by Lewis Desoto
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Wild Beast
The style of painting that Emily had learned in France is generally called Post-Impressionism, but it would be more accurate to label it Fauve. In French, the word means literally “wild beast,” and was the derogatory term used by an unsympathetic critic to characterize the artists whose use of pure, bright colour struck him as savage and crude.
As soon as she re-established herself in a Vancouver studio in 1912, Emily held an exhibition of the works she had painted in France. The newspaper reviews were polite but befuddled. Except for a few artist friends, the reaction of those who came to see the new works ranged from confusion to hostility. The paintings were derided as uncouth and primitive, and some of her supporters urged her to return to a style that people could more easily understand. Sales were practically nonexistent and Emily found it difficult to resume teaching. She was an avant-garde painter now, but she was alone, one of the few modernist painters in the entire country. Not even the Group of Seven would make such daring use of colour and form until almost a decade later.
Undeterred, Emily turned to the grand project she had postponed when she left for France: she set out to make a record for posterity of the totem poles of the West Coast. She undertook an ambitious, six-week-long journey north and east to the interior of British Columbia, painting everywhere she stopped. Now she had the understanding and the technique to paint, not as a camera would record, but as an artist would see. The word “Indian” began to be associated with her name, as Native motifs were now the exclusive subject of her paintings. A certain notoriety began to attach itself to her reputation.
In 1912 Emily approached the provincial government with the suggestion that they purchase the collection as a historical record, and help fund her future trips, for the project was by no means completed. An expert was sent to look at the work and make an assessment. While he was sympathetic, his report indicated that her paintings were not suitable as an ethnographic record. Her colours were too vivid, and her style too expressive, for the works to accurately reflect the true nature of the poles and sites. The government turned down Emily’s offer. It was a short-sighted decision. Even if the pictures don’t conform to strict anthropological criteria, they would indeed have been a significant collection for posterity. Other than her paintings and some historical photographs, there is no documentation of the places she visited. And, just as she anticipated, many of the poles have weathered and disintegrated or been removed to other places.
Surprisingly, Emily became friends with the expert sent to evaluate the paintings, C.F. Newcombe, a physician and anthropologist, who seems to have sympathized with and encouraged her interests. In 1913 Emily rented a hall in Vancouver and presented an exhibition of the paintings, almost two hundred of them. She even gave a public lecture in an attempt to explain her project.
The response to the exhibition was similar to that which greeted her French pictures. Again she met with ridicule, ignorance, and hostility that, because of the subject matter, was sometimes thinly disguised racism. Certainly, a painting like The Welcome Man (1913) would have disconcerted an audience. The sky and sea are lemon yellow, the distant mountains are purple, and the dark silhouette of a carved figure in the foreground looms over the viewer. The picture has the same power as the Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch’s brooding Nordic landscapes. No doubt it would have disturbed and terrified visitors looking for some nice views of the picturesque coast. What they got instead was the raw, emotive power of art.
The tremendous change in Emily’s style is apparent in a comparison of two paintings of the same scene, one done in 1908 and the other in 1912. The earlier work, showing two war canoes on the shore of Alert Bay, is mostly painted in washed-out browns. The only bit of colour is on the hulls of the canoes. The later picture, a double-sized version of the same scene, has emerald streaks in the hills and the water; a flash of bright red shows in a tree trunk next to deep violet; the sky vibrates with yellow and light turquoise brush strokes. Viewers of her new paintings might not have liked them, but there was no denying their originality and power.
But mostly there was silence. All artists at some point ask themselves what use their work is to the world. If Emily thought she had found a use for herself and her talent, she was disappointed. An artist can fight against resistance; some even thrive on it. But to be ignored is the worst response of all.
This time Emily bowed her head in defeat. She gave up her Vancouver studio, returned to Victoria, ceased her sketching trips up the coast, and abandoned her grand project. In Growing Pains, she titled the chapter detailing this period with one word: “Rejected.”
During the next decade she would make very few paintings, and those she did create are notable for the complete absence of Native motifs.
CHAPTER NINE
How to Be a Woman
Emily Carr was once offered a job. The job description was straightforward and unambiguous.
She was required to do the grocery shopping; to prepare, cook, and serve the food; and then to wash the dishes after meals. She would also have to host occasional dinner parties. She would do the sweeping, scrubbing, and polishing to keep up the house. Laundry would have to be washed, dried, ironed, and folded. She would also be responsible for the household accounts and would have to balance the books. In the garden, she would see to the flowers and grow vegetables. In addition, she would have to bear, raise, feed, and care for children. At all times she would be required to be kind, capable, amusing, loving, and attractive.
The job offer came in the form of a marriage proposal when she was twenty-eight. Emily declined the offer, and all others. By choosing art over marriage, she made a momentous decision. In her journals she said of the man who had proposed: “He demanded more than I could have given him. He demanded worship. He thought I made a great mistake in not marrying him. He ought to be glad I did not: he’d have found me a bitter mouthful and very indigestible, and he would have bored me till my spirit died.”
In one of those terrible ironies that fate sometimes deals, Emily later had to undertake many of those same household tasks when she ran a boarding house and served as house-keeper and mother to a disparate and changing group of tenants.
