Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

3. Colonial Madness
3.1 The Chroniclers of Colonial Madness:
Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill
The first writings in the new territory, which in 1867 was to become the nation of
Canada, were the reports by various travellers. Diary writers foremost, the purpose of
their works - if they intended their words for publication at all - lay in conveying the
flavour of their personal experience to armchair travellers at home. These reports later
gave way to the journals and narratives of explorers among which T.D. MacLulich
delineates three categories: quest, odyssey, ordeal - each of which transforms the central
explorer-character into a narrative hero of a different kind: tragic, romantic, picaresque,
realistic.1 The basic function of these exploration journals, however, was to chart
coastlines accurately, claim territory for the empire, and also collect, describe and
classify the flora and fauna they found. They are full of details about the crops and
daily routines, and sometimes transparent in their exhaustion and frustration with the
work of missions, the political tension of colonial life and the struggle to survive.2
Those who came to live in Canada in those days were confronted with great hardship.
Exposure to the elements, disease, exhaustion, and the corrosive pressures of
humiliation and discouragement quite frequently led to mental instabilities and
premature deaths. Regarded as inevitable casualties colony deaths or instances of
madness were often recorded with the same dispassion as the grinding of grain.
In order to keep themselves sane and in some way mentally deal with the harsh
realities of mud and months of endurance a lot of pioneers, especially the women who
were often trapped at home, wrote diaries which in later years have assumed great
documentary interest. Probably the most famous chronicler of the early Canadian
pioneer experience was Susanna Moodie. Her Roughing It in the Bush, based on her
experiences of the 1830s, when she accompanied her husband to settle on uncleared
ground, is in fact "a conceded classic"3 and Moodie herself has become such a vivid
1 MacLulich, T.D.: Canadian Exploration as Literature.- In: Canadian Literature 81 (1979), pp. 72-85.-
2 For more detailed information see: MacLulich, T.D.: Canadian Exploration as Literature.- In: Canadian Literature 81
(1979), pp. 72-85.-; New, W. H.: A History of Canadian Literature.- London: MacMillan, 1989.-
3 Stouck, David: Stouck, David: Secrets of the Prison-House: Mrs. Moodie and the Canadian Imagination.- In: The
Dalhousie Review 54 (1974), p. 643
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