But the law of reputations is like a bungee cord: you plunge down, you bounce up, though to diminishing depths and heights each time. In 1983, Sten Nadolny published The Discovery of Slowness, a novel that gave us a thoughtful Franklin, not exactly a hero but an unusual talent, and certainly no villain. Rehabilitation was on the way.

  Then came Owen Beattie’s discoveries, and the description of them in Frozen in Time. It was now clear that Franklin was no arrogant idiot. Instead, he became a quintessentially twentieth-century victim: a victim of bad packaging. The tins of food aboard his ships had poisoned his men, weakening them and clouding their judgment. Tins were quite new in 1845, and these tins were sloppily sealed with lead, and the lead had leached into the food. But the symptoms of lead poisoning were not recognized at the time, being easily confused with those of scurvy. Franklin can hardly be blamed for negligence, and Beattie’s revelations constituted exoneration of a kind for Franklin.

  There was exoneration of two other kinds, as well. By going where Franklin’s men had gone, Beattie’s team was able to experience the physical conditions faced by the surviving members of Franklin’s crews. Even in summer, King William Island is one of the most difficult and desolate places on earth. No one could have done what these men were attempting—an overland expedition to safety. Weakened and addled as they were, they didn’t have a hope. They can’t be blamed for not making it.

  The third exoneration was perhaps—from the point of view of historical justice—the most important. After a painstaking, finger-numbing search, Beattie’s team found human bones with knife marks and skulls with no faces. John Rae and his Inuit witnesses, so unjustly attacked for having said that the last members of the Franklin crew had been practising cannibalism, had been right after all. A large part of the Franklin mystery had now been solved.

  * * *

  —

  Another mystery has since arisen: Why has Franklin become such a Canadian icon? As Geiger and Beattie report, Canadians weren’t much interested at first: Franklin was British, and the North was far away, and Canadian audiences preferred oddities such as Tom Thumb. But over the decades, Franklin has been adopted by Canadians as one of their own. For example, there were the folk songs, such as the traditional and often-sung “Ballad of Sir John Franklin”—a song not much remembered in England—and Stan Rogers’s well-known “Northwest Passage.” Then there were the contributions of writers. Gwendolyn MacEwen’s radio drama, Terror and Erebus, was first broadcast in the early 1960s; the poet Al Purdy was fascinated by Franklin; the novelist and satirist Mordecai Richler considered him an icon ripe for iconoclasm, and, in his novel Solomon Gursky Was Here, added a stash of cross-dresser women’s clothing to the contents of Franklin’s ships. What accounts for such appropriation? Is it that we identify with well-meaning non-geniuses who get tragically messed up by bad weather and evil food suppliers? Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s because—as they say in china shops—if you break it, you own it. Canada’s north broke Franklin, a fact that appears to have conferred an ownership title of sorts.

  It’s a pleasure to welcome Frozen in Time back to the bookshelves in this revised and enlarged edition. I hesitate to call it a groundbreaking book, as a pun might be suspected, but groundbreaking it has been. It has contributed greatly to our knowledge of a signal event in the history of northern journeying. It also stands as a tribute to the enduring pull of the story—a story that has passed through all the forms a story may take. The Franklin saga has been mystery, surmise, rumour, legend, heroic adventure, and national iconography; and here, in Frozen in Time, it becomes a detective story, all the more gripping for being true.

  From Eve to Dawn

  (2004)

  From Eve to Dawn is Marilyn French’s enormous three-volume, sixteen-hundred-page history of women. It runs from pre-history until the present, and is global in scope: the first volume alone covers Peru, Egypt, Sumer, China, India, Mexico, Greece, and Rome, as well as religions from Judaism to Christianity and Islam. It examines not only actions and laws, but also the thinking behind them. It’s sometimes annoying, in the same way that Fielding’s Amelia is annoying—enough suffering!—and it’s sometimes maddeningly reductionist; but it can’t be dismissed. As a reference work it’s invaluable: the bibliographies alone are worth the price. And as a warning about the appalling extremes of human behaviour and male weirdness, it’s indispensable.

  Especially now. There was a moment in the early 1990s when, it was believed, history was over and utopia had arrived, looking very much like a shopping mall, and “feminist issues” were supposed dead. But that moment was brief. Islamic and American right-wing fundamentalisms are on the rise, and one of the first aims of both is the suppression of women—their bodies, their minds, the results of their labours—women, it appears, do most of the work around this planet—and, last but not least, their wardrobes.

  From Eve to Dawn has a point of view, one that will be familiar to the readers of French’s best-selling 1977 novel, The Women’s Room. “The people who oppressed women were men,” French claims. “Not all men oppressed women, but most benefited (or thought they benefited) from this domination, and most contributed to it, if only by doing nothing to stop or ease it.”

