2] 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 her introduction by arguing that most of the time, “emigration is a matter of necessity, not of choice” and “may, indeed, generally be regarded as an act of severe duty.” This language contains echoes of the religious and nationalistic values held by many Europeans of her time, but it also gives us an idea of what kind of motivations were driving her and her fellow immigrants. One line in particular, which I find reminiscent of the stereotypical American love of independence (another tribally-embraced story), explains the “higher motive” driving European immigrants forward: “that love of independence which springs up spontaneously in the breasts of the high-souled children of a glorious land” (Moodie Intro). Her sense of religious duty, as well as her image of Canada as a free land to claim, become clearer with her discussion of Providence working to “reclaim the waste places of the earth, and make them subservient to the wants and happiness of its creatures” (Moodie Intro). In an attempt to explain her and her fellow pioneers’ motivations, Moodie argues that “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” (Intro, emphasis added). Here we again see echoes of the ideal of a ‘second Eden’ as well as this land being empty and available to adopt.
How serious is she when she uses language like this? Is she intensely devout and patriotic, or is she playing to what she believes are the values of her audience? If she knew the stories she carried with her, and that these stories were shared by her audience, perhaps she capitalized on this, as a writer, to create a connection with her readers. If she was not aware of the stories she carried with her, and genuinely took ownership of the patriotic and religious language she was using, these stories that form her view of the world are intensely strong. They are coming from deep core values, values of faith and devotion that were necessary for survival in her circumstances. These stories are her, and her fellow pioneers’, tools and weapons necessary to “gird up the loins of the mind, and arm themselves with fortitude to meet and dare the heart-breaking conflict” (Moodie Intro).
Moving away from the stories that color Moodie’s writing, I want to touch on the idea that she sees Canada as a different future, a place where her children can live freer lives than they could back home. To live in the future is to live in an imaginary world, a world created by one’s own mind from stories heard and absorbed throughout the life, conditioning that creates our entire worldview from birth. Motivated by the desire to create a future for one’s children is a very powerful motivation, one that taps into our most basic instincts. When someone is put in a position of necessity, as Moodie finds herself, the imagination is a survival tool, and in her case, and I’m sure the case of many European immigrants to Canada, the stories she carries with her are her lifeline, and to question them is suicide. We are all walking around, viewing our surroundings through filters that have been built into our minds since childhood. These filters are our stories, or maybe our assumptions, as King would say (183). In my experience, it is very difficult to first, identify our own assumptions and second, remove or change them. Whether or not Moodie knew the stories she carried with her isn’t the most pressing question, in my opinion, because they have been disseminated in her writing, told again and again.
What I want to know is: if you knew Moodie could identify and separate herself from the stories of national superiority and religious duty that we see throughout her writing, could you blame her for continuing to hold onto them given her circumstances?
I’m curious.
Sierra
Thoughts on Assignment 2:6
Works Cited:
Funk, Ken. “What is a Worldview?” Essay published by Associate professor at Oregon State University. 21 Mar. 2001. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.
King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.
Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 1 Mar. 2016.
Tsai, Robert. “Why Americans love to declare independence.” The Boston Globe. Boston Globe Media Partners, 29 June 2014. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.