Werbanowska 1

Marta Werbanowska
Dr. Emily Kugler
ENGG-206
29 March 2017

Response to Roughing It in the Bush

In Roughing it in Bermuda: Mary Prince, Susanna Strickland Moodie, Dionne Brand,
and the Black diaspora, Andrea Medovarski recovers the rarely discussed Black presence in
Susanna Moodies narrative of settler life in early Upper Canada. In her discussion of how
Blackness is displaced not only from Moodies journal, but from the foundations of the Canadian
literary tradition as a whole, she focuses on the Harris family, from whom the Moodies buy the
land they settle on at a greatly lowered price. Another Black character that Medovarski mentions
yet does not discuss at length is Tom Smith, a runaway slave who marries a white woman and is
then killed by the townspeople under the excuse of a local wedding custom. The chapter in which
the incident is recalled, titled The Charivari, contains perhaps the most overt references to race
in the whole book, and sheds some light on its authors attitudes regarding the ideology of race
and the politics of racial relations.
The narrator is told about Tom Smiths death by her neighbor, who also explains the ritual
of the charivari to her. Smith was a runaway nigger from the States who settled in the small
Canadian town and married a local Irish girl (140). This interracial marriage created a great
sensation in the town. All the young fellows were indignant at his presumption and her folly, and
they determined to give them the charivari in fine style, and punish them both for the insult they
had put upon the place (141). Consequently, the mob drags Smith from his bed at night and,
almost naked as he was, rode him upon a rail, and so ill-treated him that he died under their
hands (141). This brutal murder is effectively a lynching, yet the neighbors story presents it as
a merry ritual gone wrong, displacing the racial/racist motivation with a cultural one. The
narrators indignation at the event, too, is at the lawless infringement upon the natural rights of
man (139) that the ritual of charivari is in general, rather than at the racist motivations behind
this specific instance. Her use of the Enlightenment humanist discourse of the natural rights of
man the same discourse that laid foundations for institutionalized slavery and scientific racism
draws the readers attention to the barbarity of the ritual in general and derails it from the fact
that, in this particular instance, the ritual was merely an excuse for executing a racist hate crime.
Thus, the episode provides another example of the displacement of Blackness that Medovarski
discusses in her essay.
As if to make up for this dismissal of race as a factor in the Tom Smith story, the chapter
closes with the narrators presentation of her abolitionist views. When her neighbor scolds her
for not sharing a table with her servants yet claims that she never could abide [her Black
servant], for being a black, the narrator dismisses the racist belief in the natural inferiority of
Black people as an ignorant fable and delivers a Biblically-motivated argument for equality
between the races (143). However, while rejecting discrimination on a racial basis, she stands by
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her class prejudice when she states that there is no difference in the flesh and blood; but
education makes a difference in the mind and manners, and, till these [lower classes] can
assimilate, it is better to keep them apart (143). Interestingly, Moodies rejection of racist
prejudice is presented alongside her claims for class-based discrimination and the scorn for an
ultra-republican spirit (133) she voices earlier in the chapter. Therefore, while her narrative
offers an abolitionist intervention, it also preserves the very logic of exclusion, differentiation,
and hierarchy that is ingrained in the European humanist discourse.

Works cited:
Medovarski, Andrea. Roughing it in Bermuda: Mary Prince, Susanna Strickland
Moodie, Dionne Brand, and the Black diaspora. Canadian Literature/Littrature Canadienne,
vol. 220, Spring 2014, pp. 94-114.
Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. 1852. Edited by Michael A. Peterman,
Norton, 2007.

Discussion questions:

1. In the second chapter of her narrative, titled Quebec, Moodie evokes the discourse of
the sublime to describe the Canadian wilderness. The impressive landscape elicits in her
an experience of an overwhelming divine presence: The mellow and serene glow of the
autumnal day harmonised so perfectly with the solemn grandeur of the scene around me,
and sank so silently and deeply into my soul, that my spirit fell prostrate before it, and I
melted involuntarily into tears (25). In the paragraph that follows, she urges Canadians
to rejoice in [their] beautiful city and exclaim: God gave her to us, in her beauty and
strength!We will live for her glorywe will die to defend her liberty and rightsto raise
her majestic brow high above the nations! (25). Does this passage echo any works of
Romantic literature that would speak to the question of nationalism? How are the
discourses of nature and nation intertwined here? In what way does the discursive
combination of the divine will, natural beauty, and national pride reinforce the ideologies
of settler colonialism?
2. The opening sentence of Roughing it in the Bush states that in most instances,
emigration is a matter of necessity, not of choice; and this is more especially true of the
emigration of persons of respectable connections, or of any station or position in the
world (9). What expectations for Canada and the narrators approach to her migration
does this statement set for the reader? How does Moodies attitude toward Canada evolve
throughout the book? In what way does Moodie assert her upper-class British emigrant
identity against that of other migrants on the one hand, and native Canadians
(descendants of earlier European settlers as well as the regions aboriginal people) on the
other?