SOURCE: Fowler, Marian. “Susanna Moodie.” In The Embroidered Tent; Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada: Elizabeth Simcoe, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Anna Jameson, Lady Dufferin, pp. 93-131. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Limited, 1982.

[In the following essay, Fowler presents Roughing It in the Bush as a blend of fact and fiction that borrows heavily from the conventions of the sentimental novel.]

It is hard to imagine two sisters less alike than Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie. They were different in looks, in temperament, and in response to the New World. They were Snow White and Rose Red; they were Martha and Mary. They were Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, the Sense and Sensibility sisters of Jane Austen's novel. Susanna was a year younger than Catharine, born in 1803. She was tall and dark, thin and intense, with eyes deep-set and shadowed. She was not her father's favourite, but rather the family rebel.

Catharine and Susanna did, however, have something in common. They had both married half-pay officers, and both emigrated to Canada in 1832. In fact, Catharine's husband Thomas was a fellow-officer of John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie. Susanna had met him in 1829 at a London literary tea—a romantic figure just then recovering from wounds inflicted by a mad elephant in South Africa. Susanna had married first, and it was while visiting the Moodies that Catharine had met Thomas Traill, one of Moodie's closest friends, for in addition to being in the same regiment, they had grown up together in the Orkney Isles. The Moodies had set sail for Canada at the same time as the Traills, but on different ships. John and Susanna settled first near Cobourg on a cleared farm called Melsetter after John's Orkney family estate, then in February, 1834 they moved to an uncleared lot north of Peterborough, in Douro township, and remained there until 1840. There the similarities end, for Roughing It in the Bush, the account which Susanna wrote of her first seven years in Canada, is very different from Catharine's in style, form and outlook.

They had gone their separate ways even in childhood. While young Catharine Strickland was labelling her collections and acquiring domestic skills, Susanna was sitting idle in the grounds of Reydon Hall, under her favourite oaks, weaving sun-and-shadow dreams through their leaves. When it rained, Susanna liked to explore all the odd nooks and secret recesses of the Hall, particularly its attic. There she could see the resident ghost, old Martin, bachelor brother of a former owner, slipping in-and-out through his tattered bed-hangings, bemoaning the injustice of life and his twenty-year banishment to the garret, at the behest of his brother's wife who disliked his odd ways. One suspects that Susanna also spent some of her time within doors, when her father wasn't looking, quietly helping herself to the forbidden fare of sentimental novels.

One day Susanna and Catharine had discovered in the attic a huge Indian papier-maché trunk with brass hinges and locks. “It had contained the wardrobe of a young Indian prince who had been sent to England with an embassy to the Court of one of the Georges”.¹ Rummaging through its musty silks and damasks, the girls found underneath reams of paper, cakes of India ink and dozens of ready-cut quill pens. Here was “treasure trove” which cried out to be used, so they both began writing novels. When Catharine's met its curl-paper fate, Susanna's somehow escaped detection, so she kept on scribbling, on … and on. When the grown-up Catharine was earnestly firing her volleys of facts, sister Agnes painstakingly researching her twelve volumes of The Lives of the Queens of England with Elizabeth's help, and Jane struggling with Rome Republican and Regal, Susanna in her writing was still soaring and circling through fantastic worlds of feeling, consistently refusing to keep her nose to the factual Gradgrind-stone.

The fact is, Susanna had refused her parent's urging to become, before all else, a rational creature and a domestic scientist, and had opted for a different pattern: one which had some social, if not parental, sanction. Susanna was a Romantic. Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto which had launched the Romantic movement, had appeared in 1800, three years before Susanna was born, and the Romantic Age was at its height during the next twenty years. Its characteristics are too well known to require a long exposition here. Suffice it to say that it established the primacy of emotion, of imagination and intuition as ways of knowing superior to reason, and of symbolism as the favourite literary device. “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections”, Keats was to write in 1817, “and the truth of the Imagination. … I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning”.²

The Romantic Susanna had fallen in love and married John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie because she saw in him a soul-mate; he played the flute, and wrote poetry, and had a mind richly stored with literary allusions. That was, alas, the extent of his riches. He was, like Thomas Traill, a younger son of landed gentry, and just as impoverished, and had decided to emigrate for much the same reasons. He and Susanna and their infant daughter therefore bade a tearful farewell to their homeland in June, 1832, and sailed away to Canada.

The first chapter of Roughing It in the Bush, “A Visit to Grosse Isle”, very well illustrates Susanna's Romantic preference for fancy rather than fact, the ideal rather than the real. Coming up the St. Lawrence, unlike Catharine, Susanna prefers the distant, to the close-up view. Grosse Isle “looks a perfect paradise at this distance”,³ but after landing, she sees that it is crawling with disgusting Irish emigrants: “It was a scene over which the spirit of peace might brood in silent adoration; but how spoiled by the discordant yells of the filthy beings who were sullying the purity of the air and water with contaminating sights and sounds!” (pp. 32-33). Catharine got all the way to her backwoods cabin before disillusionment overtook her. Susanna is already recoiling from the crude reality of this foreign land. She goes back to her silver traceries as soon as the boat pulls away from the shore: “Cradled in the arms of the St. Lawrence, and basking in the bright rays of the morning sun, the island and its sister group looked like a second Eden just emerged from the waters of chaos” (p. 39). She has, in her own mind, effectively covered up the horrid reality: “Our bark spread her white wings to the favouring breeze, and the fairy vision gradually receded from my sight, to remain for ever on the tablet of memory” (p. 40). Quebec, seen from a distance, is another ideal vision: “Edinburgh had been the beau idéal to me of all that was beautiful in Nature—a vision of the northern Highlands had haunted my dreams across the Atlantic: but all these past recollections faded before the present of Quebec” (p. 41). This time Susanna skirts reality by not going ashore, but those who do bring back reports of “a filthy hole, that looked a great deal better from the ship's side” (p. 48). Unlike Catharine, Susanna is in no hurry to land.

Susanna is no confident, curious extrovert like her sister. For the emigrant experience, her temperament was as big a handicap as Catharine's was a help. She is Mrs. Gummidge, a “lone, lorn woman”, rather than Mr. Micawber. Her motto in Roughing It in the Bush is: “Matters are never so bad but that they may be worse” (p. 157) and the very first sentence sounds a death knell: “The dreadful cholera was depopulating Quebec and Montreal when our ship cast anchor off Grosse Isle”. She has spent her time on board the Anne reading Voltaire's History of Charles XII, a doleful riches-to-rags chronicle. “How ardently we anticipate pleasure, which often ends in positive pain!” Susanna intones (p. 25). “Tis well for us poor denizens of earth / That God conceals the future from our gaze” (p. 269) begins Chapter Twelve. Roughing It in the Bush certainly contains more storm-clouds than sunshine.

Susanna's entry into wilderness is even more sudden than Catharine's. Catharine started off in Sam's comfortable cabin before removing to her own. Susanna is dumped out in a small, rocky clearing near Cobourg, surrounded “on all sides by the dark forest” (p. 111), in front of a “miserable hut” with no door, one shattered window, a dirt floor and holes in the roof. Five cattle have to be driven out before she can get in. This is fittingly known as Old Satan's Hut, and it will be Susanna's home for some months. (Moodie had bungled by not getting right of possession to the house on the farm property he had bought, and Uncle Joe, ensconced there, refused to budge until the last day of May, 1833.) Susanna doesn't grin and bear it, as Catharine would have. She bursts into tears, begging the driver of the cart to stay with her until Moodie arrives in the second wagon, “as I felt terrified at being left alone in this wild, strange-looking place” (p. 112).

At Cobourg, “all was new, strange and distasteful” (p. 245). Susanna cowers and hangs back, not at all eager to explore her new world. She suffers severely from culture shock. She has been dragged unwillingly from her English home, and hates her adopted country, hates being there. She feels like a victim, struggling helplessly “against the strange destiny which hemmed me in” (p. 166). She is terribly homesick, and dreams, sleeping and waking, of “dear, dear England”. “Ah! Those first kind letters from home!”, exclaims Susanna. “Never shall I forget the rapture with which I grasped them—the eager, trembling haste with which I tore them open, while the blinding tears which filled my eyes hindered me for some minutes from reading a word which they contained” (p. 149). If she suffers from homesickness, she suffers just as keenly from self-pity, and is constantly in tears.

The Cobourg Susanna feels the same disorientation and distaste which Catharine experienced when she reached her backwoods cabin, but for different reasons. It is not the dark pines which press in on poor Susanna—she would, indeed, welcome their gifts of solitude and quiet reflection—it is the neighbours. Susanna is timid, shy, unsure of herself. “I'm a sad coward with strangers” (p. 515), she admits. Susanna's Yankee neighbours—in her eyes a rude, dirty bunch—crowd her on all sides and they, not the pines, make her paranoid. “Residing in such a lonely, out-of-the-way place, surrounded by these savages, I was really afraid of denying their requests” (p. 120), writes Susanna, plagued with their constant borrowing. “There is no such thing as privacy in this country”, she wails (p. 98). Uncle Joe's daughters, aged five to fourteen, “would come in without the least ceremony, and young, as they were, ask me a thousand impertinent questions; and when I civilly requested them to leave the room, they would range themselves upon the door-step, watching my motions, with their black eyes gleaming upon me through their tangled, uncombed locks. Their company was a great annoyance, for it obliged me to put a painful restraint upon the thoughtfulness in which it was so delightful to me to indulge” (p. 167). Like wild animals, they spied on her, “rude and unnurtured as so many bears” (p. 167). They and the other Yankee neighbours are too crudely animal, too much like the land itself, with a bear behind every bush, threatening sudden violence. The bear will become for Susanna a charged symbol of the land's brutality, and her fear of it.

Susanna's fears and paranoia in Cobourg are also symbolized by grotesque faces which materialize suddenly from the mists of her disorientation. There is, for instance, Old Satan himself, dispossessed of his rightful domain, who “had lost one eye in a quarrel. It had been gouged out in a free fight, and the side of his face presented a succession of horrible scars inflicted by the teeth of his savage adversary” (p. 140). There is Betty Fye, “a cadaverous-looking woman, very long-faced and witch-like” (p. 122). Susanna instills into her descriptions of these macabre figures her feeling that her new life is unreal, a nightmare from which she will shortly wake. There will be later examples, but they loom and leer thickest from Cobourg's dark days.

