Spaces of Adventure and Cultural Politics of Masculinity: R M Ballantyne and The Young Fur Traders

Abstract

Masculinities reflect the characteristics of the spaces—real and imaginary, material and metaphorical—in which they are constructed. Mapmakers, ranging from academic geographers to popular storytellers, chart masculinist geographies: Spaces in which masculinities are mapped. One important genre of masculinist geographical narrative is adventure. I explore the masculinism of adventure through a detailed, contextual reading of one particular adventure story. The Young Fur Traders—a British Victorian boys' adventure story set in Canada, written by the Scottish writer Robert Michael Ballantyne. In the setting of The Young Fur Traders, Ballantyne mapped a form of masculinity known generally as Christian manliness. Literal journeys through the spaces of adventure constituted metaphorical journeys through adolescence, from white, middle-class boyhood to white, middle-class manhood. Settings—liminal, largely unknown but broadly realistic, male-dominated, primitive, simplified, and idealised spaces—were imprinted upon this masculinity. The settings of adventure stories arc cultural spaces in which hegemonic masculinity is mapped and, in some cases, unmapped.

Text as It Happens: Literary Geography

“…Other single‐author or single‐text articles concentrate their analysis on particular themes: class in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha (Leyda 2008), national culture and gender in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (Morris 1996), race in Nella Larsen's Passing (Carter 2006) and in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (McKittrick 2000), and sexuality in Brent Hartinger's Geography Club (Brown 2006). And there are genre studies, focusing, for example, on adventure stories (Hones 2006; Phillips 1995, 1997), ‘the place‐defining novel’, (Shortridge 1991), science fiction (Kadonaga 1995/1996; Kitchin and Kneale 2001, 2002; Kneale 1999, 2006), periodicals (Hones 1999, 2000), popular history (Hones and Endo 2006), and travel writing (Blunt 1994; Blunt and Rose 1994).…”

Rural geography: rural gender identity and the performance of masculinity and femininity in the countryside

“…Woodward (1998;, for example, examines the ways in which masculinity among members of the armed forces requires the demonstration of physical strength and toughness in the face of inhospitable landscapes and extreme weather conditions. Others have also shown how men's ability to survive in harsh wilderness environments has been seen as a 'test' of manhood (Phillips, 1995). The kinds of 'warrior hero' (Woodward, 2000) constructions of masculinity demonstrate very well the differing ways that, according to Campbell and Bell (2000), the relationship between masculinity and rurality has been conceptualized.…”

Embodied rural geographies: Developing research agendas

“…The relationship between masculinity and nature, in particular the taming of wilderness and the conquering of remote and 'natural' territory, is discussed with reference to men's physical strength and heterosexual bodies. Richard Phillips (1995), for example, notes the references that are made to the body in Victorian tales of adventure and exploration in the Canadian Arctic. He argues that a boy's ability to survive in remote and extremely harsh environments was seen, in these stories, as indicative of his manhood.…”