Felipe Espinoza Garrido

The Terror and the Frozen Sea: Neo-Victorian Introspections of Empire

It is not uncommon that vainglorious failure in the service of empire – the Light Brigade-approach one might call it – should inspire an often idolising, if somewhat macabre fascination in the arts. Over the past decades, a distinctly Neo-Victorian sentiment has brought one the most famous of such failures back into public consciousness; Sir John Franklin’s lost arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the late 1840s. AMC’s recent miniseries The Terror (2018), however, gives the well-worn story a distinctly postcolonial twist: As the sea slowly freezes around the ships and halts the inherently colonial endeavour to ‘discover’ the arctic waterways (and to expedite the movement of imperial exploits), the show, as this paper argues, becomes an introspective mediation on the inherent brutality of such epistemologies of conquest. Its dominant metaphor is that of an arrested Empire, which, unable to vent its normalized violence, slowly turns onto itself. It ravages first its resources and, as life on and around the ships disintegrates into murderous, cannibalistic chaos, eventually its men. The arctic sea comes to symbolize global proto-decolonisation, exposing the vulnerability of an Empire that fails to understand the shifting, dynamic forces of the taken-for-granted marine structures on which it depends.

At the same time, however, The Terror’s undoubtedly anti-colonial tone is complicated by a key character: Much of the titular terror is inspired by the actions of Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis), one of the series’ two openly homosexual characters. His systemic oppression serves as a catalyst for his actions, and once more it is the fallout of imperial ideology itself, in this case its gendered violence, that proves instrumental in its own dismantling. However, the image of the disruptive, and in that sense, queer cannibal remains deeply troubling. Additionally, Hickey is also the only crewmember who is has not received training as a sailor and who is consequently uninstructed in the norms of Empire. The show’s constant implication that it is the continual learning and performing of imperial structures that could have prevented catastrophe, that could have allowed the British to conquer even the frozen seas, ignores that it is such learning that has historically caused catastrophe around the world and the arctic. This paper thus seeks to untangle these at times contradictory colonial, postcolonial, and gendered introspections that the frozen sea forces upon the neo-Victorian Empire in The Terror.