Since the time when she sat idly under Reydon Hall's oaks, Susanna has been a dreamer, not a doer. Unlike Catharine, she has no urge to be “up and doing”. “I have wandered away … into the regions of thought”, says Susanna at one point, “and must again descend to common workaday realities” (pp. 43-44). For her it is always a difficult descent. Her happiest moments come when her body is at rest, and her imagination active. “It was long, very long, before I could discipline my mind to learn and practise all the menial employments which are necessary in a good settler's wife” (p. 330), she admits. A frontier life is hard on dreamers, and Susanna suffers. She seems, particularly in the beginning, to be as inept at domestic chores as Catharine is skilled. The Yankee neighbours sneer; Uncle Joe's daughters take “malicious pleasure at my awkward attempts at Canadian housewiferies” (p. 167). When she tries to wash some clothes, she rubs the skin off her wrists, but without getting the clothes clean. Her first attempt at bread-making is a dismal failure, the bread being not only leaden, but burnt as well. “I could have borne the severest infliction from the pen of the most formidable critic with more fortitude than I bore the cutting up of my first loaf of bread” writes Susanna (p. 148)—a revealing comparison, for she obviously thinks of herself as artist first, housewife second.

In addition to the fact that she didn't heed her mother's kitchen instructions, Susanna's domestic problems are compounded by the fact that she stubbornly clings to the English stereotype of the delicate female. In a strange, new setting, it at least is old and familiar. If the land and the Yankees are rude and coarse, Susanna will be super-refined and correct. She seems determined, all by herself, to create a one-woman garrison of custom and ceremony. One Yankee neighbour reprimands her for sitting “still all day, like a lady” (p. 168) and two vignettes of Susanna prove her point. In the first one, Susanna sits sedately at the table of her dirt-floored hut, doing needlework, just as she would sit in her English drawing-room, while her maid prepares dinner (p. 117). In the second, we see Susanna daintily picking up her skirts to cross the fields to “inspect our new dwelling”—a cabin slightly larger than Old Satan's hut—after her two servants, but not Susanna, have worked all day scrubbing it out and carrying over the furniture. Elegant females spend their time “painting some wildflowers”, not knitting for the hired help, so when John Monaghan asks Susanna for socks, “I sent him to old Mrs. R—, to inquire of her what she would charge for knitting him two pairs” (p. 187). When Susanna finds herself “tying on my bonnet without the assistance of a glass” (p. 158), it is enough of an aberration to be worth mentioning.

She is full of Hannah More's practical piety, visiting the dying Phoebe, Uncle Joe's eldest daughter: “I endeavoured, as well as I was able, to explain to her the nature of the soul, its endless duration, and responsibility to God for the actions done in the flesh” (p. 200) and telling Uncle Joe primly that “swearing is a dreadful vice” (p. 170). She is too proud to borrow from the neighbours, even though they borrow everything she owns: “I would at all times rather quietly submit to a temporary inconvenience than obtain anything I wanted in this manner” (p. 107). She is astonishingly tactless to her social inferiors. When Mrs. Joe accuses her of snobbery in not eating with her servants, Susanna retorts: “They are more suited to you than we are; they are uneducated, and so are you” (p. 168), and when Uncle Joe looks for sympathy in his loss of the homestead which was his father's before him, Susanna tells him that his drinking was the cause (p. 155). She prudishly sends a young neighbour boy from the room so that she can dress her daughter Katie, who is all of six months old (p. 129). This Cobourg Susanna clutches her shawl, as conventional, or more so, than she ever was in England.

On June 1st, 1833, after Uncle Joe's grumbling departure from Melsetter, the Moodies move in. By now Susanna is beginning to be resigned to the fact that her “fate is seal'd! 'Tis now in vain to sigh, / For home, or friends, or country left behind / Come, dry those tears” (p. 241). There will, in fact, be many more tears, but the Canadian Susanna is beginning to emerge, to enjoy her adopted country. She has survived “the iron winter” of 1833 with its extreme cold and deep snow, and as spring wildflowers fill the woods, Susanna walks abroad, and feels her spirits lift. She is soon forced, however, eight months later, to move again. Moodie can't make a go of the farm, even though it is already cleared and producing, and they decide to leave Cobourg for a backwoods lot near the Traills, on Lake Katchawanook.

Susanna is now sorry to be leaving: “It was a beautiful, picturesque spot; and, in spite of the evil neighbours, I had learned to love it. … I had a great dislike to removing” (p. 269). Unlike Catharine, always eager for new terrain, new facts, Susanna attaches herself, limpet-like, to places, forming an emotional bond, even though much of the emotion has been painful, and the depth of her attachment is never fully apparent to her until she is forced to leave. This will be for her a recurring pattern.

Confronted once again with the terrors of the unknown, Susanna's anxieties and fears resurface. When, en route to Douro, she is in the “heart of a dark cedar swamp”, her mind is “haunted with visions of wolves and bears” (p. 280). She is terrified, two miles from her destination, to cross the fragile bridge over Herriot's Falls, and looks “with a feeling of dread upon the foaming waters” of the Otonabee, below (p. 282). Susanna is struggling here, as she often is, to overcome her natural timidity and physical cowardice. Those grotesque nightmare faces crowding Cobourg's early days had gradually receded, but now, en route to Lake Katchawanook, the most astonishing trio of all materializes in a passing wagon:

The man was blear-eyed, with a hare-lip, through which protruded two dreadful yellow teeth that resembled the tusks of a boar. The woman was long-faced, high cheek-boned, red-haired, and freckled all over like a toad. The boy resembled his hideous mother, but with the addition of a villainous obliquity of vision which rendered him the most disgusting object in this singular trio.

(p. 274)

Whereas Catharine had been taken aback by the appearance of the log cabin which was to be her home, Susanna is thrilled with hers: “Such as it was, it was a palace when compared to Old Satan's log hut … and I regarded it with complacency as my future home” (p. 294). When Susanna finally finds herself in the bush, she heaves a sigh of relief at being alone, with no rude eyes and raucous voices breaking in on her rich, inner reveries. Until almost the end of her time in Cobourg, Susanna had been too tense and traumatized to really look around her, but after the move to Lake Katchawanook, her imagination begins to stir:

The pure beauty of the Canadian water, the sombre but august grandeur of the vast forest that hemmed us in on every side and shut us out from the rest of the world, soon cast a magic spell upon our spirits, and we began to feel charmed with the freedom and solitude around us.

(p. 295)

Susanna begins to live deeply and richly within her own psyche: “I would sit for hours at the window”, she writes with evident contentment, “as the shades of evening deepened round me, watching the massy foliage of the forests pictured in the waters” (p. 330).

It is in the bush that Susanna will grow and change, recording what is happening to her in Roughing It in the Bush, transmuting life to art. From now on, there will always be two Susannas; sometimes one will be dominant, sometimes the other. There will be, for Susanna, no straightforward progress, as there was for Elizabeth Simcoe. For Susanna it will always be one step forward, one step back. There will be, on the other hand, no permanent regression, as there was for Catharine. Susanna is a mass of contradictions, and startling contrasts, and it is this which gives Roughing It in the Bush its fascination and rich texture. What Susanna says of Tom Wilson applies very well to herself: “In him, all extremes appeared to meet; the man was a contradiction to himself” (p. 79).

“Two voices / Took turns using my eyes”, says Susanna in Margaret Atwood's poem sequence about her:

One had manners
painted in watercolours,
used hushed tones when speaking
of mountains or Niagara Falls,
composed uplifting verse
and expended sentiment upon the poor.(4)

This is the conventional, English Susanna. She predominates at Cobourg, but she is still alive and well in the bush. She finds expression in the novel-writing which Susanna did there, and gives Roughing It in the Bush half of its heroine, most of its minor characters, and all of its style and structure.

Susanna states in the introduction to Life in the Clearings (London, 1853), that the “greatest portion” of Roughing It in the Bush was written between 1837 and 1840, before she left the backwoods. Her sentimental novel, Mark Hurdlestone (1853), was written, as Susanna tells us in its introduction, “during the long cold winter nights of 1838-9”. Her novel, Geoffrey Moncton (1855), appeared serially in the Literary Garland in 1839-40, so it too must have been written in the backwoods. (Later, Susanna wrote two more sentimental novels with a Canadian connection: Flora Lyndsay (1854) and Matrimonial Speculations [1856].) It was thus a natural step for Susanna to look to the sentimental novel, a venerable English literary form, for the narrative pattern and protagonist of Roughing It in the Bush, just as Catharine had looked to Robinson Crusoe for hers.

The sentimental novel had been around ever since Samuel Richardson wrote Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48), establishing the primacy of feeling in prose long before the Romantics did it in poetry. Between 1770 and 1820, sentimental novels flooded the market, devoured by women patrons of the circulating libraries which proliferated in the second half of the eighteenth century to keep pace with rising literacy rates. Sentimental novels were churned out mainly by women, some of them talented (Fanny Burney, for example, or Maria Edgeworth), many of them with no talent at all, but a need to earn money in one of the few socially-sanctioned ways available to impoverished gentlewomen. The sentimental novel had indeed proved to be a hardy perennial and is still appearing in the form of Harlequin romances and ‘nurse’ novels.

Flora Lyndsay and Roughing It in the Bush appeared almost exactly in the middle of this two-hundred-year-old tradition, and taken together, these two works of Susanna's read like volume one and two of the same sentimental novel. The style of both works is identical. Here is Susanna in Roughing It in the Bush, about to leave England:

I went to take a last look at the old Hall, the beloved home of my childhood and youth; to wander once more beneath the shade of its venerable oaks—to rest once more upon the velvet sward that carpeted their roots. It was while reposing beneath those noble trees that I had first indulged in those delicious dreams which are a foretaste of the enjoyments of the spirit-land. In them the soul breathes forth its aspirations in a language unknown to common minds; and that language is Poetry. … In these beloved solitudes all the holy emotions which stir the human heart in its depths had been freely poured forth, and found a response in the harmonious voice of Nature, bearing aloft the choral song of earth to the throne of the Creator.

