I'm Not Myself at All: Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada 9780773554030

Table of contents :
Cover
I’m Not Myself at All
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE · IDENTITIES
1 Absence Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter
2 Displacements Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins
3 Gaps Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Impressionist Canvases
PART TWO · FORCES
4 Diversity Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter
5 Inclination Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With
6 Listening Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewiṉchelwet (Sophie Frank)
Coda
Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

I’m Not Myself at All

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Martha Langford and Sandra PaikowSky, SerieS editorS Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered. The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips

Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy

Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay

Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet

The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin

Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth

Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford

Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott

Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney

Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry

Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney

Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett

I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault

Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert

’

Kristina Huneault

I’MI’mNOT MYSELF Not Myself at All AT ALL woMen, art, and Subjectivity in canada

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018

iSbn 978-0-7735-5319-4 (cloth) iSbn 978-0-7735-5403-0 (ePdf) Legal deposit second quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Concordia University’s Aid to Research Related Events Program, administered by the Office of the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies, and the Faculty of Fine Arts.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Huneault, Kristina, author I’m not myself at all : women, art, and subjectivity in Canada / Kristina Huneault. (McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. iSbn 978-0-7735-5319-4 (hardcover). – iSbn 978-0-7735-5403-0 (ePdf) 1. Women artists – Canada.  2. Art – Canada – History.  3. Art, Canadian – 19th century.  4. Art, Canadian – 20th century.  5. Identity (Psychology) in art.  6. Women in art.  I. Title.  II. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history

n 6544.h86 2018

704’.0420971

c2018-901089-4 c2018-901090-8

Set in 10/13.5 Scala Pro with Scala Sans Pro and Univers Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

To Larry and Nathan “je est un autre”

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3

Part One · IdentItIes

Part twO · FOrces 4 Diversity Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter 149

1 Absence Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter 25

5 Inclination Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With 207

2 Displacements Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins 65

6 Listening Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) 245

3 Gaps Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Impressionist Canvases 103

Coda

294

Illustrations Notes

299

309

Bibliography Index 369

343

Acknowledgments

This book has been long in the writing, and many have helped along the way. I will always remember the warmth and encouragement I received from Natalie Luckyj at the outset of this project and from Kathryn Fletcher and Grahame Buss at its end. Along the way, I benefited from occasions to test and develop my ideas through conference papers, workshop presentations, lectures, and publications. Those that have taken place by invitation have provided a special kind of nourishment. At Yale University in 2003 and again in 2014, I enjoyed the impeccable hospitality of Tim Barringer, his extraordinarily bright group of graduate students, and his colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art, particularly Gillian Forrester. Tim’s invitation to be involved in different phases of his Art and the British Empire projects pushed forward my thinking about the intersections of gender and colonialism in the art of Henrietta Hamilton. Similarly, an invitation from Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland to contribute to their Local/Global volume sparked my thinking about Frances Anne Hopkins and enabled me to present that material at the Association of Art Historians in 2004. That same year, I benefited from the opportunity to publish an early exploration of my ideas on Helen McNicoll in the pages of Art History. The following year, Loren Lerner’s request to participate in the Picturing Her symposium at the McCord Museum kept me working on art and motherhood at a time when it was especially important to do so, while some time later her wisdom helped me to stop when that was important too. In 2010 Mary Hunter asked me to return to a fondly remembered place behind the podium at McGill University to speak about botanical illustration, and in 2013 Chloe Taylor invited me to present my work on Emily Carr and Sophie Frank as the annual public lecture in the Feminist Research Speakers Series at the University of Alberta. I extend my heartfelt thanks to each of these colleagues and to all whose organizational labour has enabled me to share

Acknowledgments xii

my work with others, most especially Jonathan Crago, Ryan Van Huijstee, Maureen Garvie, and the exceptional professional team at McGill-Queen’s University Press. Over these many years, I have worn through four computers, losing emails that I had once counted on to help me acknowledge the large corps of fellow scholars, librarians, archivists, and conservators who have helped me track down details and answer questions. Many I have never met in person, but time and again my work has moved forward through their dedication and generosity in the face of ever-shrinking resources and everincreasing demands. Scholarship can only happen because people like these answer emails, share information, make suggestions, and ease the way; I regret that only some will now find their names here: Barbara Black, Guy Brassard, Karthryn Bridge, Fr John J. Brioux O.M.I., Allan Byrne, Cyndie Campbell, Vanessa Campbell, Jacques Cayouette, Alan Corbiere, Jim Corrigan, Catherine Crowston, Karen Duffek, Mark Ebert, Helen Entwisle, Arlene Gehmacher, Conrad Graham, Mary Jo Hughes, Aldona Joanitis, Gemey Kelly, Dorothy Kennedy, Mary Ledwell, Kim McCarthy, Donna McDonald, Fiona McDonald, Eva Major Marothy, Magdalena Moore, Wendy Nichols, Dianne O’Neill, Cuyler Page, Bruce Patterson, Shawn Patterson, Jennifer Pecho, Laura Peers, Carolyn Podruchny, Bert Riggs, Joan Ritcey, Frances Roback, Annie Ross, Cathy Roy, Dan Rück, Danielle St. Amour, Nicole St. Onge, Gary Shutlack, Cindi Steffan, Derek Swallow, Brian Thom, Maria Tippett, Janet Turner, Nancy Turner, Auguste Vachon, Christian Vachon, Susan Vreeland, Erin Wall, Linda White, and Jonathan Wise. I am also grateful to the family members and collectors who have shared access to their works and recollections – Richard Daly, David Gottleib, Helen Dubeau McNicoll, Carl Michailoff, Al Rain, Fred and Beverly Schaeffer, Cathy Smith, and Bill Williams – and I owe a particular debt of gratitude to those First Nations leaders, elders, artists, and scholars who welcomed me into their homes and communities in the spring of 2012: Bob Baker, Vanessa Baker, Vanessa Campbell and the elders of the Squamish Nation, Jessica Casey, Sharon Fortney, Chief Bill James, Fran James, Lila Johnston, Joanne Natrall, Dionne Paul and William Baturin, Susan Pavel, Isabel Rorick, Seliliye Claxton, Deborah Sparrow, Shirley Toman, Lorna Williams, and Sesemiya (Tracy Williams). Their choice to continue a long but so often ill-repaid tradition of generosity towards settlers has been humbling and inspiring in equal measure. To work in an area one loves means that friendship and collegiality are happily entwined, and I am fortunate indeed in my colleagues, past and present, who have made the Department of Art History at Concordia University such a uniquely supportive environment. Janice Anderson: you are

Acknowledgments

an extraordinary working partner and a still more extraordinary person; Brian Foss: you first convinced me that my separate ideas formed the kernel of a book and gave me a refuge in which to write it; Cynthia Hammond: your conversation has constantly rejuvenated me; Anne Whitelaw: I aspire to your wit, savvy, and ability. I am also grateful to Pamela Caussy, Erica Hart Da Costa, and Matt Smith of the Digital Image and Slide Collection for all their help with images. Outside Concordia, my warm thanks go to Alicia Boutilier, Tobi Bruce, Lora Senechal Carney, Charlie Hill, Anna Hudson, Gerta Moray, Jody Patterson, Ruth Phillips, Damian Skinner, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Roy Wright, and the many participants in the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. Your insights, information, and ideas have enriched this book and me along with it. One of the joys of being an academic is the opportunity to share the research process with students, and I owe much to all of those whose assistance and insights helped to make this book what it is, including Bruno Andrus, Elizabeth Cavaliere, Tamara Harkness, Ruth Jennings, Marie Lortie, Brin O’Hare, Despina Papachronis, Kimberlie Robert, Jonathan Shaughnessy, Patricia Sheppard, Sofia Stalner, Susan Surette, and Sarah Wagner. I will forever remember the company and brilliance of some in particular. David Capell first showed me what it was not to work alone and introduced me to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze at a time when my thinking about subjectivity was in danger of becoming sedimented; Avery Larose helped me to bridge scholarship and motherhood; Sarah Nesbitt threw all of her considerable talents into my journey into unknown intellectual and political territory; Grace Powell and Helmut Schauer opened their lake house to me; Kat Simpson edited, listened, and commented with great astuteness; and Kat Stein helped me to bring all the pieces finally together. Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds Québecois de recherche sur la société et la culture, from the Concordia University Research Chair program, and from Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts has enabled me to be supportive in turn, and has also subsidized the travel necessary to uncover and share facts and artworks as little known as many discussed here. This book has been written at a point in western history when women’s relationship to work and family has shifted both for better and for worse. As so many of us struggle to balance our passions, we are sustained by our love and our loved ones. My mother, Triena, has aided me in so many ways that I am, even now, still coming to recognize them. My husband, Larry, has wanted for me what I want for myself and given me the gift of time in which to make these things happen. And my children, living and dead, have taught me more about subjectivity than I could ever have imagined. Nathan: may you be open to the world.

xiii

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of the chapters in the first section have been previously published as “Always There: First Peoples and the Consolation of Miniature Portraits in British North America,” in Art and the British Empire, edited by Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Doug Fordham, 288–308 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2007); “Placing Frances Anne Hopkins,” in Global/Local: Women’s Art in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, 179–99 (London: Ashgate 2006); and “Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll,” Art History 27, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 212–49. The author and publisher wish to thank the presses for their permission to include revised material from these publications.

xiv

I’m Not Myself at All

FIg. 0.1 Daguerreotype, c. 1852–53. The sitter is probably Mary Ann Scrimes-Graham, who lived in Portsmouth and on Wolfe Island near Kingston, on .

