains carrying fabrics and spices from Asia … leaving an imagined perfume of the orient in their wake ..." I pointed out that this reflects something that goes back to Columbus. They are still trying to make this land into Asia.

            She shows an old ad for the CPR showing a mountie on a horse with an Indigenous chief beside him on his feet while they gaze at the mountains. There is another of the Banff Springs Hotel. 

            I pointed out that the Banff Springs Hotel was owned by Canadian Pacific. 

            Frank thinks Freya is a lesbian. He mentions that Mary Shäffer discovered Maligne Lake. Is he implying that Shäffer was a lesbian? 

            Freya represents the New Woman, a concept that was born in 1894 in an article by Sarah Grand. The New Woman is a feminist, a social reformer and artist of unstable gender. A parasite who stands in opposition to the Angel in the House as does the female sex trade worker. 

            Freya “moves like a bullet … a small violence” who brings havoc. She is unmoved by the sublimity of the mountains. 

            On the other side of mobility are the Greek and Italian labourers. Professor Kamboureli mentioned that she is Greek. I’d thought she was Italian. The Greek labourer was not allowed to linger in the telegraph office because he did not belong as a human subject. 

            The post modernist narrative structure is wide ranging. 

            We took a break before our interview with Thomas Wharton. At that point the chat room showed 62 students in the class. 

            Our class is behind schedule because the professor likes to have a lot of discussion among the students. 

            The professor said that Tom is from Jasper and she’s known him for a long time. She’s bringing out a new edition of Icefields in the Landmark series and the new book will include the text of her interviewing him. 

            When Wharton arrived on webcam I asked the first question. I was interested in the two beliefs about Freya: that she was a lesbian and that she was a vampire and I wondered if the two things were connected. When Freya told Hal about the woman in Montreal that had thought she was a vampire he didn’t ask, “What is a vampire?” and so I wanted to know where he would have learned of them. Bram Stoker’s Dracula had been a commercial failure and was not widely circulated at the time but the novella “Carmella” about a lesbian vampire had in fact inspired Stoker’s novel. I asked if he’d gotten the idea from that book. 

            He said he hadn’t read Carmella and the two things weren’t related. He’d just wanted to show how Freya was set apart from others by suspicion in response to her independence and strength.

            Someone asked about Saraswati being the goddess of knowledge and why he chose her. There didn’t seem to be a big plan behind it. He said he’d read a bit about the goddess and liked the name. He liked the idea of bringing her father from a land with no ice to the icefields. 

            This was his first novel and he was just trying to find a story from all of his fragments. He took tutorials from Rudy Wieb who said fragments are great. 

            In the Norman Collie expedition someone did fall into a crevasse. Wharton says he is not a climber so he had to do a lot of research. Freya’s fall is based on a real event that happened to the girlfriend of a friend. 

            Someone asked why he killed Freya. He said it just made things more dramatic to have a loved character die. 

            Someone asked about the hyphens that he used, which are common in French literature but not in English. He said James Joyce used them and he liked how they looked for this story because it adds a cold mirror of the ice. 

            He said that when he was in high school he went for a hike in Maligne Canyon and slipped on the ice. As he slid down he could see a drop in front of him but could not see how far it went. He could not stop and so his life flashed before him but fortunately the drop was not very deep. 

            He explained that the chapters are short because he had a baby that demanded his attention. 

            He took the same Creative Writing courses that he now teaches. 

            There was never a railroad to Jasper but he needed something that would make the characters come and go. Some purist residents of Jasper resented the lack of historical realism. 

            He used Shakespeare quotes because he represents the background of the colonial project. 

            He was asked if he had written alternative endings. He said his teacher Rudy Wieb had wanted a real angel to come to life out of the ice but he wanted a muted ending with a tiny revelation. He had considered making Elspeth pregnant. 

            There was a Japanese climbing expedition at around that time. 

            The professor asked if Freya and Byrne made love. Wharton said he wasn’t going to answer that. 

            I had a chicken drumstick and some yogourt with honey for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I worked on finishing transcribing my British Literature lecture notes and starting my Canadian Literature lecture notes. I had six pages left when it was time for dinner. 

            I had a potato, two chicken drumsticks and gravy while watching The Count of Monte Cristo. 

            In this story Jacques Menard is a former counterfeiter who has gone straight and now runs a legitimate printing press which was bought for him by the Count of Monte Cristo. His wife Gabrielle is unhappy that they are poor and wants him to go back to forging. Jacques notes that Gabrielle spends a lot of time with her rich friend Sophie who gives her expensive dresses, jewellery and perfume. The fact is that Gabrielle works for Sophie Sablon who owns a casino that is a front for a counterfeiting ring. She keeps pushing Gabrielle to get Jacques to join them but since he won’t Sophie says they could still use his press if he were out of the way. One night the count comes to visit Jacques and persuades him to close the shop to come to the casino with him. Sophie decides that this would be a perfect opportunity to get Jacques out of the way and so while he is gambling a counterfeit note is slipped into his winnings. A policeman is notified and Jacques is arrested. The count wants to investigate and since he has in the past collaborated with the police inspector of Monte Carlo he persuades him to let him borrow some very good confiscated counterfeiting plates but with a lower quality of paper. The count then poses as Edmund Rousseau and begins passing his own counterfeit notes at the casino. This gets Sophie’s attention but also that of her second in command Armand. Armand and his men capture the count. The count tells Armand that he has notes with excellent engraving but lousy paper while Sophie’s gang has excellent paper but atrocious engraving. He suggests that they need each other but he will only deal with Madame Sablon. Armand is intent on beating the location of the count’s plates from him. He is imprisoned in the warehouse. Meanwhile Gabrielle comes to get paper from Armand for Sophie. On the floor she sees the count’s cloak and overhears the men talking about a prisoner. She leaves by the back way and frees the count. The count returns to the casino with one of the plates, which is useless without the other and offers Sophie a 50-50 deal. She brings in her printer to examine the plates and says the plate could only have come from Marcel Dubois who is now in prison and so this plate must have been acquired from the police. Suddenly the count starts fighting. Sophie is about to shoot the count with a pistol when Jacopo comes through the window and grabs her hand. Then the police arrive and Sophie and her men are arrested.