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Have you ever rubbed your cheek against a man’s rough tweed sleeve and, from its very stout, warm texture against your soft young cheek, felt the strength and manliness of all it contained? Afterwards you discovered it was only the masculine of him calling to the feminine of you – no particular strength or fineness – and you ached a little at the disillusion and said to yourself, “Sleeves are sleeves, cheeks are cheeks, and hearts are blood pumps.”

– Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands

When the World Gets One Too Much

When the World is Midling Fair

Emily (centre) could always sketch and draw cartoons that made light of even her darkest moments.

It had been arranged in Canada that Emily would be the paying guest (this was a polite name for “boarder”) with her British aunt, Amelia Green. Aunt Amelia met her at Euston station in the middle of a blazing hot London summer. Emily had never seen such a huge city and was amazed by the “writhe of humanity… as indifferent to each other as trees in the forest.” Both trees and crowds made her feel insignificant and she immediately ached with homesickness; London’s overcrowding and its stale, smelly air were hateful to her. She begged Aunt Amelia to help her.

“Miss Green, is there any place one can go to breathe?”

“There are London’s lovely parks.”

“Just as crammed – just as hot as everywhere else!”

Miss Green was a little surprised. Her idea of a nice time was to go stand on a street corner and watch lords and ladies passing by. If you were very, very lucky, you might even catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria.

“Dear me!” Miss Green exclaimed. “You Canadians demand a world apiece. I have offered to take you to Hyde Park, show you our titled people riding and driving, but no, you Canadians have no veneration for titles.”

No. Emily wanted only quiet, outdoor space. When she persisted, Aunt Amelia finally suggested London’s Kew Gardens, the largest botanical gardens in the world. Here, there were trees and plants from almost every part of the globe.

When she arrived, Emily was at first put off by all the “Thou shalt not …” signs: “No person may carry a bag, parcel, or basket into the gardens,” they said. “You must not walk upon the grass, or run or sing or shout.” Emily strode along the paths, deeper and deeper into the Gardens. What had those signs said again? Oh yes: no bags, no singing. Defiant as ever, she clutched her bag, and sang her very loudest.

When she found a small grove of Canadian pines and cedars, she was delighted. Their needles, when she rubbed them between her fingers, smelled like home.

She registered at the Westminster School of Art, located just behind Westminster Abbey in the heart of London. Emily probably chose England over France for her art studies because there was no language problem and because her sisters would be less resistant to her going to the “old country” familiar from their parents’ stories, than to the “foreignness” of France. But it was not a happy choice. In San Francisco, Emily’s status as British (as the Americans then saw Canadians), had made her feel somewhat equal to her American friends, but in class-conscious London, she was reduced to being a mere colonial, and a shabby one at that. It increased Emily’s feelings of being unwelcome and uncomfortable in this huge city.

Also, English art was traditional and conservative. The newest ideas were happening on the continent, and though the Westminster school had once been England’s best art school, it wasn’t any longer. The instruction Emily got here was to be no better than in San Francisco – and that hadn’t been good. Her unhappiness with the City of London quickly deepened to loathing, and she was further depressed when she heard of the death of her brother, Dick, from tuberculosis.

In spite of homesickness, Emily made some friends at school, but her best friend was Mrs. Redden, the aunt of Canadian friends. Marion Redden was a kind, practical Scot who had spent her married life in Canada and now lived in London with her son. She was as strong-willed and outspoken as Emily, and they often fought, but Emily soon began to spend most of her Sundays with the Redden family.

At the beginning of her second year, Mayo Paddon, her Canadian suitor, came to visit. When Emily arranged to meet him at church one day with Mrs. Redden, Mayo and Mrs. Redden liked each other immediately, and the older woman, with many “dear me’s!” and twinkling eyes, arranged to let the two Canadians walk home together without her.

After Mrs. Redden caught him one night on his knees in front of the fire, warming Emily’s cloak and patting the collar as if it were a kitten, she called him “The Knight of the Cloak” and liked him more than ever.

Not Emily. Five times a week Mayo asked her to marry him, and five times a week she said “no.” As he got sadder, Emily got crosser. It made her even more angry that Mrs. Redden continually urged Mayo not to give up, and urged Emily to say “yes.”

One of Emily’s favourite places in London, and one she must have shown Mayo, was the zoo in Kew Gardens. Here she would sit for hours watching the animals. Once they grew used to people, she thought, perhaps they did not really mind being kept in cages. Most of them seemed “merry” and all of them were “well tended.”

Emily knew what it was like to feel caged. Since childhood she had paced, eager to escape the bars of her family and her narrow Victorian culture. She had had a taste of freedom in California, but here the cage was subtle and enticing and right in front of her: small things like changing her accent to sound less colonial, larger things like the pressure to choose marriage over art, to yield to traditional values and to be – in the end – “well tended” if not exactly “merry.”