INTRODUCTION Introduction Selfhood in Canadian Art and Art History

Among the many daguerreotype portraits that remain as traces of those who lived in Canada long ago, there is one that speaks with peculiar elegance to the interests of this book. It is a mid-nineteenth-century studio portrait of a dark-haired woman of indeterminate age, neither obviously wealthy nor conspicuously poor, coiffed and clad according to the customs of her day. She sits in a chair with her gaze lowered, her arm resting on a posing table to help her maintain immobility during the long exposure time. The support, it would seem, did not quite do the trick, for her hands are slightly blurred. Her face, however, is fully in focus, revealing even brows, heavily lidded eyes, and a slight impression of swelling around the mouth. These and a hundred other details bear witness to the specificity and exactitude of photography. If, over 150 years later, the sitter’s identity has become a matter for speculation, still we have no doubt that to her friends and family she must have been instantly recognizable. All of this is quite usual. What marks the image out from the ordinary, though, is a small slip of paper, inscribed by hand and carefully inserted beneath the glass of the daguerreotype’s elaborate casing. The unusual aspect of the insertion is further amplified by the five short words written on it, which overturn all the expected functions of a photographic portrait in one negative assertion: “I’m not myself at all.” The words instantiate a paradox that cuts to the core of my project, for in the very act of setting forth the sitter’s subjectivity, the short phrase

I’m nOt myselF at all 4

simultaneously exposes a certain non-correspondence of that self to itself. The questions raised are both existential and semantic. How to inhabit and yet be at a remove from the self? How to claim the “I” who speaks, while being distanced from it? Considering the slip of paper on its own account, the puzzle is first and foremost linguistic, hinging on a gap between the denotative meaning of the words and their performative effect – the difference between what the “I” says in a sentence and what it does – for since one must be oneself in order to claim that one is not, the speaker’s explicit negation of her subjectivity also functions to affirm the very “I” that it ostensibly disavows. Selfhood, in other words, is espoused through the same gesture that refuses it, and it is precisely the sitter’s insistence that she is not her self that convinces us that she must be just that. Adding image to words, the impression of subjective presence is strengthened by the indexical and iconic qualities of the photograph itself, so apparently incontrovertible in their work of historic reportage. And yet if we step back from the image for a moment to consider the daguerreotype as a physical object, the element of subjective instability resurfaces, for as its silver-coated copper plate responds to every change of light and position, the subject in the image flickers in and out of view, reaffirming the basic contradiction of the inscription. In multiple ways, then, the self in this word-and-image arrangement is both present and absent. As with many of the images and objects discussed in the pages that follow, this daguerreotype is tantalizing and frustrating in equal measure. We do not know who made it, though given the bent of what is to come it is worth mentioning the very real possibility that the photographer was a woman.1 More intriguing, however, is the question of who altered the photograph and why. The use of the first-person pronoun suggests that the author of the inscription is also the woman in the image – a woman, it might be presumed, who was in some way dissatisfied with her photographic appearance, perhaps not recognizing herself in the serious stiffness necessitated by the long exposure time. From the photograph’s provenance, we even have a fair idea of who this sitter is likely to have been: an accomplished needlewoman named Mary Ann Scrimes-Graham (1817–1892), mother to four children and the wife of a shipbuilder resident in Portsmouth village, now part of the city of Kingston, Ontario.2 But the stable point of reference established by this probable identification is set adrift again by the quotation marks that frame the interpolated text, indicating a distance between the person who has inscribed these words and the person who originally uttered them. In this way, the punctuation reinforces the disjuncture at the heart of the altered image and reinstates a margin of doubt about the inscription’s pronomial referent. Is “I” the person who held the pen, the subject who belongs to the pronoun, or the woman who sat for her portrait? Perhaps it is all three combined. But even assuming Scrimes-Graham to have been both the sitter and the source

of the textual interpolation, the quotation marks signal a woman whose words, just as much as her image, were not her own. Nor were they. Or at least they were not exclusively so, for during the mid-nineteenth century the phrase “I’m not myself at all” was readily familiar as the title of a popular song. Originally written by the Irish songster Samuel Lover, the tune was best known in Canada through an arrangement by the American composer John Rogers Thomas, published in New York just a few years prior to the taking of the photograph.3 In the song, a lover describes his distracted state – not sleeping, not eating, until he should know the answer to his suit. The sheet music bore an image of a man gazing in bewilderment at his reflection in the mirror. As historical facts go, these two pieces of information – the likely identity of the sitter and the likely source of the quotation – are unquestionably germane to the puzzle set forth by the altered image, and yet they do little to settle the daguerreotype into a clear and coherent narrative of identity. We know, for instance, that Mary Ann Scrimes-Graham had been married for more than a decade when the photograph was taken,4 and so the drama of the lyrics would seem ill-suited to her personal circumstances; certainly there is a pronounced disjuncture between the playful tone of the song and the woman who sits so pensively for the camera. In the absence of any but the most basic genealogical facts about the sitter, it is treacherously easy to imagine story lines that might account for the contradiction. Many are possible. Perhaps she had fallen in love outside the bonds of her marriage and altered the photograph in veiled reference to her state of mind. Perhaps marriage itself, with its demands to prioritize husband and children, had left her feeling alienated from her own needs and desires. Or perhaps she simply liked the song and disliked the photograph. But whatever scenario we might imagine, it is hard to get away from the fact that in the song, it is a man who utters these words. For Scrimes-Graham to adopt them, regardless of her motivation, would necessarily have entailed a certain amount of subjective contortion. And of course it is just possible that this isn’t even Scrimes-Graham in the first place, or that someone else entirely placed paper and image together.5

Identity, Subjectivity, and Canadian Art History Selfhood in Canadian Art and Art History

The speculations, ambiguities, and ambivalences that are elicited by consideration of the Scrimes-Graham daguerreotype encapsulate the concerns of this volume, for this is a book about the simultaneous inscriptions and destabilizations of selfhood that are embedded in women’s creative statements. Across six independent chapters, the volume poses questions about the nature of the “I” that women have variously constructed and deconstructed by means of their contributions to art in Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How, it asks, can we understand the

5

I’m nOt myselF at all 6

subject positions that women created for themselves through pictorial inscriptions of the world around them? What ways of being in that world do their artworks make available to us? And what potential do they hold for our own contemporary processes of self-questioning and reflection? Such questions, abstract yet deeply personal, are also politically relevant. From Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon onwards, writers concerned with social alignments of power have understood the importance of the inner orientations of the self. The individual’s constitution as the effect of external lines of force, its disposition to agency, and its potential for disruption: all are central to my art-historical concerns. Within art history, however, the place and function of the individual have been roundly criticized. Feminist scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which the discipline’s monographic valorization of individual artists has mythologized creative expression while reinforcing constructions of personal genius that remain largely unavailable to women.6 Simultaneously, the hackneyed reduction of women artists to their personal lives (and frequently their romantic misadventures) has led to a suspicion of biography that permeates feminist art-historical discourse, even as many of its scholarly practitioners work to restore the possibility of subjecthood to those from whom it has too often been withdrawn.7 In the Canadian context, moreover, extensive archival erasure constitutes a basic limitation for art-historical work on individuals. With the sole exception of Emily Carr (1871–1945), the female artists discussed in the pages of this book have left few, if any, traces of their thoughts or personalities. Typically, all that remains is their art. In some ways, then, this book is a new response to an old puzzle: if female subjects are central to the project of feminist art history and yet biographical celebration of the personal has become methodologically suspect and often archivally impracticable, how is the history of Canadian women artists to move forward?8 Existing approaches to this question have tended to focus on the social, cultural, political, and economic determinants of women artists’ personal and professional identities. By carefully delineating the various contexts in which artists and their works gained meaning, feminist scholars have developed effective strategies for circumventing both the absences of the archive and the ideological subtexts of conventional art historiography.9 Historians of Canadian art likewise have developed powerful social frameworks for cultural analysis, probing the links between art and nationhood and honing our awareness of representation’s function as an engine of colonial expansion and economic power.10 Here too, the social determinants of identity – race, class, and gender, especially – have loomed large. This book continues that trend. Indeed it could hardly do otherwise, for the very fact of my bracketing these makers as “women” necessarily brings them within the purview of identity’s predetermined categories of social belonging. And yet the mantle of identity sits heavy on the shoulders of

Selfhood in Canadian Art and Art History

women, attended as it has been by a retinue of expectations, assumptions, and restrictions of being. There is a reductive and reifying thrust to much identity-based thought, which has functioned both as an aggression imposed upon women and as a violence committed by them towards others, whose racial, linguistic, or religious identities they have denigrated in turn. And so as much as I am indebted to the rich legacy of scholarship that takes identity as a primary vector for artistic analysis, I am also uneasy with the frame of reference that it predicates. My response to this difficulty has been to shift that frame just slightly, away from the analysis of identity and towards that which I will more commonly refer to as subjectivity, understood here as the interiorized sense of selfhood that human beings experience. Manifestly, the distinction can never be absolute, for our self-understandings are deeply influenced by the social identities into which we are either born or interpellated. Subjectivity or identity: ultimately it is less a matter of choosing between alternatives than of shifting perspectives on the same phenomenon, of approaching the subject from the inside rather than from without. There are advantages to each viewpoint, but those that attach to subjectivity are, I would argue, particularly welcome just now. Consideration of the self is more likely to reveal the tensions, uncertainties, and fractures that are so characteristic of interior experience. Whereas identity-thinking often tends towards the monolithic, discussions of the self incline towards nuance, leaving room for complexities that might otherwise be too readily foreclosed. By shifting the analysis of Canadian women’s art towards subjectivity, then, my aim is not to leave identity behind but rather to come at it anew. At a moment when the Canadian art world is once again mobilizing around marginalized groups, the fundamental premises of our discourse require continued examination if we are to navigate successfully between the extremes of a reductive and narrowly conceived identity politics on the one hand and the equally harmful assertion that we are somehow “post-identity” on the other. My turn towards subjectivity is, in this respect, in keeping with recent art-historical calls to theorize and deconstruct the dominant ideological role that identity plays, while drawing out the complexities of all identifications.11 In the pages that follow, I approach this task through a mixture of philosophically oriented questioning, historical contextualization, and formal attentiveness. Close looking is, I am inclined to think, one of the things that the book does best, opening the door to consideration of the subject positions that artworks themselves make available to us. From this looking, one overarching observation has emerged to structure my argument here: that women’s creative production is repeatedly marked by a dynamic in which the self both is and is not itself. This ambivalence runs like a refrain throughout the chapters to come, and so both of its aspects merit further elaboration.

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I’m nOt myselF at all

The Self Who Is and Who Is Not

8

In one respect, the works I consider stand as meaningful instances of personal, creative expression, by means of which the self both constitutes and articulates itself. The work of art, recent scholarship reminds us, has been central to the making of the modern subject, with the very possibility of modern, subjective self-awareness laid squarely at the door of aesthetic experience.12 During the slightly more than a century under investigation here – from the 1810s to the 1930s – artistic discourse was as deeply enmeshed in romanticism’s investment in the creative expression of the individual as it was in western aesthetic philosophy’s model of subjective autonomy and coherence. The unity and presumed autonomy of the modern work of art were qualities shared with modern understandings of the subject – a figure who, since Kant, had been understood as being brought to reflective self-awareness through moments of aesthetic contemplation. Kant’s paradigm-setting Critique of Judgment linked selves to the world through aesthetic consciousness, situating beauty in experiences of naturally occurring equivalence between the physical universe and the very structure of our subjective capacities.13 Thereafter, as Terry Eagleton observes, the aesthetic subject was developed as a dream of correspondence between exterior and interior aspects of reality, and art came to function as the link through which flesh-and-blood individuals could find consonance between themselves and the larger structures of existence.14 Later, the bourgeois woman would be encouraged to take her gardens, her home, and even herself as the objects of aesthetic fashioning, regulating herself in accordance with the universal precepts of aesthetic principles that she had been taught to regard as stemming naturally from within herself.15 In a less rarified way, the kind of self-reflexive and self-constitutive activity fostered by aesthetic thought could also be experienced more directly through the fundamental processes and techniques of artistic creation. To create art is, quite profoundly, to experience a sense of self, for it is to participate in a process of doing, of making, and of ordering that produces awareness of the doer, the maker, the orderer. Both through the manipulation of materials and the honing of visual perception, artists bring their attention to bear on the world, including their own position in it. Consider the techniques of linear perspective and the processes of visual verification that underpin the practice of representational drawing common to the women in these pages. Through perspective, drawing cements subjectivity by teaching its practitioners to concretize one aspect of the perceptual awareness that is so central to selfhood: namely, our sense of having what the historian of subjectivity Jerrold Seigel describes as “an ongoing relation with objects in the world from a point of view that persists over time and through changes in bodily position.”16 In this respect, the sense of self is closely linked to the perception of one’s own perceiving. Representational