(p. 89)

And here is Flora Lyndsay, about to leave her English home for the backwoods of Canada:

It was beneath the shade of these trees and reposing upon the velvet-like sward at their feet, that Flora had first indulged in those delicious reveries—those lovely, ideal visions of beauty and perfection—which cover with a tissue of morning beams all the rugged highways of life. Silent bosom friends were those dear old trees! Every noble sentiment of her soul, every fault that threw its baneful shadow on the sunlight of her mind—had been fostered, or grown upon her, in those pastoral shades. Those trees had witnessed a thousand bursts of passionate eloquence—a thousand gushes of bitter, heart-humbling tears. To them had been revealed all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, which she could not confide to the sneering and unsympathising of her own sex.⁵

Both these passages have the same sentimental tone, the same complex sentences, the same prolixity (every noun must have its adjective), the same periphrasis (grass becomes the velvet sward) that dominate sentimental fiction. But the similarities between Flora Lyndsay and Roughing It in the Bush go beyond mere style. Both works share similar plots, similar structures and similar heroines.

The plot parallels are many. Flora Lyndsay is raised in a rambling old English mansion. Both she and her husband John are “the younger children of large families, whose wealth and consequence is now a thing of the past”. Since they can't make ends meet in England, they decide to emigrate to Canada with their little daughter. They sail on the brig Anne, whose captain has a Scotch terrier called Oscar. They spend six weeks at sea, three of them becalmed off the grand banks of Newfoundland. While they are becalmed, Flora is seriously ill. They arrive at Grosse Isle on August 30th to find a cholera epidemic raging. Here the book ends, but with a postscript referring to the “great sorrows and trials” which the Lyndsays experienced in the Canadian wilderness, and to the fact that ultimately John Lyndsay “obtained an official appointment which enabled him to remove his wife and family to one of the fast-rising and flourishing towns of the Upper Province”.

In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna is raised in an old English house, forced to emigrate for the same reasons as the Lyndsays, arrives in Canada with her husband and infant daughter on the brig Anne, whose captain has a Scotch terrier called Oscar. The Moodies spend nine weeks at sea, three of them becalmed off the grand banks, during which time Susanna is ill. They arrive at Grosse Isle on August 30th in the midst of a cholera epidemic. After severe trials in the backwoods, John Moodie receives the appointment of Sheriff of the new Victoria district and they move to Belleville.

Susanna is aware of this overlap, and uses the voice of the self-conscious narrator towards the end of Flora Lyndsay to address the reader:

And here we shall leave our emigrants, in the bustle, confusion and excitement of preparing to go on shore, having described the voyage from thence to Quebec, and up the St. Lawrence elsewhere. A repetition of the same class of incidents and adventures could not fail of becoming tedious to our readers.⁶

Flora Lyndsay and Roughing It in the Bush are thus joined into a single narrative, using the form common to sentimental novels. Carl Klinck first recognized that Roughing It in the Bush has “a closer approach to fictional form” than the usual travel literature, but did not pursue the idea, beyond stating that “there is no way of telling how much in any given chapter is due to experienced fact and how much to literary artifice”.⁷ Of course, this is true. To measure the proportion of fact to fiction we need two yardsticks: one of Susanna's true experiences, and one of literary conventions. We don't have the former, but the latter is ready to hand, and using it we can discover how much of the sentimental novel Roughing It in the Bush contains.

Authors of novels of sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not preoccupied with a tight form in the way that modern novelists are. “Even to respectable writers a novel must have presented itself largely as a certain number of sheets to be filled with the loosely-concatenated experiences of a group of characters. Unity of plot was seldom considered. … Nor was relevance more strictly interpreted”.⁸ Anything was deemed relevant that might occupy the minds of the characters, whether it had any influence on the story or not. Anecdotal digressions frequently interrupted the narrative flow as minor characters gave their sad but superfluous life stories.

In Flora Lyndsay, Flora spends part of her time at sea writing a story called “Noah Cotton”, which takes up a hundred pages of the novel (chapters 34 to 50) and which bears no relation at all to the main plot. Minor characters in Flora Lyndsay regale us with their touching tales. Nurse Clarke tells how her sailor fiancé was ship-wrecked and drowned on the eve of their marriage, and Mrs. Dalton relates the details of her long, loveless marriage to a wealthy clergyman old enough to be her father.

In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna interrupts the main narrative of her backwoods struggle to tell a number of unrelated stories guaranteed to affect the reader's sensibility. These include the tale of John Monaghan, the poor foundling, of Brian the Still-Hunter, three times a loser at suicide but successful on his fourth attempt, of Mrs. N—— and her six starving children, of Tom Wilson, the pathetic ne'er-do-well. Some of the digressive stories in Roughing It in the Bush occupy whole chapters and others only a page or two; the whole helter-skelter collection reproduces the usual meanderings of the sentimental novel.

Sentimental novels were openly didactic. “The church-going, sermon-reading middle classes liked a good plain moral at the end of a book … feeling that the performance was incomplete without it, and not overfastidious as to its connection with what went before.”⁹ In an article in the Literary Garland in 1851 entitled “A Word for the Novel Writers”, Susanna supports a strong didacticism: “Every good work of fiction is a step towards the mental improvement of mankind”, she writes.¹⁰ She puts a good plain moral at the end of Geoffrey Moncton (“and such is the end of the wicked”) and of Flora Lyndsay:

For those who doubt the agency of an overruling Providence in the ordinary affairs of life, these trifling reminiscences have been penned. Reader, have faith in Providence. A good father is never indifferent to the welfare of his children—still less a merciful God.¹¹

The moral purpose of Roughing It in the Bush is just as clearly spelled out at the end:

If these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from sinking their property, and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prisonhouse, and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.

(p. 563)

In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna not only appropriates the sentimental novel's structure and moral slant, but also the sentimental heroine herself, that enchanting creature who has fluttered her way pathetically through thousands of pages. The model is a bit outdated now, but in Susanna's day there was a very close correlation between the female role ideology of the sentimental novels and the courtesy books, and between both these together and actual social norms. If sentimental heroines and courtesy-book girls were delicate, dependent creatures, so were most young ladies of the time.

In her novels, Susanna focuses on sentimental heroines and produces mere cardboard stereotypes. There are three sentimental heroines in Mark Hurdlestone (Elinor Wildegrave, Juliet Whitmore and Clarissa Wildegrave), two in Geoffrey Moncton (Catherine Lee and Margaret Moncton), and one in Matrimonial Speculations (Caroline Harford, who emigrates to Canada and marries a clergyman). In Roughing It in the Bush, the central character and narrator conforms to the correct model part of the time but ultimately, having burst the bonds of her confinement, proves to be much more complex and interesting than any sentimental heroine ever was.

All sentimental heroines, including Susanna's, are physically delicate. It is the languid beauty and oversusceptible emotionalism of sickness which is most appealing. Clarissa Wildegrave's cheek has the same hectic flush as the original Clarissa's. She has the disease which spreads fastest and farthest through the ranks of heroines: tuberculosis, or “consumption”, as it was more graphically called. “I much fear that she will not require my care long”, sobs Clarissa II's brother, and of course she doesn't. She bequeaths her harp to Juliet Whitmore, and expires, “The voice died away in faint indistinct murmurs; the eye lost the living fire; the prophetic lip paled to marble, quivered a moment, and was still for ever.”¹² Margaret Moncton, heroine of Geoffrey Moncton, is also patiently and prettily dying of consumption.

Flora Lyndsay's illnesses are not terminal, but frequent nonetheless, for she is seriously ill just before leaving for Canada, and again on board ship just before they land, “so alarmingly ill, that at one time she thought that she would be consigned to the deep”.¹³ In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna is also very ill on board ship, and suffers horribly and with considerable literary hyperbole from the ague which attacked all newcomers to Canada.

Sentimental heroines demonstrate their physical delicacy by fainting easily and often. They all resonate with deep feelings but outwardly have only two manifestations of them: they faint or weep or do both, with a degree of frenzy and hysteria that suggests repressed sexual energy finding a socially sanctioned safety-valve. The air in sentimental novels is always humid with hartshorn (the common fainting remedy) and damp handkerchiefs. A heroine, as Eaton Stannard Barrett defines her in his spoof of the type, The Heroine (1813), is a creature who “when other girls would laugh, she faints. Besides, she has tears, sighs, and half sighs, at command”.¹⁴

A girl in Laetitia Hawkins' novel Rosanne (1814), is so sensitive that she “always faints when the sun comes out suddenly”.¹⁵ Susanna's Elinor Wildegrave faints with more cause, when she hears of her lover's death, and when Catharine Lee in Geoffrey Moncton learns that the man she is engaged to is already married, her fainting fit is so prolonged that her female attendants have to carry her from the room. The heroine of Roughing It in the Bush either faints or comes close to it on five occasions, due to causes ranging from the trauma of a burning cabin to the bathos of a dead skunk's odour.

During their conscious moments, sentimental heroines are constantly weeping, for there must be a “sufficient Quantity of Slobbering, and Blessing, and White Handkerchief Work”, as one author puts it.¹⁶ After hearing of her lover's death, Elinor Wildegrave's handkerchief is never out of her hand. “No sound was heard within the peaceful home for many days and nights but the sobs and groans of the unhappy Elinor”, writes Susanna.¹⁷ “The tears of mortified sensibility” fill Juliet Whitmore's eyes¹⁸ and Flora Lyndsay adds her own ocean of tears to the one she is crossing.

Were we to follow Henry MacKenzie's example in the early trend-setting novel of sensibility The Man of Feeling (1771) and supply “an index of tears” at the back of Roughing It in the Bush, we would find that Susanna sheds copious tears on no less than twenty-three occasions. As her Yankee neighbour tells her, “the drop is always on your cheek”. Susanna cries when she arrives in the backwoods and when she leaves. In between she weeps from physical discomfort, from fear, from homesickness, from awe in the presence of Nature and, in the best sensibility tradition, from the misfortunes of others. Following Sterne's examples of Yorick's starling and Uncle Toby's fly, the most inconsequential objects in sentimental novels often bring forth the greatest floods of tears. Thus Susanna weeps at the sight of a favourite flower and the children's little chapped feet, “literally washing them” with her tears.

Hartshorn-and-Handkerchief Heroines, however, do more than weep for those less fortunate than themselves; they take active steps to relieve their sufferings. Juliet Whitmore in Mark Hurdlestone has “a deep sympathy in the wants and sufferings of the poor, which she always endeavoured to alleviate to the utmost of her power”.¹⁹ It is this conventional Susanna in Roughing It in the Bush who comforts the dying Phoebe, another victim of consumption, and later walks through the bush carrying food to the starving Mrs. N—— and her children.

