Antarctica
57 pages • 1-hour read
Claire KeeganAntarctica
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, sexual abuse, graphic violence, and death.
Female Agency Constrained by Domesticity and Gender Roles
Across the collection, author Claire Keegan depicts her female characters in states of entrapment to explore how patriarchal norms and traditional domestic roles and environments limit women’s freedom. In “Antarctica,” the woman feels so trapped in her nominally happy marriage and family life that she manufactures an affair for herself with a stranger in a neighboring city. In “Men and Women,” the narrator’s mother is so constrained by her marriage that she ends up fleeing the home on a whim at the story’s end. In “Where the Water’s Deepest,” the au pair is consigned to the role of the proverbial caretaker just to make ends meet, but is disallowed her own family and freedom. In “Ride If You Dare,” Roslin manufactures her own emotional escape from her husband when she realizes he is not the man she thought he was. In “Quare Name for a Boy,” the narrator is trapped by her unexpected pregnancy, determined to escape both her coming fate as a mother and her lineage when she decides not to ask the baby’s father to support her.
In the latter half of the collection, women experience even more profound versions of entrapment—facing violence and even death for their attempts to break free. In “You Can’t Be Too Careful,” for example, Butch murders his wife when he suspects her of having an affair. In “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” the underage narrator finds the adult man she slept with hanging from a tree shortly after the two have sex. In the preceding stories, too, when the female characters attempt to set themselves free, they face irreversible punishments.
The title short story, “Antarctica,” is emblematic of Keegan’s overarching thesis about women’s attempts to seize and exercise their agency amidst an oppressive patriarchal system. What begins as a pleasant escapist weekend with a stranger quickly turns violent when the woman’s lover leaves her “handcuffed to the headboard” (16), naked and gagged in a cold room. The image of her lying on the bed thinking of “the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers,” “of hell, and then eternity” (18) implies that this has been women’s plight historically, and will continue to be. (The reference to dead explorers conjures notions of the past, while the reference to eternity evokes notions of the future.) Even when women attempt to assert themselves, to make their own fates, or to defy the roles they’ve been assigned, they are punished and constrained even more tightly.
Sex as a Form of Self-Exploration
Throughout Antarctica, Keegan explores sex as a tool for exploring one’s identity and seizing one’s autonomy, disrupting traditional Catholic representations of sex as either “sacred” or “sinful.” In “Antarctica,” the woman decides she wants to have an affair before she gets too old. She feels time passing and fears she will soon be too old to have this adventure. To the woman, sex is a pathway to exploring the world beyond her insular marital and familial lives, and to experiencing her body and identity independent of her rigid roles as wife and mother. In “Love in the Tall Grass,” sex is Cordelia’s means of entertaining and exploring herself, too. The Garden of Eden imagery in this story—represented via images of apples, orchards, and the characters lying naked in the grass—presents Cordelia as the autonomous woman inviting the man into her proverbial bed and her world. In “Ride If You Dare,” sex with Guthrie gives Roslin the chance of escaping her unfulfilling marriage. Sex is a throughway to life itself: “Finally, after ten years, she’s getting what she wants, somebody who’ll make her feel like she’s alive again, like she’s somebody under her clothes” (82-83). Her clothes are emblematic of her domestic, wifely role, while her nakedness represents her sexual and existential freedom.
In other stories like “The Singing Cashier” and “Quare Name for a Boy,” sex has different connotations and purposes for the primary characters. In “The Singing Cashier,” Cora’s sexual relationship with the postman is functional in multiple respects. She sleeps with him to secure a few parcels of fish for her and her sister, but sex also gives her time to herself and a sense of autonomy over her body; she sings happily every day after she and Smethers are together. In “Quare Name for a Boy,” sex is empowering and freeing to the narrator, but it also ends up entrapping her. Sex leads to her pregnancy, and to the possibility of being forever beholden to the baby’s father. In a story like “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” sex is a way for the young narrator to search for her identity and individuality. Throughout the story, her parents chastise her for doing “men’s work” and hanging around with Slapper Jim. Initiating a sexual relationship with him is her way of seizing the person she wants to be in defiance of her parents’ expectations, even while the story casts doubt on whether she truly has sexual agency given the abusive dynamics of their age gap.
While not all of the female characters who claim sexual agency meet violent ends, the majority of them discover that even sexual freedom cannot guarantee them lasting liberation or happiness. In Keegan’s narrative universe, sex offers the possibility of autonomy and escape, but ultimately proves to be an illusion. In “Love in the Tall Grass,” the images of Cordelia locking herself in her house in the wake of her breakup—her hair graying and her furnishings consumed by dust—implies that without a man (or sexual counterpart) a woman is consigned to the margins of society where she discovers that she is obsolete and useless.
Destabilizing Nature of Loss and Grief
The short stories collected in Antarctica present a nuanced examination of loss and grief, exploring how encounters with danger, violence, and death might impact the individual’s psyche. In some of the stories, loss and grief appear more metaphorically—as in the loss of agency and control the woman in “Antarctica” experiences when she becomes her lover’s captive; or the loss of independence that Betty experiences when Louisa tries to encroach upon her solo life in “Sisters.” In other stories, loss and grief are more overt—as in the narrator and Cora’s parents’ deaths in “The Singing Cashier” or Mammy’s death in “The Burning Palms.” No matter the representation of loss and grief, these short stories illustrate how sorrow and death have the power to immobilize a person and even to estrange them from reality.
One example of this phenomenon appears in the story “Storms,” where the young narrator’s mother is so overcome by sorrow over her mother’s passing that she experiences a mental health crisis. In the months after the narrator’s grandmother dies, the narrator observes her mother’s mental decline: “My mother took to cleaning out the cow house, even though we had sold the cows years back. […] And then she came inside and talked to the statues until dinnertime. She imagined storms, locked herself under the stairs when she heard wind” (64). The mother’s response to her grief is to vacate her present reality. Her world becomes a dangerous, unpredictable place; events in the past are erased, and the inanimate becomes animate. Rather than seeking her help for her grief, her husband has her institutionalized—thus guaranteeing that she will not heal from her loss.
While “Storms” offers an example of a woman robbed of life by her grief, the surrounding stories offer examples of characters who war against the possibility of loss. In “Ride If You Dare,” Roslin already feels that she’s “wasted ten years” (76) married to an unloving husband; to prevent losing any more time, Roslin races into an affair with Guthrie. In “Quare Name for a Boy,” the narrator decides not to invite the baby’s father into her life in hopes of protecting what she has left of her independence; the affair has already taken much of her freedom from her, but she refuses to let her lover take any more. In “The Burning Palms,” Gran burns down her own house to assert her power over loss itself; she is destroying the house before someone else can take and destroy it. Across the collection, these nuanced representations of loss and grief imply that these are universal human experiences and the individual must choose how she responds to them.
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