Thrilling and marvellous experiences, place and subjectivity in Canadian climbing narratives, 1885-1925

Abstract

Critiques of mountaineering previously employed a contemporary scholarship on the history of travel and exploration had cast climbers as unproblematically heroic and identified mountain climbing as primarily a vehicle for masculine conquest over real and symbolic spaces. The difficulty with these interpretations was that they did not adequately explain the variety of mountaineering practices or the actions of all mountaineering participants. In this dissertation I examine the experiences of men and women who rock climbed and explored the Canadian Rockies during the early years of alpine exploration and recreation. Through a critical reading of the textual records produced by these early mountaineers, I will assess what influence mountaineering experiences had on gendered self-representation and place-representation. To achieve this goal I will analyze how representations of experience, place, and subjectivity are mutually constituted using insights offered by critical social theory. By blending insights from both empirical data and social theory I will demonstrate how attention to the particularities of experience can enrich our understanding of people and places.

The first goal of this research is to examine the status of mountaineering in Canada in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The second goal is to consider how contemporary social theory and feminist theory can assist in interpreting mountaineering experience and its connection to both the constitution of place and gendered subject positions. Finally, I critically interrogate the mountaineers' texts in order to identify the various ways that mountaineering experiences both constituted and reinforced climbers' representations of the Canadian Rockies and their gendered identities.

Research into mountaineering in Canada at the turn of the century reveals that technical climbing represented only a small portion of the total trip experience. In addition, the mountaineer's place representations reflected both the physicality of mountaineering practice and the values and beliefs of the mountaineers' wider culture. Finally, the self-representation strategies of the men and women who climbed in the Canadian Rockies were found to be informed by interconnecting gendered and experiential identities.