In many sentimental novels we leave the heroine at the altar, but in others—Richardson's Pamela having set the example—we see her fulfilling her true role as wife and mother. The ethics of wifehood in the “hartshorn-and-handkerchief” novels assume the beauty of complete submission to male authority. As Susanna puts it in Mark Hurdlestone: if a virtuous woman “cannot consent to encounter a few trials and privations for the sake of the man she loves, she is not worthy to be his wife. The loving and beloved partner of a good man may be called upon to endure many temporal sorrows, but her respect and admiration for his character will enable her to surmount them all”.²⁰ When her husband tells her that economic necessity forces them to emigrate to Canada, Flora Lyndsay is all compliance: “Yes, I can and will dare all things, my beloved husband, for your sake”, she says. “My heart may at times rebel, but I will shut out all its weak complainings. I am ready to follow you through good and ill”.²¹ “I had bowed to a superior mandate”, writes Susanna, in Roughing It in the Bush, “the command of duty; for my husband's sake, for the sake of the infant, whose little bosom heaved against my swelling heart, I had consented to bid adieu forever to my native shores” (p. 242).

Children in sentimental fiction are very touchstones of sensibility, and any mother who is indifferent to their sweet innocence can hardly end well. Flora Lyndsay “bent over her sleeping child and kissed its soft, velvet cheek, with a zest that mothers alone know”.²² When Susanna is left “to struggle through” alone in her backwoods cabin with a sick child and a new-born babe, she sing-songs the old refrain:

Bitter tears flowed continually over those young children. I had asked of Heaven a son, and there he lay helpless by the side of his almost equally helpless mother, who could not lift him up in her arms, or still his cries; while the pale, fair angel, with her golden curls, who had lately been the admiration of all who saw her, no longer recognized my voice, or was conscious of my presence.

(p. 354)

A prime virtue of sentimental heroines is their patience and fortitude in the face of continual and gratuitous suffering. They sit with bowed heads, folded hands, and unfolded handkerchiefs, waiting to be rescued. They are passive, and cannot help themselves. When a terrible storm at sea arises, fearful that lightning will ignite the gunpowder on board, Flora Lyndsay “took her baby in her arms, and lay down upon the heaving floor, commending herself and her fellow-passengers to the care of God”,²³ a reaction paralleled by Susanna's in Roughing It in the Bush when the Anne collides with the Horsley Hill in the St. Lawrence.

Certainly Susanna sees herself as fate's victim, in Roughing It in the Bush, much more sinned against than sinning. In the chapter entitled “Disappointed Hopes”, Susanna points out that “the misfortunes that now crowded upon us were the result of no misconduct or extravagance on our part, but arose out of circumstances which we could not avert or control” (p. 392). She is like the deer which Brian the Still-Hunter describes to her:

How bravely he repelled the attacks of his deadly enemies, how gallantly he tossed them to the right and left, and spurned them from beneath his hoofs; yet all his struggles were useless, and he was quickly overcome and torn to pieces by his ravenous foes. At that moment he seemed more unfortunate even than myself, for I could not see in what manner he had deserved his fate. All his speed and energy, his courage and fortitude, had been exerted in vain. I had tried to destroy myself; but he, with every effort vigorously made for self-preservation, was doomed to meet the fate he dreaded!

(pp. 224-25)

The stricken deer image resurfaces later in poetry, and suggests that Susanna is borrowing here from William Cowper's famous passage in Book III of The Task (1785): “I was a stricken deer, that left the herd / Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt / My panting side was charg'd.” Susanna's version goes like this:

Stern Disappointment, in thy iron grasp
The soul lies stricken. So the timid deer,
Who feels the foul fangs of the felon wolf
Clench'd in his throat, grown desperate for life,
Turns on his foes, and battles with the fate
That hems him in—and only yields in death.

(p. 391)

“By what stern necessity were we driven forth to seek a new home amid the western wilds?”, wails Susanna (p. 242). She apostrophizes fate at the beginning of Chapter Twenty:

Now, Fortune, do thy worst! For many years,
Thou, with relentless and unsparing hand,
Hast sternly pour'd on our devoted heads
The poison'd phials of thy fiercest wrath.

(p. 439)

Fortune readily complies, and evidence of “fiercest wrath” piles up at an astonishing rate in Roughing It in the Bush, beginning with a ten-week crossing and cholera epidemic and ending with the bad luck of a severe cold snap as Susanna leaves the backwoods for Belleville in an open sleigh.

In between come the persecutions of Yankee neighbours, the long delay in getting possession of their house and the failure to get a fair share of the crops on the Cobourg property, a damp summer which ruins their backwoods crop, loss of a bull, various oxen and all their hogs, money lost in Moodie's declining steamboat stock, repeated attacks of ague, Moodie's broken leg, loss of friends who move away, the burning fallow which almost demolishes the cabin, a fire on the cabin roof and a hurricane. We have no way of knowing, of course, how many of these misfortunes are fact rather than fiction. One could argue in any case that some of them are due not to malignant Fate, but to Moodie's mismanagement. Susanna's failure to acknowledge this even by a hint suggests that she is leaning heavily on literary convention; sentimental heroines are victims of Fate, not of a husband's bungling, a subject on which, as loyal and submissive wives, a heroine's lips are sealed. The victim motif is a conventional one, but it is also functional for Susanna, giving her a convenient way to externalize what were probably very real feelings of self-pity and depression. One can only speculate, however, on whether she feels herself to be a victim of a depressed British economy, rude Yankee neighbours, a hostile landscape and climate, a husband's bungling, or all these together.

The sentimental heroine of Roughing It in the Bush has affinities to all previous literary ones, but particularly to those of Ann Radcliffe, and Roughing It in the Bush in general is cast very much in the Gothic mode. The first Gothic novel had appeared in 1764, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, and the genre had split into two main types: there were the really horrible ones, the blood-and-gore tales of Gregory “Monk” Lewis and others, influenced by Germanic literature, and the only mildly horrible ones, such as Ann Radcliffe's, Charlotte Smith's and Clara Reeve's, influenced by the sentimental novel. It is to this latter group that Roughing It in the Bush belongs.

The Gothic novel reached its apogee of popularity in the 1790's, and Mrs. Radcliffe's five novels were among the most popular, particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Her heroines are all typical sentimental ones but she adds certain refinements: they all move—gracefully and elegantly, of course—through haunted mansions and deep dungeons and a series of supernatural surprises. Susanna probably read Ann Radcliffe's novels, or, at the very least, the popular Mysteries of Udolpho during her impressionable teen-age years. Mrs. Radcliffe's novels were not only widely read but also well-regarded in her day. Coleridge in the Critical Review (August, 1794), calls Udolpho “the most interesting novel in the English language” and as late as 1824 (when Susanna would have been twenty-one), Sir Walter Scott, speaking of Ann Radcliffe, refers to “the potent charm of this mighty enchantress” whose volumes, if a family were numerous “always flew, and were sometimes torn, from hand to hand”.²⁴ In Susanna's case the style and content of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels probably filtered down to her subconscious, to resurface many years later, in Roughing It in the Bush, when her own Canadian experiences made the Gothic mode appropriate.

All of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are exiles in a foreign land, isolated in wild natural settings and pining for their lost homes. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, when the heroine Emily is all alone in Italy, her thoughts recur “to her own strange situation, in the wild and solitary mountains of a foreign country”, and, looking at the ocean, she thinks “of France and of past times” and wishes “Oh! how ardently, and vainly … that its waves would bear her to her distant, native home!”²⁵

“What heinous crime had I committed” asks Susanna in Roughing It in the Bush, “that I, who adored you [England] should be torn from your sacred bosom, to pine out my joyless existence in a foreign clime?” (pp. 89-90). Travelling up the St. Lawrence where “the lofty groves of pine frowned down in hearse-like gloom upon the mighty river”, Susanna writes: “Keenly, for the first time, I felt that I was a stranger in a strange land; my heart yearned intensely for my absent home” (p. 54).

Ann Radcliffe's heroines, in true Gothic style, inevitably find themselves either in a real prison or in some remote castle or dungeon. A prison, after all, not only exacerbates the heroine's intense emotionalism by excluding all outside social stimuli but also enables her to exercise her prime virtue, fortitude. Emily is imprisoned in the castle of Udolpho “beyond the reach of any friends, had she possessed such, and beyond the pity even of strangers”.²⁶ Three times in Roughing It in the Bush Susanna refers to her status as prisoner. She informs the reader that “my love for Canada was a feeling very nearly allied to that which the condemned criminal entertains for his cell—his only hope of escape being through the portals of the grave” (p. 166). Later she quotes a poem beginning: “Oh, land of waters, how my spirit tires / In the dark prison of thy boundless woods” (p. 202) and refers in the last sentence of the book to “revealing the secrets of the prison-house” in her account of backwoods life (p. 563).

Like Ann Radcliffe, Susanna also knows the value of an expiring candle in increasing suspense at moments of supreme fear. This is a favourite device with Mrs. Radcliffe, and Susanna borrows it in Roughing It in the Bush when she is walking home through the woods at night with Moodie: “Just at that critical moment the wick of the candle flickered a moment in the socket and expired. We were left, in perfect darkness, alone with the bear—for such we supposed the animal to be. My heart beat audibly; a cold perspiration was streaming down my face” (p. 459).

The most important feature of Mrs. Radcliffe's sentimental Gothic novels is the atmosphere created by her use of natural setting. The action of most sentimental novels had taken place in drawing rooms, following Richardson's lead, until Frances Brooke in The History of Emily Montague (1769) moved it out of doors—in fact to the Canadian countryside, whose rugged grandeur had so impressed her during her years in Quebec when her husband served as chaplain to the garrison there. Ann Radcliffe followed her lead, but sent her heroines off to southern Europe: Julia in The Sicilian Romance (1790) travels through Sicily; Adeline in Romance of the Forest (1791) visits Switzerland and Languedoc, and Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho journeys in the Pyrenees, crosses the Alps and ends up in the Apennines. Ann Radcliffe would have loved the Canadian wilderness, for she prefers wild, uninhabited landscapes for her heroines: ranges of majestic mountains and deep valleys of tall, dark pines.

