The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

This historicist study attempts to recover Susanna Moodie from the
topocentric and archetypal pedestal she has been raised to in the
Canadian popular and critical imagination. Earlier critical agendas, the
author observes, either avoided or ignored Moodie’s racial and
class-based biases, as well as her evident dissatisfaction with colonial
life, in order to re-create and canonize her as “a true Canadian
heroine.” In this book, Thurston seeks to situate Moodie within the
context of the political, social, and economic environment of her time,
in order to develop a greater understanding of her entire literary
output and its historical determinants.

The book begins with a review of the critical response to Roughing It
in the Bush in this century. Thurston shows that, by viewing the work as
creative fiction rather than as historical narrative, literary critics
have managed to create the image of an ironic and detached author who is
separate from the character “Mrs. Moodie,” with her embarrassing (to
the modern reader) prejudices and dissatisfactions. Thurston points out,
however, that Moodie was perforce confined to the social discourse of
her time, and to the “definitions imposed by her class and gender.”
From his examination of Moodie’s life and literary career, he
concludes that her significance within the Canadian canon lies not in
her sanctified role as mother of the Canadian imagination, but rather in
her status as a writer whose “life and writing are bound up with the
history and ideology of nineteenth-century Upper Canada.”