LITERATURA CANADIENSE EN LENGUA INGLESA

PEC 2022-2023

QUESTION 1 – Life versus death in Roughing It in the Bush and The Journals of Susanna Moodie

Susana Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush is a great example of the pioneer memoirs genre
showing the struggle against nature and the environment lived by this early Canadians. A
narrative that also makes a perfect analysis of the complexity of human character through these
hardships, but never losing the idea of life underneath. Moodie herself explained that “Roughing
It was intended ‘to point out the error of gentlemen bringing delicate women and helpless
children to toil in woods’” (Bennett 109), an error that lied on the terrible conditions they had
to endure in these new territories.

Thus, Moodie makes use of the dichotomy between life and death to present the reader with
a powerful narrative of the Canadian nature. A narrative that has become archetypical for
Canadians settlers and which has had influence on authors even to these days, as seen on
Margaret Atwood who talks about Moodie as an emblem of the ‘violent duality’ of Canada itself,
a duality she also reflected on her poetic version of Moodie’s experiences.

This dichotomy is carried all throughout the narrative and many examples can be drawn from
the text, like the constant references to a fertile soil and the expectations from these new lands’
nature that contrast harshly against the actual conditions lived by the settlers. But perhaps one
of the best examples of the symbolism of life versus death for the pioneer experience can be
found in the section focused on their neighbor Brian, the still-hunter. This part of the narrative
is filled with vivid descriptions, like the excerpts about Brian’s attempted suicide, all of them
related to the theme of death. At a certain moment the neighbor himself talks about his
relationship with hunting and nature: “I am sorry for the creatures, too, for they are free and
happy; yet […] cannot restrain to kill them” (Moodie, in Bonnett 133) but later on he gets closer
to Moodie through her paintings of wild flowers. Examples like this show his ambivalence and
how he works symbolically to represent this constant contrast between life and death.

Margaret Atwood is very aware of these ideas in Moodie’s work and masterfully places them
in her poems in the Journals. The neighbor Brian appears in “Dream 2”, a poem where Atwood
perfectly translates all the vivid images that Moodie had described on her texts and where death
plays a major role and conveys even more emotion into the verses. Thus, a verse like “I die more

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often than many” (line 20) has such strength and works perfectly alone, as a sort of one-line
stanza. Further examples can be found in other poems, like the barren and cold images in
“Disembarking at Quebec” or “Further Arrivals”, or a more obvious one in “Death of a Young
Son by Drowning”.

In short, Moodie’s reflection of the hardships of life in Canada through the dichotomy of life
and death works with great power in her narrative and has an influence that can be easily found
on Atwood’s poems about the Journals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett, Donna, and Russell Brown. An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Oxford
University Press, 2010.

Gilbert, Teresa. Canadian Literature in English. Virtual Course – UNED, 2022.