SOURCE: Thurston, John. “Roughing It in the Bush: A Case Study in Colonial Contradictions.” In The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie, pp. 133-66. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Thurston considers the composition, editing, and import of Roughing It in the Bush.]

That Moodie dredges up recollections of her first years in Upper Canada when she first writes about it speaks of the emotional burden those years laid upon her. A desire to wrest meaning from her earliest experiences of the colony drives Roughing It in the Bush. It is as much an expression of her needs in the 1850s as a representation of her life in the 1830s. The pain charging her memories of Cobourg clearing and Douro bush comes partly from her nagging sense of that period as a void in the progress of her life. That suffering and trial had bought nothing and, if left unredeemed, might bankrupt the whole Canada venture. Carol Shields' description of Moodie's writing as “an attempt to find confirmation of … an existence which was hidden in an alien wilderness and all but buried alive” applies best to Roughing It (1977, 32). Elizabeth Thompson suggests that “Moodie's inability to resolve” the tensions between gentlewoman and pioneer may, compared to Traill, “be the more accurate rendering” (1991, 32). Moodie became engaged in Roughing It as a negotiation with her images of Yankees and the bush for significance. En route to some kind of dogma concerning the colony, however, she skirts dissolution. The text needs to be explored to see how and why it leaves a deficit when she undertook it as a recovery of spiritual and emotional capital.

Moodie's one canonical text combines evident personal commitment with extreme diffuseness of voice, intention, and execution. In Roughing It the authority she reaches for escapes her grasp. She concentrates in this book the difficulty and anguish of her entire life, reaching back before emigration and eventually extending on into old age as she prepares it for publication in Canada in 1871. Whereas Life in the Clearings appropriates the colony for the mother country, Roughing It is Moodie's incomplete attempt to appropriate the colony for herself. It is the hinge upon which she articulates her colonial and her British reputations as an author. It is the only text in the realistic mode of Flora Lyndsay and Life in the Clearings upon which she attempts to inscribe the romance plot of her novels, but the text lacks the finality of resolution that the novels attain. The inscription is smudged.

If Roughing It is Moodie's most rewarding text, seeing it as an apprenticeship novel or a Gothic romance can no longer account for its interest. Rather than being provided an interpretation that attempts to accommodate its disparate elements and perceive its deep, internal organization, rather than being closed in on itself and found a work worthy of detached contemplation, an artifact of intricate, if elusive design, Roughing It needs to be opened up to its history and its discontinuities traced to the dispersed social and psychological energies it tries to contain. When Roughing It's contradictoriness has been noticed, recuperation within a larger unity, either of an isolated monad labelled “Susanna Moodie” or of a collective unconscious labelled “the Canadian imagination,” has soon followed. The text cries out to be unified; this abjured, its disunity remains to be explored.¹

Moodie's is one hand among many involved in the production of this text. In the British market for books on the colonies, J. W. D. Moodie was the acknowledged author, not his wife. In 1832, just before they emigrated, he wrote to her that the firm that had published Enthusiasm was “still much inclined” to accept from him a work “on Canada.”² When offering Bentley Ten Years in South Africa, Moodie provided a prospectus of this other book. It would be “a fair and impartial account … a plain unaffected narrative of the progress and proceedings of a settler in this colony.” By the end of this description the proposed book begins to sound like Roughing It: “My personal narrative would of course occupy a considerable portion of the work, and would be the more popular as containing not mere opinions but my actual experience in the country.” Bentley declined, success being doubtful because “so much has lately been written on that country,” but if Moodie proceeded he would “be happy to see the M. S.” Moodie may even have begun writing his book on the colony.³

As they became established in Upper Canada, however, the Moodies divided their labour. After negotiations with Harpers in the early 1840s for the book publication of Mark Hurdlestone and Geoffrey Moncton lapsed, Mrs Moodie considered already existing connections: “If I had time, I would try Moodie's publisher, Bentley of London. My sister Agnes's name would be a great help to me now in selling a book of my own” (letter 40). Moodie was involved with his sheriff's job; she had become the recognized author. None the less, and likely because he had already written on colonization, when they compiled the manuscript of Roughing It they included his four chapters and eleven poems. The poem that opens “The Whirlwind” was contributed by Samuel Strickland, as was almost half this chapter. Mrs Moodie arranged the manuscript, and at some point the negotiations with Bentley devolved upon her.⁴ J. W. D. Moodie, pointing out that his wife's narrative would be “unintelligible” without the information he supplies, subordinates his text to hers: “one of my chief objects in writing this chapter being to afford a connecting link between my wife's sketches.”⁵ Although the text is collaborative, its emotional centre of gravity is in her contributions; his is “the informative, objective, and generally optimistic voice.”⁶ She revises sketches previously published in the Literary Garland and the Victoria Magazine and accompanies them with new material. Taking into account all three contributors' work, fully two-thirds of the manuscript sent to Bentley had appeared in periodicals prior to book publication.⁷

Moodie considered her potential audience when transforming these fragments into a book. She suppressed “Michael Macbride” to avoid further provoking Catholics, but her greater concern—or her editor's—was her English audience. Peterman analyses the revisions “for the tastes and assumptions of the particular audience she was addressing” and finds “the language … more high-toned and poetic in the English edition” (1983, 84). Ballstadt suggests that some changes were “calculated to make it acceptable and appealing to her prospective British reading public,” and others “rendered the narrative more exotic” (1988, xxvi). Both Ballstadt and Peterman note changes that seem intended to protect “the Victorian sensibilities” of “her English and feminine audience.”⁸ Among these changes are two of the few excisions from the sketches, those of Woodruff's story and of the full details of Brian's suicide attempt. To an extent she allowed her audience's demands, as she perceived them, to dictate the style and substance of the family work.

The next participants in the production of Roughing It were employees at the Bentley publishing house and John Bruce, the Moodie's London agent. Bruce “saw the work through the press, reading the proofs and making alterations and corrections” (Letters, 104). The first three “editions” of Roughing It contain hundreds of variants in accidentals and substantives, all of which are documented in the edition by the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (637-44). There are a number of major substantive variants between the first two titular “editions”: a page of dialogue in the periodical version of the first chapter, missing from the first issue, is reinserted for the second; the poems at the end of the penultimate chapter and the beginning of the last are shuffled, resulting in a change of title for the last chapter; some of the poetry is rewritten, with lines inserted or deleted; J. W. D. Moodie's “Canadian Sketches” surfaces for the first time in the second issue. The correspondence between Mrs Moodie and Bentley contains no evidence that any of these changes was made on the express wishes of her or her husband. Bentley in his “Advertisement” thinks it “right to state” that “she has not been able to superintend this work whilst passing through the press” (ix).

Bruce and the Bentley proof-readers and editors shaped the manuscript. On 27 December 1851 Bentley asks Bruce to revise it with “the view of omitting some of the poetry” (Parker 1979, 150). Two days later Bruce refers to “softnesses” he is eliminating at Bentley's request. Since the book was published on 29 January 1852, Bruce's activities ran concurrent with its setting. Bentley and Bruce also decided what was to be included in the final text. The Moodies sent two chapters to Bentley separate from the bulk of the manuscript. One was to replace “Michael Macbride,” and one was to be a concluding factual and statistical chapter, which Bentley had requested. Only the latter, J. W. D. Moodie's “Canadian Sketches,” becomes part of Bentley's edition, and its inclusion is due to several factors: it could be added on to the already set book more easily than his wife's chapter could be inserted in its middle; it broadens the market appeal to attract serious immigrants and speculators; it allows the description of the second “edition” as “with additions.”

“Michael Macbride” and the sketch of Jeanie Burns and the lost children sent with “Canadian Sketches” do appear in Life in the Clearings, where the latter is divided into two chapters. That the responsibility for which chapters were included in Roughing It resides with Bentley and Bruce can be inferred from a note concerning these three chapters: “This [“Lost Children”], and the two preceding chapters [“Michael Macbride” and “Jeanie Burns”], were written for Roughing it in the Bush, and were sent to England to make a part of that work, but came too late for insertion, which will account to the reader for their appearance here” (LC, 248). What seems to be Moodie's confusion over when “Michael Macbride” was sent and what her intentions for it were can be read, if the note is attributed to Bentley, as his attempt to conceal his hand in the creation of both texts. “Michael Macbride” accompanied the manuscript of Roughing It, and the other chapter was with “Canadian Sketches.” Yet Bentley told Moodie that “Jeanie Burns” “arrived too late for insertion” (letter 44). There is no evidence that she authorized the inclusion of “Michael Macbride” in any of her books, and the attitude to Catholics it dramatizes is inconsistent with her apparent deference to them throughout Life in the Clearings. To a significant extent, Bentley was choosing what would go into Moodie's books and what would not.

Ballstadt claims that “Canadian Sketches” was added “to the standing type of the first impression” and that Bentley waited until after “the favourable reception of the book … to issue a second impression, which he called a ‘Second Edition, With Additions,’ on 29 Nov. 1852” (1988, xxxiv). Bentley's “Second Edition” would have been of sheets printed, after extensive in-press revisions, in late 1851-early 1852. He could not have kept the type of a six-hundred-page book standing for six months between impressions and there is no record of plates being made. The Bentley archives do record the printing of 2,250 copies of Roughing It in early 1852.⁹ He produced a third issue of this edition in 1854, calling it a “Third Edition, With Additions. In One Volume” and charging half what he had for the first and second issues. He was still looking for ways to dispose of the 2,250 copies printed two years before. The critical success of Roughing It did not translate into sales.

Bentley was responsible for a further detail—the title. The freedom he would exercise in titling “Rachel MacGregor's Emigration” Flora Lyndsay, and Geoffrey Moncton, The Moncktons, was conceded to him when he packaged Moodie's first prose book. He and Bruce refer to the manuscript as “Mrs. Moodie's Canadian Life” and “a work at present entitled ‘Canadian Life’” in their correspondence (Ballstadt 1988, xxvii-xxix). She had no contact with Bentley before “Canadian Life” appeared with the title by which it has since been known. A few years earlier Bentley had published a book on Australia called Roughing It in the Outback. While his advertisement emphasizes hardship, Bentley's title also suggests that the Moodies were only doing what colonists were expected to do, preparing the land roughly for its subsequent full occupation. If his thoughts tended in either of these directions, then he was ignorant of the state of settlement in the colony in the 1830s, and the text failed to rectify his ignorance. However Bentley meant it, this book has always been read as an account of rough conditions.¹⁰

This varied evidence of editorial intervention suggests that the Moodie manuscript handled by Bruce needed work. Bentley's belief in its marketability must have been solid for him to expend so much time on it. He and Bruce must have felt a sense of responsibility to the Moodies as well as to their own interests. They supplied the patina to an inchoate work. The text's subsequent publishing history shows that they were not entirely successful. Each successive editor has assumed a freedom to remake the text according to his perception of it and of its market. The poetry was the first sacrifice to editorial prerogative, that taken by Charles Frederick Briggs in New York in the summer of 1852 and that retained by Bentley when he produced the yellow-back edition in 1857. Other chapters or verses were reduced or omitted by each new editor. Bentley and Bruce participated in a process of textual production initiated by the Moodies. Every editor since them has felt compelled to join.¹¹

The Moodies did not claim the privilege of authorial autonomy. Neither did they have any stable intentions concerning the writing project that was in 1852 labelled by their publisher Roughing It in the Bush. They produced this text by engaging in a collaborative relationship with a publishing institution. They shared authority with Bentley and Bruce. To attribute autonomous authority to the Moodies is contrary to what is known of their publishing relations. Whatever unity this book of fragments has is due as much to intentions attributed to it by its editors as to any intentions the diverse sources of it may have had.