Mayo Paddon offered her security, companionship, and family. She truly liked him, and she was now nearly twenty-nine years old – almost an old maid. But her choice was all or nothing. If she said “yes” to Mayo, her life would be spent looking after husband and children and house, and only if she had spare time would there be a place for art.

Emily hated London but she would not marry Mayo and let him take her away. She had come here to study painting. Finally she told him to, “Go away, Mayo; please go away!”

And he did.

Years after she refused Mayo’s offer of marriage, Emily mourned about “that poor love I deliberately set out to kill.” She thought it was a “dreadful thing to do,” but she didn’t regret it. “I did it in self-defence,” she said, “because it was killing me, sapping the life from me.” Once and for all she had said “no” to what was supposed to be a woman’s highest calling: marriage and family. Emily chose art, and now she committed herself to study, day and night, more intensely than ever.

But an old injury to her toe was making it harder to walk and causing her terrible pain. At first Mrs. Redden scolded her for whining – “You homesick baby! Stop that hullabaloo! Crying over a corn or two!” – but when she saw it was serious, Mrs. Redden called in her surgeon-cousin to examine the ailing foot.

The toe was fractured and had to be amputated, and it was very, very slow to heal. For the rest of her life Emily would carry a camp stool with her when she sketched because she couldn’t paint standing up.

This time it was Alice who followed her from Victoria for a visit. At first Emily was excited. She pinned her best artwork on the walls of their rooms and waited eagerly for her sister to comment. But Alice didn’t even look. She didn’t ask about Emily’s work, either. Finally Emily said, “Not interested in my work, are you?”

“Of course,” Alice replied, “but I have not seen any.”

Emily pointed at the walls and said bitterly, “I suppose you thought these were wallpaper?”

Her family had never understood or encouraged her art, but it hurt her badly that even her favourite sister didn’t care. Now Emily decided she would “seal it from everybody.” She would keep the importance of her painting hugged closely to her own heart.

When Emily’s London classes finished, the two sisters left the city so Emily could study in small villages and sketch outdoors. Alice returned to Canada, but Emily’s health, which hadn’t been good in London, got worse. She developed headaches and gained weight.

She was not happy. She was working too hard, and with so little money she was probably not eating properly. By now she also realized that the most exciting ideas in art were not in England; she should have gone to Paris or Rome. It didn’t help that Julius Olsson, her teacher at St. Ives in Cornwall on the south coast of England, forced her to paint sun and sand until she thought her head would split.

But it was in St. Ives that Emily first painted forest. Whenever she could, she escaped the blazing sun on the beaches to sketch in the cool shade of Tregenna Wood, above the village. Olsson denounced the work she did here as “Neurotic! Morbid!” but his assistant, Algernon Talmage, encouraged her. “One works best where one is happy,” he told her.

Olsson was a good teacher, but like most teachers of the day, he greatly favoured his male students. He invited them to his studio, discussed his own art with them, and treated them like fellow artists. When Mrs. Olsson had her husband’s favourite students to tea, Emily was not invited. Emily told the other students she didn’t care, but it was one more humiliation that bit into her and fed her self-doubt.

Her health continued to get worse. Emily was happy to be in the country and was learning some new things from her teachers, but she was terribly homesick. Everywhere she went in England she felt harshly judged because she was not only from the colonies, but a woman. Even her friends in London, the Reddens, didn’t take her art seriously.

She was over thirty years old and the pressure must have been intense. She must have begun to question herself. What if everyone else was right? Was her plan to be an artist just a silly mistake? If she wasn’t going to marry, what could she do? She hadn’t learned enough yet about art, and she refused to leave England before she got what she came for. Finally, emotionally and physically exhausted, Emily had, as she put it, a “crack up.”

Sister Lizzie, hearing of Emily’s illness, came from British Columbia to be with her. But Lizzie was emotionally in as bad a state as Emily. She also represented all the forces of conformity that Emily was fighting to escape, and her efforts to help – including having prayers offered for Emily at the local church – instead of calming Emily, roused her wrath and increased her anxiety even more. By now Emily was having terrible headaches and was experiencing fatigue, depression, vomiting, stuttering, and numbness on one side.

On January 12, 1903, Lizzie took Emily to the East Anglia Sanatorium for treatment and returned alone to Canada.

The Sanatorium was a hospital mainly for people with tuberculosis but there was the occasional patient, like Emily, whose complaint was entered in the hospitals “Doom Book” as “hysteria.” This was a form of illness Emily Carr_commonly diagnosed for women at the time. It was thought to be the result of women’s emotional nature and their denial of their “God-given” and socially ordained roles as sexual beings and mothers. Today, such symptoms would be recognized as a response – by both men and women – to unendurable stress. The Sanatorium, or San as it was called, was run by Dr. Jane Walker, who was experimenting with open-air treatment for tuberculosis.

