This Woman in Particular

Stephanie Kirkwood Walker

Description

What happens when an individual becomes the subject of many and divergent portraits?

“Biography,” says Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, “is a deceptive genre. Positioned between fact and fiction and elusive in its purposes, biography displays an individual life, an existence patterned by conventions that have also shaped the reader’s experience.” In This Woman in Particular, Walker explores versions of Emily Carr’s life that have appeared over the last half-century.

Walker contends that the biographical image of Emily Carr that emerges from an accumulation of biographies, films, plays and poetry as well as her own autobiographical writing establishes an elaborated cultural artefact — an “image” that is bound by its very nature to remain forever incomplete and always elusive. She demonstrates how changes in Carr’s biographical image parallel the maturing of Canadian biographical writing, reflecting attitudes toward women artists and the shifting balance between religion, secular attitudes and contemporary spirituality. And she concludes that biography plays a crucial role in all our lives in initiating and sustaining debate on vital personal and collective concerns.

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 27 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554588145
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

This Woman in Particular
Contexts for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr
Stephanie Kirkwood Walker Foreword by William Closson James
C ANADIAN C ATALOGUING IN P UBLICATION D ATA
Walker, Stephanie Kirkwood, date
This woman in particular: contexts for the
biographical image of Emily Carr
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-263-X
1. Carr, Emily, 1871-1945. 2. Biography as a literary form. 3. Painters - Canada - Biography. I. Title.
ND249.C3W53 1996 759.11 C95-932582-4
Copyright 1996
W ILFRID L AURIER U NIVERSITY P RESS
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
Cover design by Leslie Macredie. Photograph of the artist in her studio courtesy of British Columbia Archives Records Service

