THE READER WILL, I hope, forgive me beginning this introduction with my own involvement with Susanna Moodie. I am not a scholar or historian, but a writer of fiction and poetry, and such people are notoriously subjective in their reading.
While I was growing up in the 1940s and early 1950s, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush sat in our bookcase, which it was my job to dust. It was with the grown-up books, but I always noticed it anyway because of the two interlocking Os of the author’s last name, which were featured in the rounded typographical style of 1913 on the cover. I recall opening the book and looking at the frontispiece — a snow-covered log cabin — but I did not read this book at the time. For one thing, it was not a novel, and I was not interested in books that were not novels. For another, my father told me that it was a “classic” and that I would “find it interesting to read some day.” I tended to shy away from books that were so described. For yet another, it was about people living in a log cabin in the bush. I myself had spent a large part of my childhood in cabins, log and otherwise, in the bush, and did not find anything exotic about the notion. I was more interested in medieval castles, or, on the other hand, ray guns. Roughing It in the Bush, I thought, would be tame stuff.
My second encounter with this book was in grade six, when part of it appeared in our reader. It was the section in which the Moodies’ chimney catches fire and the house does too. This rang true: chimney fires caused by overstuffing were one of the bugbears of my childhood. Still, every author in the grade six reader came to us clothed in the dull grey mantle of required reading, and I forgot about Susanna Moodie and went on to other matters, such as Jane Austen.
My third experience with Susanna Moodie was of an altogether different order. When I was a graduate student at the Harvard Department of English Literature, at that time a sort of Jungian hot-house, I had a particularly vivid dream. I had written an opera about Susanna Moodie, and there she was, all by herself on a completely white stage, singing like Lucia di Lammermoor. I could barely read music, but I was not one to ignore portents: I rushed off to the library, where the Canadiana was kept in the bowels of the stacks beneath Witchcraft and Demonology, got out both Roughing It in the Bush and Mrs. Moodie’s later work, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush, and read them at full speed.
At first I thought my unconscious had given me a bad tip. Despite the drama of many of the incidents described, the prose was Victorian in a quasi-Dickensian semi-jocular way, veering into Wordsworthian rhapsody when it came to sunsets, and there was a patina of gentility that offended my young soul, as did the asides on the servant question and the lower-classness of many of the emigrants already in place.
However, the Shadow will not be mocked, and Susanna Moodie began to haunt me. About a year and a half later I began a series of poems that became a book, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, which by now has doubtless been thrust down many an adolescent throat. What kept bringing me back to the subject — and to Susanna Moodie’s own work — were the hints, the gaps between what was said and what hovered, just unsaid, between the lines, and the conflict between what Mrs. Moodie felt she ought to think and feel and what she actually did think and feel. Probably my poems were about these tensions. So are her books.
Some years later, I wrote a television play based on a notable murder in Life in the Clearings, and later still a short book of social history of the period from 1815 to 1840; and both of these experiences forced me to grapple a little with the background and climate of Susanna Moodie’s books. They also made me consider Moodie herself in a newer light. Life in a log cabin in the bush had been normal and pleasant for me, but it was obvious that it was, and had to be, quite otherwise for her. I got culture shook from flush toilets, she got it from mosquitoes, swamps, trackless wildernesses, and the thought of bears. In some ways, we were each other’s obverse.
The forces that combined to waft Susanna Moodie to Upper Canada in 1832 were wafting many others as well. In 1760, with the capture of Quebec, Britain had acquired the Canadas, Upper and Lower (so called because, though Upper Canada was “lower” than Lower Canada, travel to both was via the St. Lawrence River, and Upper Canada was further upstream). Then came the American Revolution and an influx of immigrant United Empire Loyalists to Upper Canada. Then came the War of 1812 in North America and the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. The end of these wars sent many soldiers back into the potential labour force in Britain, with widespread unemployment as a result. The effects of the Highland Clearances and the Irish potato famine were still being felt. Many of the poor in Britain looked toward emigration to the colonies as a solution that offered them at least the hope of bettering their condition, a belief that was encouraged both by the ruling classes in England and by the ship owners, merchants, and land speculators lying in wait for them along the way. Pamphlets, settlers’ guides, and other forms of propaganda poured forth, depicting Upper Canada as a bucolic wonderland with a climate much like Britain’s, where industry and virtue would inevitably be rewarded.
