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Double Voice, Single Vision: a Feminist Reading of Margaret Atwood's the Journals of Susanna Moodie

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Double Voice, Single Vision: a Feminist Reading of Margaret Atwood's the Journals of Susanna Moodie Atlantis Vol. 9 No. 1 FalllAutomne 1983 35-48 Double Voice, Single Vision: A Feminist Reading of Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie Diana M.A. Relke Simon Fraser University In her 1980 study of Margaret Atwood's poetry, and ignores a most obvious fact about the Jour• Sherrill Grace calls The Journals of Susanna nals, a fact which Frank Davey's brief descrip• Moodie "Atwood's major poetic achievement to tion of the work in his From There to Here date" and notes that "Atwood has given it her almost points out. He describes it as: own endorsement by including it, in toto, in Selected Poems."1 Interestingly, however, the ...a reading of what the responses of the difference between the initial publication and pioneer writer Susanna Moodie to the the reissue is the absence of the "Afterword" in Canadian wilderness might have been had the new volume. The "Afterword" to the Jour• they not been filtered through various nals, a largely redundant account of the surface nineteenth-century literary and social con• narrative, is a convenient interpretive crutch that ventions. These poems envisage a Moodie has encouraged critical laziness with respect to very much like Atwood, who sees the forest the work. In spite of the poem's widely acclaimed and streams as threatening shapes, who importance to contemporary Canadian poetry, feels remote from her husband and fellow critics and reviewers, in using the "Afterword" settlers, but who, in addition, cannot help as a point of departure, have generally avoided trying to impose some order on the green all but a superficial reading of the text, a reading chaos she senses around her.3 which reduces its significance to "a compelling articulation of a Canadian myth and a dramatic This statement is both misleading and instruc• incarnation of our past."2 However, the reissu• tive. By imposing a simplistic and also inaccu• ing of the entire text minus the "Afterword" rate thematic reading on the work Davey subtly invites an examination of the Journals on its dismisses it as just another nationalist poem. own terms. Although there is indeed fear associated with landscape in the Journals, there is little evidence Although Grace attempts a fuller reading by of Moodie's "trying to impose some order on the considering a variety of important thematic con• green chaos she senses around her." What in fact cerns, she still leans heavily on the "Afterword" Atwood's persona tries to do, as I shall demon- Mask batique on silk satin quilted D. Caldwell, (Hastings, Ont.) photo - John Burrows strate, is to come to terms with the landscape and light on these three aspects of doubleness related thus with herself. Davey does, however, describe to the persona and* to show how that doubleness Moodie not merely as pioneer but as a "pioneer is rooted in language. My interpretation of the writer" who, in Atwood's hands, becomes "very Journals is dependent upon a reconsideration of much like Atwood.'' These clues, along with the Atwood's language in terms of the female tradi• many direct references to doubleness in the tion in modern poetry. poem, are crucial to the exploration of a more important story that lies like a near mirror image During the Restoration, when women first just below the surface of the narrative. The night began writing professionally, the most common a bear makes a dream appearance in the Journals responses to their work were hostility and indif• is "one / night the surface of my mind keeps / ference. Those responses had the effect of silenc• only as anecdote," the speaker tells us, "though ing all but the most intrepid women writers; beneath [are] stories." 4 Indeed, all the historical rather than be silenced altogether, these women and quasi-historical events which organize the incorporated silences into their work by writing surface of the text are Moodiesque literary anec• in accordance with "received " male literary dotes which serve as metaphors for Atwood's criteria but encoding their own experience at a own experience of being both a woman and a sub-textual level in their texts. In this way they poet. subverted male-created literary forms and con• ventions. These techniques later developed into Although paranoid schizophrenia, "the na• what feminist critic Jeanne Kammer calls "the tional mental illness," is offered in the "After• art of silence," a female aesthetic that in modern word" as the reason why "Mrs. Moodie is poetry originates with Emily Dickenson.5 What divided down the middle" (p. 62), this appears to the art of silence says in women's poetry is that be a reductive interpretation of all the varieties of its creators are acutely conscious