Month: December 2015

My answer is a resounding yes. I just read Klee Wyck, the Indian stories, and Growing Pains, her posthumously published autobiography, and was sorry I ever picked up my phone to read that fictionalized bio by Susan Vreeland. She invents pieces of the Canadian artist’s life, as if it wasn’t interesting enough. She invents love interests–men of course–and I’ve come to believe that Vreeland is trying to argue that Emily was not a lesbian. Which makes me even more certain she was.

Here’s the thing: It’s possible that Emily never had sex with anybody. I think there may have been many Victorian women like her. She recognized that marriage would ruin her life as an artist, and sex outside marriage for women wasn’t possible. If you did it you certainly wouldn’t admit it to anyone, and certainly not write about it. She does mention a love interest in one sentence of the autobiography, but that’s it. She had many very close female friends. Emily did have male suitors, all spurned. At least one didn’t go quietly, but she persisted in rejection. Making art was her first love.

But I don’t think lesbianism is only defined by who one sleeps with. Even if she never had sex with a woman, I still think she was a dyke. Look at the pictures of her! She cut off her hair and wore comfortable clothes. One photo I found shows her in the doorway of her trailer house with a couple of other female friends lounging around outside. I have never learned who they are. Who buys a trailer shack and roams around in the woods? Lesbians!

And the pets! There was a monkey, birds of all descriptions, and always several dogs. Who adopts and communes with animals? Lesbians!

Carr’s old trailer is sitting next to the house with a display in its interior. Hard to imagine living in this tiny space!

The caravan Carr lived in for weeks at a time out in the woods (with her pet monkey!) is impossibly small.

Emily was an iconoclast. She was an Indian lover, perhaps because she felt herself to be an outcast too. Her family and the sister who controlled the family after her parents died were the worst kind of religious nuts. She was proud of thumbing her nose at them whenever she got a chance. The British ruling class of her hometown of Victoria reviled her art until she became famous in the East near the end of her life.

Then there was that 18-month stay in the sanitarium in East Anglia. No diagnosis was ever mentioned, except that she was anemic. In the sanitarium she was not permitted to paint. It was thought that she had overworked herself. She consoled herself by raising songbirds. The reader cannot help but wonder at the real reason for such confinement.

I did enjoy her books and learned that she became a writer when her health failed and she wasn’t able to paint as she had. I’m so glad she wrote these books. I checked them out of the San Francisco public library–first editions from the 1940s, with thick paper and color reproductions of some of her paintings. I loved holding them in my hands and thinking of all the other hands that had held them since before I was born!

Whatever her sexuality, Emily Carr is a lesbian-feminist icon. She was driven to make art at a time when women were discouraged from doing much of anything. There is no need to invent male suitors to make her life interesting. She was a fascinating person all on her own.