Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [3]
Until I decided to write this double biography, I had not noticed how often Susanna and Catharine appear in the fiction and non-fiction of contemporary Canadian writers. More than just Canadian literary archetypes, they haunt our collective imagination. The references are not always flattering—particularly for Susanna Moodie, whose sharp tongue has always got her into trouble. The literary critic Northrop Frye dismissed her as an English snob, who, in response to the vast empty expanses of Upper Canada, developed a “garrison mentality.” The novelist Robertson Davies and the playwright Rick Salutin treated poor Susanna as both comic and shrill. Novelist Timothy Findley introduced a ghostly and grumpy Susanna, “in blowing shawls and billowing skirts,” in Headhunter. Of these characterizations, Findley’s Susanna is the most accurate portrait: she is interested in spiritualism, yearns for her dead son and doesn’t try to curry favour with anyone.
Perhaps it is Susanna’s stalwart autonomy that accounts for the fact that women writers have treated her more sympathetically than men have. One of the earliest novels by Carol Shields, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Susanna Moodie, features a writer who is completing a biography of Susanna Moodie and is intrigued by the contradictions in her subject’s character. “Dare I suggest a hormone imbalance?” ponders the biographer, a sensible and witty woman. “Psychological scarring? … She was so shrewd about her fellow Canadians that she enraged them, but nevertheless seemed to have had little real understanding of herself. Is it any wonder then, I ask myself as I send the manuscript off to a typist — is it any wonder that I don’t understand her?”
The Canadian writer who has done the most to shape the popular perception of Susanna Moodie and to keep her in the forefront of our imagination is Margaret Atwood. Atwood’s long and productive relationship with Susanna began when she found the long-forgotten writer’s most famous book, Roughing It in the Bush, in the family bookcase. (Despite sharing a surname with Clinton Atwood, who married Susanna’s niece Annie Traill, Margaret Atwood is not a descendent of the Moodie-Traill clan.) In 1970, Atwood published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a powerful cycle of poetry in which she uses Susanna’s experiences as the basis for meditations on pioneer life, human dislocation and fear of the unknown.
After we had crossed the long illness
that was the ocean, we sailed up-river …
We left behind one by one
the cities rotting with cholera,
one by one our civilized
distinctions
and entered a large darkness.
It was our own
ignorance we entered.
—from “Further Arrivals”
(© Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 1970, used by permission of Oxford University Press)
Atwood’s insights into Susanna are stiletto-sharp. In a poem dealing with the death of Susanna’s young son, there is the heartbreaking line, “I planted him in this country like a flag.” But Atwood’s stark depiction of Susanna as hopelessly torn between English gentility and pioneer pragmatism has distorted all subsequent discussion of the nineteenth-century writer. Other aspects of Susanna’s life—including her passionate love for her husband, her fascination with spiritualism and her progressive views on education—are not mentioned.
Atwood returned to Susanna Moodie in her ninth novel, Alias Grace. The fiction is based on a true story that Atwood first discovered in Susanna’s book Life in the Clearings versus the Bush: the story of Grace Marks, the “celebrated murderess.” Susanna’s account of Grace’s crime was third-hand, taken largely from newspapers and much embellished with Susanna’s taste for melodrama. “Mrs. Moodie is a literary lady,” Alias Grace’s disapproving Reverend Verringer pronounces, “and like all such, and indeed like the sex in general, she is inclined to [embroider.]”
Catharine Parr Traill has had fewer walk-on roles in contemporary literature. Nevertheless, she appears, as