Wherever they travel, her heroines are emotionally moved by what they see, and react to it in a typical Burkean way. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) established for the next hundred and fifty years the effect on the emotions of landscape. Sublime natural objects are those which arouse feelings connected with fear, infinity, difficulty or pain, based on man's strong instinct for self-preservation. From Thomas Gray's letters on Alpine scenery (“Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry”) to Romantic poetry and beyond, English writers in both prose and verse wax most eloquent over such sublime prospects as mountain precipices and rushing waterfalls.

Part of Susanna's reaction to Canadian nature, but not all, is conventional, with a large debt to Burke, via Ann Radcliffe. Emily in Udolpho and Susanna in Roughing It in the Bush certainly share the same reaction to pine forests. Here is Emily:

The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence, except when the breeze swept over their summits, the tremendous precipices of the mountains, that came partially to the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily's feelings into awe; she saw only images of gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her.²⁷

And here is Susanna, getting her first view of the dense bush: “Anon, the clearings began to diminish, and tall woods arose on either side of the path; their solemn aspect, and the deep silence that brooded over their vast solitudes, inspiring the mind with a strange awe” (p. 271). Emily's spirits are “soothed to a state of gentle melancholy by the stilly murmur of the brook below her window” and Susanna writes: “I know not how it was, but the sound of that tinkling brook, for ever rolling by, filled my heart with a strange melancholy” (p. 165).

The background characters of Roughing It in the Bush, in addition to its heroine, also owe a debt to Mrs. Radcliffe and the Gothic tradition. Horace Walpole had begun the pattern of the stubborn, talkative servant in The Castle of Otranto, and Ann Radcliffe continues it in her novels. Annette, the heroine's servant in Udolpho, is very like old Jenny in Roughing It in the Bush; they share the same garrulous good humour and earthy wisdom.

Roughing It in the Bush also has a typical Gothic villain in Malcolm, the man who came to dinner and stayed for nine months. He is very like Montoni in Udolpho, who has “an expression of habitual cunning and mental reservation mingled with sullen pride and morose ill-humour” which “gave to his marked countenance a repulsive and sinister character”.²⁸ Here is Susanna's description of Malcolm:

His features were tolerably regular, his complexion dark, with a good colour; his very broad and round head was covered with a perfect mass of close, black, curling hair, which, in growth, texture, and hue, resembled the wiry, curly, hide of a water-dog. His eyes and mouth were both well shaped, but gave, by their sinister expression, an odious and doubtful meaning to the whole of his physiognomy. The eyes were cold, insolent and cruel, and as green as the eyes of a cat. The mouth bespoke a sullen, determined, and sneering disposition, as if it belonged to one brutally obstinate, one who could not by any gentle means be persuaded from his purpose. Such a man, in a passion, would have been a terrible, wild beast.

(pp. 414-15)

Susanna is horrified when Malcolm tells her that he has committed a murder and hopes “that he would not go mad, like his brother and kill” her (p. 426). Susanna is forced to spend months living with this fearsome man, just as Emily must endure the sneers and taunts of Montoni while she is imprisoned in the castle of Udolpho. Susanna's long, detailed description of Malcolm gives us a clue to her reasons for choosing the Gothic mode for Roughing It in the Bush. She compares him to a waterdog, a cat, and a “terrible wild beast”; like the Yankee neighbours at Cobourg, he gives Susanna a useful symbol for the land itself, and that “brutally obstinate” quality in the land which she resents and fears.

Ever since Walpole told a friend in a letter that The Castle of Otranto had poured from his pen in a flood, as if his hand were guided, the Gothic mode has served as a convenient expression of the subconscious mind's dark, irrational forces, and Gothic machinery has supplied objective correlatives for psychic states allied to anxiety, fear, disorientation. In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna is repeating Elizabeth Simcoe's pattern in the latter's use of the “picturesque”: what begins as mere convention is rapidly transformed into a particularly apt avenue of emotional expression. In Elizabeth's case, the feelings engendered by the wilderness were positive ones of power and freedom which found expression in her painting; in Susanna's case, because she was split down the middle, some of them were negative ones of fear and alienation, which found expression in Gothic literary motifs. Writing Roughing It in the Bush and at least two of her novels while she was living in the bush allowed her to symbolize part of what was happening to her. Susanna was writing about Elinor Wildegrave, half-starved and imprisoned by her husband in Oak Hall, “shut out from all society”, while she herself was living on potatoes and squirrel in her backwoods prison, and the analogies are obvious. “Panting with terror”, writes Susanna in Roughing It in the Bush, “I just reached the door of the house as the hurricane swept up the hill, crushing and overturning everything in its course” (p. 492). In Canada, Nature is quite as fearsome in stalking one as any Gothic villain.

Catharine's choice of form in The Backwoods of Canada produced its own Canadian hybrid, and so has Susanna's. The latter's choice of Ann Radcliffe's sentimental Gothic with a natural setting acting on character, has proved a popular prototype for all those Canadian novels with Gothic overtones, much use of landscape, and a heroine who makes a psychic journey into self. One thinks of Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925) and the struggle for freedom of its androgynous heroine, with Nature's hostility symbolized by the muskeg which is “bottomless and foul”, “black and evil”, and which eventually swallows the Gothic villain, Caleb Gare. There is Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972), in which a young woman returns to the wilderness island cabin of her childhood summers, finding her identity by plummeting to the bottom of the lake and of her subconscious, where dark forms lurk. Like Susanna, the heroine of Surfacing rejects the rational route to knowing. She, too, has a father with an analytical, scientific bent: “His were the gods of the head, antlers rooted in the brain”,²⁹ and like Susanna, she learns to trust the mind's deepest forest tangle, to heed its wisdom. The heroine of Surfacing has no name because the kind of identity she seeks is not a matter of finding neat labels and scientific definitions, any more than it was for Susanna. (Catharine Traill tried that kind of “surfacing”, sticking to life's factual crust, and so never penetrated the heart of the wild, or herself.) The young woman in Surfacing regards the wilderness with the same paranoia which Susanna, and most Canadians, sometimes feel: “Sometimes I was terrified”, confesses Atwood's heroine, “I would shine a flashlight ahead of me on the path, I would hear a rustling in the forest and would know it was hunting me, a bear, a wolf or some indefinite thing with no name, that was worse”.³⁰ She pushes on toward the depths, nonetheless.

The most detailed exploration of the bear symbol comes with Marian Engel's Bear (1976), whose heroine, Lou, also goes to a wilderness island and there makes the same discovery as Atwood's heroine: to be fully human is to be part animal, and to recognize that part. Lou learns, as Susanna did, that Canadian nature can't be tamed, or neatly labelled and defined. Lou brings the bear into the house and even gets it to curl up on the hearth, in a domesticating attempt which recalls Catharine Traill, but the bear stubbornly remains a bear: huge, fierce, unpredictable, with claws that can rake one's back as soon as it is turned. And all those slips of paper falling out of books, giving encyclopaedic bear facts, do not help Lou to define him. Only her soul can do that, and never in words.

In French-Canadian fiction, the Gothic motifs are much darker. There is Marie-Claire Blais' Mad Shadows (translated 1971), in which Louise and Patrice slowly wither, imprisoned by their own narcissistic barrier. This is Roughing It in the Bush turned inside out. Louise's prison is her own psychological construct; inside it, she loses the self in her world of mirrors. Susanna's forest prison is real enough; inside it, she finds herself in her wilderness-mirror, in spite of her Gothic fears.

There is also Anne Hébert's Kamouraska (translated 1973), historically based on a true incident, blending fact with fiction as Roughing It in the Bush does. The heroine, Elisabeth d'Aulnières, is truly a Gothic sentimental heroine, victimised by her first husband Antoine Tassy, a real Gothic villain, whose brutality, like Malcolm's, mirrors that of the land itself, in this case the blood-spattered snow of the Quebec countryside. The sentimental Gothic heroine, cowering and conventional, is, however, only half of the Susanna we see in Roughing It in the Bush, only one of her two voices. The other one is equal to the challenge of the self, and of the land.

In addition to its sentimental heroine, Flora Lyndsay contains another and much more interesting character, seemingly created by the other Susanna: Miss Wilhelmina Carr, a young lady belonging to that breed of emancipated females called “Dashers”. She has tried wearing trousers, but felt that they fettered her free movements. She has never been ill a day in her life. She is independently wealthy and once asked a man to marry her (he refused). Now she hates all men, is scornful of women's willing submission to male authority, remarking that men love passive women because “a vain man loves to see his own reflection in one of these domestic magnifying glasses”.³¹ Susanna's attitude to Miss Carr, her snub-nosed, red-haired creation, is ambivalent. On the surface, Wilhelmina is satirized, and condemned, but she is also the only vitally alive character, cavorting round a group of pale, pasteboard figures, the usual fictional stereotypes. To understand why Susanna has poured her creative energy into Wilhelmina, one needs to look at the small-scale rebellion which was taking place in England when Susanna was a teen-ager, against the prevalent role model of courtesy-book girl-cum-sentimental heroine.

Beginning around 1780, and lasting till 1820, when the Evangelicals effectively scotched it, there was a minor revolt against accepted standards of female delicacy, both physical and mental. Earlier conduct-book writers had laid heavy stress on the need for a weak body. “We so naturally associate the idea of female softness and delicacy with a correspondent delicacy of constitution, that when a woman speaks of her great strength, her extraordinary appetite, her ability to bear excessive fatigue, we recoil at the description in a way she is little aware of”, Dr. John Gregory had written in his popular courtesy-book A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774).³² William Alexander had agreed that women were right to pursue “a sedentary life, a low abstemious diet, and exclusion from the fresh air” because their physical frailty was the source of “many of the finer and more delicate feelings, for which we value and admire them”.³³

The anti-delicacy revolt was sparked by the same feminist writers who plumped for “rational creatures”; they wanted robust ones as well. “My sex,” sighs Catherine Graham in 1790, “will continue to lisp with their tongues, to totter in their walk, and to counterfeit more weakness and sickness than they really have, in order to attract the notice of the male”.³⁴ Priscilla Wakefield, in her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, (1798), sees the cult of delicacy as producing a “feeble, sickly, languid state which frequently renders her [woman] helpless, through the whole course of her life.”³⁵ The insurrection against mental delicacy shows up in dress fashions with a new sexual provocativeness. Women discarded their heavy dresses and hoops in favour of thin muslin ones and after 1795, began shedding underclothes at an alarming rate. One young lady caused a great stir by showing up at a ball in one layer of muslin with nothing underneath. The most daring girls, deaf to the warnings that even damp stockings endangered their health, wet their muslin gowns before stepping into them, and let them dry on the body's curves. (By 1820, women were back in their stiff fabrics and corsets, and the long imprisonment of Victorian fashions had begun.)

