Mémoire - Hedye BERDJIS-KAMRANPOUR

Understanding Emily Carr: A look at the fashioning of an autonomous self

Hedye BERDJIS-KAMRANPOUR

In this thesis, I argue that Emily Carr's books reveal her quest to define herself as an artist and as a person, drawing inspiration from an Authority manifest in the Pacific Northwest forest and pushing against conventions that would have limited her and suffocated her as well as her art. I endeavour an original exploration of print culture, in examining how this author discovered herself through books, and Canadian modernism, in charting how this talented woman found a vocation in the early twentieth century. As Emily Carr's conflicted public image has complicated critical discussion of her literary oeuvre, my thesis investigates how this specific artist figure has been constructed and (mis)understood. I begin with an overview and brief discussion of Carr's critical reception history, and then focus on a detailed examination of Carr's individual writings. Thus, I probe two often clashing perspectives while I argue that only in submitting to Carr's personal gaze, regardless of her subjectivity, can we approximate a better understanding of the artist's thought processes and motivations. By applying Stephen Greenblatt's theory of "self-fashioning" to the premise of my analysis, Carr's early formed self-image and ensuing self-representation in writing become both apparent and legitimate. In this study, I uncover and trace the fascinating development of Carr's self-concept, as an artist and as a person, as it unfolds in and beyond the three cornerstones of her literary oeuvre: Klee Wyck (1941), The Book of Small (1942), and Growing Pains (1946). By way of interpreting the corpus of almost all of Carr's books, and considering most of the diverse criticism on them, I demonstrate how she made herself into who she needed to be – artist, outsider, Canadian, Indigenous ally, advocate of animal and child, author, friend.