Appunti di Storia della cultura angloamericana

ESSAY:

• Literature (1972)→it

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian was a seminal essay.

Survival and The Journals of Susanna Moodie are considered as the founding texts of the Canadian

Renaissance.

Margaret Atwood thinks that Susanna Moodie was a point of reference for Canadian culture and she

thinks if Canadians want to go back in time to find a common ground we have to look back at Susanna

in 1970→they are a

Moodie: this is why she wrote The Journals of Susanna Moodie collection of

poetry which was inspired by the episodes contained in Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie.

In the 1970s Atwood read Roughing It in the bush and Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (which was

the subsequent by Susanna Moodie) while she was on her PHD program, and she said that this

experience completely changed her perspective on Canadian literature and culture.

For this reason she had the idea of re-interpreting some of the episodes which were written in prose in

means of poetry, and she wrote a number of poems from the perspective of a woman of the XX century.

Margaret Atwood thought that Susanna Moodie was an archetypal figure.

it’s

Archetype: a sort of model which goes back to the sources.

it’s

ex. The tragedy Edipus: a literary piece that goes back to ancient Greek culture, but it also

established an archetype of love between son and mother, and also of hatred towards the father.

These are all human mechanisms that we know in our life and that are mentioned many times in the

literature of the world, but we can say that the archetype for this specific human mechanism is Edipus.

So, we can say that Edipus is the archetype for the generated love between son and mother.

In the same way we can say that Margaret Atwood thinks that the relationship between Susanna Moodie

and Canadian land, the wingdonness, the territory is an archetypal kind of relationship that is later found

out in all the other experiences and writings.

SUSANNA MOODIE

She is a British woman, she belonged to the upper middle class.

From an historical point of view she was a Victorian woman: if we think of Victorianism what comes to

our mind is the angel of the earth, theatre...but what is best known is by the end of Victorian Age: the

idea of respectability, and we also had the Second Industrial Revolution, and the Middle class was

getting more and more important. Of course there were very strict divisions among different social

classes: we said that generally speaking that Middle or Upper Middle classes were increasing their

wealth, but it was not the case for some of them, because some of them didn’t really work, maybe some

of them were families belonging to people from the army and in some periods they didn’t receive money

enough to keep their social status, because according to the canons of the Victorian Age a Middle or

Upper Middle class family would have a number of servants at home that needed to be paid, a big

house, many children, of course women didn’t work, so if the father didn’t earn enough money to keep

wouldn’t

this economic needs, things be going in the right direction.

The problem with this kind of people, and this was also the case with Susanna Moodie was that it was so

humiliating eo lower their social status in their mother country, so they would be ashamed if they

couldn’t have servants anymore or would have to move to a smaller house in order to spare money: this

would expose them to criticism from the other men of this social class.

At this point they are faced with a choice: lower their economic means in their mother country, or

emigrate to one of the colonies to find fortune or a better kind of life.

Moodie’s

Susanna family decided to emigrate: so, her original surname was Susanna Strickland

(this was her family name) and she married John Moodie.

Susanna was the younger of 3 other siblings (brothers and sisters), and she started writing when she

was only 19, and she was of course still in England, but at that time she wrote mainly children books and

poetry, when she was younger.

In 1831: she got married to John Moodie→he was a retired officer who served in the Napoleonic Wars,

so he would receive a pension for that from the Napoleonic Wars. decided

In the following years, it was 1832: they emigrated to Canada with their newborn baby→they

to do so because the emigration to Canada was strongly advertised in Britain, so newspapers and

pamphlets would say that Canada was a wonderful country and that if you decided to emigrate there you

would pay practically no taxes and the background/environment was fantastic there were open spaces,

life was natural and satisfying.

This is what was told in Britain, and this is why many people emigrated there.

Susanna Moodie (she was called Susanna Strickland Moodie) emigrated to a farm near Peterborough,

in upper Canada, because one of her brothers was already working there, so there was somebody she

already knew.

When she got there she has a shock because she got to a house which was hardly adequate to her

social level, it was something like a hut (capanna): it was little more than a hut because there weren’t all

those little luxuries she would have to do menial things (things with her hands), which was not

considered to be adequate to a middle class woman.

Then, she was obliged to work the earth, land, to cultivate things, and she didn't have the habit to work in

that capacity, just as her husband: so the years after her emigration were years of great sacrifice

and difficulty, but anyway while she was going through all these difficulties, she continued to write.

