1. The North American Literary Sketch and the Eco-cultural Production of Region
In a sketch from Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush; or Life in Canada a local
man of Upper Canada, Brian, describes to Moodie how a botanist pays him a dollar a day to
guide him through the woods while the botanist collects ‘specimens’ (2297). Brian finds the
botanist’s behavior strange and inexplicable:
the man had so little taste that I thought him a fool, and so I left him to talk to his dear
plants…the little man filled his black wallet with all sorts of rubbish, as if he wilfully
shut his eyes to the beautiful flowers, and chose only to admire ugly, insignificant plants
that everybody else passes by without noticing, and which, often as I had been in the
woods, I never had observed before. (2303)
For Brian, the local man whose direct experience in the woods is a commodity to the botanist,
these plants are insignificant and have no meaning. The botanist has no personal preferences or
direct sensory experiences in taste that he is a ‘fool.’ What is insignificant to Brian are
“treasures” (2297) to the botanist, who plans to sell them in a far off marketplace whose inner
workings and valuations are incomprehensible to Brian. Brian then reflects on the encounter
nostalgically: "I never saw him again; but I often think of him, when hunting in the woods that
we wandered through together, and I pluck the wee plants that he used to admire, and wonder
why he preferred them to the fine flowers" (2310). This episode highlights the difference
between regional sources of knowledge and appreciation: Brian’s experience is more closely
related to his everyday senses and familiarity with local ecology while the botanist, known not
by name but only by this profession, comes from elsewhere. We don’t know where, but the only
thing we need know is that it is outside the region and its understanding of its own plant life.

2. The botanist comes from centers of educational power, having access to a different ordering of
the world around theoretical mappings of the nation than those actually on that map. Brian,
meanwhile, sees the plants as having no value for his life in the region, until he remembers them
fondly as a sense memory of his past experience. For the botanist, the excursion into the woods
was an act of translating topographies: of mapping away from the regional sensory experiences
like Brian’s and towards a standardized and homogenized cataloguing, centered elsewhere in the
nation.
In the period of the 1830s of North America, the ‘land craze’ was at its height.
Immigration in the literature of the period describes a rush to exploit, explore, legislate,
document and map land and natural resources. In the act of mapping of regional topographies, it
is not just the botanist, logger, or legislator that inscribes topographies for respective use, there is
also literature that maps domestic and emotional life. The literary sketch resists such mappings
by portraying that local life as "miscellanaeity, fragmentation, independence, from the strictures
of causal development or even chronological presentation mark out the literary territory" of
sketch collections (Hamilton 32). The sketch takes such scholarly fragments as the above, the
impulse to catalogue and organize social or economic factors across time and space, and resists
it: emphasizing a static, holistic image of everyday life that can’t be catalogued so easily or
chronologically and grounding it in local ecology. The ‘sketch’ or ‘picture’ names itself as
something opposed to causally progressive narratives, as if it is a pause in historical time and a
resistance to the march of national progress.
Current scholarship maps historical and political organization over ecological
materialism. For instance the narrative of political organization fluctuation in the Great Lakes
Region in the 1830s: changing tribal boundaries, British North America in 1817, then

3. nationalized but intermediate frontier ‘territory’ in the American Northwest Territory and French
Upper Canada, transfer to British Upper Canada, and then statehood and provincehood. I propose
that this area be conceptualized as one ecologically materialist center in order to do relevant
cultural analysis of gender roles and women’s lives. While being subject to either chief, crown,
or Congress, all use the lakes as their livelihoods, fear the same wild animals, and make their
yeastless bread and corduroy bridges using the same materials and hence the same processes.
Since bread-making and bridge-making are such gendered and delineated roles, the materialist
boundaries thus produce cultural boundaries, and cultural analysis cannot be accurate without an
ecological approach.
So, instead, I propose to remarry the political boundaries to the material boundaries that
are so carefully guarded, even in today’s scholarship, and imagine the regional and its
construction in literary sketches as a transnational phenomenon. Upper Canada and Michigan in
are represented as ancillary places, far from their extra-regional centers of power. By comparing
regional economic life as depicted in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush and Caroline
Kirkland’s A New Home; Who’ll Follow? we can see how there is an economic and ecological
life that regions have more in common ecologically, and therefore culturally, than do with their
national centers of power. However, these texts also show us from an outsider’s perspective and
possess a readership that identifies with the national instead of the regional. This extra-regional
place is the center of discourse, where abstracted identities in the form of literary representations
of the regional are produced, disseminated, and regulated by the literary marketplace. While they
share many of the empowering and resistant qualities of many regionalist texts (detailed by
Hamilton, Fetterley and Price), the two texts are a complicated combination of resistance to

4. portraying regional life as belittling ‘miscellanaeity’ but contributing to a ‘civilizing’ process that
submits its cultural transformation to extra-regional centers of power.