Roughing It is not the product of an autonomous author, nor can it be reduced to a hypothetical authorial intention. Moodie abdicated authorial responsibility. For the 1871 edition, the only one she oversaw, she mimiced the abscissions performed by other editors and muted the anti-Canadian tone that had drawn hostile reactions. With this book, authors, editors, texts, environments of writing, technics of production, market factors, paths of dissemination are in a relationship sufficiently unstable, shifting, and open-ended as to vitiate any configuration at the centre of which could be placed an autonomous author and her final intentions. The manuscript's unfinished quality, attested to by the labours of Bruce and Bentley, merely reflects this. There is no definitive text of Roughing It. Its outward emblems of flux are the wandering commas, spurs of exclamation, appearing and disappearing majuscules, variant spellings, substitutions, pages lost, found, rearranged, dialogue that is silenced, chapters that fail to make the Atlantic crossing or arrive shuffled, disoriented.

These emblems of Roughing It's textual instability signal its internal instability. The Moodies could not find a genre within which to inscribe this book. Bruce and Bentley may have thought it was either an informative immigrant tract, an exotic travel narrative, a wilderness romance, or all three. Critics have been looking for a genre to confine this text ever since. Klinck defines it as an apprenticeship novel (1962, xiv). Ballstadt has tried to show that it is a series of sketches in the manner of Miss Mitford, but has since argued that it follows a narrative model established by Frances Trollope (1972; 1988, xxiii-xxiv). Marion Fowler tries to prove that it is in the tradition of the sentimental Gothic novel of Ann Radcliffe. Gerson says it is in “the indigenous genre of the fictionalized survival guide” (1989, 135). As Peterman summarizes it, “containing elements of poetry, fiction, travel writing, autobiography, and social analysis, it eludes definition” (1983, 81). That, in Susan Glickman's words, Roughing It “is a miscegenous work, resisting generic classification” (1991, 22), suggests that it is no single thing. Moodie had intentions, although no single one, and she sought to provide some larger structure for the individual chapters. But the various intentions clash, and the text displays an unfulfilled dream of unity. Its strengths derive from the mix of literary sociolects with local dialects, from the mix of the serious with the comic, from the multivocality and heterogeneity that Moodie, perhaps involuntarily, figured into it.¹²

When Bentley contracted to publish the book and what precisely he thought he was getting are not known. Ballstadt says that by “early 1851 the manuscript was sent to John Bruce”; that he, “perhaps at the Moodies' suggestion, offered the shortened manuscript to Richard Bentley”; and that “by December 1851 Bentley had seen the manuscript and had it assessed by readers” (1988, xxviii). With its provisional title, Canadian Life, and J. W. D. Moodie's previous proposal in mind, Bentley may initially have believed it to be a documentary. The documentary qualities are supplied by J. W. D. Moodie, but there is too little information on the colony and too much on Mrs Moodie to qualify it for this genre. Neither is it an immigrant's handbook, like Traill's Female Emigrant's Guide or Strickland's Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West. Although “The Outbreak” and “Canadian Sketches” are historical, this is no history. The chronological development and internal correspondences and parallels make it more than just a collection of sketches. While autobiographical, it is not an autobiography, lacking as it does a narrator who stands outside of the narrative or has an understanding of the significance to her development of the period covered.

Moodie's stated intention cannot account for the diversity of the book. “I have given you a faithful picture of a life in the backwoods of Canada, and I leave you to draw from it your own conclusions,” she writes, and then draws hers: “To the poor, industrious working man it presents many advantages; to the poor gentleman, none!” Among the sections of the book that fall outside this frame for her “picture” are the first volume and “Canadian Sketches.” In her last paragraph she reiterates her intention, now as redemption: “If these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from … shipwrecking all their hopes … in the backwoods of Canada, I shall … feel that I have not toiled and suffered in vain.”¹³ Summing up “a long digression” added to “The Walk to Dummer,” however, she applies this intention only to the digression and not even to the rest of the chapter (444). The one positive truth she understands the text to contain—that the colony is a poor man's country—she never demonstrates.

Like the introduction to Life in the Clearings, the introduction to Roughing It may contain a discomforting truth about the Moodies: the “officers of the army and navy” are not the “instruments” with which “Providence works when it would reclaim the waste places of the earth” (14). J. W. D. Moodie writes that the “long probation in the backwoods of Canada” only brought him back “to the point from whence [he] started” (218). If the Moodies' first seven years in the colony were to be redeemed by a long warning to others of their class not to disobey Providence, then they did indeed toil and suffer in vain.

Mrs Moodie's inability to recognize wider intentions could be due to the unavailability of a genre that would contain these intentions. Her facility with pious and patriotic poetry, didactic children's stories, romance novels, and historical fiction did not serve her attempt to contain Canadian material. Neither could the sketch accommodate the large role she was writing for herself. The genres she brought from England could not be adapted to the amorphous, democratic, vulgar Canadian experience. Her verse production exemplifies this generic collapse. That her poetic output diminished the longer she was in the colony may have to do not only with her desire to be maximally productive but also with the frustration of her lyric impulse by the colony. Few poems were written specifically for Roughing It, and many do not relate to the text. The genteel polish of her lyrics never acknowledges the rough life around her. The colony stripped her of the outlines of a unified identity, necessary to the lyric, which she had tried to develop in her pre-emigration poetry. When, offering Bentley her novels, she decides to say nothing of her poetry because “no one reads poetry now,” she evinces her sense of the ill fit of traditional poetic genres to colonial life.¹⁴

Roughing It succeeds when the voices of vulgar characters figure strongly or, often in conjunction with these, undertones in Moodie's voice surface. Her revulsion at the proximity of these people is palpable, but she cannot deny them a prominent place in her Canadian Life. She attempts to assimilate them into her narrative and subdue them by moralizing or revealing their hypocrisy. She tries to dominate the range of discourse but, finding her voice in response to the voices of others, she begins in compromise. Her attempt to achieve a unitary language is frustrated by the dialogics of communication. She invests this narrative with the hope of restoring a unitary sense of herself. She associates this unified self with England and the lyric, the children's story and the romance. In Roughing It the insistence of the words of those she portrays thwarts her. Allowing the voices of the vulgar into her writing, she establishes a zone of contact wherein their discourses subvert hers. Hence she participates in the subversion of her authoritative language. Conjoining monologue and dialogue, Moodie, even if unintentionally, creates polyphony.

Without questioning Roughing It's referentiality, the use of the conventions of fiction in it must also be taken seriously.¹⁵ While reading it as a unified novel is to be avoided, so is reading it as unmediated fact. In dialogue, one of the fictional conventions Moodie most frequently employs, her tacit intentions for using these conventions are particularly transparent. Dialogue is central to each of her eleven chapters in the first volume. Over a third of the prose in this volume is dialogue, and more is quoted monologue. In the volume set on the Douro farm the frequency of verbal exchange decreases as the bush, rather than the neighbourhood, becomes the other; even in this volume her habitual means of depicting relations with the few people she comes in contact with is through represented conversations.

Moodie never claims to have an exceptional memory for recalling others' words, nor does she mention taking notes on them. While she is able to “remember a droll speech or a caracature face for years,” this does not imply total recall of long conversations (letter 47). She reconstructs these dialogues, perhaps to construct an imaginary projection of herself. Trying to convey an accurate and truthful impression of the past, she fills in blanks opened up in the intervening years by resorting to a technique she learned writing fiction.

While Moodie occasionally reproduces conversations to relieve the seriousness of the surrounding prose, and sometimes to portray character, her more frequent intention in the dialogues of Roughing It is to make characters complicit in the compromise of themselves. Most of the dialogues in volume one are interrogations; they are commonly resolved, however, with a role reversal, as the interrogator inadvertently exposes her or himself. The dialogues are forced to happen by a character given the role of questioner; they end when that character, instead of exacting the desired information, reveals her or his own failings. Dialogue in Roughing It becomes an inherently antagonistic tool for communication.¹⁶

The pattern is established a few lines into the first chapter when two health inspectors interrogate the captain of the Moodies' ship. She introduces this exchange with the notation, “they commenced the following dialogue.” The inspectors are made fools of when, to their question concerning births, the captain answers “three at a birth,” then has his steward bring in new-born puppies (22). Next, they unknowingly swear the captain in on “Voltaire's History of Charles XII” in lieu of a Bible (23). When the captain denies their request for planking, the inspectors express their pique by ordering him to disembark his passengers. He refuses due to the rough sea, and they leave “in great disdain” (24). Moodie concludes the scene with a comment on the captain's wisdom, as others drown that night attempting to reach shore.

The health inspectors, official interrogators, are mocked, duped, revealed as petty, denied their authority, and finally silenced. She stylizes this dialogue to represent the captain's “peculiar language” (22). The next coerced dialogue, occasioned by the visit of two customs officers and introduced by the same words as the first, is further stylized. Here Moodie uses dramatic conventions, introducing utterances with character tags, colons, and stage directions. This dialogue exposes the officers' greed and abuse of power as each of their questions solicits the expected bribe from the captain (41). Their stylization and prominence in the early pages of Roughing It suggest that these passages portray Moodie's primal image of dialogue in the colony.¹⁷

These initial images of how speech functions in colonial society are refigured in the first dialogue Moodie constructs of her own contact with that society. In “Our First Settlement, and the Borrowing System” her exchanges with Emily Seaton, “Old Satan's” daughter, are interrogatory, if not interrogations, and are further representations of speech as a coercive instrument. Her reluctance even to talk to this “girl of seventeen or eighteen years of age, with sharp, knowing-looking features, a forward, impudent carriage, and a pert, flippant voice” is apparent in every word Emily wrenches from her into the text (93). Equally, and perhaps inadvertently, apparent is Emily's assumption of her own authority as a “genuine Yankee[] … a young lady,” and, most importantly, daughter of an early settler, not a “stranger” (94). Moodie, not reliant on quoting Emily's words against her, interposes descriptions and judgments of the girl to ensure her humiliation. Yet Emily's recurring visits always focus on dialogue as she asks for what she wants and simultaneously challenges Moodie's habits and manners. As did the customs officers with the captain, Emily extorts many valuables from Moodie, while Moodie settles for exposing Emily's unscrupulousness.

Emily and other Yankee neighbours further disconcert Moodie by transgressing on her sacred bourgeois privacy, initially by reversing the mastery of seer over seen that she had exercised on the Grosse Isle mob. Upon her entrance Emily “stood, staring at [Moodie] in the most unceremonious manner, her keen black eyes glancing obliquely to every corner of the room” (93). Moodie finds of another borrower that, “once admitted into the house, there was no keeping her away” (102). A third is accustomed to “walking in and out whenever he felt inclined,” and “looking at and handling everything” (105). This last is surprised that Moodie refuses to dress her infant in his sight, and she expels him by assaulting his eyes with a cloud of dust. She ends the chapter with an account of how a candle she had borrowed was stolen, leaving her unable “even to look” at her sick child “to see” if he was recovering (111). This incident, among others, allegorizes her loss of the objectifying mastery of the gaze, even in her own home.

Unhesitating in her condemnation of Emily's affectations, Moodie seems not to recognize the justice of many of her criticisms. “You old country folks are so stiff,” Emily tells her, and “You think yourselves smart!” (95, 96) Although Moodie does not acknowledge this identification of the incongruity between her English gentry manners and her reduction to life in the colony, she may grant the next statement she gives Emily more authority: “But old country folks are all fools, and that's the reason they get so easily sucked in, and be so soon wound-up” (96). After silencing Emily's importunities by overpaying her for a plate of butter and requesting that she bring the change next day, Moodie constructs a series of dialogues with others illustrative of the borrowing system. She was exploited by people who not only recognized her vulnerability but also thought she could “well afford to lend” what they wanted (101).

The monetary temptation with which Moodie rids herself of Emily was recommended by “a worthy English farmer” who, knowing “the Canadian Yankees” better than she, offered this solution as an alternative to verbal conquest of her adversary (99). She triumphs verbally over Betty Fye, another borrower, by gradually shifting their roles until she becomes the interrogator. From the beginning of this construction she parries Mrs Fye's requests with her own questions.¹⁸ At last she attains the ideal proportion in dialogue, giving Mrs Fye a long “lecture on honesty.” When Mrs Fye responds by quoting Paul, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” Moodie has ready an Old Testament quotation: “The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again” (103). Her satisfaction at routing the enemy is apparent as she sums up the scene: “Never shall I forget the furious passion into which this too apt quotation threw my unprincipled applicant. She lifted up her voice and cursed me … And so she left me, and I never looked upon her face again” (103-4).