The rebels changed their manners along with their mode of dress. Mrs. Sherwood describes one of their number: “She was one of the new style of fashionables, then but lately denominated ‘Dashers’. … She talked loudly in a sort of scream, and awful to say, scarcely ever spoke without a broad oath.”³⁶ Lady Lade took to driving her own phaeton four-in-hand.³⁷ Fictional models, all of whom are frowned on by their creators, include Hariot Freke, in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), who swears freely, affects men's fashions and was “one of the first who brought … harum scarum manners into fashion”.³⁸ It is to this group of dashers that Miss Wilhelmina Carr belatedly belongs. All of them would have been in their element on the Canadian frontier, where there were good reasons for taking on a man's role, and where one could shout and run and fling one's arms about without danger of knocking over some porcelain figurine.

Susanna's ambivalence toward Miss Wilhelmina Carr results from the fact that she was luckier than her creation: she escaped the English drawing-room, and landed on the Canadian frontier. There she finds herself turning into a Dasher at a rate which alarms her but which she nevertheless openly acknowledges in Roughing It in the Bush in the narrator's persona. As the book progresses and this second Susanna is more in evidence, we see the exciting thrust-and-parry of Susanna's two selves: dreamer struggling with pragmatist, delicate heroine with Dasher, old English model with new Canadian one, female stereotype with fully androgynous human being. There is drama and tension on every page, and it is this which makes Roughing It in the Bush far more of a literary masterpiece, and far more fun to read, than The Backwoods of Canada. Whereas Catharine covered up her eagle's wings with embroidery, and retreated back into the female stereotype, Susanna sometimes wheels and soars in male preserves, and doesn't care who sees her.

There are several key events in Roughing It in the Bush which show the two Susannas back-to-back, like a pair of Siamese twins, trying to walk in opposite directions. The first occurs at Cobourg, when Susanna is temporarily without a servant, and Moodie goes off to fetch a cow which he has bought, leaving Susanna to spend her first night alone in the bush. “As it became later”, says Susanna, “my fears increased in proportion. I grew too superstitious and nervous to keep the door open. I not only closed it, but dragged a heavy box in front, for bolt there was none. Several ill-looking men had, during the day, asked their way to Toronto. I felt alarmed lest such rude wayfarers should come tonight and demand a lodging, and find me alone and unprotected” (p. 229). “Alone and unprotected” is a refrain every sentimental heroine, from Pamela onwards, would instantly recognize. Susanna has fallen prey to the Hartshorn-and-Handkerchief Heroine's greatest fear, founded on the male conspiracy—universal and unanimous—to rob all females of their chastity. Susanna cowers in her cabin, too nervous to go to the loft for a new candle when her old one expires, or to go outside for more wood. “I wept and sobbed until the cold grey dawn peered in upon me through the small dim window” (p. 230), she writes, quite sure that Moodie has been killed by wolves. But there is another Susanna here as well: the Canadian one who, like Elizabeth Simcoe and Catharine Parr Traill, will gain confidence by doing. Before darkness has distorted her fears, Susanna has, for the first time in her life, in spite of her terror of cattle (her equivalent to Elizabeth's rattlesnakes), successfully milked a cow. “After many ineffectual attempts, I succeeded at last, and bore my half-pail of milk in triumph to the house. Yes! I felt prouder of that milk than many an author of the best thing he ever wrote” (p. 228), crows Susanna, giving her practical skills here precedence over her literary ones. It is characteristic of Susanna, in this same incident, that her worst fears are not of cows or anything tangible but rather “unreal terrors and fanciful illusions” (p. 229), the fears crowding her mind. It is old Martin's ghost, called up again and again.

One of Susanna's very real dragons is fire; twice in Roughing It in the Bush her life is endangered by fire. In the first incident, “Burning the Fallow”, Moodie is away and the hired man unwisely decides to fire up the brush-heaps surrounding the Douro cabin. There is a strong wind, flames encircle the house, all escape routes are cut off. Here Susanna is all delicate female and sentimental heroine. She folds her hands and awaits her fate. She sees the flames outside “behind, before, burning furiously within a hundred yards of us, and cutting off all possibility of retreat. … I closed the door, and went back to the parlour. Fear was knocking loudly at my heart, for our utter helplessness annihilated all hope of being able to effect our escape—I felt stupefied” (pp. 332-3). She lies down on the floor beside her sleeping children and presses them “alternately to my heart” (p. 334) to await her fate. A sudden thunderstorm saves them, but Susanna's mind is scarred with horrible dreams in which her clothes catch fire just as she is “within reach of a place of safety” (p. 337).

The next fire crisis is a fire on the cabin roof, started by a stupid servant-girl who loads the stove with wood chips and overheats the pipes. Moodie is away (he is, significantly, absent in every crisis), but this time Susanna reacts with great coolness and courage: she grabs a blanket, plunges it in water, thrusts it into the red-hot stove. Then she runs to the loft and throws water on the pipes. She lugs the dining-room table outside, puts a chair on it, climbs up and throws water on the roof. When she sees that she can't extinguish the fire, she carries out all the heavy furniture, places the children in dresser drawers lined with blankets on the snowy hillside, wrapping them warmly, for the temperature is eighteen below. “Prompt and energetic in danger”, says Susanna of Moodie when he finally arrives, “and possessing admirable presence of mind and coolness when others yield to agitation and despair, he sprang upon the burning loft and called for water” (p. 444). Surely Susanna realizes here that she has already reacted to the fire with “masculine” presence of mind and prompt action rather than “female” passivity, according to her society's definitions.

As soon as Moodie and the neighbours are present—sentimental heroines need an audience—Susanna quickly switches from Dasher to delicate female: “Now that help was near, my knees trembled under me, I felt giddy and faint, and dark shadows seemed dancing before my eyes”, (p. 444) The “fright and over-exertion” gave her “health a shock from which I did not recover for several months” (p. 447). The pattern here repeats the first-night-alone at Cobourg: first the Canadian frontierswoman, courageous and quick-acting, then the helpless, languid English stereotype.

There is one further incident, “The Walk to Dummer”, which shows the Siamese-twin Susanna. She and her friend Emilia walk to Dummer carrying food and cheer to poor Mrs. N—— quietly starving there with her six children. Susanna sets off through the forest with her basket of goodies, and is rewarded at her destination with a truly touching tableau:

I felt that I was treading upon sacred ground, for a pitying angel hovers over the abode of suffering virtue, and hallows all its woes. On a rude bench before the fire sat a lady, between thirty and forty years of age, dressed in a thin, coloured muslin gown, the most inappropriate garment for the rigour of the season, but, in all probability, the only decent one that she retained. A subdued melancholy looked forth from her large, dark, pensive eyes. She appeared like one who, having discovered the full extent of her misery, had proudly steeled her heart to bear it. … Near her, with her head bent down … sat her eldest daughter, a gentle sweet-looking girl, who held in her arms a baby brother, whose destitution she endeavoured to conceal. It was a touching sight; that suffering girl, just stepping into womanhood, hiding against her young bosom the nakedness of the little creature she loved. … There was such an air of patient and enduring suffering in the whole group, that, as I gazed heart-stricken upon it, my fortitude quite gave way, and I burst into tears.

(pp. 524-5)

If we dig below this hearts-and-flowers trumpery, however, we find a tough-rooted resourcefulness: “We had fasted for twelve hours, and that on an intensely cold day, and had walked during that period upwards of twenty miles” (p. 529) boasts Susanna and Mrs. N——, for all her sentimental pose, is a woman coping on her own, proving herself, in dignity and fortitude, far superior to her deserting husband, who has turned to drink to drown the taste of failure in the New World.

Mrs. N—— is not the only strong female in the background warp-and-woof of Roughing It in the Bush. There is Norah Y——, who holds the hind legs of the buck caught in her rail fence until her brother comes with a gun: “I can beat our hunters hollow”, she boasts to Susanna, “they hunt the deer, but I can catch a buck with my hands” (p. 365). There is also the Indian woman who waits till a bear has closed his huge arms around her, then slowly drives her knife into his heart. “What iron nerves these people must possess”, comments Susanna, “when even a woman could dare and do a deed like this” (p. 303).

Most of the males, on the other hand, are like Mr. N——. They are not all drunken sots, to be sure, but from Brian the Still-Hunter, Tom Wilson, Uncle Joe, Malcolm-the-little-stumpy-man, to John Wedderburn Dunbar himself, they are all losers, too weak to cope with frontier life.

Like Catharine, Susanna had married a stricken deer. He didn't suffer from Traill's deep depressions, but he had a physical handicap: his left arm was partially paralyzed from an old wound and almost useless. Like Traill, he came from the class which Susanna sees as “perfectly unfitted by their previous habits and education for contending with the stern realities of emigrant life” (p. xviii), and Moodie was quite as inept as Traill in financial matters. The Moodies had had to give up the Cobourg farm, already cleared and a going concern, because Moodie had consented to go shares with a couple who did the manual labour but also cheated him of his half of the produce. Moodie failed to make a living from the Douro homestead because he had used up his remaining capital in buying far more land than he could ever hope to cultivate.

