[In the following essay, Inness categorizes class ideology and insecurity as factors for Moodie's perception of the female emigration experience.]

“This colony is a rich mine yet unopen'd,” states Colonel Rivers, hero of The History of Emily Montague (1769), the first Canadian novel about the riches awaiting settlers in Canada. “Nothing is wanting but encouragement and cultivation,” he continues. “[T]he Canadians are at their ease even without labor; nature is here a bounteous mother, who pours forth her gifts almost unsolicited” (Brooke 1: 50). Rivers, a poor gentleman-soldier who emigrates from England, claims he is going to become “lord of a principality” in his new country that “will put [the] large-acred men in England out of countenance” (1: 3). Although Rivers is a fictional character, his grandiose views on Canada were echoed by many men living in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For instance, William Catermole in his 1831 lectures in Colchester and Ipswich, England, painted a vivid picture of the benefits to be derived from emigration to Canada. “The emigrant who goes out with habits of industry, and will only retain them, not suffering himself to be led away with the ridiculous hope of finding a place where idleness may repose, while the earth shall produce its fruits spontaneously,” Catermole observed, “cannot fail of success” (vii). He praised the “general air of prosperity” (50) that pervaded the whole country, predicting that a hard worker could make a profit even in his first year, and cited statistics on increased immigration, land prices, and wages to support his claim that Canada, blessed with rich soil and an abundance of game, fish, and fruit, was a land of opportunity. Nor was Catermole alone in considering Canada the foremost location for British emigration. In 1807, Isaac Weld Jr. reported, “There can be no doubt but that a man of moderate property could provide for his family with much more ease in Canada than in the United States” (414).¹ Similarly, George Heriot in his well-known early-nineteenth-century travel narrative, Travels through the Canadas (1807), was enthusiastic about the boundless opportunities the new frontier offered. “Every person in Canada may have within his power the means of acquiring a subsistence,” Heriot wrote (253).² Catermole, Weld, and Heriot were only a few among hundreds of male orators and writers who promoted Canada as the promised land for any man willing to labor and who helped to encourage a vast wave of British emigration to Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century.³ As Susanna Moodie writes, “A Canada mania pervaded the middle ranks of British society” ([Roughing It in the Bush; hereafter cited as Roughing] xix).

What these public speakers and writers frequently overlooked, however, was how British women perceived emigration, and what it entailed for them. Emigration did not hold the same promise for women as it did for men. Like Moodie's fictional Flora Lyndsay, who declares, “I would rather live in a cottage in England, upon brown bread and milk, than occupy a palace on the other side of the Atlantic” ([Flora Lyndsay; hereafter cited as Flora] 4), many women did not want to leave their country and part from their loved ones, in all likelihood never to see them again.⁴ Although men believed farm work would be easier in Canada and looked forward to many a full day's hunting—like Moodie's Brian the Still Hunter who hunts from dawn to dusk—women did not have the same optimistic expectations about their work in the new country, which would only be more exhausting in the Canadian backwoods where both domestic help and manufactured goods were scarce. Many of the women would have experiences similar to those of Anne Langton, a British emigrant who, in addition to baking bread, preserving fruits, canning vegetables, sewing her own clothes, and performing a host of everyday chores, also made soap, dipped candles, boiled off maple syrup, glazed windows, and slaughtered pigs. “All around one sees such a multiplicity of things that should be done,” Langton sighed, “and the ways and means to accomplish them so few and small” (32). On a “grumbling day” she remarked, “[W]oman is a bit of a slave in this country” (95). The work done by Anne and other middle-class women, as well as by their servants, is often elided in heroic, male-authored travel texts and in immigration narratives.

It is hardly surprising that Anne's complaints were not addressed by male writers extolling the virtues of Canada; they wanted no dissenting voice to undermine their myth of a bountiful and blissful land. Confronted with this dominant discourse that depicted emigration as the ultimate heroic adventure for men, Canadian-British women writers sought to construct a different representation of emigration and their adventures in the new land.⁵ Catharine Parr Traill, Anne Langton, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Simcoe, and Susanna Moodie are a few of the best-known authors who described their experiences in Canada, helping to create a body of Canadian literature with what Margaret Atwood refers to as a “preponderance of women writers” (Introduction xiv). The most famous of these was Susanna Moodie,⁶ one of the “scribbling Strickland sisters”—Eliza, Agnes, Jane Margaret, Catherine, and Susanna—all of whom wrote a vast variety of poems, autobiographies, novels, and essays (Peterman 116).⁷ Susanna, who emigrated to Canada in 1832, describes her experiences in the Canadian backwoods in her most famous work, Roughing It in the Bush, one volume in a trilogy of emigration and settlement tales that includes Flora Lyndsay (1854) and Life in the Clearings (1853).⁸ Neither of the other two texts achieved the success of the first, which went through three English and several American editions in the 1850s, as well as several Canadian editions.⁹Roughing It is an autobiographical account composed of a collection of vignettes about life in Canada and the odd assortment of people (such as John Monaghan, Brian the Still Hunter, and “the little stumpy man”) Moodie encounters.