The verse with which Moodie buys her authority by selectively quoting ends, “but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth.” More importantly, the raising of Betty Fye's voice in curses dramatizes a shattering of dialogue, an end to words. Having established a dialogic context for the representation of the voice of another, Moodie destroys that context and encloses herself in silence. Herself become interrogator, in her smugness at warding off a vulgar American supplicant she has turned the tables once more and become like the anatagonist the scene critizes.

An exchange similar to that which silences Betty Fye shuts the mouth of Joe Harris's mother. Mrs Harris requests a piece of silk to make a hood to keep off the cold. Moodie's comment on the weather provides Mrs Harris the occasion to offer the story of her life. Moodie is “so much interested in the old woman's narrative” that she grants her request. Even when a subsequent request is refused, Mrs Harris is not insulted, for “she commenced the following list of interrogatories” (140). Moodie's replies—to questions intended to elicit no more information than what Mrs Harris has freely given of herself—are terse. This character sympathizes with Moodie over her father's loss of fortune, tells her that her husband had the same experience, and is not critical of Moodie's dislike of the colony. Even in this reconstruction it is apparent that, while Mrs Harris may be prying, she is also trying to establish a friendly relationship of mutual personal exchange. “Provoked by her pertinacity, and seeing no end to her cross-questioning,” Moodie abruptly reverses roles and asks, “Mrs. H—, is it the custom in your country to catechise strangers whenever you meet them?” To relieve Mrs Harris's confusion, Moodie explains that she refers to “an evil habit of asking impertinent questions.” The denouement once more discloses the self-satisfaction in Moodie's triumph: “The old woman got up, and left the house without speaking another word” (141). In this second creation of a dialogic sphere only to destroy it by silencing the other, she again turns interrogator and exposes herself.

Moodie's work in the first volume of Roughing It is concluded by a third conversational conquest tacked on to the chapter on the charivari. Mrs Dean, “an American,” pays a call and happens to witness the separation of the Moodies from their servants at mealtime. She asks, “Is not that something like pride?” (213). Moodie agrees with Mrs Dean's scriptural citation that “There is no difference in flesh and blood; but education makes a difference in the mind and manners.” During the course of the conversation Mrs Dean reveals her racism in relation to a black ex-servant, and Moodie pounces: “Indeed! Is he not the same flesh and blood as the rest?” (214) Mrs Dean will not grant racial equality, and when Moodie presses the point, “out of the house she sallied in high disdain.” The “great disdain” of the inspectors at the opening of the volume is matched at the close. Moodie notes the irony of this being the woman “who had given [her] such a plausible lecture on pride.”¹⁹ Concluding with a paragraph on the impending departure for the woods, she misses the irony that, through repeated rebuffs of all interlocutors, she has created a zone of silence in the clearing as deafening as the silence she will find in the bush.

Having suffered through physical proximity with Uncle Joe, Old Satan, and their families, Moodie attempts, almost twenty years later, to restore the authority of her voice by creating temporary spheres of dialogue and then dominating them with biblical citations and verbal aggression. The success of Roughing It lies in her failure to attain undisputed priority for her monologue. She left loopholes through which her adversaries in dialogue resist the finalization she would impose. When she allows the speech of Cobourg society contact with her own, the clash escapes her control. In this way some of her characters join her husband and brother, Bentley and Bruce as co-authors of the text in which they appear. The voices of the characters in Roughing It enter and speak with their own accents, their own emphases, and persist beyond the authorial attempt to silence them or devalue their words.

The speakers in these represented dialogues stalk each other, eager to take advantage of any opening. But those dialogues in which Moodie vanquishes her opponents do not have to be read univocally. Roughing It demonstrates a sinister side to the interpenetration of multiple voices as they jar disconcertingly with hers. She had good reasons to attempt to suppress the cacophonous voices that challenge her own. Peterman, pointing to her ability “in describing or dramatizing extremes and absurdities of human behaviour,” argues that “her finest skills as a writer left her uncomfortable” and “seemed to her somewhat frivolous, centrifugal, and lacking in essential seriousness” (1983, 88). The seriousness of her use of these skills is that, through them, she is unsettled by the decentring effect of voices opposed to her own.

Moodie, at home when writing in the lyrical, hortatory, or didactic modes, leaves the doors of this text open to the voices of others. Speaking through her, these voices have a potency she cannot domesticate. They refuse to be reduced to interior decoration and reassert their independence. Her sketches of Uncle Joe and Old Satan only come to rest when she is satisfied that their anarchic tongues have been locked in narratives of their downfall, but she cannot bar all the windows. Her compulsion to engage them in dialogue underscores her anxiety. The section on the borrowing system details her confusion or consternation with the North American pronunciation and use of words like gentlemen, girl, rooster, slack, and sauce. This confusion redoubles her inability to accept a system of commodity exchange she cannot understand. “Uncle Joe and His Family,” like the Moodies' house, is occupied by Harris and his mother.²⁰ Moodie's one-line comments and final challenge to Mrs Harris fail to recuperate the system of narrative, as she fails to grasp the system of land exchange.

In “Trifles from the Burthen of a Life” Moodie depicts the provincial dialect of a Scots landlady and “the most ludicrous enjoyment” Rachel's companion derives from “hearing her talk broad Scotch.”²¹ That she makes only those characters separate from her in race or class speak dialect points to mockery as part of her intention in using it. The Irishmen, Indians, Yankees, and servants of Roughing It speak dialect, but English gentlemen like Tom Wilson, Brian, and Malcolm speak in cadences indistinguishable from hers. She reproduces their speech at length, does not interrupt them or undercut their authority, and their monologues harmonize with hers.

Tom is her proxy in the verbal campaign against the Yankees when he goes to Joe Harris's wife to borrow yeast, since “they are always borrowing from you,” he tells Moodie (116). Tom's conflictual conversation with Mrs Harris is stylized in the manner of the captain's with the customs officers and Moodie's with Philander Seaton (105-6). Character tags and stage directions shape a dialogue she admits to inventing: “Would I had been there to hear the colloquy between him and Mrs. Joe; he described it something to this effect:—” (117). Depicting the vulgarity and deceit of Mrs Harris and her mother-in-law, and Tom's outwitting of them (117-19), this dialogue directly follows his routing of Uncle Joe with an impersonation of the devil (114-16). Tom is Moodie's ally in her attempt to quell the Yankees. But the gentlemen, too, harbour a threat, this time a threat from which she cannot distance herself. Unlike others in the text, she internalizes the voices of Roughing It's gentlemen. They do not speak through her; she speaks through them, and their expressions of abandonment and madness resonate with her own.

In the Cobourg setting “Yankee” is a synonym for low-class, and the Indians at Douro are described in terms that are the obverse of those applied to the Yankees. Moodie presents Indians and Yankees, the two recognizable societies she encounters, in paired terms and with similar methods of description. Both are represented as groups. Generalizations on Yankees and Indians abound. “Our First Settlement, and the Borrowing System” is devoted to Yankee customs and her attempt to deal with them; a parallel chapter in the second volume, “The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends,” similarly treats natives. She tries to fix these two alien societies in her writing. The phoneticized dialect spellings and broken sentence structures she puts in the mouths of these characters is matched by her designation of them by their first names and subsumption of individual Indians and Yankees into representative status. They constitute two species distinct from her own. Negations of each other in most ways, they stand in a complementary relationship to the narrator. The Yankee society is vital and thriving, and she rejects it; the Indian society is waning, and so she can eulogize it. Her imperial scorn for the Yankees is equalled by her colonist's condescension to the Indians.

Yankees and Indians are the occasion for numerous moralistic digressions, but the sin at the bottom of Moodie's ethical system is mere foul language. Told by an Indian that they only learned to swear from the English, she laments: “Oh, what a reproof to Christian men! I felt abashed, and degraded in the eyes of this poor savage … How inferior were thousands of my countrymen to him” (287). What the Yankees are actually guilty of besides vulgarity and lack of respect for their betters comprises an innocuously short list: borrowing, drinking, and swearing. She delivers three lectures on cursing to neighbours (101, 138, 318). Of a man she calls “the most notorious swearer” in the district she writes that “he had converted his mouth into such a sink of iniquity that it corrupted the whole man” and that, with this “foul disease, he contaminated all he touched” (318). What disturbs her about the logging-bee they held is all the “profane songs and blasphemous swearing,” all the “bad language” (321, 319).

To understand why this particular sin is so serious for Moodie, her distaste for “bad language” must be connected to the broken dialect she makes her Yankees speak and the ungrammatical speech of her Indians. If these ethno-philological details are then associated with her perception that “the titles of ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ were very rarely applied by inferiors” and that “they treated our claims to their respect with marked insult and rudeness,” a social explanation for her moral scale becomes possible.²² In Upper Canada Moodie finds her hierarchy in collapse, and violations of verbal decorum are cathected with the displaced force of this trauma. Each curse she hears is an echo of the shattering of her world.

Indians and Yankees form poles of attraction and repulsion in Roughing It. Between these poles are individuals who share Moodie's displacement and nostalgia for genteel standards. This group, curiously, is not represented in the text by her husband, her sister, her brother, or her friend Emilia, all of whom remain ill defined. The real representatives of the colonial gentry are a triumvirate with marked similarities: Tom Wilson, Brian, the still-hunter, and Malcolm, the little stumpy man. There are many differences among these characters, but a concentration on what they share is revealing. R. D. MacDonald and David Stouck have noted the similarities, but their social implications need to be emphasized.

Tom, Brian, and Malcolm, in contrast with the Yankees and Indians, are individualized: a whole chapter is devoted to each; their biographies are fully related; Brian and Malcolm are provided epithets, Tom and Malcolm given pseudonyms (64, 365). They speak in refined, pointed prose. The epigraph to Tom's chapter reads, “Of all odd fellows, this fellow was the oddest” (63); Moodie writes that “Malcolm was one of the oddest of [nature's] odd species” (384); Brian strikes her as “a strange being” about whom she must find out more (174). As exceptions, they hail her from an ideological position that she recognizes. As subjects of this ideology they address her in a way that ratifies her own subjection to it. She in turn, quoting their words in a voice indistinguishable from her own, speaks to her English readers, hailing them to recognize their shared subjectivity/subjection, their shared oddness before the developing capitalist hegemony.²³

These three are genteel and educated (65, 179, 370-1). They have all brought relatively large amounts of money to the colony with plans of establishing estates (76, 175, 370). Tom and Malcolm are “indolent,” and Brian neglects his farm to spend his time in the woods (65, 371, 180). Inevitably, their settlement schemes have failed, and they have squandered their money (82, 175, 370). Brian and Malcolm relate how they have degraded themselves by keeping vile company, and Tom's only Canadian friend is the bear he buys (180, 372, 82). They all perform acts that strike Moodie as absurd (82, 188, 379). Their narratives seem straightforward illustrations of the proposition that gentlemen should not settle in the bush.

Once more, as in her attempts to secure the voices of the vulgar, Moodie writes her way beyond mere didacticism. She exhibits stronger feelings for these three men than she does for anyone else in the book. Tom loves music, Brian appreciates her painting, and Malcolm writes (69, 181, 379). Tom and Malcolm temporarily live with the Moodies, and Brian is “a frequent guest” (85, 369, 179). Each delivers a moral lesson reflecting sentiments she expresses elsewhere: Tom tells her how her “literary propensities” unsuit her for Canadian society (71); Brian tells a story that ends with the question, “Is God just to his creatures?” (181); Malcolm expostulates, “Oh, the woods!—the cursed woods!—how I wish I were out of them” (380).