Selfhood in Canadian Art and Art History

drawing hones such reflexivity by setting up a continual back-and-forth movement, within the artist, between the world and the page, the page and the world. The constant process of verification of one world against another sharpens awareness of an agent who stands far enough apart from both to evaluate the results. As in aesthetic philosophy, with its repeated efforts to bridge the gap between sensing subject and physical world, the practice of mimetic drawing fosters an experience of selfhood as the point around which the world unfolds. All of this, moreover, is quite removed from any artistic intention towards self-reflection. Indeed, of the artists I will discuss in this book, only Emily Carr left any explicit indication that she knowingly used her art to heighten, attain, or express a specific sense of who she was in relation to the world.17 Nevertheless, as Seigel observes, “we make order out of ‘the constant flow of perceptual experience’ with hardly more conscious monitoring than we have of our respiration or other bodily functions.”18 Out of such foundational and barely conscious self-awareness, other more complex awarenesses can follow. That they did so follow is abundantly witnessed by the works under consideration here. For the women artists of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada, however, the articulation of self was often a contradictory matter, in which other awarenesses worked against the experience of subjective unity that romantic art and aesthetic philosophy helped foster. Thus, the female subjects who were both expressed and constituted through the creative process also – and repeatedly – used their art to absent, deny, or unsettle their subjectivities in some way. At times this dynamic is apparent through aspects of dissonance and discord. Consider, for instance, the botanical artist Sarah Lindley Crease (1826–1922), who frequently shunned the use of “I” in her diary in favour of a more distanced reference to “self” – as in her entry for 29 September 1880: “Self also suffering aches & pains & great lassitude.”19 As her biographer has noted, this curious and repeated usage conveys Crease’s marked awareness of selfhood,20 and yet her choice not to inhabit a more natural speaking position also registers an uneasiness in its inscription. Subjective dissonance similarly marks the prose of Anna Jameson, whose visit to Canada at a time of great personal upheaval sharpened her awareness of internal conflict in herself and others. Writing in the pages of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Jameson lamented the “wearing strife” of inner conflict: “How constantly do I read this in the countenances of those I meet in the world! They do not know themselves why there should be this perpetual uneasiness, this jarring and discord within; but it is the vain struggle of the soul, which God created in his own image, to fit its strong, immortal nature for the society which men have framed after their own devices. A vain struggle it is!”21 Selfhood, here, is as if ruptured along the fault line of its very existence, enmeshed in turmoil by its own contradictory aspects. For Jameson, a nineteenth-century feminist with a pronounced awareness of the injustices and inadequacies

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of the Victorian social formation, women could not help but experience those contradictions with particular intensity. She pondered repeatedly the dictum that it is “a woman’s character to be characterless,” renouncing the passivity it implied, yet at the same time apparently recognizing something of the emptiness it described at the heart of femininity within patriarchal society.22 Others, however, experienced their own discomposure more positively, as a moment in which the self might be transcended, expanded, or recalibrated. Emily Carr is the signal example here. As she laboured to attune herself to the forest and sky around her, Carr repeatedly endeavoured to leave her little “self shell” behind altogether. “You yourself are nothing,” she wrote in the pages of her journal, “only a channel for the pouring through of that which is something, which is all.”23 In other moods, she sought to expand herself to fit that larger reality. “We are so heavily cluttered with our bodily wants and necessities … What can one do?” she asked herself. “I suppose it is to fill our own niches as fully and comprehensively as we know how, fill our own place. When it’s full to bursting maybe our limits will be pushed back further.”24 Carr’s approach to subjectivity here is dialectical, her strategy one of inhabiting the self so expansively that its parameters disintegrate. Such examples enable us to glimpse, even if only in a preliminary way, an experience in which the “I” is something less, or more, or perhaps simply other, than itself. Call it “subjective non-correspondence” when the disjunction is inwardly oriented, or “non-correspondence to identity” if the rift is with externally legislated traits. Whatever the primary orientation, it is the unifying claim of this book that such non-aligned reflexive experiences constitute a significant mode of aesthetic subjectivity for women in Canada.

I’m nOt myselF at all

Feminism and the Non-Correspondence to Identity

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At its origins, this argument is a feminist one, for it is feminist cultural criticism above all that has taught me to see in this fashion, identifying the basic tension, pointed out by philosopher Denise Riley, that “while it’s impossible to thoroughly be a woman, it’s also impossible never to be one.”25 There are different explanations of why this should be so. Some, more sociological in orientation, emphasize the gap between women’s lives and the ideologies that have developed to explain and constrain them. Other explanations, more psychoanalytic in bent, emphasize the constitutive misalignment and lack that attends the subject’s entry into the symbolic order, and its projection, with particular insistence, onto women. In keeping with these insights, feminist scholars of women’s art have also foregrounded the dissonances that mark their visual output. Thus, literary and cultural critic Mary Jacobus has written about the “visual dis-

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course of nonidentity” that underpins Berthe Morisot’s painting, while art historian Griselda Pollock has written in a similar vein about the “gap” that characterizes Artemisia Gentileschi’s canvases, running like a fault line between that which was decreed to be feminine by dominant masculine narratives and that which was simply not the same as those narratives.26 Both scholars foreground representation as a site for navigating the aporias of gendered identity. Closer to home, recent interest in the Scrimes-Graham daguerreotype bears out the relevance of feminism to representations in which women both are and yet are somehow not themselves. In 2015, curators Alicia Boutilier and Tobi Bruce employed the daguerreotype as a kind of visual preface to their exhibition The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artists, highlighting its creation of a dissenting subject position beyond and apart from those Victorian conventions that insistently positioned women as empty vessels. In contrast to such conventions, Boutilier and Bruce evoked the element of refusal in the handwritten slip of paper as an instance of women’s “power and ability to self-assert and self-define” against the grain of cultural custom.27 Yet agency alone cannot fully account for the fact that self-definition in the altered photograph is, as we have seen, primarily exercised through its own refusal. Female subjectivity is not so much asserted by the daguerreotype’s unusual combination of word and image as it is disrupted, its presumptions challenged, its foundations unsettled. It was just this self-contradictory aspect that contemporary artists Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue accentuated when they adopted the photograph’s inscription as the title for creative work of their own.28 In their 2015 exhibition and performance I’m Not Myself at All, Mitchell and Logue grappled with the estrangement that fundamentally marks lesbian identity by situating themselves in a lineage of feminist and queer theorists who have analyzed femininity as something they can neither escape from nor conform to.29 Feminism’s power to elucidate the dynamic of subjective non-correspondence lodged inside work by women is most pronounced at the point of its intersection with poststructuralist and psychoanalytic art histories, for these have familiarized us with the idea that all representation is inherently disjointed at some level. On a poststructuralist reading, this incoherence has to do with the differential relations that destabilize signification even as they establish it, undercutting metaphysical assertions of presence with the absences intrinsic to meaning itself. On a psychoanalytic reading, likewise, the subject is riven all the way down, whether by competing urges or by the foundational experience of lack and estrangement from the Real. Both theoretical traditions alert us to the fact that subjective dissonance is not experienced solely by women. Indeed, under the aegis of queer theory, feminist critiques of femininity have been further developed across a spectrum of gender identifications, misidentifications, and disidentifications.

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Thus, to the extent that masculinity has weighed heavily on male artists, we should expect to find traces of subjective dissonance in their work as well. My choice to focus uniquely on women here is a matter of prioritization, for if women are to be equally valued, whether in Canadian art history or in society more broadly, it is imperative that we continue to develop ways of speaking and thinking that generate regard for their achievement and demonstrate its ongoing relevance. This book is my attempt to contribute to that project as it pertains to women who made art in Canada.

I’m nOt myselF at all

Canadianness and Subjective Non-Correspondence

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All of which raises the question of the specificity of Canadianness to the interpretation I develop here. Is there anything especially determinant about the Canadian context that frames the subjects and objects of my investigation, or is it merely accidental? For example, is the fact that Mary Ann Scrimes-Graham was born in Kent, England, and later lived in Portsmouth, Ontario, likely to be relevant to the disjuncture at the heart of her daguerreotype? Or might a similar story be told of artists and artworks anywhere? Here again, my response is equivocal, for while I do not consider that Canadianness was in any way necessary or unique to the dynamic I am describing, I do believe that, much like the experience of being a woman, the experience of living in Canada predisposed many of the artists I will consider to an awareness of subjective dislocation that manifested itself in a sense of non-correspondence. Of being both this and that – or, perhaps more accurately, neither/nor. One indicator of this dislocation has been my own experience of the impossibility of finding satisfactory language in which to denote the basic geopolitical parameters of this study. Should its project be defined as relating to Canadian women artists, or to women and art in Canada? If, in the title of this volume, I have settled for the latter, it is in deference to the fact that many of the women I discuss here would never have considered themselves to be “Canadians” – whether because they resided here for only a short while or because their presence on this land long preceded the advent of Canada as a political entity. And yet the descriptor “in Canada” is not entirely correct either, for it is also the case that this book discusses works that were not produced in the country at all. Some, like the early nineteenth-century paintings of Henrietta Hamilton (1781–1857), wife of the governor of Newfoundland, were made on terrain that would not be part of Canada for another 130 years. Others, like those of the Canadian-born artist Helen McNicoll (1879–1915), were created in Europe and depict its places and peoples. A chief determinant of this complexity is, of course, Canada’s colonial past and its attendant history of both privileged and traumatic dislocations, whether amongst the British women who came to Canada to govern or to

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settle, the Canadian women who later studied and exhibited in the British metropole that would for so long remain the guarantor of artistic success, or the Indigenous women who were forcibly uprooted from their lands. The experiences of other communities of migrants (the French, diasporic African slaves, Asians, Scandinavians, and Eastern and Southern Europeans) add further complexities that I do not consider in the pages of this book, but even along my chosen axis of interaction amongst British, settler-Canadian, and Indigenous women, the tensions and ambivalences produced by colonial dislocations complicated any unified or easy sense of the Canadian identity that the nation’s artists would eventually be at such pains to affirm. For British immigrants, who had left their country behind and yet remained British subjects, residence in Canada involved a mix of the foreign and familiar. Life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada afforded, and imposed, a much different scope for being in the world than did England. “People are expected to do very wonderful things out here,” the amateur watercolourist Julia Bullock Webster (1826–1907) confided to her diary during a visit to her son’s Okanagan homestead, “& to think it all quite natural & of every day occurrence!”30 Throughout the Victorian era, emigrant gentlewomen had been variously taken aback or delighted by the degree of self-sufficiency thrust upon them (or available to them) in Canada.31 The arduousness of settler existence left no time for the enforced idleness abhorrent to Victorian feminists. But emigration could also engender social conservatism, as a generation struggled to recreate in its new world the remembered values of its homeland.32 In Canada’s new urban centres, feminine gentility functioned as a marker of cultural sophistication. Far fewer Canadian than British women worked outside the home,33 and the British domestic ideal gained particular currency in a society where the realities of settlement had added special urgency to women’s unpaid domestic work and their reproductive labour. At times, women marvelled to see how their new surroundings destabilized even their most foundational terms of self-reference. Writing to her family back in England, the settler-artist Anne Langton (1804–1893) described a walk through deep snow: “I looked back at our own tracks, and wondered whether mine would be recognized as that of a woman, enveloped as are my feet in two pairs of stockings, a pair of socks, my house moccassins [sic], and another pair over them.”34 Culturally specific expectations of gender collide with the exigencies of place, here, producing a moment of subjective disorientation. Langton’s adoption of moccasins also points to the strategies employed by settlers faced with what the literary scholar Terry Goldie has influentially described as “the impossible necessity” of becoming “native” to their new land.35 Many of those caught up in the geopolitical structure of settler colonialism found themselves navigating issues of identity and belonging