The often uneven text combines what Carol Shields refers to as “diluted Wordsworthian passion” (6)—frequently expressed in poetry—with grim, factual commentary on the problems facing the settler. This uneven tone has caused problems for critics, who are divided over whether it is a flaw in the work or an indication of Moodie's schizophrenic personality. The latter view was made famous in Margaret Atwood's series of poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), in which Atwood depicts Susanna as a paranoid schizophrenic who vacillates between praising and condemning Canada. For Atwood, Moodie is “a word in a foreign language” (11), constantly struggling to make sense of a world that, as a middle-class immigrant, she cannot fathom. Although Atwood's poetic creation of Moodie is different from Moodie herself, Atwood's poems have inevitably colored how Moodie's works are read and interpreted by critics, encouraging the perception of Moodie as a woman on the edge of insanity, unable to handle the trials of emigration. Such a view of Moodie, however, gives a distorted picture of her agency and rationality. As Fiona Sparrow points out, “There is more of the rationalist in Susanna Moodie than is generally allowed” (25). “[Moodie] can sound prejudiced and melodramatic,” Sparrow observes, “but for the most part she speaks with a voice both controlled and sane” (27).¹⁰ Concurring with Sparrow, I shall show in this essay that Roughing It is a rational attempt to develop a woman-centered literary style that can articulate the diverse experiences of emigration more fully than can traditional male-authored narratives.¹¹ At the same time, however, we must recognize that Moodie is a “watchful visitor—a tourist and sight-seer” whose “observations are directed toward a European audience” (Giltrow 133). Although Moodie restructures the traditional male-authored immigration narrative, she does not question the division between British “civilization” and Canadian “barbarity,” displaying her alienation from her new land.

This essay also argues that what David Jackel identifies as the text's “unstructured” nature (3), far from being a flaw or, as Marian Fowler claims, an attempt to reproduce “the usual meanderings of the sentimental novel” (105), marks the author's attempts to describe an experience that refuses to fit into an organized, coherent, progressive narrative.¹² Thus, Jackel's criticism that Moodie “is unable even to take advantage of chronological ordering, the simplest means of giving structure to a narrative of personal experience” and that she writes at times “as if she had no knowledge of what would happen next” (10) expresses a narrow, formalist, and male-constructed ideology about how the immigration narrative should be written, a perspective that does not consider what Moodie is attempting to accomplish: the presentation of an alternative view of immigration.

Caren Kaplan's discussion of the importance of deterritorialization in postmodern writing promotes understanding of Moodie's fragmented prose. Kaplan writes that deterritorialization is a term “for the displacement of identities, persons, and meanings that is endemic to the post-modern world system” (188). “Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use the term ‘deterritorialization’ to locate this moment of alienation and exile in language and literature,” Kaplan continues. “In one sense it describes the effects of radical distanciation between signifier and signified. Meaning and utterances become estranged.” Although Kaplan's analysis helps to explain the fragmentation of national and personal identities that is so prevalent in the postmodern age, deterritorialization is hardly unique to postmodernism. Moodie herself is an important example of the nineteenth-century, deterritorialized author, who writes in an attempt to understand the displacement that she has undergone; her disjointed, unstructured prose is analogous to the fragmented subjectivity she experiences as an emigrant. Thus, by analyzing how several elements of the emigration story are rescripted or contested by Moodie rather than examining how the episodes that compose much of this text either cohere or fail to cohere, we gain a better understanding of how this work establishes a discourse in contradistinction to the more prevalent male-authored narratives of emigration. We also discover, however, that because of her failure to question class divisions and because of her adherence to ethnic stereotypes (such as that the Irish are “barbarians”), Moodie was ultimately unable to write a text that addressed the problems of more than a small group of middle-class and upper-middle-class women.

“A MATTER OF NECESSITY, NOT OF CHOICE”

As I have suggested, bourgeois women often did not share their husbands' enthusiasm for emigration. For example, Moodie begins Roughing It with a very different account of emigration than Catermole's: “In most instances,” she writes, “emigration is a matter of necessity, not of choice; and this is more especially true of the emigration of persons of respectable connections, or of any station or position in the world.” Moodie continues, “Emigration may … generally be regarded as an act of severe duty, performed at the expense of personal enjoyment” (xv). Here, Moodie reiterates one of the key tenets of British imperialism: It is one's duty to move to the colonies and further the state's growth. Moodie does not question the necessity for emigration but resigns herself to her fate, pointing out to her readers that emigration is “the only safe remedy for the evils arising out of an over-dense population” (209). According to this Malthusian logic, it is the woman's responsibility to emigrate or suffer the consequences of not doing so.

Although Catermole, Weld, and Heriot displayed little concern about the class mixing that was bound to occur in Canada, a less hierarchical and status-conscious society than England, Moodie perceives potential class mingling as a great threat and vainly seeks to recreate the class distinctions to which she was accustomed. She expresses nothing but derision for the “absurd anticipations” of the working-class men and women on board her ship. “I was not a little amused at the extravagant expectations entertained by some of our steerage passengers,” she writes, adding: “The sight of the Canadian shores had changed them into persons of great consequence. The poorest and the worst-dressed, the least-deserving and the most repulsive in mind and morals, exhibited most disgusting traits of self-importance. Vanity and presumption seemed to possess them altogether” (22). Again, Moodie is appalled when a working-class Irish-man clad in a “tattered great-coat covering bare, red legs” jumps for the first time on the Canadian shore, shouting, “Whurrah! my boys! … Shure we'll all be jontlemen!” (14). Moodie's rhetoric makes it clear that she does not embrace class mobility with the same enthusiasm as the steerage passengers.

