Gender and National Identity in "The Journals of Susanna Moodie" and "Tamsen Donner: A Woman's Journey"

Abstract

Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) and Ruth Whitman's Tamsen Donner: A Woman's Journey (1977) are collections by twentieth-century female poets reinterpreting experiences of nineteenth-century pioneer women. Atwood's collection was inspired by voice of Susanna Strickland Moodie, an English immigrant to in 1832 who wrote two books about her experiences: Roughing It in Bush (1852) and Life in Clearings (1853).' Whitman retraced 1846 route of Donner party west from Missouri to California, creating in poetry, prose, and scraps of historical documents a journal like lost diary Tamsen Donner is known to have kept. Atwood and Whitman both negotiate meaning of gender and national identity in their rewriting of past. Both poets portray experience of frontier as distinctly gendered. As pioneer women, both Atwood's Moodie and Whitman's Donner do not participate with enthusiasm of their husbands in wilderness journey. Yet negotiation of national identity is markedly different for Atwood and Whitman. Atwood's work is informed by what she calls the national mental illness ... of Canada - paranoid schizophrenia;2 Whitman's work, by what Frederick Jackson Turner has called primary organizing principle of American character - possibility of starting over again and again provided by frontier.3 It is important to note that constructions of national identity advanced by Whitman and Atwood in their fictionalized depictions of past are personal resolutions, not universally held