Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto Read Free Book Online Page B

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 familyfunds to Emily’s continuing education and she did not want to disappoint them.
    Emily felt alone and out of place in England. She was slighted as a “colonial,” and she longed for the landscape of home. Yet she had to stay. To leave would be to admit failure. Finally, she was still considered eligible for marriage, and relatives in England constantly tried to pair her off with suitable men. The combination of all these factors, along with exhaustion and ill health, broke her down.
    The treatment for the breakdown was dubious, to say the least. The medical establishment was as ignorant as Emily herself as to what ailed her. She was kept on a strict diet, then was switched to a different one that made her gain weight. There were experimental electric massages and enforced bed rest. Stimulation of any kind was discouraged, and she was forbidden to paint or even to think about it. In her memoir Emily wrote that she felt like a vegetable at this time, living in an uneventful forever and forever. What kept her sane were the satirical sketches and verses she made up, and the little birds she raised in her room.
    That Emily did not succumb, either to the diagnosis or the treatment, but returned to her grand ambition, is a testament not so much to her physical strength as to the deep resources of inner courage she possessed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Edge of Nowhere
    Emily once referred to herself as a little old lady on the edge of nowhere. But she was a great traveller. She saw more of Canada and parts of Europe than the majority of people of her time and class, and more than many of us have done, even today.
    Although Victoria was always her home, and she never lived more than a few blocks from where she had been born, throughout her life she regularly packed her bags and set off for distant locations. She took her first journey when she was twenty-two, and didn’t unpack for the final time until she was in her sixties.
    Here is a partial list of the places she visited: San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, Cornwall, Paris, Brittany, Sweden, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Edmonton, the Cariboo, Alaska, Seattle, various places in the British Columbia interior, the Queen Charlotte Islands, and then the many trips she made to Native villages and towns up and down the coast.
    If all her sketching trips in British Columbia were compounded into one imaginary journey, it would go something like this: she begins her journey on a steamer from Victoria to Prince Rupert, a distance of five hundred kilometres. From Prince Rupert she heads inland, perhaps to Hazleton, another three hundred kilometres. First she travels by rail, and then by paddle steamer up the river for some distance. She then transfers to a smaller boat which takes her to a town. There she boards a horse-drawn cart, and sits among the lumber and sacks of oats for another journey of some hours. Once she reaches the village that is her destination, she hires a horse and rides farther inland until she