Moodie's class bias is again evident when she goes onshore for the first time at Grosse Isle, the disinfection point for emigrants. She is confronted by a “motley crew” of Irish washing their clothes in the shallow water and “screaming and scolding in no measured terms.” “We were all literally stunned by the strife of tongues,” Moodie writes. “I shrank, with feelings almost akin to fear, from the hard-featured, sun-burnt harpies, as they elbowed rudely past me.” She calls the people “vicious, uneducated barbarians” who are “perfectly destitute of shame, or even of a common decency.” Moodie and her husband “[turn] in disgust from the revolting scene” and try to find some calm and peace in the tranquil scenery (11). Mrs. Moodie, however, complains that even the natural beauty is “spoiled by the discordant yells of the filthy beings who were sullying the purity of the air and water with contaminating sights and sounds!” (13). As T. D. MacLulich observes, “The immigrants-gone-wild at Quebec evoke [Moodie's] own panic on the edge of the new world, which may prove to be a place in which all the certainties of the English gentry are turned topsy-turvy” (120). In this upside-down world, counter to all she has known, it is not at all surprising that Moodie is unable or unwilling to endorse imperialism, which stresses that social progress and a high degree of civilization will inevitably result from the influx of British emigrants and colonial administrators. Instead, Moodie repeatedly suggests that in the colonies, all Anglo emigrants (whether Irish or British), regardless of class, have the potential to deteriorate into barbarism.

The disorder Moodie finds in Canada, which she is at a loss to understand and desperately wants to bring under control, is not limited only to the country's inhabitants. It is a disorder of the land itself, symbolized by the epidemics she finds upon her arrival. The text's emphasis on disease is evident from the first line of the first chapter: “The dreadful cholera was depopulating Quebec and Montreal, when our ship cast anchor off Grosse Isle” (1).¹³ Shortly after the Moodies' arrival, their ship is visited by health officers “who [talk] much and ominously of the prevailing disorder, and the impossibility of strangers escaping from its fearful ravages” (23). Chapter 3 begins, “Of Montreal I can say but little. The cholera was at its height, and the fear of infection, which increased the nearer we approached its shores, cast a gloom over the scene, and prevented us from exploring its infected streets” (33; emphasis added). Moodie continues, “The dismal stories told us by the excise-officer … of the frightful ravages of the cholera, by no means increased our desire to go on shore” (34; emphasis added). Note the repeated references to the Canadian shore; cholera seems to be a disease that emanates from the land itself rather than from the people, reflecting Moodie's fear of the new environment.

Montreal, instead of signifying the freedom and openness the settlers hope to find in the new land, is forbidding and menacing. Moodie paints a grim picture of the evils that lie in wait for the immigrant who dares venture into this city:

The town itself was, at that period, dirty and ill-paved; and the opening of all the sewers, in order to purify the place and stop the ravages of the pestilence, rendered the public thoroughfares almost impassable, and loaded the air with intolerable effluvia, more likely to produce than stay the course of the plague, the violence of which had, in all probability, been increased by these long-neglected receptacles of uncleanliness.

(34)

The insecurity found on land is juxtaposed with the safety Moodie locates on board the ship: “The sullen toll of the death-bell [and] the exposure of ready-made coffins in the undertakers' windows … painfully reminded us … that death was everywhere. … Compared with the infected city, our ship appeared an ark of safety” (40). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's description of the nineteenth-century European city as a “locus of fear, disgust and fascination” for the middle class, particularly disturbing because the lower classes could easily mingle with higher classes (125), provides a basis for understanding Moodie's obsessive concern with the decay and putrefaction to be found in Montreal. By transposing an ideology with which she is familiar onto Montreal, Moodie makes her environment more intelligible. Intelligibility, however, does not necessarily lead to greater acceptance. Instead, for Moodie the Canadian city, like the European city, becomes a zone of chaos and class confusion, where cholera is only the most obvious sign of the prevalent social disorder.

Moodie is constantly engaged in mapping British class ideology onto both the Canadian city and the hinterland. Thus, her attention to the “intolerable effluvia” and “long-neglected receptacles of uncleanliness” may also represent her desire to associate herself with the upper class by intimating that she has an acute sense of smell. Smell, being pervasive and invisible, could “invade the privatized body of the bourgeoisie” during the nineteenth century (Stallybrass and White 139). “At one level smell was re-formed as an agent of class differentiation,” Stallybrass and White write. “Disgust was inseparable from refinement: whilst it designated the ‘depraved’ domain of the poor, it simultaneously established the purified domain of the bourgeoisie” (140). In other words, the more disgust Moodie expresses, the more evident her identification with the upper classes. Also, the greater her sensitivity to the odors that the Montreal inhabitants seem to tolerate, the more clearly she presents herself as both a foreigner and an individual with more refined sensibilities than the local inhabitants.

Moodie's dread of the cholera reveals her bourgeois fear of contact with the lower classes, particularly the Irish, but her reaction is also symbolic of the immigrant's ambivalent attitude toward assimilation in the new country. Either the immigrant may succumb to cholera (and homesickness) and may die, never benefiting at all from Canadian life, or she may be cured of both her illness and her homesickness. Given this reading, it is understandable why Moodie provides a detailed description of one cure for cholera that supposedly saved many. An itinerant physician is credited with saving thousands of people with a mysterious remedy “all drawn from the maple-tree”: “First he rubs the patient all over with an ointment, made of hog's lard and maple-sugar and ashes, from the maple-tree; and he gives him a hot draught of maple-sugar and ley which throws him into a violent perspiration. In about an hour the cramps subside; he falls into a quiet sleep, and when he awakes he is perfectly restored to health” (36). It is not by chance that the doctor's medication is composed of ingredients from the maple tree, a symbolic reference to Canada itself. According to this analogy, the immigrant must become assimilated into the Canadian community, an experience that might induce “violent perspiration.” Ultimately, however, the immigrant accepts the new homeland and is restored to health. Although Moodie regards acceptance of the new country as necessary, she herself finds assimilation into Canadian culture difficult because she continually struggles to reconcile her British values with Canadian ones.