Rising to these lures or impelled by the pinch of necessity, seven and a half million people crossed the ocean from Britain between 1800 and 1875. In 1832, fifty thousand emigrants entered Upper and Lower Canada. The population of Upper Canada became seven times larger during the first third of the century. “In 1830,” as Moodie says, “Canada became the great landmark for the rich in hope and poor in purse.”
Susanna Moodie was not from a poor family, but from the genteel middle-to-upper middle class: however, many from families like hers also chose to emigrate at this time. There was a surplus of younger sons in Britain, of which Mr. Moodie was one, and many among the gentry or near-gentry saw a chance, in the Colonies, of becoming more nearly what they thought they already were: landed gentry. Susanna Moodie, her sister Catharine Parr Traill, later to become the author of The Canadian Settler’s Guide, and her brother Samuel Strickland were three who made the choice.
What they may have been expecting beforehand can be gathered from The Young Emigrants; or, Pictures of Canada, a children’s book written by Catharine Parr Traill in 1826, six years before she and Susanna actually went to Canada. In it, the ideal immigrant family, who are middle class like the Moodies, speedily acquire a prosperous farm, which they tend with the aid of friendly servants and a little discreet poultry feeding and gardening by the women. They whip up a comfortable and spacious four-bedroom dwelling where they spend the day supervising things and the evenings in practising their musical accomplishments and in “social chat or innocent gaiety” with their equally genteel neighbours.
The reality, when Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill actually encountered it, was far otherwise. The most “English” land in Upper Canada, the fertile and relatively warm Niagara Peninsula, was already taken. After a pleasant-enough first-class crossing, far above the horrors of the steerage where the poor travelled in stench-filled, overcrowded semidarkness, they got their first taste of the Canadas when they landed at Grosse Isle and discovered that to many of the steerage travellers the New World meant a deplorable levelling of social classes. “Whurrah! my boys! . . . Shure we’ll all be jintlemen,” Susanna Moodie heard one Irish labourer shouting. She was to encounter this spirit in many forms later on: saucy servants who wanted to eat at the same table, earlier settlers who looked upon her with contempt, “Late Loyalists” from the United States who cheated her and borrowed, without returning, anything she was fool enough to lend them. Gentlefolk like here were the target of considerable malice, she found: when the family moved into one dwelling, they found the floor flooded, the fruit trees girdled, and a dead skunk stuffed up the chimney. Later, when she’d had time to mull it over, she came to understand what these people might have had against her: yes, the British class system could be repressive. But at the time this was just one of many obstacles that were set in her path.
There were others. Nature, which Wordsworth had declared, “never did betray / The heart that loved her,” looked quite different in the thickly treed wilds of Canada from the way it looked in even the craggiest parts of England. Susanna Moodie did her best with vistas and panoramas and picturesque scenery, but she much preferred Canadian Nature from a distance; the deck of a moving boat, for instance. Up close, there were likely to be mosquitoes, mud, ruts, swamps, and stumps. Also, there was winter, which was not like anything she’d encountered before. And there was the nightmare of clearing the land, without the aid of tractors, and of wrenching a few vegetables from the apparently grudging soil.
Above all, there was her own inexperience, her own unfitness for the kind of hardship and labour she found herself compelled to do. Her first home, near Coburg, was rented sight unseen on the understanding that it was “a delightful summer residence,” but it turned out to be a doorless one-room shack that Mrs. Moodie took at first sight to be a pigsty. Her second home was even farther out in the backwoods. After seven years in the bush, Mrs. Moodie had acquired some of the skills necessary for a settler’s wife — she could make coffee from dandelion roots and bake bread that didn’t resemble a cinder, for instance — but, despite her post facto sentimentality about her woodland home, she was happy to profit by Mr. Moodie’s elevation to the position of Sheriff of Belleville and to kiss the wilderness “adieu.”
