“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
