Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (42 page)

It is easy to pervert people’s words, and the facts they may represent, to their injury; and what I have said on the subject of education may give a handle to persons who delight in misrepresenting the opinions of others, to accuse me of republican principles; I will, therefore, say a few words on this subject, which I trust will exonerate me from this imputation.

That all men, morally speaking, are equal in the eyes of their Maker, appears to me a self-evident fact, though some may be called by His providence to rule, and others to serve. That the welfare of the most humble should be as dear to the country to which he belongs as the best educated and the most wealthy, seems but reasonable to a reflective mind, who looks upon man as a responsible and immortal creature; but, that
perfect equality
can exist in a world where the labour of man is required to procure the common necessaries of life – where the industry of one will create wealth, and the sloth of another induce poverty – we cannot believe.

Some master spirit will rule, and the masses will bow down to superior intellect, and the wealth and importance which such minds never fail to acquire. The laws must be enforced, and those to whom the charge of them is committed will naturally exercise authority, and demand respect.

Perfect equality never did exist upon earth. The old
republics were more despotic and exclusive in their separation of the different grades than modern monarchies; and in the most enlightened, that of Greece, the plague-spot of slavery was found. The giant republic, whose rising greatness throws into shade the once august names of Greece and Rome, suffers this heart-corroding leprosy to cleave to her vitals, and sully her fair fame, making her boasted vaunt of
equality
a base lie – the scorn of all Christian men.

They thrust the enfranchised African from their public tables – born beneath their own skies, a native of their own soil, a free citizen by their own Declaration of Independence; yet exclaim, in the face of this
black
injustice “Our people enjoy equal rights.” Alas! for Columbia’s
sable sons!
Where is their equality? On what footing do they stand with their white brethren? What value do they place upon the negro beyond his price in dollars and cents? Yet is he equal in the sight of Him who gave him a rational soul, and afforded him the means of attaining eternal life.

We are advocates for
equality of mind
– for a commonwealth of intellect; we earnestly hope for it, ardently pray for it, and we feel a confident belief in the possibility of our theory. We look forward to the day when honest labour will be made honourable; when he who serves, and he who commands, will rejoice in this freedom of soul together; when both master and servant will enjoy a reciprocal communion of mind, without lessening the respect due from the one to the other.

But equality of station is a dream – an error which is hourly contradicted by reality. As the world is at present constituted, such a state of things is impossible. The rich and the educated will never look upon the poor and ignorant as their equals; and the voice of the public, that is ever influenced by wealth and power, will bear them out in their decision.

The country is not yet in existence that can present us a better government and wiser institutions than the British. Long may Canada recognise her rule, and rejoice in her sway! Should she ever be so unwise as to relinquish the privileges she enjoys under the sovereignty of the mother country, she may seek protection
nearer
and
“fare worse!
“ The sorrows and trials that I experienced during my first eight years’ residence in Canada, have been more than counterbalanced by the remaining twelve of comfort and peace. I have long felt the deepest interest in her prosperity and improvement. I no longer regard myself as an alien on her shores, but her daughter by adoption, – the happy mother of Canadian children, – rejoicing in the warmth and hospitality of a Canadian Home!

May the blessing of God rest upon the land! and her people ever prosper under a religious, liberal, and free government!

A
s readers, we like to think that books are prompted into print through a sense of authorial urgency, and that a writer picks up a pen out of the heat of intense conviction. We imagine that the resulting manuscript goes on to forge a mystical bond with an editor – wise, principled – who instantly grasps the historical significance of the work and foresees how its pertinent observations and narrative leaps will fuse with the consciousness of a contemporary audience, speaking with its authentic voice and awakening its best instincts.

This romantic notion holds little truth today, as we all know, nor did it in the summer of 1852 when the English publisher, Richard Bentley, wrote to Susanna Moodie of Belleville asking if she would consider writing a second book on the subject of life in Canada. His terms of reference were genial but specific:

In November she replied. She was eager to begin, so eager that she enclosed a partial manuscript. She was, she explained to Bentley, recovering from a life-threatening illness, and at the urging of her doctors had recently undertaken a restorative boat trip to Niagara Falls.