Moodie's uncertainty as to whether British middle-class beliefs could survive in Canada undermines the belief, prevalent in the nineteenth century, that British colonialists, whether in Canada, Australia, South Africa, or India, could always succeed in imposing their own ideology onto a foreign country. Although male writers invariably emphasized that land ownership would result in a more moral populace, Moodie stressed the lack of connection between owning land and moral goodness, depicting the rural environment as, instead, a breeding ground for vice. For instance, the English gentry, who can afford to move to the backwoods to hunt and fish, abandon their ethical principles almost as quickly as the Irish laborers. Moodie remarks that British men soon add to their “profitless accomplishments” of hunting and fishing the “bush vices of smoking and drinking, and quickly throw off those moral restraints upon which their respectability and future welfare mainly depend” (xxxi). For Moodie, no amount of moral rectitude is sufficient to save a man or woman from inevitable corruption in the hinterland. An itinerant preacher shares her views: “[T]he bush is a bad place for young men,” he warns. “The farther in the bush … the farther from God, and the nearer to hell” (310). Moodie regards the wilderness as both a physical and spiritual wasteland. The wilderness is not the earthly paradise envisioned by many male writers of the nineteenth century in their travel and emigration accounts.

In Roughing It, Moodie refutes the common Romantic assumption that living in a wilderness area, far from the corruption of cities, makes a person both spiritually and morally stronger. Although upon her arrival she delights in Canada's natural beauty, her enthusiasm later wanes as she becomes increasingly disillusioned with nature as a source of moral and spiritual rejuvenation. She depicts nature, instead, as “red in tooth and claw,” offering little security to the middle-class female immigrant like herself, who is constantly fearful of the known and unknown dangers of the woods. Moodie refers to the bush as a “green prison,” a description that surely expressed the thoughts of many other women immigrants ([Life in the Clearings; hereafter cited as Clearings] xxxii). Living closer to nature fails to offer the immigrant a heightened experience of the sublime, as described by such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley; instead, the middle-class woman is confronted with the sordid actuality of daily life in the backwoods, a reality that seems impossible to change. Longtime Canadian settlers tell Tom Wilson, the Moodies' friend and fellow immigrant, that it is “impossible to be nice about food and dress in the bush; that people must learn to eat what they could get, and be content to be shabby and dirty, like their neighbors in the bush” (Roughing 72). Thus, the bush, associated with disorder and filth, also becomes identified with the lower classes and uncouth behavior. Mrs. Moodie is informed by a Canadian that “ladies and gentlemen have no business in the woods. Eddication spils [sic] man or woman for that location” (246). Attributes (such as education) that are valued in England are worthless in this new country. At one point, Mr. Malcolm, a visitor at the Moodies' house, tries to justify his swearing to Mrs. Moodie, saying, “Surely, in the woods we may dispense with the hypocritical, conventional forms of society, and speak and act as we please” (366). Malcolm fails to recognize that it is exactly those “hypocritical, conventional [British] forms of society” that Moodie is trying to perpetuate in the wilderness.

Since Moodie is intent upon recreating British society in the Canadian backwoods, she is upset by the indiscriminate intermingling of classes, as well as by the reversal of traditional gender roles. As Carol Shields notes, Moodie's women tend to grow more “self-sufficient and masculine in the woods, while men tend to become less self-sufficient and more feminine” (7).¹⁴ Mr. Moodie, Brian the Still Hunter, Tom, and Malcolm are only a few of the men in Roughing It who are either idle or incompetent and force women to take over masculine responsibilities. When her husband proves to be inept in financial matters, Mrs. Moodie must raise money through her painting and writing. For her, this gender role inversion refutes the popular assumption that men, once they emigrated to the frontier, would prosper through their own agency. Moodie contradicts the then-prevalent belief that frontier men were “natural” leaders, as well as the personification of manliness. Instead, she implies that the frontier actually sapped male agency.

Nowhere is Moodie's struggle to reconcile her British Romantic views with the actuality of Canada more apparent than when a group of Indians visits her. She describes the Indians as “a people whose beauty, talents, and good qualities have been somewhat overrated, and invested with a poetical interest which they scarcely deserve” (264).¹⁵ Although she suggests that the Romantic depiction of the Indian as a “noble savage” is inappropriate, she seems unable to avoid using Romantic rhetoric. She remarks that an “Indian is Nature's gentleman—never familiar, coarse, or vulgar” (284), showing her allegiance to the same Romantic values that she questions.¹⁶ Again, Moodie succumbs to Romantic ideology when she ponders the Indians' fate: “Often I grieved that people with such generous impulses should be degraded and corrupted by civilized men; that a mysterious destiny involves and hangs over them, pressing them back into the wilderness, and slowly and surely sweeping them from the earth” (289). In this passage we see that Moodie, despite attempting to redefine the emigrant experience for middle-class women as different from men's, is no more able to escape complicity in the imperialist project than the nineteenth-century British male. By alluding to a “mysterious destiny,” Moodie refuses to acknowledge any human—never mind British—agency in the destruction of the Indians; she affirms the basic premise of imperialist colonialization: Native peoples have less right to their lands than do the British.

In Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1839), Anna Jameson expresses thoughts about the Indians similar to Moodie's. Jameson, however, is more enthusiastic than Moodie about the picturesque possibilities of the Indians; she comments after she meets a group of Indians that there was not “a figure among them that was not a study for a painter” and wished that her “hand had been readier with the pencil to snatch some of those picturesque heads and attitudes!” (2: 134). Here, to borrow Abdul Jan Mohamed's words, “[C]olonialist discourse ‘commodifies’ the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses him as a ‘resource’ for colonialist fiction [or, I would add, any form of colonialist aesthetic production]” (64). In other words, Jameson ignores the agency and subjectivity of Indians, regarding them only as useful commodities. At the same time, she criticizes the Indians for their “dirty,” “barbaric,” and “ignorant” habits and alludes to them as her “dingy, dusky, greasy, painted, blanketed, smiling friends” (2: 192). Obviously, such “barbaric” individuals do not deserve to be treated with the same respect as white people. For Jameson, the Indians are only subjects for paintings, and like Moodie, she believes that they are doomed to extinction: “The attempts of a noble and a fated race, to oppose, or even to delay for a time, the rolling westward of the great tide of civilization, are like efforts to dam up the rapids of Niagara. The moral world has its laws, fixed as those of physical nature” (2: 38). Jameson's words, like Moodie's, are chilling. She does not attribute any responsibility to the individuals who compose the “great tide of civilization,” thus relieving them of any culpability in the extermination of the Indians. Furthermore, her teleological language makes the Indians' destruction seem more like a natural disaster than the result of human agency.

Moodie's and Jameson's insistence on the nobility of the native Canadians must be examined in more detail, since it seems to refute JanMohamed's argument that colonial texts display a “vociferous insistence … upon the savagery and the evilness of the native” in order to “justify imperial occupation and exploitation.” “If such literature can demonstrate that the barbarism of the native is irrevocable, or at least very deeply ingrained,” JanMohamed continues, “then the Europeans attempt to civilize him can continue indefinitely … and the European can persist in enjoying a position of moral superiority” (62). Although JanMohamed's argument helps to explain the operation of some colonial texts, it does not fully explain Moodie's and Jameson's insistence that the Indians are both barbarous and noble. What we find is that, paradoxically, nobility can be used as effectively as barbarism to explain the dominance of European culture in its colonial lands, since both the noble native and the barbarous native are defined as incapable of assimilation into Anglo society.

Moodie's and Jameson's rhetorical emphasis on the nobility of the Indians also conceals the harsh living conditions forced upon them by European settlers, who encroached upon the Indians' land and contributed to the spread of disease. Although the northern Indians did not meet with mass eradication to the same extent as did tribes in the United States, their numbers were still greatly reduced. In the 1790s, Alexander MacKenzie could report in his travel log of his trip across Canada: “I explored those waters which had never before borne any other vessel than the canoe of the savage; and traveled through deserts where an European had never before presented himself to the eye of its swarthy natives” (vii); yet in the nineteenth century, because of the influx of Europeans and the diseases they brought with them, the original inhabitants were decimated. By 1845, Henry Warre reported that the Indians were reduced from “sickness and other causes, to less than one-third of their former number” (1). And the Canadian government, like that of the United States, did little to stop the decimation. As even Anna Jameson admits, “Every means hitherto provided by the Canadian government for the protection of the Indians against the whites has failed” (2: 45). This grim historical background must be taken into account by present-day critics so we recognize that Moodie's text is concealing as much as it is revealing about the actual lives of Indians. Moreover, her bourgeois European background necessarily colors how she perceives Canada's first inhabitants. (All travel fiction, including the immigration narrative, is inevitably biased because writers are discussing their subjective experiences in a foreign and often unfamiliar country.)

Moodie's subjectivity and her adherence to English rather than Canadian values are clearly evident in her many tirades about the poor quality of domestic servants available in her new country, a subject about which she is obsessed.¹⁷ She repeatedly criticizes what she calls the “insolent airs of independence” (217) of Canadian servants who know, because of the high demand for servants, that they can insist on higher wages or leave one position and immediately find another. In her writings, Moodie is particularly critical of newly arrived servants, warning in Flora Lyndsay: “Persons emigrating to Canada cannot be guilty of a greater blunder than that of taking out servants with them. … [T]hey no sooner set foot upon the North American shores, than they suddenly become possessed with an ultra republican spirit” (1: 114).¹⁸ Once this happens, according to the narrator, the servant is rendered useless: “Ask such a domestic to blacken your shoes, clean a knife, or fetch a pail of water from the well at the door, and ten to one she will turn upon you as fierce as a lioness, and bid you do it yourself” (1: 115). Moodie fears a world turned upside down, where masters and mistresses are made to serve those who formerly served them. It is clear she does not think her former servants are intellectually or morally prepared to govern others. She scoffs at their accomplishments and criticizes Canadian servants who “think themselves as good as their employers” (xix).¹⁹ Moodie is particularly critical of the lower classes' lack of manners toward the middle class. “The utter want of that common courtesy with which a well-brought-up European addresses the poorest of his brethren, is severely felt at first by settlers in Canada,” she observes. “At the period of which I am now speaking, the titles of ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ were very rarely applied by inferiors.” On the other hand, Moodie notes, “[M]y bare-legged, ragged Irish servants were always spoken to, as ‘sir’ and ‘mem,’ [sic] as if to make the distinction more pointed” (213). To a nineteenth-century English audience, the possibility that the Irish regarded themselves as superior to the English would have been shocking, suggesting to the readers that Canada was far outside the civilized pall.

The conduct of such disobedient, rude, lower-class individuals encourages Moodie to dwell on the reasons for their behavior:

Why they treated our claims to their respect with marked insult and rudeness, I never could satisfactorily determine. … Then I discovered the secret.

The unnatural restraint which society imposes upon [uneducated emigrants from Britain] at home forces them to treat their more fortunate brethren with a servile deference which is repugnant to their feelings. … Necessity compels their obedience; they fawn, and cringe, and flatter the wealth on which they depend for bread. But let them once emigrate, the clog which fettered them is suddenly removed; they are free; and the dearest privilege of this freedom is to wreak upon their superiors the long-locked-up hatred of their hearts.

