“Mind above matter”: Work, gender, and social class in Susanna Moodie’s immigration memoirs

ABSTRACT

This article examines Susanna Moodie’s memoirs in the context of changing narratives around immigration and social class in the 1830s. She overtly engaged with the age’s boosterist literature, warning genteel Britons about unrealistic portrayals of emigration, and positioning herself as an authentic interpreter of colonial realities. Moodie’s texts dramatize the settler-colonial dilemma of early Canada, caught between American influences and imperial loyalties. In Canada, class was inflected and performed differently from in Britain due to local realities and to the different attitudes that working-class immigrants and genteel immigrants had towards women, waged labour, upward mobility, and social hierarchies. Given imperial fears of American republican influences, Moodie uses class markers as national identifiers to redefine gentility in this new setting. While sympathetic to upward mobility, her settlerist discourse remains inflected in class terms, presenting social hierarchies as an ideological bulwark protecting the colonies from the lure of American political models.

KEYWORDS:

• Susanna Moodie
• Canada
• settler colonialism
• class
• work
• immigration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The 1837 and 1838 anti-colonial rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada were caused by widespread dissatisfaction with the corrupt oligarchic colonial regime. The uprisings in Lower Canada started in late November 1837 and were crushed soon after by the British troops. The Upper Canadian rebellion failed to garner popular support and eventually had a similar fate. London responded to the rebellions by uniting Lower and Upper Canada in the Province of Canada in 1840.

2. In the first half of the 19th century, British North America consisted of Upper and Lower Canada (united in 1840 in the Province of Canada), and the Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; these colonies were to remain distinct until Confederation of 1867, and had well-defined regional identities underpinned by their particular histories of settlement and involvement in empire, as well as by a diverse ethnic and socio-economic make-up.

3. Reformers in British North America clamoured against the power of the colonial oligarchy and demanded more representation in local governance. But colonial reform was feared by London as potentially opening the way to democratic institutions which could erode support for the Crown. By the 1840s, Given America’s aggressive expansion into Texas, the Oregon Territory dispute, and the US assistance to 1837–38 revolutionaries, London feared that Canada would be the next target of American land grab.

4. The Moodies’ first stop in Canada was on Grosse Isle, in the gulf of the St Lawrence, off the coast of Quebec, where in the hope to contain the cholera epidemic the authorities had in 1932 built an immigration depot to quarantine Irish immigrants coming to Canada.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy teaches American studies in the Global and Intercultural Studies Department at Miami University in Ohio, USA. Her research interests include Canadian and American literature, American popular culture, globalization, and film. She is interested in how political ideologies are articulated and legitimized in literature and popular culture. Her work has appeared in Early American Literature, the Early American Studies Journal, the Journal of European Studies, the Journal of American Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.