“My idea was,” she wrote, “to describe as much of the country, as I could in my trip to Niagara, beginning with Belleville, and going through our lovely Bay, sketching the little villages along its shores, and introducing as many incidents and anecdotes illustrative of the
present state of Canada
, as I could collect or remember, to form a sort of apendix
[sic]
to
Roughing It in the Bush.”

Considering the differences of geography and privilege, gender and sensibility that lay between Bentley and Moodie, it is impossible to say whether his “pendant” bore any resemblance to her “appendix.” Bentley’s intentions can be imagined; he was a gentleman, but also a businessman with an eye to capitalizing on the romance of immigration and on the widespread need for practical information.

Moodie’s expectations were more complex. She was understandably anxious to profit from the success of her previous book and ever in need of money for “bread, butter and tea,” and she also hoped to correct what she perceived to be the public’s grave misunderstanding of
Roughing It in the Bush
. She had never, she maintained, discouraged immigration to Canada; she had only warned that life on an uncleared farm offered hardship, isolation, and ruin for those of the middle
or higher classes who were unfit for hard labour. Far more suitable for such settlers were farms already under cultivation or positions in Canada’s progressive and prosperous towns.

It seems likely that Bentley anticipated a new manuscript, freshly conceived and composed, but Moodie, ever practical and always resourceful, saw the book as a chance to reissue old work, both published and unpublished. Thrifty housewife that she was, she emptied her drawers, added a few new chapters and a thin tissue of connecting material, and quickly arrived at a complete manuscript.

It is little wonder that the book she wrote was not the book that she promised. Once settled in Canada, Moodie scarcely ever travelled more than a few miles from Belleville, and so she was far from being a knowledgeable and objective witness to the state of contemporary society. Her sensibility, too, was firmly rooted in pre-Victorian England, and her syntax was shaped – decorously, protectively – for a readership she had long since lost touch with. The “facts” specified by Bentley in his letter of contract for
Life in the Clearings versus the Bush
either sink beneath the weight of Moodie’s didactic commentary or are annihilated by her indefatigable enthusiasm. Also fragmented along the way is her proposed structural device, the journey to Niagara Falls in search of health.

The idea of such a pilgrimage is an ancient one, and so, particularly, is the idea that water possesses restorative properties: the pure spring, the enchanted fountain, the sacred river, the calm lake, the bracing seaside. A change of air, a change of scene these held out the promise of a renewal of the body and spirit, and what more abundant source of refreshment could there be than the waters of Niagara. Here the power and purity of nature merged, and here too was a tourist attraction that Moodie shrewdly judged would interest her English readers.

But she seems unable to decide whether this is a literary or historical journey. Again and again in the early chapters she pleads for postponement –“My dear reader, before we proceed further on our journey …” – and imposes her own agenda. From time to time she catches herself, briefly relocating the reader on the map and painting in a few landmarks. Only the final chapters accommodate themselves to the journey scheme, but these suggest an anecdotal travelogue rather than an Odyssian voyage. The vision soon deteriorates, and the vigour with which she devours information, consumes scenery, and thirsts after vignettes refutes her claims to physical frailty.

Life in the Clearings
, then, succeeds by default. Moodie was ill-equipped to write the kind of book Bentley commissioned, and she quickly loses control of her organizing framework. Her voice is discursive, euphemistic, overblown, and sometimes oppressive – in the way that all storytellers are oppressive – but it is unmistakably authentic.

When we speak of the voice of a period, we most often mean a voice of authority and munificence, the far-ranging voice of the lavishly gifted or the arbitrarily powerful. In the past that voice frequently was both aristocratic and male, securely located, rich with certitude and learning, a voice either self-anointed or baptized by the circumstantial unfolding of a literary tradition.