These men, unlike the Yankees and the Indians, are capable of, or in Tom's case associated with, serious sin. Brian has attempted suicide, and Malcolm has committed murder (177, 377). Tom, in a lighter tone, uses a false admission of robbery to deflate the seriousness of a fellow passenger on a stage-coach (68). Yet Moodie does not moralize upon these crimes.

The key to the excessiveness of Moodie's treatment of these characters is another of their shared features: they are all mad. Tom, asked if he is going mad, replies, “I never was sane, that I know of” (79). Brian, in another's words, is “as mad as a March hare!” (175) Malcolm asks Moodie, “Don't you think me mad?” (377) This triumvirate of English gentlemen presents the spectre of madness and sin lurking in the colonial bush beyond the orderly society of the imperial centre and its moral strictures. The stories these characters embody, the words they speak through her, reverberate with her own fears of what she confronts.

Early in her narration of her arrival in the Canadas, Moodie asks, “What heinous crime had I committed, that I … should be torn from [England's] sacred bosom, to pine out my joyless existence in a foreign clime?” (73) Later she reflects on a period when her “love for Canada was a feeling very nearly allied to that which the condemned criminal entertains for his cell” (135). Plagued by a guilt the source of which she cannot identify, she writes of “the secrets of the prison-house,” fearing that madness and death await her (489). Her feelings of guilt derive from an anxiety that, her system of values severely compromised in the colony, the guarantees for moral choice have evaporated. The exercise of “right reason” can no longer establish moral certainty. The triviality of her moral judgments in Roughing It is explained from another angle: cursing is execrable but suicide possible.

The mad English gentlemen all die prematurely. Brian makes another, this time successful, attempt on his life (191). Rumours of the murder of Malcolm in Texas reach the Moodies (385). She deletes the end of Tom's story between its Garland appearance and the book. He returned to England, married, lost his wife in childbirth, and went to New South Wales, “a melancholy and heart-broken man,” to die in his mid-forties (303).

Moodie is trapped between damned Yankees and mad English gentlemen. The rabble are vulgar, vital, exploitative, materialistic, alcoholic, profane, and democratic. The gentry are refined, attenuated, generous, artistic, suicidal, spiritual, and elitist. She is caught between a manifest society and a potential society. One is someone else's reality, for her a nightmare; the other is her dream, a nightmare at its core.

Tom, Brian, Malcolm, and the Moodies are spiritual and poor. The materiality and profanity of the Americans at Cobourg is shown, but their possible suffering is not. The Indians, with no chance of gaining from the wealth of colonial society, have absorbed its profanity. Unable to elevate herself and her kind to the ideal of spirituality synthesized with materiality, Moodie leaves this position in the text vacant. Striving for it, the English gentlemen fall outside of possibility into madness and death. She can find no solution to the contradiction of profanity triumphant other than futilely to ridicule the vulgar between the covers of a book. Providence has indeed deserted her.

T. D. MacLulich, using categories very like Yankees and Englishmen, attributes the presence of these categories in Roughing It to the “European personality structure,” but they can be traced to a European social structure (1976, 125). Her positive definitions of self insecure, Moodie seeks identity through negation. She may be unsure of what she is in the colony, but she knows she is not a member of the barbarian Yankee and Indian communities she encounters. They threaten her view of how civilized society should function, but the Englishmen gone wild, in a condition into which she might herself degenerate, threaten her as an individual. Barbarians inhabit the wilderness outside, but wild men come to live in the wilderness within. Her Yankees derive from the gentry attitude towards the newly formed English working class as little better than animals and objects of fear. The connection she makes between “the low-born Yankee” and “the Yankeefied British peasantry and mechanics” reinforces the class antagonism in her rejection of North American society (198).²⁴

This antagonism was exacerbated by emigration. Isolated in the genteel rural home, Susanna Strickland had still witnessed the disaffection of the growing class of urban poor. In her letter about the triumphal procession of “Orator” Hunt through London, she needs the reassurance that, six months after July 1830, “thoughts of Revolution … have died away.” She is reluctantly impressed by “the incomparable blacking mass” even as she dismisses “their teeth jarring jargon” of “Radical Reform” (letter 29). The proletarian masses were a murmur from the urban wilderness, to be ridiculed in passing. Sharing the European image of Upper Canada as a natural wilderness, she could not have expected when she left England for the colony that she would land in the midst of the barbarian horde. What were laughable rumblings in the metropolis became impending social chaos in the hinterlands.

As others have noticed, Malcolm especially approximates to the Byronic hero, but so does Brian, and even Tom, if Tom is viewed as a comic inversion of the type. Did Moodie shape her stories of them to suit this type, or were they themselves trying to live a cultural convention? In her conception of the artist and herself as one, the distinction between imagination and reality that this question implies does not hold. The dread her portrait of these English wild men sublimates is also a desire for a possible solution to the uncertainty of British North America.

A link between Tom, Brian, and Malcolm and Moodie's conception of the artist can be forged through her reconstruction of her youthful self as the romantic genius Rachel Wilde. Rejection of and by the world must be the writer's lot. But the artist as outcast and visionary in London, the Lake District, or Geneva had one or two others of similar temperament with whom to share his or her discontent. Youthful daydreams were transformed into a sterner yet far too mundane reality in the colony. The madness and death lurking on the other side of the visionary, anti-materialist stance became realities after that stance may have been discarded. Hence she is called and responds to the characters of Tom, Brian, and Malcolm.

The missing third term, dissolving the binarism of mad Englishmen and damned Yankees, is a class that Moodie does not write about in Roughing It. Not until Life in the Clearings does she address rising businessmen and professionals, and then to persuade them that “intelligence … is itself an inexhaustible mine of wealth” (83). They undervalued their writers and intellectuals, and saw a more prosaic meaning in her metaphor. For them artists and workers were only sources of surplus value. When the economy slumped, they were best kept busy in the colonies; otherwise they might become revolutionary workers or radical artists. The “Yankeefied British peasantry and mechanics” and the landless English gentlemen constituted two displaced populations, however disproportionate in numbers, abilities, and expectations.

Moodie was neither radical nor reactionary. All in flux in the colonies, various classes and social orientations jockeying for dominance, she wanted no more than to find a solid basis for a new hierarchy within which she could instal herself at a modest level commensurate with her status in England. She worked with words to affirm the values she knew. While Roughing It itself is the emblem of this affirmation, within it she fights a defensive battle. She easily distances herself from the damned Yankees; she knows that she is not like them. The figure of the mad English gentleman is more insidious. The wild man within the gates, he speaks intimately to her of the madhouse and the prison.

Another set of terms in Moodie's socially determined bifurcation can be generated through a consideration of her attempt in Roughing It to establish a stable orientation towards colonial customs. The chapter “Our First Settlement, and the Borrowing System” is paralleled in title and content with “The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends.” In the settlement the borrowing system is a custom connected with a society fully developed before the arrival of the Moodies. In the bush their Indian friends are part of an equally developed society. She finds the Yankee customs vulgar and the Indian customs quaint. What she calls the borrowing system may have been, had she learned to manage it, a system of barter pre-dating the circulation of a standard currency and the availability of consumer goods. The Indians also retain barter, but she can control their use of it, as when she refuses to trade “Canoe, venison, duck, fish … and more by-and-by” for her husband's map, and when she realizes that she could have “demanded a whole fleet of canoes for [her] Japanese sword.”²⁵

Moodie suffered from ignorance of the customs at Cobourg. Barter was part of an emergent rural economy that failed to survive when industrial capitalism became the dominant social formation. Other customs can be connected with a rural society since peripheralized. Charivaris and bees are among these customs, and she reacts to them as she did to the borrowing system. When she wrote about them, these practices belonged to her past; they did not intrude upon her in Belleville.²⁶ Ignorant of charivari, when the events of a number of instances of this “queer custom” are related to her she reacts with shock: “Good heavens! are such things permitted in a Christian country?” (208, 211) Her informant assures her that it is “the custom of the country” (210). While “much has been written in … praise” of bees, to her “they present the most disgusting picture of a bush life” (313-14). “People in the woods have a craze for giving and going to bees,” but she has a “hatred to these tumultuous, disorderly meetings,” calling their own a “hateful feast” (314, 322). The folk customs of colonials are not to Moodie's taste; she heralds their demise with the advance of civilization.

Moodie is understandably dismayed at the violence to which the charivari sometimes led, but she may have feared it as a carnival folk ritual.²⁷ According to the woman who explains the custom to her, charivaris are held “when an old man marries a young wife, or an old woman a young husband, or two old people … enter for the second or third time into the holy estate of wedlock” (208). They respond to carnivalistic mésalliances. So too, they force sacred and profane together, as when the invocation of matrimony as a religious sacrament is followed immediately in the text by a description of riotous behaviour. Carnival annuls the rules of everyday life. Moodie feels “a truly British indignation at such a lawless infringement upon the natural rights of man” as charivari (209). Carnival suspends hierarchy. The charivaris described to Moodie include idlers and gentlemen, booksellers and lawyers. Carnival encourages all to participate, regardless of class. She is told that a charivari “would seldom be attended with bad consequences if people would take it as a joke and join in the spree” (212). Despite this belief that participation would solve the violence associated with charivaris, local legislators used that violence as an excuse for curtailing them. Charivaris threatened the rule of law. Moodie has, after all, a motivation for tacking on to her account of charivari the dialogue with Mrs Dean about the separation of servant and master at mealtime: this defence of her own “custom” confronts the social relativity of “the customs of the country” (213).

The list of the participants in the Moodies' logging-bee establishes it as another occasion for familiar contact across class barriers. The “bad language” against which she rails is integral to the carnival atmosphere. Moodie thinks bees “noisy, riotous, drunken meetings,” and theirs ends with the house ringing “with the sound of unhallowed revelry, profane songs and blasphemous swearing.”²⁸ This describes the spontaneous eruption of the carnivalesque. What seems over-reactive in her depiction of the bee is merely commensurate with the degree of threat it represents. She knows how necessary bees are to rural colonial society.

Wholeness of action and unity of tone in the sketches of Tom, Brian, and Malcolm contrast with fragmentation and composition from a wide variety of materials in “The Charivari” and “Our Logging Bee.” These chapters contain exhortation, anecdote, social commentary, comedy, autobiography, lyric lament, and dialogue; violating linguistic decorum, they fluctuate wildly between high rhetoric and low slang. Perhaps due to her sense of their literary prototypes, Moodie is able to package her English gentlemen in shapely narratives; but folk customs disorder her text. Tom Wilson, his activities dissociated from social implications, is an innocuous carnival fool. When the carnivalesque presents a distinct intimidation, shrill self-righteousness accompanies a vulnerability to depicting its power. Her contemplation of the “perfect paradise” of Grosse Isle is disrupted by the frolics of “vicious, uneducated barbarians,” until the Moodies were “literally stunned by the strife of tongues.”²⁹ Compelled to represent the words of her Yankee interlocutors in her “Canadian Life,” so is she compelled to represent charivaris, bees, and, in her next book, camp meetings. Her attempts to monologize “the strife of tongues” at these rituals fail. While these are the darkest scenes of iniquity she conjures up from the colony, they are also scenes of vital communal ritual.

That Moodie absorbs colonial characters and folk customs and attempts to subdue them to her own voice suggests that she really might have heard in that voice the unifying principle of Roughing It, so authorizing subsequent attempts to unify the text around her. But her narrative persona, rather than being unified, is dissolved in the tensions between monologism and dialogism, between attraction to wild men and revulsion from barbarians, between narrative system and carnival chaos. Any belief in the author as unifying principle must take into account the collaborative production of the text and recognize that, by welcoming the aid of her husband, Bruce, and Bentley, she dramatizes her dependence upon and limitation by these men in her efforts to attain a unified image of herself. To unify the text would also require showing that the narrator of 1851 really does present a coherent and whole image of herself as protagonist of a story set in the 1830s.