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in relation to the Indigenous peoples who already called this place their home. Most of the early female artists who came to Canada, as well as a number of those born here, represented Indigenous people and themes. In so doing, they opened themselves to the contradictions of settler colonialism so pithily expressed by Goldie: “The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But the Indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien. But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada?”36 A mixed sense of territorial entitlement and identificatory estrangement thus haunts the work of both British and settler-Canadian artists. A related ambivalence also marks the art and experiences of generations of Canadian-born women who returned to the imperial centre for professional advancement and found themselves negotiating the neither-nor identity of the “colonial,” who was, as Samantha Burton has observed, white but still “not quite.”37 Amongst Indigenous women, the subjective ruptures and dislocations were exponentially more traumatic, and territorial dispossession fell with particular violence on the shoulders of those for whom personhood was bound, ontologically, to the land. Yet even as the enforced acculturation that followed colonization inflicted new and deeply wounding identities on Indigenous women, traditional Indigenous cultural forms, knowledges, and beliefs continued to shape understandings of the self.

I’m nOt myselF at all

An Argument in Two Parts

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There are, then, a range of reasons why the women I discuss in these pages might have felt disconnected from themselves, even as they claimed the capacity to look, record, and imagine. Societal formations around gender and colonialism constitute the book’s two major axes of investigation, though of course these particular determinants coexisted with numerous others. I do not – indeed, cannot – adequately address them all. Social class, for instance, figures in these essays only when it is overtly signalled in the artwork or obviously shaped its production, and yet economic status necessarily affected the circumstances in which all women artists came to their senses of self. Recent intersectional theory highlights the overlaps among such social determinants of identity. If such intersections are already tremendously complex, the further conjunctions of specificities that constitute individuals, from birth order to biochemistry, are immeasurable. Selfhood is also shaped and experienced at the level of intimate, personal connections with people, places, and things. In this book I look closely at women’s physical and psychological ties with their loved ones, notably through the chapter on motherhood, while chapters on botanical illustration, as well as landscape painting and basketry, also consider how selfhood is forged in relation to the world: to

Selfhood in Canadian Art and Art History

the spaces we inhabit, the plants that grow there, and the rain, wind, and sunlight that affect both us and our environment. Self is experienced and thought through the body, which enters these essays through discussions, extended or passing, of physical disability, sexuality, even menstrual cycle. At each point of entry, and still more between them, pressures and forces are exerted under which selves are formed and fractured, embraced or clung to, expanded and dissolved. Taking as given the sense of autonomous subjective unity fostered by aesthetic and perceptual self-awareness, the chapters to come move on to explore the ways in which that sensibility is reinforced but also disrupted or surpassed through the visual and material qualities of the works themselves. These chapters have been conceptualized and written as discrete entities. Earlier versions of some have been previously published as stand-alone essays, and all may be read in this way, but when they are taken together, they map out the larger phenomenon of subjective noncorrespondence with which I began this introduction. My approach to that phenomenon is organized by means of a two-part structure. The essays in part 1, gathered under the rubric of “Identities,” approach their subject in a critical manner, considering non-correspondence as a largely adverse effect born of the inequalities of patriarchal and colonial formations. These chapters foreground the exigencies and impositions of ideologically driven identity constructions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada, as well as their effects on inscriptions of subjectivity. As such, they look to artworks that raise questions about what it meant to be, say, “a woman,” or “a red Indian,” and they explore the difficulties that individuals faced in fully acceding to or communicating an integral sense of selfhood under those circumstances. Chapter 1 presents a close analysis of the affect of blankness and absence that characterizes the 1819 miniature portrait of the Beothuk captive Demasduit (d. 1820) painted by Henrietta Martha Hamilton, wife of the governor of Newfoundland, before Demasduit’s death from tuberculosis and the subsequent extinction of her entire people. Chapter 2 examines the subjective dislocations to be found in the mid-century paintings of Frances Anne Hopkins (1838–1919), an English traveller to Canada who painted herself both into and out of her scenes of wilderness canoe travel amongst First Nations voyageurs. Finally, in chapter 3, I identify and investigate the pictorial gaps and silences that destabilize the otherwise idyllic Edwardian canvases of the Canadian impressionist Helen McNicoll, a woman whose deafness, gender, and colonial status all combined to put her at a remove from dominant cultural narratives. Across these initial chapters, I am primarily concerned with the impediments that have stood in the way of women’s experiences of selfhood, particularly their accession to a sense of subjective unity and unimpaired wholeness. The tenor of my language is frequently negative; I employ a

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terminology of blankness, absence, dislocation, and gaps in order to communicate the sense of disjuncture that haunts the works in question, witnesses to the violences both great and small of colonial and patriarchal society, including the ideological violence so often tied to discourses of identity. However, these essays do not position women solely as the victims of powers that impinged upon them. Rather, as part 1 of the book progresses, negativity comes to function as negative dialectics: that is, as the means by which women negated the narratives of identity that held them in place, registering not only the failure of ideology to fully encompass their existences but also the non-compliances with which they answered it. If it is true, as Theodor Adorno has so famously argued, that throughout history identity has only been achieved negatively, as an imposition upon subjects that suppresses or ignores their differences, then negative dialectics is the process of responding to that reality negatively in turn, thereby creating fissures in the seamless fabric of the self within ideology.38 Identitarian thought is, to this extent, ruptured, its identifications called out as misidentifications. Such an exposure of the emptiness of identity means that a liberatory political practice can only be negative in relation to it. If critique is the best we can do, however, I have also come to wonder if we are not aiming at the wrong thing, and so in part 2 I begin to explore the possibility of alternative modes of thought. Here my investigation of women’s imagery shifts gear, moving gradually away from their subjective experiences of the strictures of dominant identity discourses and towards the possibility of experiences that exceed them. Concomitant with this turn is a shift away from critique and toward the articulation of alternate reconfigurations of selfhood. Thus, whereas part 1 of the book examines images by women for signs of their struggles with a subjective coherence from which they were structurally debarred, the chapters in the second part investigate the possibilities that art puts forward for dissolving that coherence in favour of something else. It is a shift that requires some elaboration. We might take as a starting point philosopher Julia Kristeva’s influential description of the feminist project as a critical refusal of identity – a process of saying “‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it.’”39 The question that goes begging here, however, is just what that “it” might conceivably be. Will it ever be possible, in some shining future day, to see Adorno’s dream in practice and “to think the non-identical under the aspect of identity” without the commission of violence?40 Will female, or Indigenous, or other marginalized subjects be able to occupy selfhood in a state of something better than permanent negation? In the course of writing the essays that constitute part 1 of this book, I became aware of a certain elegiac tendency within them – a vision of personal cohesion that seemed to hover, out of reach yet somehow glimmering on the horizon, like an unspoken dream of whole and happy women. This is the fantasy of an integrated self with which it might finally be

possible to achieve isomorphism, correspondence, unity. Selfhood, on this look-out, is something supremely to be valued – to be cherished, nurtured, and developed against considerable odds, even if all too often it can only be mourned as stillborn. Such a vision is familiar to feminism. As philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out, the “drive to identity, recognition, and self-affirmation” is a persistent ambition of a feminist politics that is often structured “as a struggle around the rights and needs of female subjects … who require a more adequate and respectful recognition.”41 It was this drive that led Anna Jameson, for example, out of her ambivalence about the characterless character of women to her conclusion that “women need in these times character beyond everything else.”42 The dream of whole and securely grounded selves has furnished feminists with both the defensive bulwarks we need to engage in battle and the organizing principle on behalf of which to fight. Female selves have offered feminism its ontological grounding, while indigeneity now arguably performs a similar work within the decolonial project. But if identity has been a problem, is more identity likely to offer the solution? There are other ways of approaching the issue. To Grosz, for instance, the essential question is not to find an adequate way of representing or affirming women’s being but rather to create new possibilities for their becoming: Feminist theory is not the struggle to liberate women, even though it has tended to conceive of itself in these terms … it is the struggle to render more mobile, fluid, and transformable the means by which the female subject is produced and represented. It is the struggle to produce a future in which forces align in ways fundamentally different from the past and present. This struggle is not a struggle by subjects to be recognized and valued, to be and to be seen to be what they are, but a struggle to mobilize and transform the position of women, the alignment of forces that constitute that “identity” and “position,” that stratification which stabilizes itself as a place and an identity.43 Selfhood in Canadian Art and Art History

Such language instantiates the posthumanist challenge to reconceptualize the self, not as a unified subject, nor even as the divided one of psychoanalysis, but as a constellation of forces that conjoin and stabilize only temporarily and that are constantly open to processes of change and reformulation. The self here is neither a precondition nor a goal, but an always-shifting by-product, our constantly changing point of intersection with the world. In a process of gradual reckoning, the chapters in the second half of the book bring this perspective to bear on work by women in Canada.

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Chapter 4 begins the shift, mounting a critique of identitarian thinking by means of women’s botanical drawings. Through an analysis of the apparent shortfall between the ideals of botanical illustration and the realities of Canadian women’s drawings, I consider how the genre put women in contact with the norms, codes, and structures that determine identity, and how they in turn contravened those codes, replacing a logic of identity with one of diversity. Chapter 5 extends the push away from the logic of identity through a comparative study of two popular late nineteenth-century genres for women painters: the reverie scene, in which women are lost in individual thought, and the image of maternité, in which women are tightly bound to the infants in their arms. If the former would appear to be paradigmatic statements of subjective autonomy, the latter would seem, conversely, to dissolve women’s identities in their maternal roles; but my analysis in both cases suggests that appearances can deceive. Following the lines of affective force operative across numerous examples, I demonstrate how these two genres closely parallel each other in their opening up of the self to the world, calling attention to constitutive moments of interpenetration and intersubjectivity that stand as a corrective to both solipsistic individualism and its flip side, maternal self-ablation. Finally, in chapter 6, I attend most directly to the problematic of forces and their intersection as the condition of subjectivity by means of a cross-cultural comparison of the late landscape paintings of Emily Carr and the coiled cedar baskets of Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank, 1872–1939). Here, a re-examination of Carr’s much-maligned mysticism functions together with consideration of traditional Salish ontologies to consider the self as part of a larger fabric of existence. Overall, the tone of my language in this latter half of the book is substantially more positive. In place of gaps, silences, and critique, I speak of diversity, connection, and listening. Non-correspondence with identity no longer figures as a negative dialectics but as the positive expansion – sometimes to the point of dissolution – of the cohesive self. Here, noncorrespondence becomes a paean to diversity and an interconnectedness too rich and complex to be encompassed by the boundaries of any individual. Neither account is meant to be definitive, however, and the shift from one to the other should not be read as a teleological development, but rather as a response to differences in the works themselves, and in the various functions that non-correspondence has played for those who created them and for those who view them now.