An
authentic
voice is something else. We know it when we hear it. The texture of the quotidian is in it, and every cultural moment secured suggests a thousand others. Even its self-consciousness, even its silences, can make a statement. It whines and falters, but manages to catch enough thieving narrative to reveal the configuration of a society and how it invests itself with meaning.

Susanna Moodie’s life spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century. Her lifetime coincided with enormous shifts in political dominion and, more important, with dramatic new concepts of personal power. To these phenomena, she is a perplexed but never disinterested witness. She immigrated to Canada when she was close to thirty years old, and so her consciousness was stretched across two cultures, two continents, and two political philosophies. Her adopted culture exposed her to the new radical democracy, but failed to erase her conflicting instincts of privilege. “That all men, morally speaking, are equal in the eyes of their Maker, appears to me to be a self-evident fact,” Moodie says in one chapter, but goes on in the next breath to say that “equality of station is a dream.” Her fixed view of society was shaken, finally, by her growing suspicion that many of the grievances of the lower classes were justified, and that immigration and education offered at least a measure of class mobility.

Happily, Moodie’s comments are never deformed by that critical strait-jacket; unity of vision, and her struggle to maintain her idealistic vision in a harsh landscape provides
Life in the Clearings
with much of its tension. Romanticism and realism, those competing forces, not only reflect the turbulence of the period, but also that element in her nature that urged her toward decency and fairness. She examines, she vacillates, she contradicts herself.

Her contradictions are her chief delight. She is one minute praising the natural beauties of the land and the next minute smarting under the bad manners of her fellow tourists. She enjoys local folk customs while longing for those at home. Always a woman to relish irony in human behaviour, she was perhaps unaware of the way in which her own bewilderment and indecisiveness gave weight to her account.
Writing for Moodie was both a financial opportunity and a personal outlet; she is forever trying to reconcile the two, and never realizing that she has succeeded. To her work she brings a kind of fortuitous innocence, mingling the historical and the sentimental with results that are sometimes earnestly clumsy, at other times vividly dramatic.

The experience of her life is so long and varied, so splintered and buffeted by social upheavals, that she is obliged to create a new form.
Roughing It in the Bush
and
Life in the Clearings
are both books that generously and disconcertingly embrace elements of travel writing, the literary sketch, narrative fiction, meditation, factual material, and poetry. The tone varies widely, from injured and defensive to astringent and bright, and the theme of dislocation and adaptation is anchored to the seemingly random ceremonies and stories with which she shapes her sense of the world.
Life in the Clearings
is the kind of patchwork, unofficial document that allows us to “read” a slice of our national history, and a rather large slice at that.

Trying to place such a text in a governing tradition is to miss the book itself. The form is Susanna Moodie’s invention; it fits like a comfortable hand-knitted sweater. She is at home with her divagations, liberated by them, in fact. “Allow me a woman’s privilege,” she begs us, “of talking of all sorts of things by the way.” Her digressions are only superficially intrusive, however, since they carry us into unmapped territory and provide us with an interlinear gloss, giving her voice not just authenticity, but particularity.

For today’s reader, the ringing subtext reveals even more. Beneath Moodie’s “enthusiasm” (a favourite word of hers and also the title of her 1831 volume of poems) is a sense of woman making the best of things, of bitter longing transcended by fervour and commitment. Moodie is a Crusoe baffled by her
own heated imagination, the dislocated immigrant who never fully accepts or rejects her adopted country. When her methodology wobbles, her reflexes can be counted on. Her acts of reimagination rise from an unconscious strategy of survival; she states her belief in male dominance, for instance, but reserves for women characters like Jeanie Burns qualities of courage and endurance. She struggles with the image of a beautiful lake disfigured by a new saw mill – natural harmony confronted by necessary progress – and is unable to resolve her feelings.

It is precisely this human ambivalence of Moodie’s, as well as her shifting focus and telling silences, that defines her for the modern reader and places
Life in the Clearings versus the Bush
near the heart of our developing literature.