(213-14)

Although Moodie's analysis of the possible reasons for class antagonism in England is perceptive, she still does not question the organization of society, presuming that members of the upper and middle class are “superiors.” She perceives the rebellious conduct as unimportant, as merely an inconvenience and a major annoyance that the upper classes can avoid by remaining in England.

For Moodie, the lower classes present a much greater threat to her physical well-being than do the Indians, whom she quickly dismisses as picturesque but doomed. The lower classes, however, are not so easily dispensed with and prove to be extremely articulate about their “long-locked-up hatred.” The most notable example of class conflict occurs when Moodie is washing clothes for the first time and is watched by a working-class Canadian woman, Mrs. Joe, who sneers: “I am glad to see you brought to work at last. I hope you may have to work as hard as I have. I don't see, not I, why you, who are no better than me, should sit still all day, like a lady!” (140). “I guess you don't look upon us as fellow-critters,” Mrs. Joe continues, “you are so proud and grand. You don't choose to sit down at meat with your helps. … I hate you all; and I rejoice to see you at the wash-tub, and I wish that you may be brought down pon [sic] your knees to scrub the floors” (141).²⁰ Demonstrating her inability to fully understand class relationships in her new country, Moodie is “hurt and astonished” by Mrs. Joe's speech (141). Moodie adheres to English social codes, and she equates the breakdown of such codes in Canada with the essential barbarism of the nation.

Lower-class men and women refuse to be silenced, showing that emigration can sometimes offer a voice to the disenfranchised. Mrs. Joe is not the only working-class woman who will not accept her position. When the Moodies move into temporary living quarters, they are met by a young woman “with … a forward, impudent carriage, and a pert, flippant voice” (86) who has come to borrow some whiskey and who Moodie mistakes for a servant. The visitor resents this assumption, remarking, “I hope you don't take me for a help. I'd have you know that I'm as good a lady as yourself” (87). Although Moodie clearly intends this as a comic speech, present-day readers might feel some empathy toward the visitor, who is determined not to be snubbed. When Moodie calls the visitor a “girl,” she replies sharply, “Now, don't go to call me ‘gal’—and pass off your English airs on us. We are genuine Yankees, and think ourselves as good—yes, a great deal better than you. I am a young lady” (88). It becomes evident in this verbal exchange that, as well as class conflicts, there are nationalist differences in Canada. Moodie satirizes Americans as greedy, unkempt, rude, and illiterate, ridiculing their pretensions to elegance and breeding just as she disparages the Irish.²¹ Obviously, for Moodie one of Canada's drawbacks is the lack of demarcation between different groups of emigrants, resulting in what appears to her to be cultural and social anarchy.²²

According to Moodie, the American girl's request to borrow a flask of whiskey is symptomatic of what is wrong in Canada.²³ Borrowing is frequent and continuous. Moodie complains that in Canada, even one's land is borrowed without permission: “[O]ur new home was surrounded by these odious squatters, whom we found as ignorant as savages, without their courtesy and kindness” (81). Moodie is as critical of those who would borrow a plot of land as she is of the women who try to borrow household supplies from her. What is borrowed is not significant; it is the act of borrowing that denotes Canada as an “uncivilized” country that has not yet become a capitalist economy. Borrowing blurs the distinction between private and public property, as goods tend to be traded indiscriminately among a large group. Also, goods are borrowed without compensation or promise of payment. Rather than having a capitalist economy, essential for the emigrant to prosper financially, Canada has an economy based on borrowing, which can only lead to economic disaster. Moodie suggests that financial and material gain—the most common reason for emigration—is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. By arguing that emigration, far from leading to material gain, results in fiscal ruin, Moodie raises a distinct countervoice to the dominant ideology.

“THE SECRETS OF THE PRISONHOUSE”

Moodie's subversion of the male-authored emigration narrative is also apparent in the conclusion of Roughing It, when she suggests that middle-class British men and women should avoid emigration altogether. She writes, “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” (515). As well as revealing Moodie's personal anxieties about emigration, her words show her desire to expose the “secrets” about British colonialism that were seldom brought up in contemporary discussions of emigration to Canada. She also points out that the reality of emigration for men might have little to do with the experiences of women: males might find personal agency and physical freedom in the woods, while females might find only a “prisonhouse.” As I have mentioned, however, Moodie's perception of the imprisonment that rural Canadian life foists on women is intimately connected with her class position; we must not assume that Moodie expressed the thoughts of all nineteenth-century female immigrants. Moodie herself would be the first to deny that she spoke for working-class Irish women or for women from other ethnic backgrounds.

Moodie's ambivalent attitude toward emigration demonstrates that deterritorialization is never an experience of absolute alienation and exile. Rather, as is evident in Moodie's fiction, the deterritorialized writer struggles with feelings of exile and attempts to make all that is alien more familiar by viewing it within the context of imported ideologies. Moodie, for instance, judges her Canadian domestics by middle-class British standards of correct behavior, showing her complicity with Anglo males in importing British values and beliefs into the colony. Despite her conformity with some aspects of colonialist ideology, it should not be inferred that Moodie's views were always congruent with those of male writers, who did not give the same consideration to gender that she did. Deterritorialization offered Moodie a location for subversion of imperialist ideology that she would not have found without the experience of physical and psychological displacement; however, deterritorialization also created a space for Moodie to reaffirm her bourgeois notions of class separation and racism. Deterritorialization, therefore, cannot offer the subject full escape from the hegemonic codes of her former nation. Such a perception of the complexities of emigration allows the reader to better understand how travel between countries can be both a socially conservative and subversive experience, invoking the questioning of certain beliefs while simultaneously affirming others.

