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"A Brave Boy's Story for Brave Boys": Adventure Narrative Engendering RENEE HULAN tation of the north which is, in the words of Hugh Brody, "the saga of a few heroic individuals" (Brody, 17). Whether faced with the challenges of endless possibility or intractable circumstance, the white, solitary, adventurous male hero thrives in this setting. In early exploration literature, this figure enjoys an erotic embrace with the landscape as he follows rivers ever deeper into his sublime, mother nature; later, he lives the masculine fantasy of the American frontiersman, that solitary wood dweller Annette Kolodny's research caught happily penetrating the virgin landscape (5). While adult adventurers become these rugged individuals by defining themselves outside social relations, adventure tales written for and about boys construct rugged individuals through complex relations with men. In order to peel away the layers of gender, social, and racial characteristics informing these relations, this paper situates an adventure story based on the life of an Inuit boy named Pomiuk within the paternalistic tradition of "muscular Christianity" advocated by the Victorian Social Reform movement . Within this tradition, the discourses of medicine, gender, class, and religion converge to convert, cure, or otherwise overcome difference, an erasure necessary to colonial expansion. In Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World, Joseph Bristow links the popularity of heroic adventure at the end of the Victorian period to "a number of shifts in attitude towards juvenile publishing and curriculum design" (20-21), which emphasized the importance of turning boys into good citizens of the British Empire (19).' Boys' literature of the late Victorian period was a prolific genre with a substantial audience, especially for magazines like the influential The Boy's Otm Paper, which had a circulation ranging from two-hundred thousand to one million copies (Dunae, rctic adventure narratives contribute to a represen- .A 184 "Empire," 107; Drotner, 115). While its counterpart, The Girl's Own Paper, advised readers in matters of etiquette, health, work, and education, emphasizing "activities that were seen as necessary bulwarks against feminine dissipation and inactivity" (Drotner, 150), The Boy's Own Paper was filled with exploration and adventure in far-away lands. As literary representation engaged in "wider discussions of the moral and physical wellbeing of boys" (Bristow, 2), boys' magazines and novels engendered good citizens by promoting "wholesome adventure, cold baths and Christianity" (Moyles, 47). Education and Social Reform movements endorsed adventure narrative as a moral teacher: the education system added the Empire Readers series to the curriculum, and the Church formed organizations like the Religious Tract Society,which published the Boy's OwnPaper (Bristow , 20-21). Adventure narratives set in Canada, in magazines like The Boy's Own or in novels like R. M. Ballantyne's Ungava; or,A Tale of Esquimeauxland "fixed the Canadian north as a great stage for boy's adventures" (Waterston, 132) with the people inhabiting the territory, the Inuit, enhancing the scenery as guides or "Huskies," as "queer little men" or savages , and later as friends.2 Adventures from every corner of the British Empire represented masculine action and virtue and reflected the concerns British Social Reformers had about the education of boys. In Britain, Social Reform addressed the concerns about the education of boys by targeting the working-class boys who, like the working class generally, were "regarded as more primitive and in greater need of socialization into the dominant culture " (Slemon and Wallace, 12). The "rough lad," as the working-class boy was known, paradoxically embodied the romantic and primitive nature of boys admired by reformers as well as the potential danger of letting that nature run wild as "hooligans" (Koven,374). Upper-class men tried to prevent hooliganism by founding boyss social and athletic clubs in workingclass areas aimed at improving boys by establishing 'Vertical bonds of comradeship across class lines" (Koven, 365). Boys were malleable subjects who could transcend their social positions by becoming like their gentleman friends. Social Reform was a movement based on cross-class companionship (Koven, 370), but its goals could be translated into cross-cultural and cross-racial contexts, too. Just as generational difference masked class difference between the British Social Reformers and their "rough lads" (Koven, 368), so missionaries could mask racial difference by establishing a paternal relationship with the colonized. Pomiuk: A Waif of Labrador (1903), the book whose epigraph provides the tide of this paper, tells the story of one such relationship between Doctor Wilfred Grenfell and a young patient who was one of the Inuit...

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