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Scholarly Practice in a Field of Echoes I am, of course, one of those viewers, and the trajectory that leads from part 1 to part 2 of the book is also, in part, a product of my own developing theoretical knowledge. Because the book that I have written is as

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much a collection of interpretive essays as a work of history, the question of my implication in its pages cannot pass uncommented. Whether history itself (and especially art history) is ever anything else but an interpretive act remains an open question, but I would argue that such acts are particularly vital in the Canadian context. The comparatively late development of an art-world infrastructure in Canada has combined with its histories of patriarchy and colonialism to ensure that facts about the nation’s historical women artists are notoriously thin on the ground. Consider the example of Helen McNicoll. As one of the growing number of Canadian women who have recently received scholarly attention, McNicoll’s empirical history has already been told; paintings and family members have been traced, newspapers and archives have been combed, and primary sources have been summed up in the catalogue of an important retrospective exhibition. Yet the text of that catalogue barely exceeds a dozen pages.44 In writing this book I have been motivated by the conviction that art by Canadian women has more to offer than such slender facts can sustain. If the art of women like McNicoll is to be the subject of full and generous exploration, the risks of interpretation must be met. Among these risks, that of authorial projection looms particularly large. As a creative female subject born and working in a Canada that still bears an especially powerful imprint of its past, I am unavoidably caught up in the very nexus of ideas that I am attempting to explore, and the overlong labour invested in these pages has presented ample occasion for reflection on the more hubristic aspects of my endeavour to assess subjectivity as it figures in the work of others. At times, indeed, the words of the women themselves have called me up short on this point. Here, for instance, is Emily Carr on the writerly urge to lay bare the inner workings of others: “This would-be smart psychology makes me sick; it’s so impertinent, digging round inside people and saying why they did things, by what law of mind they came to such and such, and making hideous false statements.”45 Truth, however, is a trickier business than Carr was willing to allow. In this book I have endeavoured to be rigorous in my unearthing and presentation of historical facts, but I recognize that the truths contained in its pages are as likely to be my own as those of the artists I am investigating, and that in representing the non-correspondences that reside in these works, I am quite possibly projecting my own absorption with questions of subjective ambivalence and self-formation onto artists who, for the most part, have said nothing on the matter for posterity. It is a situation commonly faced by those whose approach to history is inspired by a desire to redress its absences. Writing about those who write about women from the past, historian Joan Scott describes an “echo effect” that attends our labour: a sending forth and picking up of sounds, past and present, in a recursive process that raises questions around “the distinction between the original sound and its resonances and the role of time in

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the distortions heard.”46 The question then becomes: is this recursivity a problem to be avoided? To what extent should the art historian’s endeavour be that of opening a one-way channel of communication that enables the messages and truths of the past to be vouchsafed, without distortion, to us today? In response, I would argue that if the history of women and art in Canada is to be a vibrant field of investigation, it will be as much for its ability to actively engage our responses and identifications in the here and now as for any access to past identities that it provides. The interpretations that I offer in these pages derive from very contemporary concerns – concerns around the legacies and continuations of colonialism, the ongoing power imbalances between genders, the difficulties of navigating identity, the drive for recognition, and the conflicted human experiences of connectedness and alienation. Thus, for example, when I choose to focus on Helen McNicoll’s career and reception in England rather than on the reception of her Impressionism in Canada, it is because of my very contemporary concern to move Canadian art history away from the inward-turning orientation handed down to it by its nationalist progenitors and open it up to intersections with a larger global context. Or again, when I undertake to write about Emily Carr’s or Sophie Frank’s relations to the land, my orientation is doubtless influenced by current concerns about ecological crisis and a corresponding desire to rethink the terms of our relation to the natural world. My perceptions of historical women’s subjectivities are equally contemporary in nature, and it is both eminently meet and pragmatically unavoidable that this should be so. Yet I do not consider that my interpretations of the past exist in a contemporary vacuum. Indeed, I depend heavily on the extent to which parallel considerations, differently articulated, were shared by women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I have endeavoured to bring these correspondences to the fore. Scott’s metaphor of the echo is thus an apposite one, for it is just such a closely tethered back and forth between past and present that I have striven to create here. The degree of attunement between past and present gives each act of art historical elucidation its texture and depth, and, I hope, its power to convince. At times it has been difficult to come to grips with this transhistorical facet of research on women and art in Canada. From my position as Euro-Canadian woman in a society where colonization remains a reality for Indigenous people, the premise of an ongoing connectedness with the settlers of yore becomes an uncomfortable proposition. As Indigenous scholars and activists reclaim their cultural heritage, Canadian art historians are rethinking the premises of our discipline. When writing about the art of this place we call home, how are we to position ourselves in relation to Indigenous art and culture? Do we remain silent and thus reinscribe the exclusions and omissions of old? Or do we undertake to speak about Indigenous art and risk perpetuating the appropriative and assimilative gestures that underpin the present-day “politics of recognition” in Canada?47

Selfhood in Canadian Art and Art History

As the discipline of Canadian art history begins to grapple with these questions, its individual practitioners find ourselves learning as we go. This book begins with an exploration of Indigenous people as subjects of European representation. In choosing to end it with a discussion of Indigenous women as cultural producers, I have found myself questioning the utility of my accustomed scholarly methods. At times, for instance, I have abandoned the western historian’s preoccupation with historical specificity and change in order to foreground transhistorical connections between past and present that are particularly important within Indigenous communities. Thus, my approach to the historical baskets of Sophie Frank has been shaped by dialogue with ten very contemporary weavers and basketmakers: Sesemiya (Tracy Williams, Squamish), Debra Sparrow (Musqueam), Jessica Casey (Sechelt), Lorna Williams (Lil’wat), Seliliye Claxton (Saanich), Bill and Fran James (Lummi), Dionne Paul (Sechelt/Nuxalk), Isabel Rorick (Haida), and Susan Pavel.48 In the Squamish Nation, community members and elders have also spoken with me of their ancestors, the women who made the baskets I am discussing here.49 I have cited their words extensively, hoping thereby to expand the sphere of contemporary interpretation beyond my privileged and culturally restricted authorial perspective. Nevertheless, my presentation of my interlocutors’ words and ideas is also an interpretation of them, and one that evinces my own western cultural and intellectual heritage and priorities; the lessons I have taken away from basketry are different from the lessons that basketry teaches within its own communities. My challenge as a settler scholar has been to be transparent and respectful in my presentation of those differences, while also building on commonalities. One such point of differentiated connection pertains to a conviction that objects, including works of art, have their own agential force, and this too becomes a factor in moving aesthetic interpretation beyond the sphere of solipsistic projection. For even more than the truths of particular historical individuals, the realities I am endeavouring to connect with in this book are ones opened up for speculation by the works themselves. Hermeneutic and deconstructive art historians have long been split on whether or not a work possesses a “truth” beyond what is projected upon it by its viewers. Do the material and visual qualities of an object make claims on its viewers, resulting in interpretations that might be said to be more or less “right” – that is, more or less truthful to the work itself?50 I rather suspect that they do, and so I naturally hope that my readers will sense such a correspondence in the interpretations I offer here. If they do, however, it will likely not be based on any metaphysical essence inherent in the work but rather in my ability to mobilize the affective and cognitive affordances that its material dispositions make accessible to us. Here, I have learned from Michael Ann Holly and Mieke Bal, whose respective understandings of artworks as “rhetorical” and “theoretical” objects ring true to me in that they emphasize the capacity of material things to propose and embody modes

21

I’m nOt myselF at all

of thought, and to assume their place as active interlocutors within art historical dialogue.51 By thus relying heavily (though not exclusively) on artworks to pry open discussions of subjectivity, I hope to offer a book that speaks to both the means and the ends of a liberatory art historical practice. With respect to the question of the subject, the objectives of feminist art history have too often been presented as a simple dichotomy: either the positive celebration of female artists and the recuperation of feminine contributions in the face of patriarchy, or the critique of ideologies of sexual difference within representation. Parallel divisions have prevailed within the cultural histories of other marginalized groups. In one account, it has seemed, the subject is naively mobilized as an autonomous and possibly essentialized individual, while in the other it has appeared to be vitiated of historical agency and reduced to an empty signifier. In the context of this dilemma, I have found the words of Elizabeth Grosz, already cited here, to be a touchstone worth returning to in their advocacy of a cultural criticism that works “to render more mobile, fluid, and transformable the means by which the female subject is produced.”52 By focusing on the dynamics of subjective non-correspondence that underpin the artworks I examine here, I endeavour to participate in this loosening of the stranglehold of identity – whether through its refusal or through its circumnavigation altogether. It is in this spirit that the book’s chapters unfold.

22

PART ONE Part One IDENTITIES Identities

ABSENCE Absence

chaPter 1

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

All through the summer and well into the fall of 1808, an oil painting sat in the middle of the Newfoundland forest, exposed to the elements and unregarded, save perhaps by the animals. The setting, an unaccustomed one for any work of art, was particularly incongruous for this one: a largescale, multi-figured narrative canvas in Romantic history-painting style. Appearances much to the contrary, however, the painting’s unusual fate betokened neither mishap nor neglect but was the result of careful and extended planning. The work had been made to order for its forest setting, a commission from the former chief justice of the Newfoundland colony, John Reeves, to his family friend, the Irish painter Amelia Curran (1775–1847).1 Earlier that spring, Reeves had delivered Curran’s finished work to the Portsmouth docks, where Newfoundland’s governor, Sir William Holloway, had been personally awaiting its arrival before embarking with it for St John’s.2 From there, an armed Navy schooner had conveyed Curran’s painting up the eastern coast of the island into the Bay of Exploits, and thence to its destination. All told, the expense of the undertaking must have been considerable. Fortunate, then, that the Colonial Office was footing the bill, for Curran’s canvas was en route to the forest on official business, charged with the task of altering the trajectory of the colony’s future as laid down by its recent past.3 The audience intended for Curran’s prospective history painting was the Beothuk population of Newfoundland, by then one of only a few Eastern

