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Paper short abstract

C.J. Cooke’s A Haunting in the Arctic (2023) uses the selkie myth to tell a story of trauma, memory, and the sea. Set on a Dundee whaler in 1901, it connects violence against women with exploitation of the ocean, showing how North Atlantic folklore links people, myth, and environment.

Paper long abstract

In A Haunting in the Arctic (2023), Scottish novelist C.J. Cooke draws on North Atlantic myth and the sea as a means of negotiating trauma, memory, and ecological exploitation. Set primarily in 1901 aboard a Dundee whaler, the novel intertwines the selkie motif with the harrowing experiences of a young woman who, abducted and repeatedly abused, gradually undergoes a metamorphosis into a selkie. This transformation operates both as a metaphor for psychological and emotional trauma and as an instance of the fluidity of identity, aligning the female body with the mutable and liminal realm of the sea.

As a Gothic historical novel, A Haunting in the Arctic participates in the genre’s concern with the voices of the marginalised and the silenced, here foregrounding the intersections of gendered violence and environmental exploitation. Cooke draws an explicit parallel between the violation of women’s bodies and the whaling industry’s “rape of the ocean” (p. 334), thereby exposing the workings of patriarchal power over both women and the natural world. The novel’s dual narrative structure—juxtaposing the 1901 whaling voyage with a contemporary haunting—further underscores how trauma, like ecological devastation, reverberates across time, much as the ocean itself carries residues of the past.

I argue that Cooke’s reworking of the selkie motif exemplifies how North Atlantic folklore may articulate entanglements of gender, ecology, and memory. Through the destabilisation of boundaries between the real and the mythic, the novel offers a powerful lens for exploring belonging, trauma, and the transformative potential of the sea.