How Jean-Baptiste Charcot came to embrace fear but not anger. Emotions of polar exploration and their communication to the public in the 1900s

Abstract This article makes the case for applying recent developments in the history of emotions, and in particular the concept of “emotional arena”, to the study of past polar expeditions. It focuses on the first Antarctic expedition of Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1903–1905), showing how, despite a lack...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Polar Record
Main Author: Simon-Ekeland, Alexandre
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0032247423000384
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0032247423000384
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Summary:Abstract This article makes the case for applying recent developments in the history of emotions, and in particular the concept of “emotional arena”, to the study of past polar expeditions. It focuses on the first Antarctic expedition of Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1903–1905), showing how, despite a lack of ideal sources, attention to the role of emotions in his expedition, and in the way it was communicated to the public provides a new understanding of the culture of exploration of the time. The article pays particular attention to two groups of emotions: first, those related to fear, an emotion that Charcot initially was reluctant to say that he had experienced (his position changed under the influence of journalists who saw the emotion as an interesting selling point); and second, anger and hate, emotions that were deemed inappropriate and were omitted from hidden in published accounts of the expedition, even though they appear in other sources.