IdentItIes 26

Indigenous nations who had chosen not to enter into trading relations with the British. Instead, increasing competition for access to fish and furbearing animals had resulted in mounting hostilities between the two groups. Faced with unwonted hardships of their own, and resentful of what they perceived as Beothuk infringements of their property rights, settlers grew increasingly violent in their actions towards the island’s Indigenous inhabitants. Occasional trade between newcomers and natives dwindled and then ceased altogether as the Beothuk were pushed out of rich coastal fishing areas and forced inland to escape those who would kill them. By 1768 the military author of a report to the colony’s governor accused British fishermen of an attitude of “inhumanity which sinks them far below the level of savages.”4 The following year, the Colonial Office began to order all new governors to issue decrees for the protection of the Beothuk.5 None of this, however, was visible in the canvas that Amelia Curran painted. Instead, Curran focused on an imagined future in which an officer of the Royal Navy shook hands with a Beothuk chief. Behind this central pairing, English sailors and Beothuk men traded blankets for furs, while mothers from each group watched with delight as their children embraced one another. Still further back, a young English seaman courted an Indian maid.6 Once the painting was in situ, blankets, hatchets, and other objects similar to those painted by Curran were arrayed on the ground at its base as gifts, the close parallel meant to convey the British desire to make good on other aspects of the represented scene as well. Together, image and trade goods were envisioned as a means of gaining Beothuk trust and promoting the friendly and economically profitable relations that the Colonial Office still hoped might be possible for the island’s inhabitants. To this end, a detail of sailors came daily to check on the gifts, ready to replenish them should they have been removed. For the schooner’s commander, Lieutenant J.W. Sprott, promotion hung on the successful initiation of such friendly contact. In the event, however, the lieutenant was not to be so rewarded, for no goods were ever taken, and if any Beothuk ever saw the image, they gave no sign of having done so. Undaunted, Governor Holloway ordered the attempt to be repeated the following summer, again to no effect. Curran’s canvas was returned to St John’s, where it is thought to have been destroyed by the fire that later consumed the courthouse where it was stored when not in active service. In retrospect, the failure of this remarkable scheme is hardly surprising, and even at the time, people mocked it. From London, the secretary to the Privy Council wrote to Holloway wryly lamenting that “the united efforts of our friend Reeves and Miss Cuoran [sic] could not tame and catch a single Indian.”7 Such talk of “catching” an Indian was no mere figure of speech, for prior to the more peaceable painting-in-the-woods scheme, and again after it, the primary means attempted by the British in Newfoundland to effect the closer relations so desired by London was precisely the taking of

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

Beothuk captives. Between 1758 and 1822, at least seven Beothuk women and five children were abducted from their families.8 Once initiated into European culture, the captives were meant to be treated kindly, taught English, and returned to act as intermediaries who would convince their communities of British benevolence and superiority. In actuality, almost every abduction was accompanied by the violent death of one or more Beothuk, and no captive was ever the means of effecting further communication between the two peoples.9 In these circumstances, it now seems extraordinarily naïve that anyone might have imagined that a painting could undo the suspicion and hostility so brutally engendered. Possibly, British misunderstandings of other Indigenous peoples’ ritual uses of mimesis – in which representation was sometimes deployed to mediate between different worlds – led to erroneous expectations about the sway that imagery in general might be expected to have over the Beothuk.10 More likely, however, the scheme was undertaken in the absence of any better idea for how to fulfil London’s orders. Certainly, the plan was taken seriously by those in the highest authority, with funds appropriated to the cause by Lord Castlereagh himself, then secretary of state for war and the colonies and charged with the oversight of the entire British Empire.11 The political, economic, and personal hopes that were pinned on Amelia Curran’s painting raise questions about the role of representation, and particularly women’s representation, in the context of Canada’s colonial history. Literary historian Fiona Polack – the scholar first to identify “Miss Cuoran” as Amelia Curran – has suggested that the maternal and courtship themes in the canvas were probably an innovation on the part of its female artist.12 What function, if any, did women’s art play in mediating intercultural contact in during the early phases of Britain’s occupation of North America? And what do their artworks tell us about the processes of establishing, navigating, and registering the divergent subjectivities of settler and Indigenous women in the territory that we have since come to know as Canada? The intersection of art and subjectivity amongst women living on these lands was fundamentally altered by European settlement, by the relations of violence, curiosity, and desire that it engendered, and by their conjunction with other frameworks for understanding selfhood. In this chapter I explore these questions by means of a second work of art: a portrait of the Beothuk woman Demasduit (d. 1820), painted by Henrietta Martha Hamilton (1781–1857), the English wife of the governor of Newfoundland. Unlike Amelia Curran – who never visited North America, and whose Romantic sensibilities were not subject to any check from personal experience of its colonial realities – Hamilton was resident in Newfoundland for five years, between 1818 and 1823. During this time she came to have firsthand knowledge of the lethal combination of imported disease, starvation, and outright murder that had by then reduced the

27

FIg. 1.1

IdentItIes

Henrietta Martha Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit, 1819, is inscribed on the back, “Mary March / a Female Native / Indian of the / Red Indians who / inhabit Newfound / land painted by / Lady Hamilton / 18.”

28

island’s Indigenous population to a few dozens.13 Hamilton was present in St John’s in the spring of 1819 when a young Beothuk woman in her early twenties, Demasduit, was taken captive, renamed Mary March, and brought to the capital in the mistaken expectation of a reward from the governor, who insisted instead upon the immediate return of the captive to her community.14 It is generally presumed that the artist must have painted Demasduit’s portrait while arrangements for this voyage were being made. Like Amelia Curran’s lost canvas, the Hamilton miniature is a remarkable artifact in the annals of colonial representation in British North America. In contrast to the vast majority of images of Indigenous people made by British women, Hamilton did not draw Demasduit in watercolour on paper for her album or sketchbook; nor did she follow ethnographic conventions in making a full-length drawing that focused on dress and physical description.15 Rather she created a portrait in miniature, worked on a small

rectangle of ivory, not three inches high. The choice was unusual, both for the emphasis on subjectivity that a portrait conveys and for the implications of interpersonal connection that typically attended the miniature format. What makes the work truly exceptional, however, is its status as the only European image of a Beothuk person ever to have resulted from a direct encounter between the two cultures, for within months Demasduit was dead from tuberculosis, and by the 1830s British settlers had proclaimed the Beothuk to be entirely extinct.16 In view of this, Hamilton’s unusual artwork has become the extraordinary emblem of an entire people’s fate.

Subjects, Absent and Present

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

Like many images that perform an iconic function, Hamilton’s painting is, paradoxically, difficult to really see. From the nineteenth century onwards, some version of the work (and there have been at least seven) has appeared in almost every illustrated discussion of the Beothuk people, yet in a sense the painting itself has become invisible – a gateway to the larger concerns of abduction, murder, colonial conquest, and genocide.17 At issue here is the portrait’s status as a documentary artifact. Hamilton’s miniature is preserved in the documentary art collection of Library and Archives Canada and has typically been employed by scholars as illustration. In this manner, its status as a work of art has been subsumed by its broader historical context. It is easy enough to understand why this has been so; in the face of human extinction, what room for art-historical talk of brushstroke, medium, or material? The legacy of formalist decontextualization that dogs discussion of such painterly considerations leaves them all too easily consigned to a realm of aesthetic nicety that pales by comparison with the enormity of Beothuk history. Add to this the obviously amateur quality of Hamilton’s miniature, and it has been natural enough for commentators to focus on the work’s context in preference to its pictorial qualities. But there is another reason too for this propensity to look through Hamilton’s artwork rather than at it, and this has to do with exactly those aesthetic qualities that have so readily been overlooked in discussions of the work – notably, with a certain affect of blankness, indirectness, and absence that they engender. Through these qualities, I argue, the Demasduit miniature not only illustrates loss but comes, indexically, to embody it, making the portrait singularly well suited to perform its historical function as a marker of human extinction. On this view, aspects of brushstroke, medium, and materiality do not so much elide the historical significance of the piece as they instantiate it, giving the impression of a sitter who isn’t quite there. As we shall see, Hamilton’s miniature places absence on permanent display, and in the context of Beothuk history, the historical implications of this affect are intensified to a degree that is chilling to contemplate and impossible to overstate.

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IdentItIes 30

Absence, however, is only part of the story I wish to tell, for the portrait of Demasduit also exerts an opposing affective pull by virtue of its nature as a miniature painting. Drawing the beholder into an intimate viewing relationship, Hamilton’s portrait, like all miniatures, is suffused with an aura of presence that works quite differently from its other affective qualities. Ultimately this tension between what might be termed a pictorial vacancy and a phenomenological fullness cuts to the heart of the miniature’s pictorial and historical significance. My primary task in this chapter is to call this tension more fully into view, for I wish to argue that in the context of Canada’s ongoing history as a settler-colonial society, aspects of presence and absence are central to women’s aesthetic inscriptions of subjectivity – both their own and others’. Significantly, the dynamics of presence and absence that mediate women’s symbolization of self and other also link the past and the present. To inquire into the pictorial and phenomenological tensions that structure this 1819 portrait is not only to embark on a discussion of subjectivity as this was experienced in the nineteenth century; it is also to come face to face with the continuing significance of Beothuk history for contemporary Canadian identity and the place of representation within it. Works of historical art claim our attention for many reasons, not least for the access to the past that they seem to promise as they evoke distant temporal horizons, often with a singular immediacy. Yet an image never quite corresponds to the thing that it portrays, and viewers can never truly slip their temporal moorings in one moment in time completely enough to enter fully into another. For this reason, the most enduring images of the past are those with the ability to serve as focalizers and interlocutors for the concerns of contemporary viewers. The tension between presence and absence that structures Lady Hamilton’s miniature portrait of Demasduit makes it such an image, for this tension is an ongoing facet of subjective experience in Canada. Of these two terms, absence is the one that has most decisively shaped public discourse on the Beothuk. The extinction of an entire people exemplifies the devastation that colonialism wrought upon North American First Peoples, and the magnitude of the loss has deeply affected both settler and Indigenous nations. People disagree over crucial aspects of this absence, however. There is, for example, no consensus on the emotionally loaded question of whether or not it constitutes an instance of genocide.18 More fundamentally still, the very premise of Beothuk extinction has recently been called into question by observers who have begun to insist on the likelihood that Beothuk DNA still exists in the gene pool as the result of intermarriage with the Mi’kmaq and Innu peoples, and also with French fishermen on the western coast of the island.19 Such claims for a continuing Beothuk presence have been of particular importance to Indigenous people seeking to further the decolonial project by countering

the pernicious rhetorical trope of the Vanishing Indian, so effectively deployed by settlers seeking to establish themselves as the legitimate occupants of their own “native land.”20 The complex realities of Indigenous absence and presence continue to trouble settler society, and as Canadians struggle to come to emotional and political terms with their colonial past and present, the Beothuk have returned to haunt the settler imagination as well. Since the 1970s, and with increasing frequency in the past decade, Euro-Canadians have also sought to restore voice and life to the Beothuk people, largely through novels and films.21 Thus, if the absence of the Beothuk reverberates as a foundational and traumatic moment in Canadian and Indigenous histories, so too does a Beothuk presence continue to shape the two groups’ shared and separate cultural imaginaries. My interest in Lady Hamilton’s miniature is thus not only the expression of an academic interest in long-dead nineteenth-century figures but also a response to the more pressing need to understand how that history continues to shape communal experiences and senses of selfhood even today.

