Multiple Consciousness: Rethinking Italian Canadian Women Writers through Susanna Moodie.

Abstract

An inaugural text for launching feminist works and lives in Canadian literature, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It In the Bush has served as a groundbreaking, multigenre experiment for recent generations of Canadian writers. A didactic book, an autobiography, and a sketchbook on the toilsome experience of immigration recounted through the eyes of a British gentlewoman, Moodie’s narrative articulates the excruciating coexistence of two distant worlds: the Old (England) and the New (Canada). The cultural dynamism of bridging the two worlds, also typical of the immigrant autobiographical form, is also central to the works of many Italian Canadian women writers. Both Caterina Edwards and Mary Melfi, who wrote respectively the memoirs Finding Rosa and Italy Revisited, use the binary oppositions of old/new, past/present, reality/imagination as vantage points to express their being-in-the-world. Italian Canadian women writers were first launched by the poet Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, in his poetry collection Roman Candles (1978). This watershed collection illuminates a new consciousness informed by multiple identities based neither in Italy nor in Canada. Displaced, voiceless and marginalized, Italian Canadians are at home everywhere and nowhere, as the diasporic theory of “Italics” currently argues.