Representing nature in Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe’s Diary: an examination of Toronto’s colonial past (Canada)

In this article the author examines how gender, class, and race are important factors in the construction of historical discourses of nature. Using a close reading of the diary of a government official’s wife at the turn of the nineteenth century, three themes of colonialism appear. The contradictions of rationalizing the landscape through cartography, counting nature using botany and natural history, and romanticizing the landscape through painting and nature writing, highlight how the colonial project was a complex weave of ideas about nature, as commodity, scientific fact, and moral instruction. By exploring the diverse media in Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe’s Diary – maps, paintings, and writings – a nuanced picture of an upper-class, white woman’s role in the Upper Canadian colonial project is drawn in relief. The article explores the ways that historic discourses of nature remain in cities and are easily (and often uncritically) incorporated in current day geographies. The author argues that the colonial past must be thoroughly interrogated in order to understand how discourses of nature have been constructed to serve certain interests, disguise the processes of colonialism, and reinforce certain ideas about gender and nature in the present.