“Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or
psychological ‘frontier,’ separated from one another and from their
American and British cultural sources: communities that provide all that
their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are
compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them
together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and
formidable physical setting–such communities are bound to develop what
we may provisionally call a garrison mentality....In such a society the
terror is not for the common enemy....The real terror comes when the
individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the
group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware
of a conflict within himself far subtler than the struggle of morality against
evil.”

“Susanna Moodie in the Peterborough bush ... is a British army of
occupation in herself, a one-woman garrison.”

Frye, Northrop "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada." The Bush Garden:
Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1975.