Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto Read Free Book Online

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 makebarely 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, albeitin 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