of the extent to doubleness that inform the poem. The immi• which a patriarchally-conceived language has grant Susanna Moodie, who is only one aspect of excluded them from poetic discourse. As a male Atwood's persona, was first of all a woman and a symbol system, language—particularly the heav• human being in an era in which—even more ily allusive language of literature—is virtually markedly than in our own—the term "human devoid of meaning for the woman poet. Carolyn female" was assumed to be a contradiction in Burke has noted that "when a woman writes or terms. Living out the split demanded of women speaks herself into existence, she is forced to between "human" and "female" is a condition speak in something like a foreign tongue, a lan• of female existence in patriarchy. Second, as a guage with which she may be personally uncom• woman writer—a similar contradiction in terms— fortable."6 The woman poet must therefore Moodie was split between her loyalty to art and choose carefully from among the empty symbols her duty as wife and mother, a situation exacer• and reinvest them with a meaning that conveys bated by the demands of pioneer life. Finally, as something of her experience of the world. It is Atwood's poetic persona, Moodie suffers a further this careful choosing that accounts for Atwood's doubleness by sharing her identity with the poet. sparseness of language and the visual sparseness Moodie's attempt to create literature out of her of the text on the page. Her flatness of tone has pioneer experience in the language of Victorian the effect of denying admittance into her lan• Romanticism, a language decidedly inapprop• guage of all those patriarchal overtones which riate to that experience, is analogous to Atwood's each word threatens to drag into her poetry. struggle to describe female experience in the Atwood's use of syntactical compression per• only language we have: the language of patri• forms a similar function in that it denies admit• archy. The present paper attempts to shed some tance to patriarchal rhetoric. Her syntactical method creates a doubleness in her language: age. Journal I appears to comply with this struc• read syntactically, the Journals carries out a nar• ture, for it is a fictional recreation of Moodie's ration of the persona's life but below the surface experiences as a young poineer woman, and this of this narrative the syntax begins to break down first Journal must, of course, be interpreted on and as the spaces between the lines open up, a those terms. However, a journal is a document of new language consisting of a series of discontin• process, a work without premeditated formal uous and often oracular epigrams of aphorisms structure. What the Journals becomes in the emerges. When lifted out of their syntactical second and third parts is a record of the poet's arrangement within the poem, lines such as own thought processes as she begins to discover "time a thin refusal" (p. 11) and "words, my just how fluid the identity boundaries are between disintegrated children" (p. 41) take on profound herself and her persona. Gradually, Moodie meaning in terms of female existence and female becorhes emblematic of the struggle faced by all art. Significantly, this new language is not dis• poets who are women; finally, she is transformed similar to a pre-Socratic—and perhaps even pre- into the vehicle for a kind of Utopian vision that patriarchal—mode of discourse.7 Like the gnarled is rarely—if ever—found in the works of Mar• utterances of the ancient female Oracles, these garet Atwood. In the final poem Atwood and powerful aphorisms also create ambiguities Moodie become fully integrated and Atwood re• which are nevertheless functional in that they stores formal structure to the work by making it open up the text to a wider play of meaning. circular. As we shall see, the final result is remark• That The Journals of Susanna Moodie was born ably effective in bringing into single focus what out of the silence which has threatened so many at first apppears to be the work's "double generations of women poets is amply demon• vision." strated in the "Afterword": As many reviewers and critics have noted, vis• These poems were generated by a dream. ual perception and inner vision are central con• I dreamt I was watching an opera I had cerns in the Journals. What few have considered written about Susanna Moodie. I was alone however is that women's perception of them• in the theatre; on the empty white stage, a selves and the world is uniquely different from single figure was singng. (p. 62) male perception. In this connection, John Berger has written: The poet, as sole occupant of the theatre, is swallowed up by its vast emptiness, even as To be born a woman has been to be born, Moodie, the creation of the poet's dreaming within an allotted and confined space, into mind, is threatened by the empty whiteness that the keeping of men.
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