Gender on Ice.

A study of gender bias in polar exploration and its depiction in the National Geographic.

p. 39: Josephine Peary bored by little to do, accomplishing little because excluded from her husband’s male world. She is at least reading Greely.

p. 42: Indeed, there were no small unfilled corners aboard Peary’s ship. Its extensive inventory included: “a fairly complete Arctic library,” “a large assortment of novels and magazines,” “a pianola and an extensive collection of two hundred pieces of music.” Peary’s taste in music verged on the grand and monumental: Faust, Blue Danube waltz, ragtime.

p. 43—Bloom contends that with his cabin on the Roosevelt and his own personal isolation, Peary never left his home environment: Peary never leaves home in the sense that he continues to inhabit a simulacrum of home while he is away. Any reality he encounters that is incompatible with his own he literally transforms to a known and familiar space by filling it with his own personal furnishings (e.g. his fraternity flag at the North Pole).

p. 54-5—Bloom is critical of Wally Herbert for fully demonstrating the problems of Peary’s North Pole “‘discovery” while praising him as a great American and a national hero, in the Robert Scott mold.