Her sister Lizzie wanted to be a missionary, and Emily hated it that their house was now full of what she called “the missionary blight.”
Proper Victorian women didn’t usually work outside the home, but the Carr family was now in what was called, “reduced circumstances.” With four sisters at home and brother Dick in hospital in California, Emily had to earn an income, and although at first she felt a little afraid of her pupils, she began to teach drawing to children in the family dining room.
But the room was too dark. The children created mess and noise and there was trouble with her sisters after every class, and so, feeling brave after her taste of independence in California, Emily asked Edith if she could use the loft of the old cow barn for a studio.
Reluctantly, Edith agreed. The barn was in poor repair. Emily used all her money to pay a carpenter to fix the leaky roof, but still there was a problem because the loft, like the dining room, didn’t have enough light for painting. With no money left, Emily and Bong, the family servant, tackled the problem themselves. They fitted two old windows into the roof to make a skylight. They fixed the leaks, put in a stove, blocked the pigeon holes, and burlapped the walls. Soon, even if it smelled a bit like cow, Emily was cozy and warm with her students above and the warm, snuffing noises of the old cow chewing below. Outside on the roof, a beautiful peacock began to come to preen, using the dormer window as his mirror.
Before long there were several students attending Miss Carr’s art classes in the loft above the cow barn. Emily was a natural teacher, almost as playful as the children. If they got too noisy, she would drop through the trap door into the cow’s manger, creep through the barn, and run up the studio stairs to surprise them and set them back to work.
She also continued her own work, changing from the art school focus on portrait and still life toward landscape. In those days in Victoria, the only place an artist could exhibit was among the crocheted afghans and fresh-baked pies at the Victoria fall fair, and twice, Emily’s pen and ink drawings won first prize.
In the summer of 1898, Emily took the steamer Willipa to Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island to visit her sister Lizzie. She stayed in the small mission house near the reserve where about two hundred members of the Ucluelet band of the Nootka (now called Nuu-chah-nulth) nation lived.
To her, this way of life outside the city was all new. She loved having so few rules, being on the shore between the vast calm of sea and of forest. She loved being outside all day in the fresh air, eating fresh fish, wandering as she liked. Time slowed down and people let her do mostly as she pleased. The prisoner of strict Victorian rules and manners could feel her chains being loosened.
One day soon after she arrived, the chief – who was said to be a “reader of faces” – visited her in the missionary’s house. He sat on top of the medicine cabinet, his hands gripping the edge, elbows braced, and stared hard into Emily’s eyes. After a while he looked up, said a few sentences in Chinook Jargon (the trading language), and returned to the village.
Emily asked a little nervously, “What did he say?”
“That you had no fear,” the missionary told her, “that you were not stuck up, and that you knew how to laugh.”
The native people gave her the name “Klee Wyck,” the Laughing One, and she quickly made friends in their community. Without speaking either Chinook Jargon or the local native language, and using only gestures and facial expressions, she received permission to visit them and sketch in the great houses that were home to several families. But it never occurred to her to paint the forest. The Canadian forest was still too vast to imagine trying to express it in paint.
Living conditions on the reserve were poor. There was little work for the men, and many people were fatally ill with German measles, whooping cough, or tuberculosis. Residents were sick at heart, and perhaps because of this, there was widespread drinking and gambling.
Emily felt great sympathy and she firmly blamed Europeans for the natives’ dispirited condition. She especially blamed the missionaries, who called traditional ways “ungodly” and taught native people to be ashamed of their heritage.
Her sympathetic response was unusual for the time. Most white people in British Columbia, although they had relied heavily on the skills and kindness of First Nations people to help them adjust to a new country, by the 1870s were hostile, and regarded most native people as “drunks and idlers.”
Her visit to Ucluelet was the first time Emily found comfort and pleasure in the company of First Nations people. Unlike most of the white people she knew, native people left her alone. She didn’t feel lectured or scolded or disapproved of. Mostly they accepted her presence in silence, and so, in their company she could focus on her passion – her art.
On the steamship home, Emily became friends with the ship’s purser, William “Mayo” Paddon, son of an Anglican priest in Victoria. Mayo soon became a frequent visitor to the Carr house. He and Emily walked and talked together through the park and along the cliffs above the sea. Emily even attended his church, the Holy Saviour. Mayo, who was deeply religious, was drawn to Emily because he found her the same, in spite of her rebellion against what she saw as the hypocrisy and mistakes of the church.
He proposed marriage more than once, but Emily turned him down, although one time she almost changed her mind. It happened when she told him about a time when Edith was furious at her (again) and trying to shame her. Edith had said, “Poor Mother worried about leaving you. She was happy about her other children, knowing she could trust them to behave – good reasonable children – you are different!” It hurt Emily’s feelings badly, and for years she cried over it until Mayo whispered in her ear, “Don’t cry, little girl. If you were the naughtiest, you can bet your mother loved you a tiny bit the best – that’s the way mothers are.” For that, she said, she almost loved him.
But not enough to marry him. Apart from the fact that all her life she was bashful about her body and squeamish about sex, Emily, like every Victorian woman, knew that her duty when she married was to bear children and care for her husband and family. (Partly, a woman had no choice but to bear children; these were the days before birth control.) At best, the woman’s own interests – like art – must take second place. Emily wasn’t ready for that. Besides, by now there was enough money in the shoes. One of her friends from Victoria, Sophie Pemberton, had had great success studying in England and was now making her artistic debut in Paris. In 1899, Emily announced to Mayo and her family, “I’m going to London to study!”
The trip was a difficult one. Emily could not go on the water without being seasick. For the entire voyage to England she was violently ill.
4
Breakdown
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