Blankness

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

The specific historical narrative that Henrietta Hamilton’s miniature most frequently illustrates is that of Demasduit’s kidnapping and the murder of her husband by settlers. These events are unusually well documented. No fewer than four eyewitness accounts exist – two by the leader of the expedition, one from a settler participant, and one from a member of Demasduit’s own family, Shanawdithit (d. 1829), who was herself taken captive in 1823. These accounts have served as the basis of innumerable retellings of Demasduit’s story, both at the time and since.22 Ironically, however, it is this very narrative that most insistently calls into question the illustrative potential of Hamilton’s miniature and its capacity to straightforwardly represent a history, for when narrative and image are taken side by side, a considerable gap opens up between them. The basic outlines of the historical narrative are as follows.23 On 5 March 1819, after a journey of five days, a group of Newfoundland colonists tracked their way to a Beothuk encampment at the shores of an inland lake. Vexed by small but recurrent losses of personal property at the hands of the Beothuk, the men were determined to mount a response. As they descended upon the encampment, its inhabitants fled, but one woman – Demasduit – could not run as fast as the others, for she had only recently given birth. According to one participant in the day’s events, she passed her baby to others for safety and struggled to follow through the snow.24 Pursued intently by the leader of the expedition, she eventually fell to her knees and bared her breasts, a gesture that the settlers interpreted as a plea for mercy based on gender. Three Beothuk men returned to free her, including her husband, Nonosabasut, and his brother. The settlers, however, refused

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IdentItIes

FIgs. 1.2–1.4 Details of Hamilton’s miniature of Demasduit show the uniformity of her brushstroke and the flatness it creates.

32

to relinquish their prize, and in the struggle that ensued, the two brothers were shot and killed. Nonosabasut may or may not have also been stabbed with a bayonet. The woman’s further attempts at escape were thwarted, and she was transported, closely guarded, from her home. Without a mother to feed it, her baby died within days.25 Demasduit was brought to Twillingate and, when the ice thawed, to St John’s, where she resided during part of May and early June. An attempt to return her to her community that summer ended in failure, and in January of 1820, before a second attempt could be mounted, she died of the tuberculosis to which she had no natural immunity. At some point during her captivity, probably early on, she was renamed: Mary March, for the month in which she had been taken.

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

Even in its barest outlines, the story is horrifying. Turning from it to Demasduit’s portrait, however, is to enter a completely different affective world, for the face that Henrietta Hamilton has given us appears to be completely untouched by violence. Instead, the sitter’s features are relaxed, with no suggestion of turmoil or anxiety creasing her brow. Her nose and cheeks are soft, rounded, and childlike, the corners of her mouth upturned in the permanent suggestion of a smile. Overall, the effect is one of sweetness and placidity, as large, wide-set eyes create an impression of trusting naïveté that ill accords with a knowledge of what the sitter had witnessed. So great, indeed, is the gap between narrative and image that it is difficult to reconcile them as referencing the same historical person. Faced with two such different versions of reality, the seamless transition between image and history that typically attends the display and reproduction of Hamilton’s portrait is called into question, and her miniature comes to visibility in a new way. If the face on Lady Hamilton’s ivory is rendered less believable by Demasduit’s personal history, this is largely because it has been emptied of psychological depth. Various formal factors create this impression of vacancy. The gaze of the sitter in Hamilton’s miniature is unfocused, the result of a slight discrepancy in the direction of the eyes: one looking more or less forward, the other directed upwards and to her left. An ungradated tonal handling lends peculiar prominence to the whites, and without shading to create the illusion of orbs set within occipital sockets, a distinct flatness is created. This surface orientation is characteristic of the work

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IdentItIes 34

more generally. While the brushstrokes change direction to delineate the contours of the features, there is a pronounced superficiality in the overall handling of forehead, cheeks, and chin, as if the bone structure that the strokes intended to describe was more decorative than foundational. Such flatness slips easily into blankness. Whereas miniaturists typically enhance the illusion of psychological depth by distinguishing the face from the rest of the painted surface through the use of finer brushwork, Hamilton adopts a relatively uniform approach. Her handling of the hair, for example, seems to carry over into the sitter’s forehead and temple. Clothing, face, and background are treated with a sure but only moderately varied touch. Together, these details create a surface orientation devoid of depth. None of this seems to have struck nineteenth-century observers as noteworthy, however, and Lady Hamilton’s contemporaries praised her painting for its excellent likeness. An 1820 account penned by the naval commander Sir Hercules Robinson noted that the miniature of Demasduit was “said to be strikingly like her,” and subsequent commentators have repeated the claim.26 Given the early date, no photographic record exists from which we might judge for ourselves whether Robinson’s comments were anything more than the flattery due from a rising young officer to the naval governor’s wife. A recent forensic reconstruction of Nonosabasut’s skull – which is now held, along with that of Demasduit, in the vaults of the National Museums of Scotland – lends the allure of empirical possibility to the persistent fantasy of knowing what the Beothuk were really like, but since no reconstruction has been attempted for Demasduit, any speculation on the matter of the painting’s correspondence to her actual appearance necessarily falls back on the written record. At first glance, this record would seem to support the portrait’s claim to verisimilitude. Descriptions of Demasduit as a gentle, patient young woman with a “mild and pleasing” countenance conform well with the portrait that Hamilton has left us. The more one delves into the written accounts, however, the less convincing the descriptions become.27 Their chief narrator, Hercules Robinson, arrived in Newfoundland only after Demasduit’s death, which doubtless goes some way to explaining the contradictory characterizations contained in his description of her. The Mary March of Robinson’s text is helpful and gentle, yet she is also stubborn and sulky. She is playful, with a good sense of the ridiculous, yet in all of her actions she “but dragged a lengthened chain.”28 Mary March is modest, but she likes exhibiting herself to strangers. She is mild, but she is also arch. With every contradiction, the subject of these statements recedes into further obscurity. Lady Hamilton’s miniature comes no closer to pulling her into focus. Subsequent versions of the portrait only heighten awareness of the limitations of the original. Ingeborg Marshall, the leading historian of the Beothuk, has identified seven related portraits, all copies, at varying

FIg. 1.5 William Gosse’s miniature, A Female Red Indian from Newfoundland, is one of two copies he made from Hamilton’s original in July 1841.

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

degrees of remove, from Hamilton’s 1819 ivory.29 The first to be made (and the source for a number of subsequent versions) were two small watercolours, dated July 1841 and generally considered to be the work of William Gosse (1808–1890), a miniaturist who was resident in Newfoundland at the time.30 The copyist’s hand is in full view here. Aside from the obvious similarities of pose, colour, clothing, and hairstyle, the derivative origin of Gosse’s miniatures is apparent in more telling details: the unusual curl of hair under the ear, the wispy strands that escape from the centre parting, and the irises that do not meet the lower lids of the eyes – an unusual effect and unrealistic for a head held at this degree of inclination. An anonymous inscription on the back of one of the miniatures confirms it to be a copy of Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit, and yet the faces are markedly dissimilar. In addition to the closed mouth, the nose Gosse portrays is wider, and

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IdentItIes 36

the features noticeably fuller; sweetness has been replaced by sadness and stoicism. These discrepancies are sufficiently striking that Marshall has proposed an entirely different subject for the portrait: Demasduit’s niece, Shanawdithit.31 Evidence for the identification is circumstantial, however, and since Shanawdithit died thirteen years before Gosse painted his miniatures, the most plausible scenario seems to be that he copied from Hamilton’s painting but altered the features – either to correspond with his memory of Shanawdithit, whom he might have seen and sketched, or to conform to his own emotional response to the fate of the Beothuk at a time when public discourse around them had begun to assume a tragic and elegiac air.32 Either way, the indeterminacy of identity that attends the image brings us face to face with a familiar emptiness. Are we looking at Demasduit or Shanawdithit? A copy or an original portrait? Both or neither? Whatever the case, we are back on accustomed terrain, confronted with a sitter who is but isn’t there. In the copies, as in Hamilton’s original, as in Robinson’s written description, Demasduit exists in a zone of almostbut-not-quite, of presence constantly undermined by absence, in which the woman herself perpetually recedes from view. Absence here is my leitmotif. Call it emptiness, blankness, or vacancy, absence haunts this instance of colonial portraiture at a deeply structural level, and the effect is to position the image somewhere outside of the understanding of portraiture that has dominated western modernity: namely, as the creative invocation of personal presence. The privileged relation between portraiture and subjective presence has been described by the hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. For Gadamer, the true work of a portraitist is neither to faithfully render incidental aspects of the sitter’s physical form nor to idealize their outward countenance, but rather to call forth an “increase in being,”33 giving shape and form to the sitter’s inner being – what Gadamer variously calls their “essential” or “true” appearance.34 This quasi-ontological function was intensified in the case of miniature portraits. As the art historian Marcia Pointon has observed, English miniature portrait objects reached their apogee within a culture of institutionalized separation, as military and naval campaigns, mercantile expansionism, and emigration inscribed absence into the social matrix of British life.35 One of the tasks of the miniature portrait object was to combat such separations through materially engendered affects of presence. Worn on the body as a locket or brooch, sometimes including a lock of the sitter’s hair, the corporeal presence of the miniature portrait object augmented its mimetic or representational likeness, conjuring forth its sitter’s subjectivity in an unusually tangible way. It is just this kind of existential surplus that animates a 1710 miniature of the Haudenosaunee chief Oh Nee Yeath Ton No Rion, executed by the London miniaturist Bernard Lens III (1682–1740). The sitter was part of

FIg. 1.6 Bernard Lens III, Oh Nee Yeath Ton No Rion, 1710.

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

a four-man delegation of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Anishnaabe (Algonquin) chiefs who visited the court of Queen Anne in 1710 to forge an alliance against the French. Because their mission was of importance to British geopolitical interests, the chiefs were received as kings negotiating on behalf of their different nations.36 Their portraits – both full length and miniature – were commissioned. Lens’s likeness is a superb rendering, in which expertly articulated bone structure and direct gaze conjure forth a self-possessed, even haughty man. Far more effectively than the large oils by Verlest now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the miniature conveys a sense of psychological presence. By comparison, Lady Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit seems hollow. Resolutely superficial in technique and aspect, it calls forward no inward essence, offers no Gadamerian “increase in being.” If the copy by Gosse

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FIg. 1.7

IdentItIes

An image of Demasduit published in Philip Tocque’s Kaleidoscope Echoes (1895). The author, a Newfoundland clergyman, knew William Gosse.

