Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto Read Free Book Online Page 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 herwork, 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. Thisrepression 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