  Women who read this book will do so with horror and growing anger: From Eve to Dawn is to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as wolf is to poodle. Men who read it may be put off by the depiction of the collective male as brutal psychopath, or puzzled by French’s idea that men should “take responsibility for what their sex has done.” (How responsible can you be for Sumerian monarchs, Egyptian pharaohs, or Napoleon Bonaparte?) However, no one will be able to avoid the relentless piling up of detail and event—the bizarre customs, the woman-hating legal structures, the gynecological absurdities, the child abuse, the sanctioned violence, the sexual outrages—millennium after millennium. How to explain them? Are all men twisted? Are all women doomed? Is there hope? French is ambivalent about the twisted part, but—being a peculiarly American kind of activist—she insists on the hope.

  Her project started out as a sweeping television series. It would have made riveting viewing. Think of the visuals—witch-burnings, rapes, stonings-to-death, Jack the Ripper clones, bedizened courtesans, and martyrs from Joan of Arc to Rebecca Nurse. The television series fell off the rails, but French kept on, writing and researching with ferocious dedication, consulting hundreds of sources and dozens of specialists and scholars, although she was interrupted by a battle with cancer that almost killed her. The whole thing took her twenty years.

  Her intention was to put together a narrative answer to a question that had bothered her for a long time: How had men ended up with all the power—specifically, with all the power over women? Had it always been like that? If not, how was such power grasped and then enforced? Nothing she had read had addressed this issue directly. In most conventional histories, women simply aren’t there. Or they’re there as footnotes. Their absence is like the shadowy corner in a painting where there’s something going on that you can’t quite see.

  French aimed to throw some light into that corner. Her first volume—Origins—is the shortest. It starts with speculations about the kind of egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies also described by Jared Diamond in his classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. No society, says French, has ever been a matriarchy—that is, a society in which women are all-powerful and do dastardly things to men. But societies were once matrilineal: that is, children were thought to descend from the mother, not the father. Many have wondered why that state of affairs changed, but change it did; and as agriculture took over, and patriarchy set in, women and children came to be viewed as property—men’s property, to be bought, sold, traded, stolen, or killed.

  As psychologists have told us, the more you mistreat people, the more pressing your need to explain why your victims deserve their fate. A great deal has been written about the “natural” inferiority of women, much of it by the philosophers and religion-makers whose ideas underpin Western society. Much of this thinking was grounded in what French calls, with wondrous understatement, “men’s insistent concern with female reproduction.” Male self-esteem, it seemed, depended on men not being women. All the more necessary that women should be forced to be as “female” as possible, even when—especially when—the male-created definition of “female” included the power to pollute, seduce, and weaken men.

  With the advent of larger kingdoms and complex and structured religions, the costumes and interior decoration got better, but things got worse for women. Priests—having arguably displaced priestesses—came up with decrees from the gods who had arguably replaced goddesses, and kings obliged with legal codes and penalties. There were conflicts between spiritual and temporal power brokers, but the main tendency of both was the same: men good, women bad, by definition. Some of French’s information boggles the mind: the “horse sacrifice” of ancient India, for instance, during which the priests forced the raja’s wife to copulate with a dead horse. The account of the creation of Islam is particularly fascinating: like Christianity, it was woman-friendly at the start, and supported and spread by women. But not for long.

  The Masculine Mystique (Volume Two) is no more cheerful. Two kinds of feudalism are briskly dealt with: the European and the Japanese. Then it’s on to the appropriations by Europeans of Africa, of Latin America, of North America, and thence to the American enslavement of Black people, with women at the bottom of the heap in all cases. You’d think the Enlightenment would have loosened things up, at least theoretically, but at the salons run by educated and intelligent women the philosophes were still debating—while hoovering up the refreshments—whether or not women had souls, or were just a kind of more advanced animal. In the eighteenth century, however, women were beginning to find their voices. Also they took to writing, a habit they have not yet given up.

  Then came the French Revolution. At first, women as a caste were crushed by the Jacobins despite the key role they’d played in the aristocracy-toppling action. As far as the male revolutionaries were concerned, “Revolution was possible only if women were utterly excluded from power.”

  Liberty, equality, and fraternity did not include sorority. When Napoleon got control, “he reversed every right women had won.” Yet after this point, says French, “women were never again silent.” Having participated in the overthrow of the old order, they wanted a few rights of their own.

  Infernos and Paradises is the third and longest volume. It takes us through the growing movement for the emancipation of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the gains and reverses, the triumphs and the backlashes, played out against a background of imperialism, capitalism, and world wars. The Russian Revolution is particularly gripping—women were essential to its success—and particularly dispiriting as to the results. “Sexual freedom meant liberty for men and maternity for women,” says French. “Wanting sex without responsibility, men charged women who rejected them with ‘bourgeois prudery.’…To treat women as men’s equals without reference to women’s reproduction…is to place women in the impossible situation of being expected to do everything men do, and to reproduce society and maintain it, all at the same time and alone.”

  It’s in the final three chapters that French comes into her home territory, the realm of her most personal knowledge and her deepest enthusiasms. “The History of Feminism,” “The Political Is Personal, The Personal Is Political,” and “The Future of Feminism” make up the promised “dawn” of the general title. These sections are thorough and thoughtful. In them, French covers the contemporary ground, including the views of anti-feminist and conservative women—who, she argues, see the world much as feminists do—one half of humanity acting as predators on the other half—but differ in the degree of their idealism or hope. (If gender differences are “natural,” nothing to be done but to manipulate the morally inferior male with your feminine wiles, if any.) But almost all women, she believes—feminist or not—are “moving in the same direction along different paths.”

