Image of Susanna Moodie
Read Susanna Moodie’s introduction to the third edition of Roughing it in the Bush, 1854. I use the Project Gutenburg website which has a ‘command F’ function that allows you to search the entire document by words or phrases. Moodie’s introduction is often read as a warning to would be emigrants as well as an explanation of why her family emigrated from Britain. See if you can find echoes of the stories discussed above: a gift from god, a second Garden of Eden, an empty/wasted land, the noble but vanishing Indian, and the magical map. By echoes I mean reading between the lines or explicitly within Moodie’s introduction. Discussing what you discover, use your examples as evidence to write a blog that explores what you think might have been Moodie’s level of awareness of the stories she carried with her. And accordingly, the stories that she “resurrects’ by her appearance in the Dead Dog CafŽ in Green Grass Running Water.
Moodie begins with sharing a perspective on the push factor(s) of emigration. According to her, there is a principle rationale for this movement. The majority of cases is due to a “matter of necessity.” This of course being paired with a “hope of bettering his condition, and of escaping from the vulgar sarcasms too often hurled at the less-wealthy by the purse-proud…” (“Introduction” Paragraph 1.) There are a couple references to the aforementioned “echoes” in her Introduction to Roughing it in the Bush. The most glaring to me being “an empty, wasted land” and “a second garden of eden” (Paterson, 2021.) These two characterizations of Canada prove to be quite interesting as they are clearly in literal juxtaposition of each other.
The Garden of Eden being of course an originally biblical, and probably now the most popular reference to the notion of “paradise.” This is how Canada was advertised to the masses, and was as Moodie puts it: “kept alive by pamphlets published by interested parties” all the while “they carefully concealed the toil and hardship to be endured to secure these hardships.” As a result of this, Moodie explains that “Canada became the great land-mark for the rich in hope and the poor in purse.” This description of the fertile ground on which the country was situated on, and its invigorating climate was a very romanticized narration.
It is to my understanding that this passage is a first-hand account of the hardships endured by those chasing that Utupia-esque facade of what Canada was like. As mentioned in the question at hand, it served as a warning to would be emigrants, but also enables the reader to have the slightest view into the craziness of this time. This was quite a loaded introductory paragraph, but proved to be insightful and gave the reader a glimpse through a very interesting perspective. With this being said, there isn’t much room left for the Indigenous population. Moodie’s lack of recognition of these “other people” is a direct reference to another “echo,” this time of “the noble but vanishing Indian.” This passage serves as a interesting view into what it may have been like from the perspective of the immigrant population, but does not take into account the effect these emmigrations had on the people who inhabited this land from the beginning.
Works Cited
Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush.. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 9 Apr 2013.
Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:3”. Canadian Literature, University of BritishColumbia. 26 February 2021. Lecture notes.
2 Comments
Hello Aidan,
It was very enjoyable reading your thoughts on Moodie! I also tackled this question, and your reference to Utopia – “Utupia-esque facade” – was intriguing. This is a wonderful summarization of how Canada must have appeared to those emigrating. This view further draws attention to the never-ending search humans go through to find their place in the world. I was immediately reminded of Thomas More’s Utopia, and I wonder if Moodie had this image in her mind on her crossing, and how much more of a disappointment she had upon arrival if she did indeed carry this particular story with her. In a wonderful article by BBC, Tom Hodgkinson outlines the various influences this novel had over European and world literary history , noting the impact on Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Knowing this, I would say it is highly likely she had some awareness.
I also appreciated that you talk about the introduction showcasing the immigrant’s perspective on the peoples “who inhabited this land from the beginning”. I wonder if this is due to the notion that this new land – this new “paradise” – was made specifically for Europeans, and the First Peoples were extensions of this land. Would this be similar to your thoughts, or is your interpretation of their perspective different?
Great post! I loved your point about the “Utopia-esque facade” of Canada, or at least what the settler-colonialists wanted Canada to be. I wrote on the question on Thomas King, so it’s interesting to examine how others have read Moodie and her treatise on settler life. It interesting you bring up the Eden metaphor; our classmate Cayla also took notice of it in her examination of “Roughing it In the Bush’s” initial descriptions of Canada “as being a bountiful land, ripe for the plundering,” images of the land that are quickly dashed away by the Moodie’s harsh truthtelling on nineteenth-century Canadian immigration (Banman 2021).
I think the Eden metaphor is quite important. King examines Genesis in his introduction to “The Truth About Stories,” presenting his own, quick, soulless version of it in juxtaposition to an imaginative rewrite of the story of Charm. “we listen to them and then we forget them,” writes King, of Native narratives, “for admist the thunder of Christian monologues, they have neither purchase nor place. After all, within the North American paradigm we have a perfectly serviceable creation story” (21). And so we have Eden: the master narrative, the creation of North American Christian hegemony, and Moodie uses it to set the stage for the vast “wilderness” – notice the quotation marks – of Canada.
“The post-garden world” of Genesis, writes King, “is decidedly martial in nature, a world at war…humans vs. the elements” (24). Imortantly, King writes of this “post-garden world” as “inherited.” So the image of Canada, untouched by the settler, untouched by Christianity, as the mythical unspoiled Eden allows the settler-colonialist a view of themselves as the originator – the first people. The rhetoricity of Edenic imagery considers the “Indian” invisible – or perhaps not, and instead as part of that untapped “paradise”? How do you think the mythical Indian of early settler-colonialism fits into the view of a Canadian Eden?
But Moodie rids her narrative of this Eden image – her book is called “Roughing it In the Bush,” after all – the garden is rough, and rather not a garden but a bush instead. It is no paradise. “The unpeopled wastes of Canada must present the same aspect to the new settler that the world did to our first parents after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden,” writes Moodie, tracing a lineage for the Canadian settlers tracing back to Adam and Eve. Of course, Canada was not “unpeopled.” It was not “new,” and it certainly was not there for the settler to make of it what they saw fit – it was stolen by, not given to, the settlers.