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“You must live through the long night, the storms, and the destruction of human pride.”

Author: Christiane Ritter

I was excited when my book club chose A Woman in the Polar Night. Over the last few years, I’ve found a deep connection with memoirs and autobiographies, and I’ve always had a love affair with the forbidding, forgotten places on this planet. After watching John Carpenter’s The Thing as a child (I know, I know), I fell in love with the beautiful, dangerous vistas and the isolation of Antarctica, so I was excited to learn more about Christiane Ritter’s unprecedented adventure to the remote Arctic Island of Spitsbergen.

The write-up depicts Christiane as an intrepid explorer. A woman who in the 1930s defies convention and faces the elements. The actual memoir paints her differently.

Christiane’s husband decides that it is his continual dream to rough it in Spitsbergen, and so as the dutiful wife, Christiane goes along. As the men have adventures, face death and the elements, and routinely screw up the barely functional stove, Christiane’s contribution is uprooting her housekeeping life in Austria to, you guessed it, continue keeping house in the Artic. I had visions of polar bears and Little House on the Prairie like adventures. What I got was one woman trying to sweep the dust out of an artic hut.

Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

A lot of the story is like this. As the men – thoughtless, cavalier, selfish – leave Christiane alone, she battles the stove and tries to make a home for them. She is the person on the side, the interloper who only gets a tiny picture of the Artic that the men live. This isn’t a testimony, as the blurb says, to a woman defying society’s conventions, but instead the story of a woman who does what she is told and brings some civilized cleaning to a cold world.

Of course, there are some sublime moments as Christiane describes the beauty of the harsh atmosphere, as she talks about the wildlife (always in danger from the men), as she bonds with a fox (who almost gets slaughtered by the men), and as she describes, second-hand, the men’s adventures. But mostly A Woman In the Polar Night is a short story of one woman’s imprisonment. Her life is the same as it was in Austria. The Artic just brings out more how she is an aside, a servant to her husband, a dutiful wife scrubbing and cleaning wherever her man – the free one – decides to go. It’s disappointing and honestly, a bit boring. Because Christiane is so staid, we see little of the world around her, and while this book is touted as a classic, it really is a creation of its time. What’s the most poignant is what it doesn’t say, or perhaps Christiane is just guarded, and the true moments of beauty and discovery don’t make it to the page. This memoir is more about bland sadness than adventure and discovery.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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