Since John Wedderburn Dunbar was no hero, he had no need of a sentimental heroine. What he needed was a Dasher who could prop him up, rather than lean. Like Catharine, Susanna had to grow strong. However, there is a difference in the way the sisters viewed their husbands. Thomas Traill flutters pathetically round the outer edges of The Backwoods of Canada; we never see him centre stage. Perhaps Catharine found him impossible to embroider; it was easier to shove him out of sight. In Roughing It in the Bush, on the other hand, Susanna sees her husband whole, just as she sees herself, countenances all of him, good and bad, and shares her vision with the reader. She is dutifully loyal because she is deeply loving. Moodie belongs in her secret wood; she needs him there—not for his strength, but for love's sharing. Susanna calls him “my beloved partner” and there are many glimpses in Roughing It in the Bush of their happy companionship. They become particularly close after the move to Douro where they are more isolated. We see them fishing in a quiet bay gay with cardinal flowers: “Many a magic hour, at rosy dawn or evening grey”, says Susanna, “have I spent with my husband on this romantic spot, our canoe fastened to a bush, and ourselves intent upon ensnaring the black bass” (p. 360). They work side by side tilling and planting: “We cheerfully shared together the labours of the field. One in heart and purpose, we dared remain true to ourselves” (p. 392-3). When Moodie as loyal officer of the Queen, goes to Toronto to fight the 1837 insurrection, “all joy had vanished with him who was my light of life”, sobs Susanna (p. 471).

It is while Moodie is in Toronto—he was gone for four and a half months during 1837-8—that the Dasher in Susanna wins a few rounds. Her sheltering shawl lies mouldering in the underbrush as she bares her arms to the sun and picks up her hoe. She amazes even herself. “I have contemplated a well-hoed ridge of potatoes on that bush farm with as much delight as in years long past I had experienced in examining a fine painting in some well-appointed drawing-room” (p. 393), exults Susanna. She and her servant Jenny, without even a hired man, cope with all the farm chores. Old Jenny gives Susanna a splendid image, always before her, of what women can do, bursting out of her comic-servant straitjacket, just as Susanna does from her sentimental-heroine one. Being lower class, Jenny never has to bother her head with standards of delicacy. A natural-born Dasher, she stomps about in men's boots, runs and shouts, burlesques feminine fashions by wearing all three of her “iligant” bonnets at once.

As Susanna makes decisions and manages the farm, the stricken deer becomes the gallant deer, outrunning his persecutors, victor in life's struggle:

It was a noble sight, that gallant deer exerting all his energy, and stemming the water with such matchless grace, his branching horns held proudly aloft, his broad nostrils distended, and his fine eye fixed intently upon the opposite shore. Several rifle-balls whizzed past him, the dogs followed hard upon his track, but my very heart leaped for joy when, in spite of all his foes, his glassy hoofs spurned the opposite bank and he plunged headlong into the forest.

(p. 398)

We see Susanna outstripping even Catharine in her maple-sugaring [“one hundred and twelve pounds of fine soft sugar, as good as Muscovado” (p. 479)], planting the garden, devising an ingenious method of catching wild ducks (p. 480). One day she paddles her canoe through “the angry swell upon the water” (p. 537) to ferry a neighbour servant girl anxious to see her dying father on the opposite side of the lake. Swept by a strong current towards the rapids on the way back, Susanna, alone in the canoe, heads for an island, hauls the canoe ashore, pulls it round the headland, lands triumphant at her own dock. Elizabeth Simcoe sat in a canoe, trailed her small, white hand in the water, wished it held the paddle. Catharine Parr Traill watched one being made, peered carefully, made neat jottings in her notebook. Susanna Moodie pushes off from shore boldly, heads for deep water, strokes strongly through the opposing current.

Before these four-and-a-half months on her own, Susanna “had never been able to turn my thoughts towards literature” (p. 475), being too fatigued in body to focus her ideas. It is at this point that her new-found energy spills over into writing. She begins to compose the sketches for Roughing It in the Bush, and to work on her novels, writing late at night, earning the money which her husband can't, to support her growing family, just as Catharine did. (Susanna gave birth to seven children before she was done; between 1832-38 she produced five, four of them born in the backwoods.) “I actually shed tears of joy”, Susanna confides, “over the first twenty-dollar bill I received from Montreal. It was my own; I had earned it with my own hand; and it seemed to my delighted fancy to form the nucleus out of which a future independence for my family might arise” (p. 476). Her progress is very different from Catharine's, who had had a five-guinea note tossed unexpectedly into her lap at the age of eighteen, and who, after that, never stopped chirping, but who also never countenanced all of herself in print.

This leads to an interesting question: if Susanna can creatively come to terms with the androgynous ideal in Roughing It in the Bush, why does she revert to the feminine stereotype for the heroines of her novels? There are three possible answers. Faced with the grim realities of frontier life, perhaps her imagination needed the antidote of languid ladies living happily ever after. Her sentimental novels are, for the most part, set in English drawing rooms; perhaps she was externalizing her nostalgia and homesickness for English refinement. Or perhaps she is not so unlike Catharine after all, cutting out a chain of paper-doll heroines just as Catharine decorated and embroidered: to ease her guilt, at having moved away from the female stereotype endorsed by her society.

Susanna may have needed all those Hartshorn-and-Handkerchief Heroines, weeping on every page, because she herself, as time passes, laughs as often as she cries. (Sentimental heroines never laugh!) At first, in Cobourg's dark days, Susanna laughs in spite of herself. “I could hardly help laughing”, confesses Susanna, just recovered from a lady-like swoon, when she finds Uncle Joe's parting gift, a dead skunk, in a cupboard of her Cobourg house, “but I begged Monaghan to convey the horrid creature away” (p. 205). She laughs again when mice scamper over her bed all night, “squeaking and cutting a thousand capers … but in reality it was no laughing matter” (pp. 206-7). While Moodie in his night-shirt and old Jenny, brandishing a large knife, chase a bear from the clearing (a real one this time) Susanna stands “at the open door, laughing until the tears ran down my cheeks” (p. 460).

Sometimes one can laugh at bears, feel calm and confident; sometimes one can only cry and cringe, and this love-hate relationship to Nature is Susanna's legacy to all Canadians. We all feel the fascination and the fear, in alternating waves. For one Susanna, fear clouds her vision:

The moving water will not show me my reflection
The rocks ignore
I am a word in a foreign language.(39)

It is this Susanna who falls back on the familiar tongue of Gothic metaphor. For the other Susanna, the land is not fact, but a mirror for the soul. For Catharine it was always fact, and this, in part, was the cause of her failure, her retreat. Susanna, on the other hand, shines her Romantic imagination out into the dark forest around her, holds mind and land together, connected by the beams of light.

Unlike Catharine, Susanna doesn't crave orderly, right-angled spaces. She moves comfortably in a world of intuition and mystery. Susanna can follow the oxen into the deepest part of the forest. “All who have ever trodden this earth … have listened to these voices of the soul, and secretly acknowledged their power”, Susanna affirms, “but few, very few, have had the courage boldly to declare their belief in them: the wisest and the best have given credence to them, and the experience of every day proves their truth” (p. 241). “The human heart”, she contends, “has its mysterious warnings, its fits of sunshine and shade, of storm and calm, now elevated with anticipations of joy, now depressed by dark presentiments of ill” (p. 241). She is a firm believer in extra-sensory perception: “I have no doubts upon the subject, and have found many times, and at different periods of my life, that the voice in the soul speaks truly: that if we gave stricter heed to its mysterious warnings, we should be saved much after-sorrow” (p. 242). When Susanna and her husband are separated, he writes to her precisely at those times when she feels most need of communicating with him: “How can this be, if mind did not meet mind, and the spirit had not a prophetic consciousness of the vicinity of another spirit kindred with its own?” (p. 534), she asks. “The holy and mysterious nature of man”, according to Susanna, “is yet hidden from himself; he is still a stranger to the movements of that inner life, and knows little of its capabilities and powers” (p. 535).

She particularly responds to flowing water, and to islands. For Susanna, islands are catalysts for the imagination: “glorious islands that float, like visions from fairyland” (p. 279) … “fairy isles” (p. 295) … “isles that assumed a mysterious look and character” (p. 375). One island, in particular, stirs her imagination: “a tiny green island, in the midst of which stood, like a shattered monument of bygone storms, one blasted, black ash-tree”. “It is certain”, continues Susanna, “that an Indian girl is buried beneath that blighted tree; but I never could learn the particulars of her story, and perhaps there was no tale connected with it. She might have fallen a victim to disease … or she might have been drowned” (pp. 360-61). This recalls Wordsworth's ballad “The Thorn”, where three simple objects, a blighted tree, a hill of moss, and a pond, are shrouded in a thick mist of possible murders and drownings, imagination's vapours. For Susanna, as for Wordsworth, truth lies in the mind, not eye, of the beholder. Susanna's discovery in the Canadian wilderness is that the mind works on nature's materials, creating and forming, re-creating and re-forming, in a vital, ongoing, autonomous process. The land is mirror when imagination holds the lamp.

Susanna may sometimes fear the land's brutality, but, unlike Catharine, she accepts it without embroidery. “We beheld the landscape, savage and grand in its primeval beauty” (p. 373) says Susanna from her canoe in Stony Lake. She loves the “strange but sadly plaintive” cry of the whip-poor-will (p. 517). Her own quick-changing temperament responded to the flash and flow of fast water: “By night and day, in sunshine or in storm”, says Susanna, “water is always the most sublime feature in a landscape, and no view can be truly grand in which it is wanting. From a child, it always had the most powerful effect upon my mind” (p. 330). Sometimes Susanna can make the sublime her own, moving beyond convention, fitting it to her own psyche. She hears the waters of life:

The voice of waters, in the stillness of night, always had an extraordinary effect upon my mind. Their ceaseless motion and perpetual sound convey to me the idea of life—eternal life; and looking upon them, glancing and flashing on, now in sunshine, now in shade, now hoarsely chiding with the opposing rock, now leaping triumphantly over it,—creates within me a feeling of mysterious awe of which I never could wholly divest myself.

(p. 165)

Water for Susanna is like Elizabeth Simcoe's fire: a compelling image, propelled by its own, autonomous power.

Susanna has a Janus-faced view of social class as she does of Nature, but here she progresses more surely from English prejudice to Canadian compromise. On first arriving in Canada, Susanna is as elitist as her sister, shocked to see Scottish labourers “infected by the same spirit of insubordination and misrule” as the rest of the Grosse Isle riff-raff (p. 31). When the nosy Mrs. R—— at Cobourg asks Susanna, “what was your father?”, Susanna replies with a half-truth: “A gentleman, who lived upon his own estate” (p. 173), and when another Yankee condemns Susanna's practice of eating separately from her servants, Susanna counters with Catharine's view: “There is no difference in the flesh and blood”, says Susanna, “but education makes a difference in the mind and manners” (p. 263). She is upset that inferiors refuse to call her “madam”, and even more upset when her Yankee neighbours gleefully use “madam” to address her bare-foot servant-girl (p. 246). “We shrank from the rude, coarse, familiarity of the uneducated people among whom we were thrown” (pp. 245-46) shudders Susanna, drawing her shawl closer. At first the Moodies deliberately ostracize themselves from the lower ranks who, as Catharine has informed us, are social equals only at the many “bees”. When the Moodies have a logging-bee themselves, Susanna leaves her guests, to retire to bed, and Moodie stops attending bees, sending “his oxen and servant in his place” (p. 352). To the early Susanna, only the well-born can be benevolent, so that when Brian the Still-Hunter brings milk for her baby, she decides: “It was the courtesy of a gentleman—of a man of benevolence and refinement” (p. 222).