The text as it was initially produced does not achieve formal manifestation of this image. If Mrs Moodie's work alone is considered—but all of her work, including the introduction and poems—then the two volumes appear to have a parallel structure. Each begins with a voyage into what is the main setting for the volume. The space allotted to the voyages is disproportionate, three chapters on the way to Cobourg and one to Douro, yet they seem to be structural equivalents. Each volume ends with the decision to exit from the setting. Again, the exact parallelism that might establish conscious design is lacking: the departure from the clearing is reserved for the bush volume. In volume one Moodie's main conflict is with a vulgar neighbourhood, in volume two with a hostile environment. The correspondences between “Our First Settlement, and the Borrowing System” and “The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends” are matched by other correspondences between chapters. The chapters on Old Satan, Uncle Joe, and Phoebe H— in volume one can be paired with the chapters “Burning the Fallow,” “The Fire,” and “The Whirlwind” in volume two; “Brian, the Still-Hunter” can be paired with “The Little Stumpy Man.”

The parallels between the two volumes are, however, incomplete and undeveloped. There are two more chapters in the second volume than the first. Moodie may have wanted a structure flexible enough to be used for each setting and yet contain the varied contents of the two sets of experiences. She may have, but it is more likely that Bruce, Bentley, or his compositors were responsible for deciding that the manuscript should become a two-volume book. On the evidence, she did not divide Canadian Life into two discrete units. When she summarizes the book, at the beginning and end, she refers to “the Backwoods of Canada,” ignoring altogether the part set in the clearings (15, 589). The first third of the text is but a prelude to the heart of Roughing It, in the bush. Early in the second volume she comments on the selectivity governing what follows: “It is not my intention to give a regular history of our residence in the bush, but merely to present to my readers such events as may serve to illustrate a life in the woods” (305). The portion of the text dealing with the seventeen months in the clearing is “a regular history,” narrated in detail and containing all the events she felt important. It has the greatest concentration of previously published material, while covering only a fifth of the chronology of the whole. If there is a parallel structure to the two volumes, she does not seem to have grasped it consciously.

Typographical irregularities suggest the manuscript was sent off before Moodie was able to see it as a whole and revise it accordingly. She is inconsistent in her use of dashes to give anonymity to places and people, including herself when she has others address her.³⁰ A deeper disunity is signalled by the varied internal marks of when the book was written. Five times Moodie measures the distance between the events depicted and the moment of writing, and, apart from his “Canadian Sketches,” her husband makes one such reference. These markers, all in portions of the text not previously published, designate a composition period of between late 1848 and early 1850.³¹ In her introduction Moodie mentions her “sojourn of nineteen years in the colony,” and in “Canadian Sketches” her husband says that he has been “sheriff for the last twelve years.”³² The disjunction between the period of composition and the introduction to the finished text opens up its temporal discontinuities. These inconsistencies suggest a manuscript for the most part in first draft, composed on an elementary chronological structure and never treated as a unit.

Neither was Moodie able consistently to detach herself as narrator from the presentation of her younger self as protagonist. In the first half of “The Charivari,” discussing society in the colony, she begins by drawing on her early experiences but gradually modulates to a generalized account, indistinguishable in tone and tense from most of Life in the Clearings. Then, having “dwelt long enough upon these serious subjects,” she returns to “the close of the summer of 1833” and her first experience of the charivari (206). Likewise, a digression on military half-pay occurs in the narrative present, interrupting a story set in the past (443). While memory is creative throughout Roughing It, her description of the St Lawrence shoreline fuses younger and older selves: “I love to recall, after so many years, every object” (36). She then proceeds to recall—or create—her sensations in 1832.

While many passages on homesickness in Roughing It arise from specific past events, some bring that emotion into the present, so that it is not always certain whether the “I” in the text is the narrator or the protagonist.³³ Moodie's created dialogues and attempts to place charivaris and bees satisfy desires that persist into the time of writing, and the need to express her yearning for England also persists twenty years after its initial occurrence.³⁴ One paragraph begins in the protagonist's past with reference to “the few weeks that [she] had sojourned in the country.” She then describes homesick dreams of England from which she awoke crying: “I found it but a dream.” The paragraph concludes in the narrator's present: “The reader must bear with me in my fits of melancholy, and take me as I am” (89). The reader must ask which Susanna Moodie had fits of melancholy, the one in 1832 or the one in the late 1840s. Similarly, into a meditation tied to her recollections of feelings prior to emigration she obtrudes pleas from the present: “Dear, dear England! why was I forced by a stern necessity to leave you? … Oh, that I might be permitted to return and die upon your wave-encircled shores, and rest my weary head and heart beneath your daisy-covered sod at last!” That this is the narrator's voice, not her protagonist's, is confirmed by her reference to “melancholy relapses of the spring home-sickness” (73). The text never tells if she ceased to suffer these relapses, so the “home-sickness and despair” she mentions in her introduction belong equally to her experience in 1851 (15).

Moodie likewise mixes past and present in her use of the idea of “home,” but home never belongs to the present. In her first meditation on the word she states just this certainty: “Home! the word had ceased to belong to my present—it was doomed to live for ever in the past; for what emigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home?” (48) Her last prayer before dreaming of England invokes “Home! Oh, that I could return, if only to die at home!” (89). Considering her unhappiness in the first volume, it is surprising to find her writing “not without regret” of leaving the cleared farm: “in spite of the evil neighbourhood, [she] had learned to love it.”³⁵ The dynamic accounting for this first attachment to a colonial setting is clarified at the end of Roughing It when she sheds “regretful tears” at leaving “the dear forest home which [she] had loved in spite of all the hardships” (480). Only when freed from confinement to a place can she forget associated hardships and love it. The one other time she refers to a colonial dwelling as home is when looking back from the deck of the steamboat leaving Belleville (LC, 19). For Moodie “home” is always and only the place that is left behind. The ideality expressed by the word can never belong to the reality of her present.

The few glimpses of happiness in the second half of Roughing It do not relieve the “many bitter years of toil and sorrow” (270). The “halcyon days of the bush” are confined to the “first spring … spent in comparative ease and idleness” (278). When a view of the lake is cleared that summer, Susanna's “joy was complete,” but the new vista transports her “back to England,” and in sitting “for hours” looking at the lake, she neglects “to learn and practice all the menial employments which are necessary in a good settler's wife” (306). “In moments” of oneness with nature she “ceased to regret [her] separation from [her] native land; and … [her] heart forgot for the time the love of home,” but these are only moments amid a more constant homesickness (340). By the mid-1830s hunger, sickness, deprivation, and hard work are also constants. The two occasions that relieve the gloom of the years 1836 to 1838 both involve the gathering in of food:

Oh, how I enjoyed these excursions on the lake; the very idea of our dinner depending upon our success added double zest to our sport!

(356)

That harvest [of 1838] was the happiest we ever spent in the bush. We had enough of the common necessaries of life.

(425)

But the “winter of 1839 was one of severe trial” (436). She and the children are sick; her husband is in Belleville as paymaster; the Traills have sold their farm and left, and her friend Emilia Shairp is also gone: “I felt more solitary than ever, thus deprived of so many kind, sympathising friends” (437).

Moodie portrays little of what she learned in these years. She retains her fear of cattle and of the woods throughout Roughing It.³⁶ She learns “that manual toil, however distasteful to those unaccustomed to it, was not after all such a dreadful hardship” (352-3). She overcomes her pride and enervation and learns those “menial employments” of “a good settler's wife,” working in the garden and kitchen and making the best of the little they have. But if these lessons are part of the independence she gained, it must also be acknowledged that she never gave up the reliance on servants specific to her class in England. And as she states in the introduction to Mark Hurdlestone, she quit the jobs taken on in the bush when the family moved to Belleville. She never ceased to distinguish herself from the “hardy labourer” born to manual toil. Even after the experience of poverty allowed her to appreciate the poor, she continued to designate them in the third person.

Moodie implies—through the placing of her claim to have “received more godlike lessons” in the “soul-ennobling school” of “glorious poverty” than she “ever … acquired in the smooth highways of the world”—that she first entered this school in 1836 (352). If so, she could believe that bush life did teach her something. Once again, however, she blurs her representation of past experience. Of the family events that forced her to emigrate, she writes that “poverty … became their best teacher” (196), and admits that she enrolled in “this school of self-denial” prior to emigration (197). Groping for the meaning of the years in the backwoods, she looks “back with calm thankfulness on that long period of trial and exertion”: “When our situation appeared perfectly desperate, then were we on the threshold of a new state of things, which was born out of that very distress.” The succeeding narrative is “to illustrate the necessity of a perfect and child-like reliance upon the mercies of God” (353). The Moodies' release from Douro was not itself born out of distress and required decisive action on their part, which does not accord with a reliance on God. According to her, “Providence was doing great things” for them during these last years in the bush (420). She does not, however, go so far as to characterize John Lovell and Sir George Arthur as emissaries of Providence.

While the Moodies chose to enter the bush, contingency provided the opportunities they needed to exit. Moodie could not shape her life-plot to ratify the providential guidance that presides over her fictional characters. Behind her recognition that gentlefolk are not the “instruments” with which “Providence works when it would reclaim the waste places of the earth” is the menacing possibility that the whole emigration scheme may have been a mistake (14). In “Trifles from the Burthen of a Life” the storm that rages the day the M—s try to leave Suffolk strikes Rachel as “a bad omen.” Her husband is angered by her “childish” belief in “an exploded superstition.” She insists that “we are all more or less influenced by these mysterious presentiments,” but “Rachel's defence of her favorite theory was interrupted.”³⁷ Missing their ship for Scotland a second time, Rachel says, “I should be quite disheartened if I did not believe that Providence directed these untoward events.” This time her husband inclines to her opinion despite his “disbelief in signs and omens … [T]here is something beyond mere accident in this second disappointment” (212). In the expansion of this scene for Flora Lyndsay, the heroine asks, “Is it not a solemn warning to us, not to leave England?” Her husband, unwilling to argue, simply states his determination to oppose his will to his wife's message from God (105).

In Roughing It Moodie opens her account of the events leading up to emigration by insisting that everyone has “secretly acknowledged” the power of the “mysterious warnings” that “the human heart” receives (193-4). She declares her faith in these warnings and hints that she would have been “saved much after-sorrow” if she had paid “stricter heed” to “the voice of the soul.” This digression introduces one such omen: “Well do I remember how sternly and solemnly this inward monitor warned me of approaching ill, the last night I spent at home; how it strove to draw me back as from a fearful abyss, beseeching me not to leave England and emigrate to Canada, and how gladly would I have obeyed the injunction had it still been in my power.” Duty to husband and child overrode her premonition: “it seemed both useless and sinful to draw back” (194). She never answers the question of how it “seemed” twenty years later. Whose was right, her husband's interpretation of duty or her own of omens? Her uncertainty must not have been relieved by experience of “much after-sorrow.” In her fiction only misguided characters attempt to control their destinies. Was emigration a misguided attempt to circumvent the decrees of Providence?

That Roughing It begs for such questions to be asked conditions consideration of the feelings Moodie expresses in it for the colony. The narrator only voices attachment to the colony as a contrast to her protagonist's expressions of dislike for it. Praise for the country never arises spontaneously but only to compensate for the complaints of her younger self. After describing how she sat in her first dwelling “abusing the place, the country, and our own dear selves for our folly in coming to it,” she says that “now, when … loving it,” she can “look back and laugh at the feeling with which [she] then regarded this noble country” (91-2). At the end of a year her letters home continue to “abuse[] one of the finest countries in the world as the worst that God ever called out of chaos” (163). Comparing herself to Lot's wife, she writes of the battles “with old prejudices, and many proud swellings of the heart” that she and her husband fought before they “could feel the least interest in the land of [their] adoption, or look upon it as [their] home” (197). She addresses her fullest encomium to the country to “British mothers of Canadian sons!” (38) The phrase implies that first-generation immigrants are never naturalized. She urges these British mothers to raise their sons for the “future greatness” of the colony: “do this, and you will soon cease to lament your separation from the mother country, and … learn to love Canada as I now love it, who once viewed it with a hatred so intense that I longed to die” (39).