She wrote letters and diaries, which contained valuable information on the life of immigrants of that time.

In addition to personal things, these diaries contained observations concerning the backwoods of

Ontario, for instance how the wild life was like, what the customs of local people were like, and she also

mentioned the sense of the community that sometimes you could find in those areas, were people lived

at great distance the one from the others, so the people who would share the same area, would try to

help each other, because even if you needed basic things, especially in winter it would be very difficult to

go for that.

ex. If you were lacking food or wood and it was winter and you had 5 metres of snow, that would be a

problem.

In 1836: there was a very severe economic depression in Canada that triggered a rebellion, which

started in upper Canada, led by a man called William Lyon Mackenzie (the upper Canada rebellion).

This was a rebellion against British rule, because the rebels thought that the economic crisis was the fact

didn’t

that the British Crown help Canada, and on the other hand, it would exploit this land.

John Moodie, that already fought in the Napoleonic Wars, was called by the Crown to fight against the

rebels, so in 1836 Moodie served in the Loyalist Army that fought against Mackenzie.

So in 1836 there were 2 armies that would fight:

-One led by Mackenzie: they were The Rebels.

VS

-The British Crown: the other army supported the British Crown, and they were called The Loyalists,

this is the army John Woodie fought in.

After this rebellion and after the victory of The Loyalist Army, the people that fought for the Crown

were awarded a prize, and the prize for Moodie was to become the Sheriff of Bellville, which was a

small town in lower Canada→this happened in 1840, so all the people of the Moodie family moved to

Bellville. The land was more pioneer friendly, so it was easier to live in that small town, and they began to

live a life that was much closer to the life they used to live in Britain.

So, Susanna Moodie went through a rather called period, where she could relax and write more, in a

more relaxed way, she didn’t have to work the land anymore, her children had already grown up, so she

had definitely more time. husband’s

She remained in Bellville even after her death and she died there.

In 1852: she wrote Roughing It in the Bush, she wrote it in Bellville, but it was based on the experience

she went through 20 years before between 1832 and 1840 in upper Canada, after her emigration.

It was based on the letters and the diaries she kept while she was in Peterborough, but at that time she

didn’t have the time to put them together and to give a literary structure/form to her work, which she had

time to do now, since she lived in a more comfortable way, in 1852.

This book has to do with her farming experience in the 30s and also with the relationship she

with the land: it was an “emigrant's guide”, a guide for the potential emigrants, for

managed to establish

those who were thinking of emigrating to Canada.

ex. British upper middle class person, who was not satisfied in Britain and you were thinking of

emigrating to Canada: you would buy Susanna Moodie’s book, to know what you could expect in

Canada. This is what the publisher advised Susanna Moodie to do in her book.

What does she do in her book?

-First of all she emphasises her difficulties after the emigration: difficulties, sacrifices, also the extreme

sacrifice of one of her sons, because when she was still in upper Canada one of her sons died, she

drowned in the river, it was a traumatic experience for her→this is an inspiration for a piece of poetry that

Margaret Atwood wrote in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and she reinterpreted this episode, giving

vent to the sentimental part of this loss, and there is a famous verse for this: “I planted my son like as a

flag in this land”, which means that her son became part of this land, and when this happened she

planted her roots in the land, because it now holds the cause of her son.

So there is a sense of rootedness, of being rooted in this land→this is the interpretation that Margaret

Atwood gives in the poems she wrote.

So, all in all her message is that being or becoming a Canadian is extremely difficult, it involves a lot of

it’s

sacrifice and difficulties because the land is hostile, an obstacle to your living.

AIM OF THE BOOK: not just to keep English people from going to Canada, but also to instruct a norm,

its goal would be to warm potential emigrants of the difficulties that emigration would entail, but also

giving them some useful pieces of advice to cope wide the hardships of this kind of life.

After Roughing It in the Bush in the following year, she wrote Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush

(1853), which again is an autobiographical memoir and deals with her subsequent life in Bellville, and

it’s don’t

completely different from the first book: we have the component of extreme sacrifice.

Between 1853 and 1868 she wrote a number of novels, but they are less famous.

The Enduring Enigma of Susanna Moodie

It’s a documentary about the life of Susanna Moodie and it is about 20 years old, but it is very well done,

because in Canada the tradition of documentary films is very strong (also animation movies).

This movie is a reconstruction of the life of Susanna Moodie on 3