Emily arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. The front wall of her room was open from the ceiling to a foot above the floor. Above her bed, small windows opened into a corridor that was all open windows. As the wind roared through, a nurse shook the snow off the bedspread before her Canadian patient could crawl, shivering, into bed.

The doctors’ prescription was for complete rest and freedom from worry for one year. Emily could do some sketching but no painting. Any emotional stimulation, they said, was harmful, so tears as well as laughter were discouraged. According to Emily, “Even thinking was prohibited.” Mostly, she stayed in bed and ate. Occasionally she was allowed to draw cartoons and write silly rhymes to pass the time and to get her revenge on nurses she didn’t like. “I was not always polite,” she remembered later.

Her one joy was that she was allowed to raise birds. The beautiful songs of some English birds, she thought, were the only thing England had that Canada did not. Her plan was to take songbirds back to Canada with her and release their offspring in the wild. Today, people could tell her such experiments don’t usually work, but at the time, Emily thought it was a splendid idea.

When spring came she stole several nests, eggs and all, from nearby bushes. Her books said that if her hand with its juicy worms was the first thing the young birds saw, they would accept her as their mother.

When her nestlings hatched, she poked food into their mouths every two hours with a tiny pair of pincers. Other patients helped her. After their walks they left small offerings of ants and grubs, beetles and worms on Emily’s windowsill. Kitchen maids donated rhubarb and cabbage leaves that, when laid on the grass, attracted snails and other bird treats. She was christened “Birdmammy” by a doctor who found her asleep one day with five baby bullfinches cuddled under her chin. When they began to fly, the birds were put into a large aviary in the yard.

Emily’s birds became the San darlings. If a patient was feeling bad, the nurse would ask Emily to, “Lend the soldiers!” and head off with a cage full of birds to cheer the sad one.

Today, some would criticize her for capturing and raising wild birds, but these small creatures and their songs were the single thing that brought her – and many others in the hospital – joy. “But for birds,” Emily said later, “I doubt I could have stood it.”

All her life she kept large numbers of animals – wild and domesticated – as a way of connecting to nature. They were also an outlet for her devotion. Emily was never a mother but she had a strong maternal instinct. If she couldn’t have her own babies, she would have these wild ones who quietly loved her and didn’t require her to sacrifice her art.

After more than a year, everyone’s special gentleness to her – and the fact that she was no better – made Emily begin to wonder if she would die. When simple rest and good food didn’t help, the doctors began to “treat” her by alternating under- and over-feeding and giving her cold and hot baths. When she still did not get better, they proposed, as a last resort, a more severe and experimental form of treatment. Before she agreed, Emily called her doctor.

“May I get up?”

“You are not able, Mammy.”

“Something I must do.”

“Your nurse is here.”

“No one can do this but me.”

Emily had hoped to take her birds back home. Now, sadly, she put them one by one into a box and asked for the doctor again.

“The birds, Doctor. There in the box. Chloroform them.”

The doctor was shocked but Emily insisted, “Quick, they are waiting.”

“Free them, Mammy!” the doctor urged.

“They do not know freedom,” Emily replied. “Villagers would trap them – tiny cages – slow starvation…. Broken necks, fertilizer for cabbages! Please, Doctor. I love them too much.” And the doctor did as she was asked.

Now Emily gave herself into the hands of the doctors, who drowned her in huge amounts of food, massage, and electrical treatments – four hours each day for the next six weeks.

Although Emily is vague about this time and the hospital records have been lost in a fire, the “electrical treatments” were some form of electro-shock therapy, though probably not the extreme kind we know today. Doctors at the time were experimenting with different kinds of electrical equipment, including an electric massage device that produced a buzzing sensation on the skin. Verses Emily wrote later in which she compared the treatment to sitting on a bee hive, seem to agree with this.

When Emily finished the experimental treatment she was declared “cured” and told never to go near London again. It was big cities, it seemed, that made her sick. She was as rooted as any pine tree in wild Canadian soil. Without it, she seemed to fade.

Still, she wasn’t well. After eighteen months in the sanatorium she was depressed. Her struggle to paint had become a distant dream. She cared about nothing and she was afraid the doctors had killed her enthusiasm for painting. When she left the sanatorium she returned to the last village where she had studied and, not knowing what else to do, wrote about her time in the San as a series of silly verses illustrated with sketches. She cried the entire time she was writing it.

In June 1904 Emily caught a ship back to Canada. She was thirty-two years old, depressed, and convinced that her five years of study in England had been a complete failure.