Moodie's persistent homesickness, identification with England, and memories of hatred for the colony combine with her deferral of its greatness into a future only her children would see to create the impression that, in the moment of writing, she is trying as much to convince herself of her love of her present habitat as she is trying to convince her readers. These four sites contain Roughing It's only prose in praise of the colony, and they are overborne by the felt life of the text. Resigned to living out her days in exile, she wished to be buried in England.

Given the lack of typographical uniformity or structural completion, the lack of any view of the experience portrayed as a whole, the lack of any clear moral to be derived from that experience, the lack of any convincing presentation of a positive feeling for the country, to attempt to interpret Roughing It as a unified artistic whole would be perverse. What is interesting about the text is not its unity, completion, and wholeness but the expenditure of so much energy and self-examination in a failed attempt to achieve these qualities. When pressure is exerted upon its various cracks and contradictions, it exposes a woman trying to work through words to the terms that could contain the tremendous tensions of her own and her country's histories. Even after she had employed the strategies of fiction at hand, the creation remains unfinalized, and threatens to disprove itself.

Perhaps the most important meaning Roughing It had for Moodie was not within its pages but in the book itself: it confirmed her status as author. After 1852 her mature writing no longer languished in defunct colonial periodicals but was available to the whole English-speaking world in a book produced by Richard Bentley of London, “Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.” Her attempt to construct an image of self and society uncovered the dangers of dialogue and carnival, the imaginative horrors of damned Yankees and mad Englishmen, and the fractures in her own experience, but once produced, the text was the emblem of her authority. The reality of the book gained for her a status that her various antagonists could not claim.

The frugality of Moodie's publishing practice was manifest once more as she transformed fugitive periodical documents into books. The domestic and creative economy of reselling already-written works to a new audience returned, replete with overtones of a psychological economy. She preserved the continuity between pre-emigration and post-immigration selves by reprinting her British poetry in colonial periodicals, and enacted an imaginative return in her fiction by using British settings. With Roughing It she established the other half of the exchange, returning her name to British soil on the covers of a book written in the colony. Her engagement, in D. M. R. Bentley's words, “to explain life on the periphery to those at the centre” was accepted (1990, 119). She threw the second line of an alternating current of psychic energy across the chasm, creating a reciprocal, mutually reinforcing system of literary exchange through which she earned money and a trans-Atlantic identity. Colonial periodicals welcomed the work of the young Englishwoman, and, beginning with Roughing It, a British publisher welcomed the work of the middle-aged colonist. This exchange across time and space must have provided a satisfying, if illusory, sense of personal unity. She could disregard the revelations of disunity that her book contains.

“Communication,” writes Janet Giltrow, “maintains her attachment … to the society … from which she derives her identity.” The exchange of language ensured Moodie of her existence. Through it she avoided “vanishing anonymously into a social and cultural void.” Giltrow suggests why this textual exchange differs from the verbal exchanges within the text: “the traveller's isolation has a counterpoise in the affinity he feels with the culture he addresses.”³⁸ Dedicated to her sister Agnes, Roughing It is metaphorically what Catharine's The Backwoods of Canada is literally, a long letter home. Many of its effects result from implicit contrasts of America with England that only those from the latter would understand. Peterman notes her attempt “to fit the imagined needs of a distant and revered audience” (1983, 88); she could risk contact with colonial voices and customs on the assumption that her British readers would respond to these passages in the spirit in which she wrote them. Her application of a line from an Australian poem to the “ruffianly American squatter, who had ‘left his country for his country's good,’” is partly an inside joke that only cultured readers could appreciate. Other literary allusions, often biblical, similarly exclude the participation of the vulgar.³⁹

On several occasions in Roughing It Moodie addresses her reader, sometimes with rhetorical questions. Unlike the interrogations within the text, these queries are meant to establish a communion between author and audience. They invoke shared standards to accentuate the absurdity of particular colonial scenes.⁴⁰ The most pointed of these questions, and the most double-edged, concludes the interrogation of Mrs Dean for her double standards on servants and blacks: “Which is more subversive of peace and Christian fellowship—ignorance of our own characters, or of the characters of others?” (215) Moodie exposes the American's self-deception to British readers, and implicates them in her judgment. There is no irony here, no awareness that other readers might find her blind to her own character. She assumes that her readers—British, genteel, educated—will respond sympathetically. As Giltrow phrases it, she dispatches “an appeal to her distant audience. She asks for commiseration” (1981, 142). She has little idea that in this larger dialogue dispute is as possible as consent.

This product of Moodie's domestic, artistic, and psychic economy has won consent, becoming part of the cultural economy of English Canadian literature. That consent has required the silencing of dissonant voices in the text, through editorial censorship or critical deafness. As the English Canadian literary tradition was reaching the point where it could be said to have a canon, Roughing It was becoming one of its anchor texts. During this process the text was continually shaped by the hands of others besides its author.

The very title supplied by Bentley is a distortion. The first volume narrates events from the “30th of August, 1832” up to “the close of the summer of 1833” (21, 206). Moodie ends her last chapter in this volume anticipating the “departure for the woods” (215). J. W. D. Moodie's two concluding chapters cover their first year in Canada. He ends by describing the “uncleared land” he has obtained north of Peterborough (253). After the voyage from Grosse Isle to Cobourg this volume deals with life on a previously settled cleared farm less than six miles from Cobourg. In her portion Mrs Moodie tries to come to terms with an established society, while in his chapters J. W. D. Moodie distinguishes between settling on a cleared farm close to markets and developing uncleared land in advance of settlement. In his description of frequent trips into town for “groceries and other necessaries,” Cobourg appears as a bustling village (238). Volume one could have been called “life in the clearings.” It is as long as volume two, which deals with the bush segment of the Moodie experience.

Bentley and Bruce, producing from a raw manuscript a book directed at a specific market, conditioned all subsequent perceptions of that book and hence its position in English Canadian literature. In the first half a middle-class English woman tries to maintain dignities of caste in the midst of an uncouth, vulgar population. After the bush option is undertaken, she appears against a background of sickness, cold, scarcity, fire, and storm. Class-bound indignation yields to more dramatic and romantic heroism. At this point in the text the creative possibilities of the raw experiences and rawer prejudices of the Moodies unfold. The image of the resourceful gentlewoman, roughing it in the bush of discontent and in a winter of social and mental migration, enlivens and energizes the story. Bentley's “Advertisement,” silent on the Cobourg experience, foregrounds the “delineations of fortitude under privation … contained in her second volume” (x).

That Moodie and her collaborators never achieved consensus on what unifying intention held their fragments together helps to account for the varied composition of each edition. She plays variations on her intention to warn prospective genteel emigrants away from the Canadas, but her husband addresses those coming. Neither of these intentions accords with Bentley's marketing of the text as pioneer romance. A further intention surfaces in 1871 in the first Canadian edition. While this edition cannot be bought by prospective emigrants, the warnings to British gentlemen remain, even in the rewritten and expanded introduction. In “Canada: A Contrast” Moodie remarks only on that part of the narrative set “in the woods, attempting to clear a bush farm” (527). She complains of unjust criticism but traces it to her “account of [their] failure in the bush” (528). She forgets her harsh treatment of the clearings society, and even transfers that criticism to the backwoods by referring to “the first seven years” as if they were all passed there and by writing as if the Moodies had never had a farm “near a village” (527, 528). She asserts that her “love for the country has steadily increased from year to year” (528). She describes how development has erased the conditions they faced in the 1830s. She adds “Forest” to the subtitle “Life in Canada.” She changes the epigraph on the title-page from one emphasizing her “Painful experience in a distant land” to a more uplifting one claiming that “poor exiles” are the “first founders of mighty empires” and the civilizers of “barbarous countries.”⁴¹ The book becomes a document of a vanished way of life. It provides the basis for a contrast between then and now, between her hatred of the country then and her love for it now.

In contracting for the Canadian edition Moodie was requested to reduce it in size (letters 107, 109). To this end she follows the American pirated edition and cuts most of her verse. By omitting the pieces by her husband and brother, both dead, she becomes the text's sole author keeping one chapter by her husband that accords with her own tone and method but cancelling its attribution to him. His contributions would better suit a “work entirely his own,” but plans for such a work were never executed (letter 107). She corrects some factual errors and deletes some mild profanities from dialogue. She changes the word she uses to describe the occupants of Grosse Isle from “harpies” to “women.” A general retrospection on “the state of society in Canada,” covering a period of “seventeen years” in the 1852 edition (201), covers “forty years” in the 1871, while the statement itself is unchanged. These are her sole attempts to update the text.

Despite refusing to acknowledge the source of criticism of the book, Moodie makes a number of revealing excisions for the Canadian edition. Writing to her daughter a few months before its release, she describes drawing her “pencil through many objectionable passages”: “As this edition is for the D. C., we need not arouse their anger by a repetition of them” (letter 109). She deletes a commentary on the disturbing precocity of Canadian children that ends stating that “such perfect self-reliance in beings so new to the world is painful to a thinking mind” and that “it betrays a great want of sensibility and mental culture” (136). She cuts a passage that recounts the Moodies' rejection because “the society of C—” lacked refinement and was resentful of any who had it (201). This omitted passage goes on for ten more paragraphs criticizing local customs. In line with her reconsideration of the Rebellion of 1837 she deletes from the second volume “An Address to the Freemen of Canada,” which rails against traitors and “base insurgents.” In “Canada: A Contrast” Mackenzie is presented as “a clever and high-spirited man”: “the blow struck by that injured man … gave freedom to Canada” (530). Yet the epigraph to “The Outbreak,” drawn from her poetic attack on him and speaking of “a corrupted stream” and “the slave, who lures / His wretched followers,” is allowed to stand (407).

All Moodie's changes for the 1871 edition are of this kind. She excises block passages, usually complete paragraphs. She does no rewriting and adds nothing except “Canada: A Contrast,” largely taken from the 1852 introduction. Given her chance to oversee an edition, she reduces Roughing It from a collaborative production in prose and verse to a story of one woman's trials in the pioneering past. She eliminates the direct social criticism without muting the implicit criticism. She is, at this late date, reclaiming her text, one that attempts, in light of the life she has lived, to speak for her perceptions of self and nation and not for Bentley's perceptions of market and imperial moment. Her reclamation of nation and text is ambiguous and uncreative. It is her post-Confederation re-appropriation of a pre-Confederation imperial blitz on the significance of colonial life. This readdress of intention and text by Moodie in old age salvages authenticities, both fabricated and factual, from the collaborationist text of the two Moodies, Bentley, and Bruce. Thus she stakes her claim as a canonical figure, for her book as a canonical pioneering text of a new dominion. She also participates in the dismemberment of a text tenuously held together at best.

The 1913 edition, published in Edinburgh by T. N. Foulis and issued in Toronto and New York, is a resetting of the 1871 text. Apart from modernized punctuation, the text is unaltered. In its packaging, however, it extends Moodie's 1871 aim of presenting a document from pioneering forebears. Early photos of the Moodies are included; R. A. Stewart contributes scenic water-colours, and other plates are taken from the British William H. Bartlett's 1842 book Canadian Scenery Illustrated. These sketches, executed on his visit to the colony in 1838, thus contemporary with the Moodies' bush experience, reflect a romantic taste for the picturesque that Moodie seldom indulged in the colony. The foreword by the publisher “still further emphasizes the contrast between life in Canada in 1830 and 1913” (xi). The book becomes a piece of a period, the 1830s—in the eyes of 1913, a period piece. In piecing their notions of the 1830s Upper Canada together in an editorial trapping of piety and remembrance, the editors at the Foulis press reveal and reflect their own period.