Because she was a woman, and an unconventional one, Emily always struggled against the expectations and prejudice of men, as well as other women, both as an artist and an individual. More than anything, she wanted to be an artist. There shouldn’t have been anything wrong with that ambition. Artistic flair was considered an asset in a woman. The ability to sketch, along with some musical ability, and perhaps an aptitude to write light verse, added to a woman’s attractiveness. And if a woman did persist in painting, the subjects thought suitable for her talents were flowers, children, small animals, and delicate landscapes in watercolour.
The language used to describe women was also applied to their art: delicate, graceful, charming, modest, sensitive— a language of passivity.
A career as a professional artist just was not considered suitable for a lady. Men could marry and remain artists. Women were expected to be wives and mothers, and little else. A man could be an artist and remain a bachelor, but an unmarried woman was pitied as a spinster. Even in Paris and London, where artistic milieus existed that were opening to women, an artist’s prospects were still determined, in part, by gender.
Many young women did go to art school. In fact, they tended to dominate in numbers, but as students only, very seldom as teachers. Most never came near to being artists. The only outlet they could find for their talents was as teachers in the regular school system. And if they did form clubs and arts organizations, the names were always prefixed by the words “Ladies” or “Women’s.” Men gave their clubs and organizations more important titles, like Academy, Salon, or Royal Society. And if women were given the opportunity to study in these academies and societies, it often was in segregated classes. The histories of art written at the time made absolutely no mention of
a single woman artist.
When women’s art was reviewed in the newspapers, as Emily’s was, the articles generally appeared in the women’s section. When Emily held an exhibition of her work from France, the paintings were discussed in the Vancouver Province on the page for “Casual Comment on Women’s Activities and Interests,” alongside articles on fashion and social gossip. Men’s art was never relegated to a page otherwise devoted to carpentry and fishing.
Higher education was effectively closed to women. They were not accepted into most faculties at most universities. Women lawyers, judges, physicians, or engineers simply did not exist. Other than taking menial jobs, they could be typists, secretaries, or clerks. Women did not live alone or travel without a chaperone, and to be unmarried past a certain age carried a social stigma that veered between pity and condemnation. In Canada, women were barred from voting both provincially and federally until 1917–18.
When the Group of Seven painters began to achieve some positive notice after 1920, they were often portrayed in heroic terms as brave Canadian artists. But when a handful of serious and talented women—contemporaries of Emily’s, if only in age—formed the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal at around the same time, they received nothing like the attention devoted to the Group of Seven, even though they were accomplished painters working in the progressive styles. It is worth noting that of the ten women in the Beaver Hall group, only one married, and only briefly.
The artistic climate in Victoria, what little there was of it, remained conservative throughout Emily’s lifetime. Art was more often than not displayed at annual fairs along with handicrafts, agricultural products, and horticultural exhibits. The society in which Emily lived viewed art, especially the modern variety, with suspicion, and saw its practitioners as social outsiders, unless they had been lauded already in the dominant European institutions. A modern artist who made no sales and received no commissions was beyond the pale. Because women’s roles were so circumscribed and the expectations of how they should act were so defined, a woman like Emily, who flouted conventional expectations and persisted in working as an artist in the modern vein, was bound to be viewed as an oddity.
She had certain other “bad” characteristics. She smoked cigarettes. She used strong language. She played cards. She rode a horse astride, like a man, instead of sidesaddle, like a polite young woman. She had a monkey as a pet. Then there were her friends. She championed a Chinese artist who had been rejected by a local art society because of his race. She often visited a man confined to a lunatic asylum. She took a mentally handicapped boy along on a few of her local sketching excursions. She formed a friendship with a Native woman who was considered an alcoholic prostitute.
And then there were the Indians. It was bad enough that she painted images of what was considered a savage and primitive art form. But Emily went further than that; she actually went to live among the Native people on her trips and slept in their houses. Conventional observers saw this behaviour as a betrayal of all the civilizing virtues for which their society stood.
Emily was independent, forthright in her views, and had a healthy disrespect for the established order. Some of her contemporaries considered her selfish, egotistical, and irritable, qualities accepted in a man but deemed unfeminine in a woman. We could also say that she was ambitious, dedicated, hardworking, and didn’t suffer fools gladly, but local society had already filed her away in the category of outsider and eccentric.
Male artists were allowed to be eccentric, bad-tempered, or sexually profligate. Such traits were often attributed to their creative temperament, and might even be seen as a sign of genius. A woman who exhibited the same traits was considered mentally unbalanced.
It is tempting, in retrospect, to see Emily Carr as an early feminist. She wasn’t—at least in the political sense of the term. Although the movement for equal rights for women was well underway in Canada by the 1920s, her diaries make barely a reference to any political events of the day. In 1917 a suffragette demonstration in Victoria was disrupted by police, but the event seems to have made no impression on Emily. Margaret Clay, a politically active friend and supporter, visited Emily frequently in the 1920s and 1930s, but Emily never participated in Margaret’s activities. Emily was opinionated, but she was always aware of her lack of formal education, and tended to be reticent when conversation took an intellectual turn. She was a feminist in the personal sphere only: she was always determined to make her own choices without having to defer to the opinions of others.
