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

Abstract

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.