The 1923 McClelland and Stewart reimpression of the Foulis edition culminates this distancing of the text to a romantic past. Stewart's water-colours and Bartlett's engravings are kept in one issue, but replaced in a second with sketches from various sources. The book is wrapped in an illustrated jacket featuring a log cabin in the foreground, a high silhouette of evergreens in the background. This slip-jacket describes it as a “semi-diary” presenting an “accurate picture of pioneering conditions and life.” The blurb steals an afterthought of the 1913 foreword to say that the book has “the additional charm of literary excellence.” This edition, available to Canadians through half this century, presents the text as a historical and social document. No longer a warning to emigrants, or a handbook for immigrants, or the grappling of an English gentlewoman with a new world and her place in it, this book is a quaint document from the romance of history, something distant yet engaging, as an exotic tale from a distant land would be engaging for British readers in the middle of the last century.

Klinck's first claim in his introduction to the 1962 New Canadian Library edition rationalizes his completion of the text's dismemberment, as he has made it conform to a specific genre and reduced it to a third of its original length: “Only a successful book requires as much editing as Roughing It in the Bush has received” (ix). It is now an “apprenticeship novel” with a central “author-apprentice-heroine” (xiv). His excisions reinforce a reading of it as a novel in which the protagonist resolves her conflicts. Gone is the central “A Journey to the Woods,” and with it any indication that Moodie gained limited self-possession only in the bush, after retreat from the clearings. It becomes proof of her 1871 statement that she had grown to feel at home, and, now a unified novel, proof that she has contemporary relevance. An arbitrary critical notion, orthodox within a particular period of academic culture, ratifies the editorial privilege of exclusion.

Roughing It, in play between its various dualities, does not rest in any stable configuration. Its instability exposes it to dismemberment at the call of intentions foreign to itself. It is an installment in an incomplete serial writing project, not an achieved literary artefact, an open text, not a finished whole. It is one woman's attempt to write through a forest of oppositions and contradictions. While it demands its reader's participation in the effort to negotiate a path, it does not authorize the after-the-fact blazing of this path with critical or editorial sleight-of-hand. While the text as an object—published in England, bound in two volumes, selling for a guinea—may have assured Moodie that she had come through, her journey within it is incomplete.

In the developing English Canadian canon this book has found its place in various forms. Each edition has been constituted by a desire to create a work unified by certain conceptions of what the book should be. Each edition ignores or excludes discordant elements to foreground other elements that accord with the various notions of what the text is. The colony was given it by an English publisher as an exotic narrative of struggle in a distant land. It then became the basis for a contrast showing how far the colony had come on the way to dominion status. Next it was transformed into a quaint document from a distant past. Then it was reduced to the shape of a unified novel. The book has found a home with the Virago Press and the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts. The New Canadian Library has published a new edition, reprinting the full text of the first edition. Now that the text has been restored in complete versions, attention to it unbound by the need to unify may be generated.

Margaret Atwood's conception of Moodie as schizophrenic disperses a textual division on to psychological and metaphysical levels. Shields, remarking on Atwood's interpretation, writes that “it is possible that the dichotomy is not rooted in Mrs. Moodie's personality; it may be only a surface splintering, a division which exists for literary purposes, namely the division between person and persona” (1977, 30). Rather, the division exists between literary purposes and the intractability of her linguistic—her ideological—milieu. The split in her personality transposes the split between the institution of la langue she carries and la parole she finds spoken in the colony. She works at generic and social stability through words but is confuted by the discourse she encounters in her production of self.

Moodie knew that language inscribes social reality. When she quotes the serving-class belief “that no contract signed in the old country is binding in ‘Meriky,’” the dialect disavows linguistic contracts as well as legal ones (212). One contradiction she avoids is that of separating language and ideology.⁴² She knew that her writing was worth an expenditure of time and effort; even after it was no longer needed to buy children's shoes, it may have bought sanity and sanctity.

This text is central to English Canadian culture precisely because of its problems. In coming to a land that could not be contained by any generic framework, Moodie wrote unabashedly, believing she could capture it all. The inadequacies of language allowed her to catch more of the society around her than she knew. She had little idea of the contradictions riving this text from typography to tone. In her very inability to close the gaps, she delineates the determinate absences upon which she had to build. In its contradictions, its irresolutions, its generic amorphousness, its open-endedness, its disunity, Roughing It tells a story of which Moodie had little conscious awareness. She absorbed the contradictions, lived them out, and then reproduced them unresolved. A stronger writer, or one less honest, might have hidden them beneath some aesthetically satisfying resolution. A stronger personality might have imposed a unified presence. As it was, Moodie articulated disturbances molded into the building blocks of Canada. She was the person needed to focus and initiate the textual activity called Roughing It in the Bush.

Notes

1. The critical approach outlined in this paragraph takes one of its cues from Macherey's program of bringing “out a difference within the work by demonstrating that it is other than it is” (1966, 17). Roughing It readily reveals what Macherey believes of every literary work: it is characterized by a “diversity of the letter—the text is saying several things at once” (22).

2. PHEC, ser. I, Correspondence, no. 59a. Ten Years in South Africa was passed between Colburn and Smith, Elder before Bentley accepted it in 1834, although in “Trifles” M— has placed his South African book with Bentley by the spring of 1832 (179).

3. J. W. D. Moodie's letter to Bentley in 1834 is quoted by Peterman (1983, 82); Bentley's response is quoted by Ballstadt (1988, xxvii). By the late 1830s Moodie was more concerned about Ten Years in South Africa than about any new colonial narrative. De Rottenburg thought he should have got four hundred pounds for it, and Agnes Strickland advised him to have someone in London pressure Bentley for payment (PHEC, ser. I, Correspondence, nos. 65, 80). Moodie had material ready for inclusion in Roughing It, and after his death Susanna found “a large portion of a work on Canada” that he had written before the rebellion (letter 105).

4. J. W. D. Moodie's chapters are “The Village Hotel,” “The Land-Jobber,” “The ‘Ould Dhragoon,’” and “Canadian Sketches.” His poems are “To the Woods!—To the Woods!” (215), “Stanzas” (“Where is religion found?” 229-30), the thirty-one-line poem opening “The Land-Jobber” (231-2), “Oh, Let Me Sleep!” (257), the thirty-one-line poem opening “The ‘Ould Dhragoon’” (342-3) and the thirty-six-line poem closing it (349-50), “Oh, the Days When I Was Young!” (385-7), “The Bears of Canada” (406), “A Song of Praise to the Creator” (437-8), “The Magic Spell” (477), and “God Save the Queen” (522-4). To reap the benefits accruing to them from his involvement, Mrs Moodie notes at the end of her introduction that she has been assisted by her “husband, J. W. Dunbar Moodie, author of ‘Ten Years in South Africa’” (15). Strickland's “Description of a Whirlwind” (RI 433-5) first appeared in the Victoria Magazine, signed PIONEER (100-2) and later became part of Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (1853, 1.241-6). All the surviving correspondence with Bentley about Roughing It was written by Mrs Moodie.

5. RI, 219; at both the beginning and the end of his linking chapters J. W. D. Moodie explains that he has provided details necessary to making their “situation” intelligible (219, 255).

6. Peterman 1983, 83; Heather Murray finds the “ever-hopeful spirit and entrepreneurial zeal” of J. W. D. Moodie's chapters “dissonant with Moodie's own chapters” (1990, 94).

7. See Parker 1979, 145-6, 156 n 8, for details of the prior publication of Mrs Moodie's portions of Roughing It. The passage on dandelion coffee (RI, 353-6) had also appeared in the Victoria Magazine (22). Fothergill had published J. W. D. Moodie's “The Bears of Canada” and “Oh, Let Me Sleep” in the Palladium in 1838 (PHEC, ser. 1, Correspondence, no. 60) and may have published other poems by him. “The ‘Ould Dhragoon’” was in the Literary Garland (ns 2 [1844]: 360-2), as were his poems “Stanzas” (as “Religion”; 2 [1839-40]: 164), “A Song of Praise to the Creator” (ns 2 [1844]: 548), and “The Magic Spell” (ns 5 [1847]: 39). “To the Woods!” and “Oh, the Days When I Was Young!” had been in the Victoria Magazine (117, 145-6). “Canadian Sketches” may expand on an 1836 essay.

8. The first phrase is Ballstadt's (1988, xxvi-xxvii), the second Peterman's (1983, 84). These critical texts contain the only treatment of revisions made to the sketches for Roughing It.

9. The List of the Publications of Richard Bentley and Son 1829-1898 contains entries on the first three issues of the first edition of Roughing It and the second edition of 1857. The first issue is represented most fully. Towards the end of the entry the following description is given: “The First Edition consisted of 2,250 copies. A New Edition, with additional matter, was issued November 29, 1852. Cheaper Editions appeared July, 1854 … and 1857 … the latter with slight modifications” (folio 616). The entry on the second issue carries a note only: “November 29, 21s. A NEW EDITION WITH SOME ADDITIONAL MATTER. For particulars see the FIRST EDITION, published January 28, 1852” (folio 650). The entry on the third issue again refers to “the First Edition” and also ahead to “A Popular Edition,” that of 1857 (folio 751). The entry on the 1857 edition, a wholly new printing, once more describes the book in full (folio 846).

10. The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] several meanings for the gerund “roughing” current in the first half of the nineteenth century. Besides “the fact of undergoing hardships, or living under hard conditions,” it could also mean the “operation of preparing roughly or treating in a preliminary manner.” Thackeray activates both senses when he writes that a bankrupt in Vanity Fair may have to “go and dig in Canada, or rough it in a cottage in the country” (1848, 194).

11. The Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts has weeded out errors attributable to the printing process but includes the chapter “Jeanie Burns,” which Moodie at one time wanted in Roughing It. The theory of textual bibliography that the Centre endorses rests on the concepts of authorial autonomy and intention. Jerome McGann has worked out an alternative to these principles that stresses authorial collaboration and shared intentions. For a fuller discussion of McGann's theories as they apply to Roughing It, see Thurston 1987, 198. Since the text is being viewed as a collaboration between its authors and its editors, the first full version they produced will be the one analysed. This is the second issue of the 1852 edition (without “Jeanie Burns”), the copy-text for the 1989 NCL edition. For the in-press revisions, corrections and additions to the copy-text, see CEECT 637-48.

12. This description is derived from Bakhtin's analysis of one of the roots of the novel as “multi-styled and hetero-voiced … mixing high and low, serious and comic … prosaic and poetic speech, living dialects and jargons … Alongside the representing word there appears the represented word” (1963, 108). Susan Johnston emphasizes Moodie's representation of “alien sociolects,” especially “sociolects of landscape appreciation” (1992, 29).

13. RI, 489. That Strickland saw his book not only as a promotion of the colony but a refutation of his sister's book is clear in his preface, the last paragraph of which echoes and alludes to her last paragraph: “If the facts and suggestions contained in the following pages should prove useful and beneficial to the emigrant, by smoothing his rough path to comfort and independence, my object will be attained, and my first literary effort will not have been made in vain” (1853, 1.xix).

14. Letter 44. Bakhtin characterizes poetry as based on “the idea of a unitary and singular language and a unitary, monologically sealed-off utterance.” He opposes the poet to the prose writer, who “welcomes the heteroglossia and language diversity of the literary and extraliterary language into his own work.” While “poetic forms reflect lengthier social processes … requiring centuries to unfold,” prose forms “register[] with extreme subtlety the tiniest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere” (1934-35, 296, 298, 300). These distinctions are useful in understanding Moodie's different talents for prose and verse.

15. Mary Louise Pratt's comments on the development of travel writing, once it became “a profitable business,” help to explain the production of Roughing It: “travel-writers and their publishers relied more and more on professional writers and editors to ensure a competitive product, often transforming manuscripts completely, usually in the direction of the novel” (1992, 88).

16. Jameson writes “that the normal form of the dialogical is essentially an antagonistic one” and that “class discourse … is essentially dialogical in its structure” (1981, 84).

17. Pratt stresses the importance of “arrival scenes” as “a convention of almost every variety of travel writing”; they “serve as particularly potent sites for framing relations of contact and setting the terms of representation” (1992, 78, 80).

