Assignment:

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 Café in Green Grass Running Water.

My response:

     While Susanna Moodie may be a foundational name in Canadian literature, one need read no more than the introduction to her memoir, Roughing it in the Bush, to realize that the Canada she portrays in her writing is far from the Canada(s) many of us are familiar with. While her Canada is set apart from ours by over 100 years, it is also set apart by Moodie’s naïveté and cultural lens.
     Moodie portrays Canada as one of “the waste places of the earth” (5) and laments the remoteness of bush settlements, “often twenty miles from a market town, and some of them even that distance from the nearest dwelling” (3). Her introduction makes no mention of indigenous Canadians at all and her book portrays them much as de Sepulveda did: as lesser than Europeans and the “respectable settlers” (Moodie 5) Moodie talks about.
     Moodie’s introduction predominantly portrays Canada as an empty/wasted land and the colonies as second Gardens of Eden, stories which Moodie seems to be unaware she carries. Her descriptions of empty land give the illusion of an unpopulated nation – terra nullius – just waiting for impoverished settlers to arrive and begin anew. It is a surprise then, when Moodie goes on, later in her memoir, to mention the local natives, people who, by her description, should not exist. Her descriptions of an empty, barren land coupled with her later, condescending descriptions of the natives are very much the creation of her culture. While Moodie’s Canada is portrayed through a Euro-Christian lens, it’s one she’s grown so accused to wearing that she seems to have no awareness of its presence.
     There is one Euro-Christian story, however, that Moodie challenges, right from the beginning of her book. While she portrays Canada as an empty wasteland, her experience in the colony has led her to challenge its representation as a gift from God. She counters the stories “told of lands yielding forty bushels to the acre” (3) by saying that “they said nothing of the years when these lands, with the most careful cultivation, would barely return fifteen” (3). While Moodie certainly believes that colonization is “hew[ing] out the rough paths for the advance of civilization” (Moodie 5), she does not seem to view Canada as a gift from God, but rather a gift she and her husband are giving in their service to God. Moodie’s Canada is not the land of plenty, but a land of hope (perhaps against hope).
     While Moodie seems to be unaware of the stories she brought to the “New World” with her, others who have read her book have come to it with more awareness. In Margaret Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie, the character Moodie notes that “whether the wilderness is/real or not/depends on who lives there” (Atwood 63) and that she “should have known/anything planted here would come up blood” (Atwood 75). While Atwood uses Moodie as a character, often mimicking her naïvity, many of Atwood’s Moodie poems are underlined with a satirical note, such as “Charivari” in which she tells of a man being killed and “the American lady, adding she/thought it was a disgraceful piece/of business, finish[ing] her tea” (78).
     Likewise, Moodie makes a cameo appearance in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, where she visits the Dead Dog Café with E. Pauline Johnson and Grey Owl. The group is presented as clueless Canadian tourists, wishing to learn about the natives but failing to see what is right before their eyes. While Moodie may have been unaware of her cultural lens, King (and, to a lesser degree, Atwood) draws attention to it, leaving her looking absurd and pathetic. In King’s book, the roles are reversed and we see European Canadians from a native perspective, rather than the other way around. As European Canadian literature has been appropriating native culture for years, King appropriates Moodie and many of the other characters in Green Grass, Running Water from the European tradition. His portrayal of Moodie (and many of his other characters) calls into question the single narrative we have been hearing for years, while poking some good intended (and much needed) fun at European Canadians and our bizarre traditions, beliefs, and stories.

© 2015 Heather Josephine Pue

Works Cited:

Atwood, Margaret. Selected Poems. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1990. Print.

Gorham, Harriet. « Pauline Johnson. » The Canadian Encylopedia. Historica Canada, 2014. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

« Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. » Columbia College. Columbia University. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 1993. Print.

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1989. Print.

Smith, Donald B. « Archibald Belaney, Grey Owl. » The Canadian Encylopedia. Historica Canada, 2014. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.