The Journals of Susanna Moodie: A Twentieth-Century Look at a Nineteenth-Century Life

In The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Margaret Atwood is not interested in the documentary component of Moodie's books Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings, nor is she even prepared to grant that such a component plays a very central role in the autobiographies. Rather, Atwood is primarily interested in the psychological dimension of the immigrant experience in Canada, the ways in which the encounter with the unexplained wilderness precipitates a psychological reaction which is irrational and symptomatic of something larger than the reality at hand. While not denying the possible validity of Atwood's approach, one cannot help noticing that the dichotomies she identifies are largely illusory, the results of a twentieth-century consciousness looking back on a nineteenth-century life