Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [2]
In the early nineteenth century, it was tempting for members of the British gentry to share Dickens’s belief as they boarded the ships to Canada. Surely, with their brains, education and manners, they would effortlessly rise to the top of the colonial society! The sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, and their husbands John Moodie and Thomas Traill, assumed this as they set sail across the Atlantic. Most of their fellow immigrants were so poor, so ignorant. The Traills and Moodies persuaded themselves that they would form the land-owning cream of Upper Canada.
They were terribly wrong. The two husbands lacked the physical skills and abilities required to be pioneers in a hostile frontier landscape. The two wives, tougher and more competent than their husbands, met challenges far greater than anything they would have known living in genteel poverty in the Old Country. The four sisters they had left behind in England could not begin to imagine the exhausting and harrowing experiences of women in the Canadian bush. Susanna and Catharine faced childbirth alone in the woods and dealt with the threat of forest fires, wild animals, frostbite and starvation.
Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill differed from almost all the other middle-class women who arrived in British North America in the early nineteenth century in one respect: by the time they arrived in Canada, both were published writers, with an intellectual need to capture their experiences in the written word. Back in England, the two sisters had published poetry, romantic fiction and children’s stories that fit into the Regency tradition of women’s writing. Most of it was insipid and conventional. In Canada, while they evolved from ingenuous British emigrants to sturdy Canadian immigrants, they were also finding new voices. Despite the incredibly hard work of surviving and raising families in the raw new colony, they carved out time each day to write themselves into visibility.
I read Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna’s best known book, soon after I myself arrived in Canada. Her reactions and observations resonated with me, although 150 years had elapsed between our transatlantic crossings. I identified with her homesickness, and her inability to understand her Yankee neighbours. Like her, I found little charm in an Ontario landscape that was a bleak contrast to the cosy English countryside. Years later, I discovered Catharine Parr Traill while researching Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King. Her book The Backwoods of Canada provided telling details about life in the nineteenth-century colony. I was captivated by Catharine’s sunny temperament. Her unpretentious pragmatism was a characteristic that, after fifteen years of friendships with Canadian women, I saw as a dominant Canadian trait.
The sisters’ ability to speak to contemporary readers helps explain Catharine’s and Susanna’s powerful hold on the contemporary Canadian imagination. Their names and books have endured not simply because there are so few records of domestic life in the early years of Upper Canada, but because the personality of each sister reverberates through her best works. Over the course of their long lives, the two sisters laid the foundation of a literary tradition that still endures in Canada: the pioneer woman who displays extraordinary courage, resourcefulness and humour. This “Canadian character type,” as critic Elizabeth Thompson calls her, is a pragmatist who discovers her own strength as she overcomes adversity. Her stalwart figure has marched through the pages of some of the best-known Canadian writers of the last one hundred years, from Ralph Connor to L.M. Montgomery, from Robertson Davies to Margaret Laurence. Her motto comes directly from Catharine Parr Traill’s The Canadian Settler’s Guide: “In cases of emergency, it is folly to fold one’s hands and