It is Susanna's own poverty in the backwoods which tempers her. When the Moodies are reduced to living on milk, bread and potatoes, supplemented by squirrel, it is a humbling experience:

You must become poor yourself before you can fully appreciate the good qualities of the poor—before you can sympathize with them, and fully recognize them as your brethren in the flesh. Their benevolence to each other, exercised amidst want and privation, as far surpasses the munificence of the rich towards them, as the exalted philanthropy of Christ and His disciples does the Christianity of the present day.

(p. 483)

Jenny's warm heart contains “a stream of the richest benevolence” (p. 501) and after she and Susanna have toiled together to keep the farm going without a man, Susanna comments: “We were not troubled with servants, for the good old Jenny we regarded as an humble friend” (p. 486). “Many a hard battle had we to fight with old prejudices, and many proud swellings of the heart to subdue, before we could feel the least interest in the land of our adoption, or look upon it as our home” (p. 245) writes the Canadian Susanna, looking down the road she has travelled. Her final view comes in the 1871 Preface to Roughing It in the Bush: People “can lead a more independent social life than in the mother country, because less restricted by the conventional prejudices that govern older communities”, writes Susanna, and those that return to England “almost invariably” come back to Canada because “they feel more independent and happier here; they have no idea what a blessed country it is to live in until they go back and realize the want of social freedom” (pp. 10-11).

There are, on the other hand, the usual two unreconciled Susannas looking at the Indians. Sometimes she sees them through Noble-Savage spectacles: “An Indian is Nature's gentleman—never familiar, coarse, or vulgar” (p. 316) says Susanna. Her view of a young Indian girl recalls Elizabeth Simcoe's painterly bias: “She would have made a beautiful picture; Sir Joshua Reynolds would have rejoiced in such a model—so simply graceful and unaffected, the very beau idéal of savage life and unadorned nature” (p. 315). “I have read much of the excellence of Indian cookery but I never could bring myself to taste anything prepared in their dirty wigwams” (p. 324), says Susanna, with a backward step, all delicate female.

As she gets to know the Chippewa Indians around her Douro cabin, however, she changes more than Catharine did, often seeing the Indians first as human beings, only secondarily as Indians. She admires their “honesty and love of truth” (p. 295), their affection for their children and deference for the aged (p. 306) and notices how grateful they are “for any little act of benevolence. … They became attached to our persons, and in no single instance ever destroyed the good opinion we entertained of them”, says Susanna (p. 296). They are, after all, kindred spirits: “They are a highly imaginative people” (p. 321) and “the Indian's face … is a perfect index of his mind. The eye changes its expression with every impulse and passion, and shows what is passing within as clearly as the lightning in a dark night betrays the course of the stream” (p. 305). There is genuine pathos in Susanna's description of her Indian friends bidding her good-bye as she leaves for Belleville: “They had been true friends to us in our dire necessity, and I returned their mute farewell from my very heart” (p. 552).

The Moodies were leaving the backwoods because the Dasher in Susanna had boldly, without telling Moodie, written to the Lieutenant Governor, Sir George Arthur, asking him to give Moodie some permanent appointment in the militia: “The first secret I ever had from my husband was the writing of that letter; and, proud and sensitive as he was, and averse to asking the least favour of the great, I was dreadfully afraid that the act I had just done would be displeasing to him; still, I felt resolutely determined to send it” (p. 485). Susanna is desperately trying to ease their financial straits and, after all, she is a long way from England where Mrs. Parkes was exhorting wives to show all letters to their husbands. When Sir George Arthur responds by offering Moodie the post of sheriff at Belleville, Susanna on her own sells their stock, implements and household furniture, packs up all their goods, makes all necessary preparations to leave the backwoods. This burst of decisive action recalls Elizabeth Simcoe at Quebec, hiring servants and buying a calèche.

Susanna, who has formed a strong emotional bond with her surroundings, is loathe to leave: “Every object had become endeared to me during my long exile from civilized life. I loved the lonely lake, with its magnificent belt of dark pines” (p. 554). “I clung to my solitude”, Susanna writes, “I did not like to be dragged from it to mingle in gay scenes, in a busy town, and with gaily dressed people” (pp. 544-45). With many backward glances, she moves on to the next chapter in her life, following the course of her favourite river: “the grand, rushing, foaming Otonabee river, the wildest and most beautiful of forest streams” (p. 555). The voice of waters, now in sunshine, now in shade, carols the flux and flow, the mutability of all earthly things, but particularly of Susanna. It is her consciousness of this mutability which, in the final analysis, gives Roughing It in the Bush its shaping vision. Susanna's conception of Roughing It in the Bush is the exciting synthesis of her progress to full maturity, evolving from her backwoods life, through the dialectic of fear and fascination, the conflict of delicate-heroine versus Dasher. It is only in the creative act that Susanna achieves a blend and balance; in actual life, the duality of her personality probably remained, painfully, in jagged splinters. In Roughing It in the Bush, however, without resorting to a simplistic synthesis, she nonetheless holds the duality in solution, and her solvent is irony.

In all her other works, her sentimental novels and Life in the Clearings, her account of her Belleville years, Susanna looks through a single lens. In the novels, it is an English one, fully committed to all things English. In Life in the Clearings, it is a Canadian one, fully committed to all things Canadian. Only in Roughing It in the Bush does Susanna wear bifocals. When she arrived in Canada, there was no gap between female conventions and the self; as the gap grew, and her awareness of it grew, Susanna resorts to distanced irony as the only means of keeping all the ambiguities in view.

Susanna is not the only Canadian full of contradictions; nor the only one to countenance them through irony. Susanna has mastered the double-exposure technique which Margaret Laurence, to take but one example, will use in The Stone Angel, showing us the image of ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley superimposed on all the earlier snapshots in her life's album. We get the old Hagar and the young Hagar, Hagar as she views herself, and Hagar as we view her, and it is, as with Susanna, the complex point of view which informs and intrigues and holds us rapt.

Part of Roughing It in the Bush was written in the backwoods, but its shaping vision must have come when it was enlarged and arranged for publication in 1852, when Susanna was twenty years downstream, looking back at her 1832 self. She looks back, for instance, on that first-night-alone at Cobourg. “I cannot now imagine how I could have been such a fool as to give way for four-and-twenty hours to such childish fears; but so it was” (p. 226). “Now, when not only reconciled to Canada but loving it”, says Susanna in 1852, “I often look back and laugh at the feelings with which I then regarded this noble country” (p. 112). “We may truly say, old things have passed away”, says an even older Susanna, two years after John's death, in the 1871 Preface to Roughing It in the Bush, “all things have become new” (p. 13). One can never step into the same river twice and Susanna, like Heraclitus, wouldn't want to.

In the opening sentence of The Diviners, Margaret Laurence describes the Otonabee, Susanna's river. “The river flowed both ways”, writes Laurence. It is driven alternately by its own current, and the wind, in opposite directions, in an “apparently impossible contradiction”. English winds … Canadian currents. The river of Susanna's life flows first one way, then the other, and Susanna rejoices in its living waters.

Notes

1. “Biographical Sketch” to C. P. Traill's Pearls and Pebbles (Toronto, 1894), p. x.

2. Selected Poems and Letters, edited by Douglas Bush (Boston, 1959), p. 258.

3. Roughing It in the Bush (Toronto, 1913), facsimile edition, Coles Canadiana Collection (Toronto, 1974), p. 29. I have used this edition throughout, since it is more readily available than the 1852 one, and is unabridged. All subsequent page references occur in brackets following the quotation.

4. “The Double Voice” in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto, 1970), p. 42.

5. New York [1854], pp. 84-85.

6. Ibid., p. 342.

7. Introduction to Roughing It in the Bush, New Canadian Library edition, 1962, p. xii.

8. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (London, 1932), pp. 340-41.

9. Ibid., p. 71.

10. Vol. IX (new series), p. 351.

11. p. 343.

12. Mark Hurdlestone (London, 1853), II, 264.

13. Flora Lyndsay, p. 326.

14. London, 1813, I, 83.

15. London, 1814, III, 48.

16. G. L. Way, Learning at a Loss (1778), quoted by Tompkins, p. 108.

17. Mark Hurdlestone, I, 117.

18. Ibid., I, 253.

19. Ibid., I, 285-86.

20. Ibid., I, 121-22.

21. Flora Lyndsay, pp. 9-10.

22. Ibid., p. 5.

23. Ibid., p. 335.

24. On Novelists and Fiction, edited by Ioan Williams (London, 1968), p. 105. This essay on Ann Radcliffe appeared originally as one of the “Lives of the Novelists”, a series a prefatory essays which Scott wrote for Ballantyne's Novelists Library between 1821 and 1824.

25. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, edited with an introduction by Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1966), pp. 240, 419.

26. Ibid., p. 367.

27. Ibid., p. 224.

28. Ibid., p. 157.

29. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (Toronto, 1972), p. 153.

30. Ibid., p. 73.

31. Flora Lyndsay, p. 44.

32. 2nd edition, London, 1775, pp. 50-51.

33. The History of Women from Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time (London, 1779), II, 41-42.

34. Letters on Education (London, 1790), p. 48.

35. London, 1798, p. 20.

36. The Life and Times of Mrs. Sherwood (1775-1851) From the Diaries of Captain and Mrs. Sherwood, edited by F.J. Harvey Darton (London, 1910), p. 158.

37. Charles Pigott, The Female Jockey Club or A Sketch of the Manners of the Age (New York, 1794), p. 82.

38. 2nd edition, London, 1802, I, 88.

39. “Disembarking at Quebec”, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, p. 11.