  Whether you share this optimism or not will depend on whether you believe the Earth Titanic is already sinking. A fair chance and a fun time on the dance floor for all would be nice, in theory. In practice, it may be a scramble for the lifeboats. But whatever you think of French’s conclusions, the issues she raises cannot be ignored. Women, it seems, are not a footnote after all: they are the necessary centre around which the wheel of power revolves; or, seen another way, they are the broad base of the triangle that sustains a few oligarchs at the top. No history you will read, post-French, will ever look the same again.

  Polonia

  (2005)

  What advice would I give the young? I have trouble answering this question. Here’s why.

  Just before Christmas I was in a cheese store, purchasing some cheese, when a very young man of—oh, say, between forty and fifty—entered, manifesting bewilderment. His wife had sent him out to get something called “meringue sugar,” with strict instructions to buy no other kind, and he didn’t know what the stuff was and couldn’t find it, and nobody in any of the shops he’d so far wandered into had any idea either.

  He didn’t say this to me. He said it to the cheese shop person. She too appeared to be without a clue as to the meringue sugar mystery.

  None of this was any concern of mine. I could have—should have—simply pursued my own personal goal of cheese acquisition. Instead, I found myself saying: “Don’t buy icing sugar, that isn’t what your wife wants. What she probably wants is something like fruit sugar or berry sugar, which is sometimes called powdered sugar but it isn’t really powdered, it’s a finer grind than ordinary white sugar, though you’ll have a hard time finding it at this time of year. But really, ordinary white sugar works just fine for meringues as long as you beat it in very slowly, I use it all the time myself, and it helps if you add just a tiny bit of cream of tartar and maybe a half teaspoon of white vinegar, and…”

  At this point my daughter—who’d succeeded in identifying the required cheese—got me in a hammerlock and dragged me over to the cash register, where a lineup was building. “The white vinegar, not the brown,” I called in closing. But I was already appalled at myself. Why had I spewed out all this unasked-for advice to a complete stranger, albeit a helpless and confused one?

  It’s an age thing. There’s a hormone in the brain that kicks in when you see a younger person in a state of shell shock over meringue sugar, or how to get the lids off jars or the beet stains out of tablecloths, or the right way of dumping the bad boyfriend who should be disposed of immediately because as anyone with half a wit can see the man is a psychopath, or which candidate is the best bet in the local election, or any number of other things on which you appear to yourself to have an overflowing fund of useful knowledge that may vanish from the planet unless you dish it out right and left, on the spot, to those in need. This hormone automatically takes over—like the hormone in a mother robin that forces her to cram worms and grubs down the gaping maws of plaintively cheeping nestlings—and reams of helpful hints unscroll out of your mouth like a runaway roll of toilet paper falling down the stairs. You have no way of stopping this process. It just happens.

  It’s been happening for centuries; no, for millennia. Ever since we developed what is loosely called human culture, the young have been on the receiving end of instruction from their elders whether they liked it or not. Where are the best roots and berries? How do you make an arrowhead? What fish are plentiful, where and when? Which mushrooms are poisonous? The instruction must have taken pleasant forms (“Great arrowhead! Now try it this way!”) or unpleasant ones (“You idiot! That’s no way to skin a mastodon! Do it like this!”). Since we’ve still got the same hardware as Cro-Magnon man, or so we’re told, it’s merely the details that have changed, not the process. (Hands up, everyone who’s ever taped laundry instructions to the washer-dryer for the benefit of their teenage kids.)

  There are mountains of self-help books testifying to the fact that the young—and not only the young—are fond of securing advice on every possible subject, from how to get rid of pimples, to the suave way of manoeuvring some youth with commitment issues into marriage, to the management of colic in infants, to the making of the perfect waffle, to the negotiation of an improved salary, to the purchase of a rewarding retirement property, to the planning of a really knockout funeral. The cookbook is one of the earliest forms of self-help book. Mrs. Beeton’s enormous nineteenth-century tome, The Book of Household Management, expands the tradition, and includes not only recipes but advice on everything, from how to tell a real fainting fit from a sham one, to the proper colour choices for blondes and brunettes, to which topics of conversation are safe for afternoon visits. (Stay away from religious controversy. The weather is always acceptable.) Martha Stewart, Ann Landers, and Miss Manners are Mrs. Beeton’s great-granddaughters, as is Mrs. Rombauer Becker of Joy of Cooking fame and every home handywoman, interior decorator, and sex expert you’ve ever watched on television. Look at the shows and read the books and authors quickly, in sequence, and you’ll feel the need of some cotton wool to stuff in your ears as a defence against the endless stream of what would sound like relentless finger-waving, hectoring, and nagging if you hadn’t chosen to let these folks in the door yourself.