The Arctic’s appeal to Walton lies in it being “never before visited” a place of imagination that, through his exploration, may be transformed into a space of authorship. Walton wants to “tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man”¹ both to inscribe his own footprints and write his own narrative, and thus the act of exploration is itself a kind of writing and the Arctic a blank page on which to inscribe a narrative.² The idea of an empty Arctic and by extension of a sui generis masculinity for Walton, however, is as much a fiction as the open, tropical Polar Sea envisioned by Barrington: Walton encounters other beings—Frankenstein and the creature—and an impenetrable ice field. His link between writing and self-making and indeed the very genre of bildungsroman itself are problematized when Walton’s tale is replaced by Victor Frankenstein’s story at the same time as his physical progress toward the North Pole halts.****