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.
5
Digging In
Every year Sophie had a new baby. Almost every year she buried one…. By the time she was in her early fifties every child was dead and Sophie had cried her eyes dry.
– Emily Carr, Klee Wyck
On her way home to Victoria, Emily stopped for eight weeks to visit friends in the Cariboo district of British Columbia. Here she began to get better in the clean air and open spaces of B.C. ranch country. Her friends taught her to ride a horse astride instead of in the more “ladylike” sidesaddle position that women were expected to use, and she spent most of her time outdoors, riding.
Once again, Emily defies expectations of how “nice” ladies should act, by learning to ride her horse astride, instead of sidesaddle, while in the Cariboo district of British Columbia.
When she returned to Victoria, Emily seemed to her family more strong-headed than ever. Not only did she shock the entire neighbourhood by riding astride, but she’d also picked up the unladylike habits of smoking, swearing, and playing cards, and she refused to attend church regularly.
Most of her childhood friends had left Victoria. Sophie Pemberton was back in Victoria but she had married and now had other interests than art. Emily felt restless. She was deeply disappointed in how little she had learned in England and she was still not completely well. Her sisters were busy with their own lives: Lizzie was going to study physiotherapy in Seattle; Edith worked on charities; Alice had opened a new kindergarten. Emily sought comfort by heading back to Ucluelet for a while; then she and her birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and Billie – a sheepdog one of her sisters gave her – all moved to Vancouver, where she was hired to teach the Vancouver Ladies’ Art Club.
Things immediately went bad. Knowing she had just returned from study “abroad,” the ladies assumed their new teacher would be witty, clever, and smartly dressed. Instead, they got a shy, fat, dowdy creature who smoked and swore at them. They had hired her to look at their paintings and give criticisms, suggest ways to improve, but it quickly became clear they didn’t take their art seriously enough for Emily Carr. Ladies came to class late. They re-posed the models. One refused Emily’s art criticisms altogether.
Being Emily, she took her revenge not by fading away but by going on the offensive. She considered their casual attitude to art a sacrilege and called them “vulgar, lazy old beasts.” When they snubbed her, she gave extra-harsh criticisms of their work. After one month, they fired her. Emily decided that from now on, she would concentrate on teaching children, who were easier to get along with.
Children taking classes from Miss Emily Carr at 570 Granville Street ran up the marble stairs to the second floor, past the Men’s Conservative Club and into a studio jammed with tables, easels, flowers, and animals. From one corner might come the tantalizing squeak of chipmunks and squirrels, busy building nests. The masked raccoons could be daintily washing their dinner while Jane the parrot and Sally the cockatoo screeched happily over the din. In the middle of it all, Billie the English sheepdog curled like a warm white rug for any child who needed a moment of quiet snuggling before returning to the fun of sketching a nursery rhyme or painting one of the bright bouquets at the window. Sometimes Miss Carr released the two white rats to play on the table. Then everyone grabbed their bread-erasers to save them from becoming a rat’s dinner. There was always tea, and snacks, and laughter.
On warm days she paraded her little company through the hallway, down the stairs, and along Georgia Street to the Vancouver wharves or to Stanley Park to sketch. Each child carried a camp stool and easel, and one held die basket from which Sally the cockatoo happily screeched, “Sally is a Sally! Sally is a Sally!”
When she wasn’t teaching, Emily worked on her own paintings, but her favourite activity was to lose herself and Billie on one of the many paths that threaded through the densely treed Stanley Park. She especially loved the solitude of a grove of seven huge cedars called the Seven Sisters. Although she no longer went to church regularly (“God got so stuffy squeezed into a church,” she once said) she was finding her holiness outside.
One day there was a knock at her studio door. She opened it to find a slim, barefooted woman about thirty years old with a baby on her back and two small children beside her. Sophie Frank was a Coast Salish woman who sold her handwoven baskets door to door. Emily especially liked one but she hadn’t enough money to buy it. Sophie offered to exchange it for used clothes the next time Emily came back from Victoria. In the meantime, she left the basket.
Emily was moved by the native woman’s trust in her. When she brought back a collection of used clothes that Sophie found acceptable, the two women began a lifelong friendship. Whenever Emily lived in Vancouver, Sophie dropped by for tea. And when Emily felt lonely she visited Sophie in her village on the north shore of Burrard Inlet. She would take the ferry across Burrard Inlet and the two women would visit in Sophie’s three-room house beside the Catholic Mission. In spite of Emily’s poor Chinook and Sophie’s broken English, they laughed easily together. Often there was a new baby to play with. Sometimes they sat silently on the church steps, watching the ferry cross to the North Shore,
