Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush

by Susanna Moodie

  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.

  BY SUSANNA MOODIE

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada (1852)

  Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (1853)

  FICTION

  Mark Hurdlestone; or, The Gold Worshipper (1853)

  Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life (1854)

  Matrimonial Speculations (1854)

  Geoffrey Moncton; or, The Faithless Guardian (1855)

  The World before Them (1868)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Spartacus: A Roman Story (1822)

  The Little Quaker; or, The Triumph of Virtue (n.d.)

  The Sailor Brother; or, The History of Thomas Saville (n.d.)

  The Little Prisoner; or, Passion and Patience (n.d.)

  Hugh Latimer; or, The School-Boy’s Friendship (1828)

  Rowland Massingham; or, I Will Be My Own Master (n.d.)

  Profession and Principle; or, The Vicar’s Tales (n.d.)

  George Leatrim; or, The Mother’s Test (1875)

  LETTERS

  Letters of a Lifetime [eds. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins,

  and Michael Peterman] (1985)

  POETRY

  Patriotic Songs [with Agnes Strickland] (1830)

  Enthusiasm; and Other Poems (1831)

  This edition is an unabridged reprint of the first edition of Life in the

  Clearings versus the Bush, published in London, England, by Richard

  Bentley in 1853.

  New Canadian Library edition © 1989 by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Afterword copyright © 1989 by Carol Shields.

  First New Canadian Library edition 1989.

  This New Canadian Library edition 2010.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced,

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system,

  without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying

  or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright

  Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Moodie, Susanna, 1803-1885

  Life in the clearings versus the bush / Susanna Moodie; afterword by Carol Shields.

  (New Canadian library)

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-9371-5

  1. Ontario – Description and travel. 2. Ontario – Social life and customs – 19th century. 3. Frontier and pioneer life – Ontario. 4. Moodie, Susanna, 1803-1885. 5. Women pioneers – Ontario – Biography. 6. Immigrants – Ontario – Biography. 7. Authors, Canadian (English) – 19th century – Biography. I. Title. II. Series: New Canadian library

  FC3067.2.M66 2010 971.3’02 C2010-900037-4

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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