18. Moodie's first questions arise from her confusion (99). She progresses to personal queries (101). She has learned the effectiveness of being blunt, bringing Betty to the point with questions that are in effect challenges: “Oh, you want to borrow some?”; “Well, Mrs. Fye, what do you want to-day?” (100, 102). The analysis of these scenes of dialogue applies one of Bakhtin's insights: “In dialogue the destruction of the opponent also destroys that very dialogic sphere where the word lives … This sphere is very fragile and easily destroyed (the slightest violence is sufficient, references to authority, and so forth)” (1970-71, 150).

19. RI, 215. She next writes: “Alas, for our fallen nature! Which is more subversive of peace and Christian fellowship—ignorance of our own characters, or of the characters of other?” Upon these words Johnston speculates that “the Moodie character is able to respond to Mrs. D. as a subject whose language can penetrate her own” (1990, 40). The whole scene has led up to Moodie's irony about Mrs Dean's lecture on pride, however, and has been structured in the same way and with the same conclusions as the scenes with Mrs Fye and Mrs Harris. Johnston credits Moodie with a self-reflexive irony inconsistent with the rest of her writing. “The Moodie character” was first used by Moss (1974) to absolve Moodie of responsibility for now-distasteful social attitudes.

20. Moodie's prolonged animosity towards Joe Harris would be further explained if he was the same Joseph Harris who in early 1846 became minister of the Belleville Congregationalist church that had expelled the Moodies in April 1845. The evidence for this possibility is in the minutes for 3 June 1846; Smith 1846, 281; “Uncle Joe and His Family” (1847), 429 (see also RI, 170); Traill 1852, 86n; Martin, McGillis, and Milne 1986, 44, 97, 234. This evidence is presented in detail in Thurston 1994.

21. “Trifles,” 234; Moodie also represents the dialect of blacks in this text and in Hugh Latimer and “Richard Redpath.”

22. RI, 197, 198. Bentley analyses Moodie's reaction to language in the colony in terms similar to those developed here: “The very speech of the men whom Moodie describes on arrival in Canada thus reflects her fearful sense of a social and personal disintegration … during the transition from the hierarchical civilization that she cherishes to the independent or republican culture that she knows to exist in North America” (1990, 116-17). Howison reports that when lower-class immigrants “hear themselves addressed by the titles, sir, master, or gentleman, a variety of new ideas begin to illuminate their minds” (1821, 174). Moodie tells how her “bare-legged, ragged Irish servants were always spoken to, as ‘sir’ or ‘mem’” (197-8). There are also similarities in their analyses of natives (Howison, 148, 149; RI, 287, 295). These parallels and others suggest the influence of Howison on Moodie.

23. Althusser's theory of ideology underlies these statements about the relationship of Moodie and Tom, Brian and Malcolm. Gubar and Gilbert write of “the extent to which a female artist … is keenly aware that she must inevitably project herself into a number of uncongenial characters and situations” and of “the degree of anxiety a literary woman may feel about such a splitting or distribution of her identity, as well as the self-dislike she may experience in feeling that she is ‘really closest to’ those characters she ‘appears to detest’” (1979, 69).

24. These remarks are informed by Hayden White's discussion of wildness and civilization (1979, 151-2). White also distinguishes between wild men and barbarians (165-7) and connects notions of them with the difficulties the upper and middle classes were having with the concept of nobility and with the working class (192-3). Yankee levellers and British peasants can be reconnected with North American natives through Greenblatt's observation that the European “response to the savages … strikingly resembles the response of the European elite to the unreformed carnivalesque customs of the lower orders” (1990, 67).

25. RI, 281, 282. “All mercantile business,” writes Howison in 1821, “is carried on by means of barter; circulating medium being so scarce, that it cannot be obtained in exchange for almost any thing” (112). While Traill shares some of her sister's reservations, she sees “legimate reasons for borrowing, and all kindly, well-disposed neighbours will lend with hearty good-will” (1855, 25). The Yankee customs are, in Williams's terms, emergent, among those “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships [that] are continually being created” (1977, 123). The native customs are residual, having “been effectively formed in the past” and “at some distance from the effective dominant culture” (122, 123). The offers the natives make to Moodie hint at a social system based on reciprocity and foreign to the European predilection for unequal exchange (see Hulme 1986, 147-48; Pratt 1992, 80-1, 84-5).

26. Bees, organized around activities like quilting, were still being held in parts of rural Ontario thirty-five years ago, although the practice seems to have since disappeared. Likewise, charivaris or shivarees, apparently restricted to rural districts, seem to be held with less and less frequency.

27. Moodie's unfamiliarity with charivaris is an index of her insulation from popular culture, since Palmer traces its roots to medieval Europe (1978, 9). “But despite its rather mundane purpose,” he writes, “the charivari often posed acutely the problem of social order and disorder” (24). While early Upper Canadian charivaris had both “patrician” and “plebian” participation, by 1850 they were “exclusively an affair of the lower orders, … associated with the barbarism and savagery of the masses” and “harshly condemned” (52). This “proletarianization” occurred unevenly: “where bourgeois consciousness matured earliest, the charivari was first attacked” (54). Palmer's description of it in Williams' terms helps to place Moodie's motives in criticizing the charivari as a custom of the working class: “an autonomous culture reared its head, an implicit challenge to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Built on the residual, it could move towards an emergent purpose” (60). Elsewhere, Palmer describes the charivari as “a world turned upside down, a carnival atmosphere of disguise, producing the possibility of overthrowing the social relations of a paternalistic order” (1983, 44). For the charivari's carnivalesque features, see Bakhtin 1963, 122-3.

28. RI, 314, 321; Moodie lists the participants in their bee on 314-15, 338. Profanation, or “playing with the symbols of higher authority,” is central to Bakhtin's category of carnival (1963, 125). In Moodie's description of their bee may be perceived “the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything” (129-30). For approving accounts of what Traill calls “friendly meetings of neighbours,” see Howison 1821, 253; Cattermole 1831, 87; Traill 1836, 102-3. Strickland, after a favourable report of a bee, concludes “the general practice is bad” (1853, 1.37; see Harris and Warkentin 1974, 127-8).

29. RI 28, 29; on Grosse Isle as carnival, see Kroetsch 1983.

30. The variant treatments of proper names occur as follows:

    Peterborough, usually spelled out, but P— 154, 399, 450, 461, 463 (also for Port Hope, 97)

    Cobourg 59, 61, 305; but—76, 85, 89, 95, 97, 114; and C— 133, 157, 201, 208, 260, 380, 484 (twice), 485 (twice)

    Rice Lake 266; but—lake 176 (twice)

    Douro 215, 258, 260, 330, 456; but D— 79, 207, 450

    Dummer 318, 355, 407, 439ff; but D— 146, 155

    Mr Young 301, 315; but the Y—s 327 (twice), 330 (twice), 331, 333, 334 (twice), 387, 409

    Mr Wood and Mr W— 297

    Moodie, usually spelled out, but M— 80

    Mrs Moodie, usually spelled out, but Mrs M— 84, 213 (changed to Mrs Moodie in the NCL edition)

    Susanna 399; but S— 277, 468

31. Moodie mentions that “sixteen years have slowly passed away” since the first letters she received from England late in 1832 (122). After recalling the birth of her daughter on 9 June 1833, she writes that “sixteen years have passed away since” she heard anything of the Harris family (170). Referring to Cobourg in 1833, she writes that “seventeen years has made … a great … difference in the state of society” (201). To a poem likely written February 1834 she adds a note stating that “fifteen years have passed away since this little poem was written” (272n). To the description of land bought in late 1833, early 1834, she adds the note: “After a lapse of fifteen years, we have been glad to sell these lots.” Ballstadt dates sales of portions of this land to May 1848 and November 1849 (274n; CEECT, 579, note to 293). J. W. D. Moodie refers to “a residence of sixteen years in Canada” (218).

32. RI, 15, 507; J. W. D. Moodie is more cagey at the beginning of the “Canadian Sketches” when he refers to the previous text as containing “truthful pictures … observed fifteen or twenty years ago” (518).

33. Those passages on homesickness that begin and end in the narrative past are at 121-2, 134, 163, and 337. The collapse of narrator and protagonist further discredits attempts to separate Moodie the writer from “the Moodie character.”

34. Indeed, Moodie never seems to have lost her homesickness entirely. In 1869 she again refers to her “own heartsickness, to return and die upon my native soil” (letter 91). Nevertheless, two years later she writes in the introduction to the Canadian edition of Roughing It that she “cannot imagine any inducement … which could induce me to leave the colony” (528).

35. RI, 258. When she writes that “it was much against [her] wish” that the Cobourg farm be sold, she may be suggesting that she already intuited that the bush was no place for gentlefolk. When she writes of her dislike of “emigrant roving and unsettled habits,” she shows her awareness of the tendency of early nineteenth-century settlers to become nomadic, the adventurous or insolvent retreating from the advance of civilization to the frontier (Gagan 1975, 316-17; Harris and Warkentin 1974, 127).

36. Moodie first confesses to being “terribly afraid of cattle” when her request for help in milking is mocked by Mrs Harris. She perseveres and does the milking herself: “I had learned a useful lesson of independence, to which, in after-years I had often again to refer” (183). But on the next occasion she is confronted with the task she writes that she “never could overcome [her] fear of cattle.” Malcolm mocks her at this point, and again she does the job (375). That Mrs Harris's words to her (“A farmer's wife, and afraid of cows!”) and Malcolm's (“A farmer's wife, and afraid of a cow!”) are the same is another indication of invented rather than remembered dialogue. The first time she experiences fear of the woods she writes that she “never could wholly shake [it] off,” and she experiences the same fear later (276, 403-4).

37. “Trifles,” 197, 198. In the expansion of this scene for Flora Lyndsay the presentiments of doom are more pointed: “If we may judge of the future by the present—it looks dark enough” (90).

38. Giltrow 1981, 134, 143, 132; other critics have made observations similar to Giltrow's. Hallvard Dahlie, for instance, sees transatlantic correspondence as the exiles' way of maintaining a “tangible link … with their homeland” (1986, 13). “Traill throws into relief the gender-dimensions of the long letter home to mother,” writes Bentley, “a type of writing that affirms a female connectedness of the blood and heart across enormous geographical barriers” (1990, 104). For “pioneer women autobiographers,” Helen Buss places writing among those activities “motivated and enlarged by … the desire to remain connected” (1990, 129).

39. RI, 104; see also CEECT, 566, note to 97.8-9; Briggs 1959, 389. Samuel Strickland also quotes this line (1853, 1.113). Moodie makes literary or biblical allusions on the following pages: 21, 25, 32, 64, 76, 135, 196, 201, 213, 214, 276, 299, 385, 407, 422, 441, 453, 455, 462, 487.

40. For addresses to the reader, see 524 and 589; for rhetorical queries of the reader meant to highlight a colonial absurdity, see 108 and 170.

41. For changes to the title-page of the 1871 edition, see CEECT, 618. For the changes made for the 1871 edition, see CEECT, 657-68.

42. Moodie pragmatically unites writing and living. She compares writing to bread-baking (121) and milking (183). She compares contemplating a field of potatoes to contemplating a painting (353). Her fungus paintings are on a par with her writing as a means to supplement the family income (420).

Abbreviations

CEECT: Editorial material in the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts' edition of Roughing It in the Bush, supplied by researchers at the Centre and by editor Carl Ballstadt (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1988).

FL:Flora Lyndsay (New York: De Witt and Davenport 1854).

GM:Geoffrey Moncton (New York: De Witt and Davenport 1855).

LC:Life in the Clearings (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1989).

Letters Editorial material in Susanna Moodie: Letters of a Lifetime, ed. Carl Ballstadt, Michael Peterman, and Elizabeth Hopkins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985).

letter: Letters as numbered by the editors of Letters of a Lifetime.

MH:Mark Hurdlestone (New York: De Witt and Davenport 1854).

PHEC: Patrick Hamilton Ewing Collection of Moodie-Strickland-Vickers-Ewing Family Papers, Rare Book Room, National Library of Canada.

RI:Roughing It in the Bush (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1989).

TFC: Traill Family Collection, National Library of Canada.

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