Notes

1. Martin Doyle, like Weld, was convinced that Canada was a far superior destination for emigrants than the United States and, in his emigration guide, sought to steer his readers to Upper Canada so they would avoid “the blunder [they] might otherwise commit by settling in the States” (3). The English commonly assumed in the early nineteenth century that Canada, still a British colony, would offer a more hospitable region to settle in than the United States.

2. Not all men were equally enthusiastic about the benefits of Canadian emigration. Taylor, for instance, warned his readers to think carefully before they left the “comforts of their English homes, for the miserable huts and habits of a foreign country” (81-82). Even Taylor, however, forecasted prosperity for men willing to work hard, forego whiskey, and avoid land speculation.

3. Some women writers were as positive as Catermole about the benefits of Canadian life. Anna Jameson, for instance, described Upper Canada as a “paradise of hope” flowing with “milk and honey” (2: 35).

4. In her writing, Moodie repeatedly dwells upon this painful break that the emigrant must make. See “The Vanquished Lion” (1831); “The Sailor's Return; or, Reminiscences of Our Parish” (1841); “The Broken Mirror: A True Tale” (1843); “The Well in the Wilderness: A Tale of the Prairie—Founded upon Facts” (1847); and “Trifles from the Burthen [sic] of a Life” (1851). All of these stories are included in Thurston's collection of Moodie's short fiction.

5. Questioning the representation of emigration and western migration was not limited to Canadian fiction; U.S. women writers also provided a reading of westward expansionism that questioned dominant ideology. For example, Moodie's Roughing It has many similarities with Kirkland's account of life in rural Michigan, a work with which Roughing It was compared when it was first published (Ballstadt 110). Also see Kolodny's thoughtful study of Kirkland's work (131-58).

6. For an overview of critical essays on Moodie, see Noonan.

7. Probably the best-known of these sisters was Agnes, who wrote the multivolume Lives of the Queens of England (1840-48) with her sister Elizabeth. Susanna and her sister Catherine, who also emigrated to Canada, achieved a lesser degree of fame with their many accounts of Canadian life.

8. The interested reader should locate the unedited version of this text, not Carl Klinck's popular edited version, which has done much to alter the public perception of Moodie's work. As Peterman comments about Klinck's version, “[M]uch of the bush [has been] removed” (115). Other critics, such as Fiona Sparrow, concur with Peterman's assessment (27).

9. For an excellent account of the reception Roughing It received in the nineteenth century in Britain, Canada, and the United States, see Ballstadt (104-10).

10. Certainly many of Moodie's readers perceived her text as rational, sane, and a direct reflection of reality. For instance, the New York Albion review of 10 July 1852 praised the book's “obvious stamp of truth” (qtd. in Ballstadt 109).

11. Not all critics agree that rationality can be found in Roughing It. For instance, Gairdner discusses the “fundamental uncertainty” and “dark chaos” found in the text (40). He, however, overlooks Moodie's simultaneous attempts to order and understand the chaos, as well as her growing recognition that all countries do not adhere to the British model.

12. Fowler's claim that Roughing It must be understood as a dual text (a sentimental narrative and a Gothic novel influenced by the work of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Clara Reeve) is not without validity. In this essay, however, I am more concerned with examining Roughing It as an immigration narrative that expresses a gendered viewpoint than with tracing its roots in the sentimental or Gothic traditions.

13. We must recognize the historical validity of Moodie's fears, as well as their symbolic nature. The living conditions at Grosse Isle, the quarantine station for new immigrants throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would have shocked anyone. Quarantined patients were housed in barracks with the windows painted over, since light was considered harmful to invalids. Guards controlled patients' movements, preventing escapes to the mainland. During one of the various plagues that swept through Montreal in the 1800s, from fifty to over a hundred people would die every day on Grosse Isle from cholera, typhus, smallpox, diphtheria, or malnutrition and ill health brought on by the long voyage from Europe. The worst plague year was 1847, when over 5,300 Irish immigrants died. In 1832, when Moodie visited Grosse Isle, the cholera epidemic was so fierce that victims were buried in shallow mass graves in mudflats that were exposed when the bay waters retreated. Given the grim reality of Grosse Isle, Moodie's fears seem less exaggerated. (I am indebted to Gary Thomson's article, “Island of the Sorrows,” for much of the information contained within this paragraph.) For information on the devastation wrought by cholera in Quebec, see Raible.

14. Not all women shared Moodie's views about gender roles in Canada. For instance, Anne Langton writes in her journal about her experiences in Canada, “I have caught myself wishing an old long-forgotten wish that I had been born of the rougher sex. Women are very dependent here, and give a great deal of trouble” (60).

15. Mr. Moodie finds the native Canadians more interesting than his wife does and is intrigued by the poetic quality of their language, but when he attempts to collect some native songs, they refuse to give them out, saying they are “no good for white ears” (273). Mr. Moodie's failure is similar to that of Mr. Rivers in the novel Emily Montague. When he attempts to find an Indian to translate some native songs, he is informed that “the Indians were not us'd to make translations, and that if [he] chose to understand their songs [he] must learn their language” (Brooke 1: 21). Clearly, the Canadian natives resist becoming mere curiosities for the white man.

16. Moodie is less complimentary about half-castes: “The half-caste is generally a lying, vicious rogue, possessing the worst qualities of both parents in an eminent degree” (293). For her, the half-caste did not possess the poetic possibilities of the full-blooded Indian.

17. Many British observers shared Moodie's concern about servants. Even George Heriot, despite his enthusiasm for Canadian life, thought that Canadian servants were “bad” because “indolence and a spirit of independence make the yoke of subjection, however light, to appear to them burdensome and unpleasant” (256). Similarly, Anne Langton complained in her journals about the difficulties of obtaining good help: “Our new [domestic] is by no means promising, and [has] to be perpetually reminded. … Such as ours, I suppose, is the ordinary sort of Canadian servant” (91).