We should remember too that the years she spent in the bush were child-bearing ones for her; in those days before modern medicine, when a doctor, even if there had been one available, wouldn’t have been much help, not all the children eventually survived. Mrs. Moodie is reticent on the subject, but she says at one point, rather chillingly, that she never felt really at home in Canada until she had buried some of her children in it. She may have come to “love” her rustic house and her new country somewhat, but to get to that point she’d had to pass through “a hatred so intense that I longed to die, that death might effectually separate us forever.” The point of her book, she more than once reminds us, is to discourage other English gentlefolk from doing what she herself had done. The Canadian frontier, she claims, is for the working classes, who are strong enough to put up with it. Drunkenness, debt, decline, and “hopeless ruin” are more likely to be the lot of the transplanted gentleman.
Now that such warnings are no longer needed, what does Roughing It in the Bush have to offer the modern reader? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Although it isn’t a novel, but one of those books that purports to tell the plain truth — as, indeed, early novels did too — it’s structured like a novel. It has a plot, which combines the journey with the ordeal, as the emigrant-travellers encounter a new land, cope with the strange inhabitants and customs they find there, overcome hardships that range from cholera to starvation. Looked at in this light, Roughing It in the Bush can be seen as belonging to a distinct tradition of travel writing — a tradition that perhaps culminates in Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush — in which the horribleness of the journey, the filthiness and squalor of the accommodations, and the awfulness of the food are outdone only by the traveller’s self-perceived lunacy in having undertaken the trip at all. It also has a meticulously described setting: the confrontation with a harsh and vast geography was, and was to become, a dominant motif in Canadian writing. It also has characters; “character sketches,” with dialogue included, are something Mrs. Moodie is particularly good at, and “Brian, the Still Hunter” has frequently been anthologized as a short story. But the most complex and ambiguous character in her book is herself.
If Catharine Parr Traill with her imperturbable practicality is what we like to think we would be under the circumstances, Susanna Moodie is what we secretly suspect we would have been instead. Time and again she rises above the prejudices of her own age and position, but time and again she sinks back into them. She doesn’t know how to do things right, she makes mistakes, she’s afraid of cows, she gets caught out on the lake in thunderstorms. But (surely like us!) she is not a total ninny; she can keep her head in emergencies, she has an innate decency and a respect for natural virtue and courtesy, and she has a sense of humour and can laugh at her own ineptness.
There is another way of reading Moodie, and that is to place her with three other women writers who were among the first to produce much of anything resembling literature in Upper Canada. One was of course Susanna Moodie’s sister, Mrs. Traill. Another was Anne Langton, who settled near Sturgeon Lake and wrote A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada. The fourth did not settle but passed through quite thoroughly: Anna Jameson, the author of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. All were gentlewomen, all looked at the growing colony with a critical though not entirely harsh eye, and all demonstrate that gender is not the only thing to be taken into account when accomplishments of one sort or another are being evaluated: their class gave these women a literary edge over those of their less well-educated fellow citizens who happened to be male.
In fact, when you place the early literature of the Canadas beside that of the United States, a curious thing emerges. It’s possible to cover American literature from, say, 1625 to 1900, without spending much time at all on women writers, with the exception of Ann Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson. Attention focuses on the “great” and overwhelmingly male American writers of the period: Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau. English Canada produced no such classics at this time — it was settled later — but if you study the literature at all, you can’t ignore the women. Possibly the reason for the relative preponderance of women writers in Canada can be found in the different ages in which the two were initially settled: America in the Puritan seventeenth century, English Canada in the nineteenth, the age of the letter and the journal, at a time when many women were already literate. In any case, it’s a situation that has persisted until today: the percentage of prominent and admittedly accomplished women writers, in both prose and poetry, is higher in Canada than it is in any of the other English-speaking countries. The same is true of Quebec, in which some of the first writing was done by nuns who had come to convert the Indians (and where, incidentally, the first English-language novel in Canada was written, also by a woman).
Susanna Moodie did not intend to write a Canadian classic, nor would she have anticipated or relished being claimed as an ancestress by the modern women’s movement; she was a creature of her own society, and would have disapproved of many feminist principles. But, as others, including T. S. Eliot, have pointed out, a work of literature gains meaning not only from its own context but from those later contexts it may find itself placed within. Susanna Moodie’s account of her struggles, failures, and survival have resonance for us now partly because we have produced our own literature of struggles, failures, and survival. She was not Superwoman, but she coped somehow, and lived to write about it, and even managed to squeeze a kind of wisdom from her ordeal.