Printed in Canada
This Woman in Particular: Contexts for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr has been produced from a manuscript supplied in electronic form by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means-graphic, electronic, or mechanical-without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.
With memories of Hexham House for John Martin [1904-65] and Nancy-Lou Patterson in whose lives and art, like Emily Carr s, the sacred comes to ground
Millie Carr! I can hear some of her fellow Victorians exclaim with a slight gesture of scornful amazement.
Yes, Millie Carr! When the dust of your bones is confined in neglected grave plots or blown about the ways of the world forgotten, the spirit of this visionary will be fresh and living still, speaking to generations of what she saw and felt here.
- Ira Dilworth, Saturday Night, 8 November 1941
C ONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Preliminary Thoughts on Biography and Meaning
C HAPTER 1 The Edge of Nowhere : Emily Carr and the Limits of Autobiography
Emily and God: Creating the Modern Self
In the Arena of Self-Writing
Autobiography: An Arena for the Creation of Meaning
C HAPTER 2 The Enigma of Biography
Biography and the Covenant between Word and Object
C HAPTER 3 A Mirror to Culture: Moments in the Development of the Genre
Enlightenment Lives
Plus a change, plus c est la m me chose
In or About 1910
The Image of Emily Carr: Early Shapes
Mid-Century Spiritual Quests: Canadian Versions
The 1960s: Consolidation
C HAPTER 4 Life and Text: There Once Was an Artist Named Emily Carr
Feminist Inversions in the Biographical Sphere
Portraits of the Artist as a Female in the (Post)Modern World
Reconstruction and Interpretation
Versions
C HAPTER 5 Deep Nature: Survival in a Constructed World
Constructing Lives and Constructed Absence
Sites of Meaning
Signs of Life
Lives of a Mystic
Cultural Determinants/Spiritual Imperatives
Definitional Elasticity and the Necessity of Improvisation
The (Im)possibility of Knowing More
Deep Nature: Religious and Psychological Dimensions
Deep Nature: Dimensions of the Primitive
After Life
A PPENDIX A A Brief Chronology of Emily Carr s Life and Writing
A PPENDIX B Three Responses to Carr s Biographical Image
Notes
References and Sources Consulted
Index
L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS
The Carr Home in Victoria
Emily in Cornwall
The Carr Sisters
Emily and Flora Burns
Carriana
The Artist in Her Studio
Indian Church, 1929
Emily and the Elephant
Emily Carr with Her Monkey and Dogs
F OREWORD
Geography is about maps; biography is about chaps. one hopes that this self-assured aphorism is not merely mnemonic, but ironic: if geography can be reduced to cartography, then of course biography is no more than the account of the external facts of a male life. More than the obvious sexism of that statement calls for revision. (What would a chap be in inclusive language anyway, even conceding the loss of the internal rhyme?) In our ambiguous, problematizing and deconstructing postmodern age nothing is what it appears to be and every text has a subtext. Biography, then, may be autobiography, as much about the biographer as about the life of the ostensible biographical subject. But this book takes its probing of the issues attending biography to even deeper levels.
Stephanie Kirkwood Walker has not written another biography of Emily Carr, that great and enigmatic Canadian artist become superstar and icon. Nor has Walker written a book examining the various biographies (or examining the biographers) of Emily Carr. Rather, as her title indicates, her interest lies in the biographical image of Emily Carr and, even more, in the various contexts where that image has developed. Does not this seemingly centrifugal approach take us further away from, rather than closer to, Carr? To the contrary, Walker succeeds in incorporating, and then surpassing, both biography and the study of the making of biographies. She takes us beyond biography and beyond metabiographical criticism to study the ecology of biography as she explores the contexts of biographical endeavours. Along the way, conscious of the role of her own subjectivity, Walker interpolates her own engagement with Carr as part of this study. Knowing authorial self-effacement to be an impossibility, she risks that self-exposure.
A few years ago I was working on a book, in part biography, about a Canadian fur trader and photographer. At that time I believed, having read it somewhere, that biography employs a master metaphor to comprehend the subject s life, providing an overarching explanatory theory for everything they thought and did. A biographer steeped in the life of the subject would know them better than they ever knew themselves, even to the extent of being able to predict what they might think or do. My quest for the material to assemble such a metaphor for the capture of my subject led me to the archives of the Hudson s Bay Company in Winnipeg. There various letters and journals seemed to put my photographer almost within my grasp. I was staying with a friend in Winnipeg who, every evening when I returned to his house, asked me: Is he in the bag yet?
Such is the biographer s hubris. More facts, further interviews, re-examining old data from a fresh perspective, sifting it all, carefully developing a new interpretive net-all this will bring the elusive subject ever closer until you finally get them in the bag. Though conscious of biographical theory, and of my own subjective engagement with my subject, I was no more aware of the context (in Walker s sense of the word) of my own biographical endeavour than a fish is conscious of the sea. I thought I was approaching some kind of apprehension of my subject, not unconsciously contextualizing a biographical image.
Who could not be fascinated with the life of Emily Carr? Her distinctive paintings are regularly shown and reproduced for an admiring, even idolizing, Canadian public. The haunting monumentality of her work looms large in memory, is so intrinsic to the Canadian imagination that one sees, for instance, the reconstruction of the west coast native village at Hull s Museum of Civilization almost as if through Carr s eyes. The artist herself has been re-created and presented to us variously as an iconoclast (though later installed to iconic status herself) and eccentric, an outsider to the staid conventions of the Victorian (in both its regal and civic senses) society in which she was raised. She was drawn to an appreciative encounter with native cultures (and today some accuse her of appropriating them). She was a woman struggling for recognition as an artist in a world that celebrated the achievements of men. Success came to her relatively late in life, and then as much through her writing as her painting. She was orphaned as a teenager, possibly an incest survivor, unmarried, perhaps a lesbian. She has been enthroned as a kind of proto-ecofeminist heroine who understood in advance of her time the place and importance of nature. So the facts and the appreciations and the conjectures run. What is the reality behind these images? Or more important, as Walker would have it, what are the contexts for these images?
I can summon up in my imagination her paintings with the towering totem poles whose verticality replicates the gigantic trees of the west coast forest, beckoning towards a sacrality and an otherness extrinsic to the conventional religiosity of the day. I think that I remember (though I may have imagined it) a photograph of the artist, hulking and scowling with a knitted cap on her head, pushing a monkey in a baby carriage in Victoria. Is this my own partial and fragmented biographical image of Emily Carr? What is its source and context?
In these pages Walker presents a thoroughly engaging examination of all the contextual frameworks for the various biographies of Carr. She explores the complex conflicting and converging of approaches to Carr s life: theories in the genre of biography, twentieth-century views of art and the artist, changing perceptions of Canadian identity and culture and constructions of the self in literary theory, religious studies and feminist theory, expecially with regard to the narratological basis of selfhood. On one level this work could be termed metacriticism, that is, a study of studies (especially within the biographical genre) fo