Neither was Carr anti-male. She had a number of significant platonic friendships with men. She preferred the company of women, but in her professional life she responded to the advice of men. This comes as no surprise, considering the authority men wielded both in society and the arts, but we must remember also that she had grown up in a house-hold of women whose wills were ultimately subordinate to that of Richard Carr.
To see Carr as an entirely rejected and isolated woman is inaccurate. Her artistic contacts with the mainstream in Canada and elsewhere were sporadic, but she did have the company of other artists in Victoria and Vancouver, and had her supporters among them. She exhibited frequently, albeit in minor venues or in her own studios. She had a great many friends and relatives, as well as the constant company of her sisters, and in most respects lived a fully integrated social life. The fact that she was an unconventional and independent artist, frustrated in her ambitions and development, often led Emily to portray herself as lonely and isolated. There is truth in that self-characterization, but only to a degree.
CHAPTER TEN
Female Hysteria
Emily was not physically weak. She undertook arduous sketching trips and engaged in strenuous physical labour during her years as a landlady. Nevertheless, she suffered from a variety of ailments over the course of her life, one severe enough to confine her to a sanatorium for fifteen months.
In 1900, shortly after she arrived in London, one of her big toes was amputated when it did not heal properly after a carriage accident in Canada. Just before her scheduled departure for Paris in 1910, she contracted diphtheria and was confined to bed for weeks. In Paris she became ill with what she described as either bronchitis or jaundice. Twice she spent periods of about six weeks in the American Student Hostel infirmary, and eventually she travelled with her sister Alice to a spa in Sweden, where she recovered. In her forties she had a gall bladder operation that was apparently unsuccessful. Finally, in her later years, she was felled by two heart attacks and two strokes, the combination of which caused her death.
Throughout her life she suffered from periods of depression, and her journals frequently refer to the black moods that sent her to bed in despair. But it was during her stay in England that a combination of physical and psychological disorders resulted in a complete breakdown. Her toe took a long time to heal and must certainly have been painful. She received news of the death from tuberculosis of her brother, Dick, in California. At the same time, a suitor, Mayo Paddon, was visiting and importuning her to marry him. She began to suffer debilitating headaches and nausea. Emily actually collapsed when she and Alice were among the crowd watching the funeral procession for Queen Victoria, the first sign that her health was in a precarious state. She found London oppressive and confining, but a summer in the country brought no respite from the headaches. In Cornwall, where she went to attend sketching classes, the glaring light on the beach made her flee into the shade of the woods, angering her teacher.
Before returning to London she spent a period in a nursing home trying to regain her energy, but when she did go back to the city she again suffered fainting spells, accompanied by numbness in her right arm and leg. A friend in the country took her in for just over a month. No record of a diagnosis exists, but it was likely that the strenuous effort she made at her work, knowing how much rode on her success, coupled with the effects of the surgery on her foot, contributed to her constant bouts of illness. The headaches and nausea probably had a physical cause,
migraine perhaps, but the only advice she received was to rest.
In July 1902, Emily’s sister Lizzie arrived in England. Unable to bear a return to the city, which she saw as a prison, Emily moved to a succession of lodgings outside London. She would recover, and then a relapse would come. Her symptoms included fits of stuttering, heart palpitations, and numbness on one side. A specialist was consulted. He concluded that she was suffering from a nervous breakdown.
Eventually, in January 1903, Emily was admitted to a sanatorium in Suffolk. She would remain there until March of the following year.
Women’s health problems tended to be under-diagnosed and were often dismissed as psychosomatic under the general heading of “female hysteria.” (Male hysteria, which usually manifests itself in wars and sports, has of course never been considered a psychosis.) The origin of the illness was often attributed to sexual repression and familial conflicts, which were converted into physical symptoms. The growing popularity of Sigmund Freud’s pseudo-scientific speculations encouraged the view that women were sexually repressed. This repression was attributed neither to male domination nor societal strictures, but instead to supposedly unconscious fantasies. Among the alleged fantasies were feelings of sexual attraction to the father, resulting in such severe anxiety that impairment of speech and limb might result.
A number of later writers have applied these imaginative speculations to Emily Carr’s breakdown, equating her refusal to marry with sexual frigidity or unacknowledged homosexuality, or even to an actual sexual encounter with her own father. Such judgments are perhaps too easy to make upon a woman who consciously violated conventional rules of behaviour.
What is more likely is that Emily was suffering from specific physical ailments that were left unattended. Her psychological breakdown could just as easily have been a result of the enormous pressure she put on herself. She was thirty-three in 1904, older than most other students in the classes she attended. She knew that her family and her acquaintances in Victoria expected her to succeed, perhaps as her old friend Sophie Pemberton had done—with success at the Royal Academy and further triumph in Paris. Pemberton was a talented painter in the Beaux-Arts tradition, but the kind of art Emily wanted to make had no tradition. As well, the Carr sisters had allocated family funds to Emily’s continuing education and she did not want to disappoint them.