18. Kirkland expressed similar thoughts about the difficulty of locating good servants in rural Michigan: “I have … seen the interior of many a wretched dwelling, with almost literally nothing in it but a bed, a chest, and a table. … [B]ut never yet saw I one where the daughter was willing to own herself obliged to live out at service” (61). Kirkland finds Michigan “appalling” and only gradually adapts to the habits of her neighbors. Also see Trollope's account of her problems with servants in Ohio (44-48). For British women writers, the poor domestic service found in Canada and the United States became a metaphor for the “uncivilized” nature of these countries.

19. Similarly, Catharine Parr Traill warns in her Canadian Settler's Guide (1855): “There is an error which female servants are very apt to fall into in this country, which as a true friend, I would guard them against committing. This is adopting a free and easy manner, often bordering upon impertinence, towards their employers” (6). Unlike Moodie, Traill warns employers that they should treat their servants with consideration.

20. This is not the only example of the Joe family's class hostility toward the Moodies. When they move out of the house the Moodies are to occupy, the Joe family members girdle the apple trees, flood the house with water, and leave a trapped skunk in the house.

21. Anti-American feelings were prevalent in nineteenth-century Canada among members of all classes, who feared that the expansionist United States would inevitably wish to expand into Canada's western territories. Thus, by condemning Americans, Moodie made Roughing It more, not less, salable in both England and Canada.

22. Moodie's feelings about class separation become less pronounced by the time she writes Clearings. She writes in this later work, “To those persons who have been brought up in the old country, and accustomed from infancy to adhere to the conventional rules of society, the mixed [Canadian] society must, for a long time, prove very distasteful. Yet this very freedom … is by no means so unpleasant as strangers would be led to imagine.” Still, Moodie adds, “The lady and gentleman in Canada are as distinctly marked as elsewhere. There is no mistaking the superiority that mental cultivation bestows; and their mingling in public with their less gifted neighbours rather adds than takes from their claims to hold the first place” (38). Moodie might have agreed with Caroline Kirkland, who commented that “a greasy cook-maid, or a redolent stable-boy, can never be, to my thinking, an agreeable table companion” (82-83). Both Moodie's and Kirkland's rhetoric indicate that women's emigrant narratives often tried to assure middle-class readers that the bush was not devoid of social codes.

23. Concerns about borrowing were frequently expressed in women's emigration narratives. See Kirkland (105-12) and Traill (25-27).

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Introduction. Roughing It in the Bush. By Susanna Moodie. Boston: Beacon, 1986. vii-xiv.

———. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970.

Ballstadt, Carl, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman, eds. Susanna Moodie: Letters of a Lifetime. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.

Brooke, Frances. The History of Emily Montague. 1769. 4 vols. New York: Garland, 1974.

Catermole, William. Emigration: The Advantages of Emigration to Canada. 1831. Toronto: Coles, 1970.

Cowan, Helen. British Migration to British North America. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1961.

Doyle, Martin. Hints of Emigration to Upper Canada: Especially Addressed to the Middle and Lower Classes in Great Britain and Ireland. Dublin: Curry, 1834.

Fowler, Marian. The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada. Toronto: Anansi, 1982.

Gairdner, William. “Traill and Moodie: Two Realities.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 1 (1972): 35-42.

Giltrow, Janet. “‘Painful Experience in a Distant Land’: Mrs. Moodie in Canada and Mrs. Trollope in America.” Mosaic 14 (1981): 131-44.

Heriot, George. Travels through the Canadas. London, 1807.

Jackel, David. “Mrs. Moodie and Mrs. Traill and the Fabrication of a Canadian Tradition.” Compass 6 (1979): 1-22.

Jameson, Anna. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. 2 vols. New York: Wiley, 1839.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59-87.

Kaplan, Caren. “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse.” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 187-98.

Kirkland, Caroline. A New Home—Who'll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life. New York: Francis, 1839.

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Langton, Anne. A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada: The Journals of Anne Langton. Toronto: Clarke, 1950.

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Moodie, Susanna. Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life. 2 vols. London: Bentley, 1854.

———. Life in the Clearings. 1853. Toronto: Macmillan, 1959.

———. Roughing It in the Bush. 1852. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Noonan, Gerald. “Susanna and Her Critics.” Studies in Canadian Literature 5 (1980): 280-89.

Peterman, Michael. “In Search of Agnes Strickland's Sisters.” Canadian Literature 121 (1989): 115-24.

Raible, Chris. “‘In Sable Garments of Mourning …’: Cholera Devastates Upper Canada, 1832.” Beaver 72 (Apr./May 1992): 43-50.

Shields, Carol. Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Ottawa: Borealis, 1977.

Sparrow, Fiona. “‘This Place Is Some Kind of Garden’: Clearings in the Bush in the Works of Susanna Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25 (1990): 24-41.

Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.

Stouck, David. “Secrets of the Prison House: Mrs. Moodie and the Canadian Imagination.” Dalhousie Review 54 (1974): 463-72.

Taylor, James. Narrative of a Voyage to, and Travels in Upper Canada, with Accounts of the Customs, Character, and Dialect of the Country, also Remarks on Emigration, & c. Hull: Nicholson, 1846.

Thomson, Gary. “Island of the Sorrows.” Beaver 71 (Feb./Mar. 1991): 35-38.

Thurston, John, ed. Voyages: Short Narratives of Susanna Moodie. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1991.

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Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans. 1832. London: Century, 1984.

Warre, Henry James. Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory. London: Dickinson, 1848.

Weld, Isaac, Jr. Travels through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797. London, 1807.