Question:

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.

A:

Within Moodie’s introduction there is a definite conflict between the reality and the idealism of the emigrant narrative. Undoubtedly though, Moodie believes that the emigrant who works hard and under the lord’s guidance will prosper from the land: “The Great Father of the souls and bodies of men knows the arm which wholesome labour from infancy has made strong, the nerves which have become iron by patient endurance, by exposure to weather, coarse fare, and rude shelter.” These “souls and bodies” with iron patience will be god’s chosen. What will they receive for their labour? A gift: all emigrants who leave for Canada believe, in Moodie’s eyes, an inspiring narrative: “they go forth to make for themselves a new name and to find another country, to forget the past and to live in the future, to exult in the prospect of their children being free and the land of their adoption great” (Moodie).

Here we find the gift of god promised in the new settlement: a place with a history for the settlers to write. The stark lack of any Native inhabitants concerns or even interactions in Moodie’s introduction is also represented by the term “the land of their adoption” as the need for parenting is established. Emigrants receive Canada to raise up from a ground zero, reminding us of the “Chapter 1” that colonizers begin at, and the “Chapter 15” of the Natives they neglect in the process of “receiving” and cultivating their adopted land (Asch 31). Moodie’s emigrant is gifted a new beginning, a biblical rebirth, while the Natives, perhaps, see the rising tides of doom.

This gift from god is the garden of Eden with its “salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country.” The caveat for Moodie, seen earlier, is that only those chosen by god and endowed with iron patience will make this garden an actuality and “reclaim the waste places of the earth,” again commenting on the Natives’ usage of the land while keeping them out of the text. The wasted land of Canada require iron men who will “hew out the rough paths for the advance of civilization,” driving further the implication that any previous inhabitants of the land are uncivilized. Implicit also in this advance is that Moodie’s civilization is the one and only civilization, she does not say “the advance of our civilization” or “English/European civilization.”

The most striking statement of the introduction comes early as Moodie relates the emigrant’s task to an “act of severe duty.” Not only is the land a gift, it is a gift that must be accepted and capitalized on. The necessity of this statement could even be said to emphasis the active European vs. passive/wasteful/invisible Native relationship that we can see in this very short introduction. The absence of any direct address to the Native people invokes the vanishing and noble Native narrative prompted in the question above; the land receives both glorified, holy applause and realistic brutality, the land symbolizing, perhaps quite consciously, the noble Native who needed to be reined in by civilization. The flowery language of the narrative Moodie finds to be a failure is paralleled by the realism of the empty and wasted: “what a mass of misery, and of misrepresentation productive of that misery, have ye not to answer for! You had your acres to sell.”  Taking the idealized land as the symbol of the noble Native, Moodie, reasoned on experience (“nineteen years in the colony”), addresses both the literal landsellers, likely European, but also the noble Natives who squandered their gifts and never became “productive.”

Moodie, while sardonically describing the lofty language of the romanticized emigrant, reinforces the narrative of the Europeans active responsibility to bring civilization and productivity to the land. They must fulfill this narrative because they themselves come from productive civilization and any land not yet under the “influence of the wise and revered institutions of their native land” must consequentially be theirs. 

King’s Susanna Moodie searches for Indians. From Moodie’s introduction alone we can see why she can’t find them in Green Grass, Running Water: she’s written them out of the conversation. She remarks that “we’re all Canadians” in King’s story, yet she’s on an adventure to find “Indians.” people surely present in her nation (158). King perceptively sees that the Canadian emigrant narrative neglects to give the Native people: an active role or even a voice.

Work Cited:

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. 1993. Rpt. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush.. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 21 Apr 2016.