38

succeeds, at least partially, in infusing the figure with a sadness that suggests a degree of subjective interiority, the woman whom Gosse portrays is nevertheless somehow monstrous. Her skewed and drooping features undermine her basic humanity, as her left eye sinks down the side of her face. Not until 1895 does a portrait of Demasduit appear that seems both humane and psychologically appropriate, but by then the image had become an almost total fabrication – the creation of a professional artist, likely working out of Toronto from a copy of a copy of Hamilton’s original, the influence of which nevertheless remains visible in the figure’s clothing and the details of her hair. Judging these works by portraiture’s conventional standards, there can be little doubt that Lens succeeded where Hamilton and her followers failed. Much of this is a matter of artistic ability. While Lens was a highly trained professional, the son of an engraver and widely considered to be one of the most talented miniaturists of his day, Henrietta Hamilton’s reputation was that of a “Virtuous and Accomplished Lady.”37 Her artistic training had almost certainly been limited to that considered necessary to demonstrate the gentility of a family whose wealth was still relatively new.38

Yet in the remainder of this chapter I want to make the case that in a way – though doubtless one different from that envisaged by Gadamer – Lady Hamilton’s portrait is ultimately successful in conjuring a certain surplus that exceeds the limits of faithful representation. To be sure, the excess of being that Hamilton’s miniature calls forth is not that of the well-formed and fully self-possessed subjectivity captured by Lens, a metropolitan man working at the centre of imperial power and representing another man engaged in nation-to-nation diplomacy. By contrast, Hamilton’s miniature articulates the aporia of subjectivity as it was experienced between two women in a settler-colonial outpost where customary identities and senses of selfhood were being dramatically reconfigured, and where questions of presence – like those of absence – were being settled in a very different way. The miniature’s blankness, I suggest, is not just a matter of lack of painterly skill (though doubtless it is that too); it is also part and parcel of a larger social reality.

“A Meeting of Two Subjectivities”?

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

In 1819, roughly forty thousand settlers inhabited the colony of Newfoundland. Europeans (first the British, then the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish) had long been drawn to the island as a base from which to access a lucrative seasonal fishing trade. England had launched its colonial claim to the island as early as 1583, but its mercantilist economic policies had discouraged the development of permanent, large-scale settlement. When war with France disrupted the traditional migratory fishery from the west of England, however, a resident fishery began to grow, and between 1793 and 1815, the island’s settler population more than doubled.39 Agitation for representative government and the local administration of justice initially met with little response, but the appointment of Sir Charles Hamilton as governor was part of a slowly changing British attitude toward the colony. The last of the admiral-governors, Hamilton was also the first to bring his family with him. Lady Hamilton’s presence on the island was thus especially important, for it functioned as an indicator of the colony’s acknowledged permanence. Nothing is known of the specific circumstances under which Henrietta Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit was created. We do not even know for certain that Demasduit sat to Hamilton for the image, though this was typical practice for portrait miniatures and seems by far the most likely scenario. During her time in St John’s, Demasduit became something of a celebrity, and there can be little doubt that she was brought to see Lord Hamilton in person – not least because her captors hoped to collect a reward. It seems probable that Lady Hamilton, who enjoyed a local reputation as “the kind and constant friend of the Widow and the Orphan,” would also have wished to meet her.40

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FIg. 1.8 Shanawdithit, Sketch

ii , 1829. An inscription identifies the upper scene as “The taking of Mary March on the north side of the Lake.”

40

What might such a meeting have been like? In her comments on portraiture, Linda Nochlin highlights the reciprocal subjective relationship that she considers to be inherent to the portrait sitting. “Unlike any other genre,” Nochlin writes, “the portrait demands the meeting of two subjectivities: if the artist watches and judges the sitter, the sitter is privileged, by the portrait relation, to watch and judge back.”41 In view of the blankness I have been at pains to describe, however, it is reasonable to wonder whether Nochlin’s observation is transposable to situations of extreme colonial violence, such as that which existed in Newfoundland. If we are to judge by the outcome of the 1808 painting-in-the-woods scheme, the field of British-Beothuk relations would not seem to offer much in the way of scope for occasions of aesthetically engineered reciprocity. That works of art could serve as a meeting point for Beothuk and settler subjectivities would, however, be subsequently demonstrated in a series of remarkable drawings by Demasduit’s niece, Shanawdithit. Like her aunt before her, Shanawdithit was captured by British settlers and freed by authorities but was never able to rejoin her community. Alone, ill, and seriously malnourished, she returned to live amongst settlers for six years, demonstrating skill and versatility in both traditional Beothuk arts, such

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

as carving and birch-bark patterning, and European techniques, such as paper cutting and drawing.42 During a four-month period towards the end of her life, between September 1828 and January 1829, Shanawdithit used drawing as a form of communication with William Eppes Cormack, her self-designated protector and the president of the Bœothik Institution, a settler organization founded in 1827 from a typically Victorian combination of scientific, humanitarian, and paternalistic motives. With Cormack, Shanawdithit made sketches of Beothuk life and material culture, as well as drawings of buildings, and maps of significant historical events, including the taking of Demasduit in 1819 and the return of her body the following year.43 One experimental portrait sketch, of slightly earlier date, has also been preserved, and there are textual references to other portraits, along with images of animals and birds.44 In these drawings, Shanawdithit gave material form to her knowledge, experience, and perspective on the world and its inhabitants, both Beothuk and European. Her maps present a distinctively Indigenous understanding of the land, displacing the European cartographic vision of terra nullius in favour of a populated interior.45 Geographically reliable, Shanawdithit’s maps conceive physical space as the site of action, movement, and death – thus giving expression to a Beothuk subjectivity, with its distinctive ways of knowing and recording. Yet Shanawdithit’s drawings are also palimpsests, overlaid with annotations in Cormack’s hand. As the two struggled to communicate with each other, the annotated drawings became sites of cross-cultural encounter. Fiona Polack has examined the sketches in this light, charting the distinctive holographic contributions of each participant to a process of material communication in which occasional flashes of comprehension emerged with difficulty, and against a backdrop of transcultural confusion and awkwardness. At times, Polack argues, Cormack’s inscriptions suggest his efforts “to imaginatively enter Shanawdithit’s point of view”; at other times they unambiguously retreat from it.46 For her own part, Shanawdithit also experimented with the techniques and viewpoints of her interlocutor – quite literally so in her drawing of the interior space of Cormack’s house, executed in a shaky attempt at one-point perspective. It remains an open question whether Shanawdithit’s effort to reproduce this western visual convention was undertaken out of her own creative curiosity or at Cormack’s behest – a pictorial manifestation of his expressed determination to “civilize” the Beothuk by degrees.47 To highlight the drawings’ function within an historical process of subjective reciprocity is by no means to suggest that such exchange was conducted on a level playing field. It is, however, to note their inscription of two points of view, attending to the ways in which Cormack and Demasduit approached each other and veered away, in an aesthetic and communicative process characterized by effort, refusal, and bewilderment.

41

FIg. 1.9 A drawing of a room, presumed to be by Shanawdithit, with inscription by William Eppes Cormack. Writing in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal in March 1829, Cormack recommended that a likeness of Shanawdithit be taken in St John’s, but none is known to exist.

Given the example of Shanawdithit’s drawings, then, perhaps it is worth considering Lady’s Hamilton’s miniature of Demasduit with Nochlin’s description of reciprocal subjectivities in mind. Whose presence – or, perhaps better still, whose absence – does this unique miniature portrait object inscribe: Demasduit’s or Lady Hamilton’s? Both or neither? The potential combinations and permutations of subject positions inherent in this tiny work far outstrip its ostensible air of pictorial simplicity. I will explore each of these possibilities in turn. As a variety of plausible but constantly slipping and empirically unsecured scenarios for the artwork emerge, the metaphysics of presence that hangs so thickly in the air around portraiture begins to disperse. In this process, the “failures” of Hamilton’s miniature will come to be refigured as silences: absences that nevertheless demand to be recognized, aporia whose reverberations mutely bespeak the structuration of subjectivity within settler-colonial cultures.

IdentItIes

Piles of Sixteen

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For contemporary viewers attuned to the psychological effects of trauma, the readiest explanation for the air of vacancy that attends the portrait of Demasduit may well lie in the sitter herself, and in the fundamental mechanisms of human response to horrific violence. This is a woman who had been mercilessly uprooted from all that was familiar to her. Her child’s

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

father had been shot, repeatedly, in front of her eyes. She had been separated from her newborn infant and was doubtless in fear for its life, as well as her own. Three times she had tried to escape her captors, and three times she was retaken. Her liberty, her self-determination, her very name were stripped from her. Contemporaneous accounts of Demasduit’s mental state minimized the lasting effects of this brutality, and in this they are in keeping with the broader pattern of settler disavowal of colonial violence. According to Hercules Robinson, Demasduit was “tolerably reconciled to her situation” within weeks of her capture, and able to “enjoy the comforts of civilization.”48 Yet the same accounts bear inadvertent witness to a different emotional state. According to one of the expedition’s members, present at the shooting, the captive seemed at first “scarcely to notice the corpse” of Nonosabasut at her feet, and “it was not until obliged to leave the remains of her husband that she gave way to grief.”49 Such delayed reaction is now known to be generalized amongst survivors of extreme violence. Subsequently, Demasduit is reported to have developed an emotional attachment to the leader of the expedition, a response that is consistent with the psychological phenomenon of capture-bonding that not uncommonly affects hostages and victims of abduction.50 Other details, more poignant still, lend additional force to the hypothesis that the historical Demasduit was deeply traumatized when she met Lady Hamilton: throughout her captivity, she hoarded whatever she was given, dividing it into piles of sixteen – one for each member of her immediate family – and she slept tightly curled in a ball. In view of this, the “mild and pleasing” countenance that Demasduit was said to share in common with her portrait begins to suggest the emotional numbing and dissociative state so often adopted as a coping strategy by those who cannot bear to process their experiences. If we are to accept the portrait as a straightforward record of subjectivity – an ontological inscription of Gadamer’s “true appearance” – then the anodyne face in Hamilton’s miniature makes sense as an inscription of the detachment of a woman not fully present in her own body. For this to be so, however, we must also posit an artist who was sensitive enough to see that blankness and to convey it. There is some evidence – admittedly not much – to suggest that Lady Hamilton might have been such a person. When she left the island, its inhabitants paid public tribute to “the numberless instances” in which the governor’s wife had “comforted the afflicted, clothed the naked, fed the hungry and soothed the sorrow of the agonized mind.”51 Hamilton was particularly known for her empathetic response to women beset by misfortune. Describing her assistance to an impoverished mother of triplets, whose children died not many days after their birth, the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal made mention of Hamilton’s “accustomed research

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for objects of commisseration.”52 Did Demasduit become such an object to Lady Hamilton? The governor’s wife was herself a mother, and thus had some experiential ground for an empathetic response to Demasduit’s plight. Beyond this, however, we have only the official correspondence of her husband from which to hazard any guess. In a letter to Lord Bathurst, then secretary of state for war and the colonies, Charles Hamilton highlighted Demasduit’s maternity and his own emotional response to the enforced separation of mother and child, invoking “every feeling of humanity” in support of his decision to return her to her tribe.53 Taking the governor’s account at face value, and extending its presumption of humane benevolence to his wife, it is certainly possible to imagine a scenario in which Lady Hamilton was empathetic enough to see the woman who faced her and give material form to “the essential quality of [her] true appearance.”54 To see the blankness of Lady Hamilton’s miniature as a reflection of Demasduit’s trauma is thus both to affirm Gadamer’s understanding of portraiture’s function and to inscribe the image within the intersubjective moment that Nochlin posits. As with everything about this painting, the scenario remains highly conjectural. It would, however, go some way towards accounting for the artist’s unusual choice of medium, for miniature portraiture is a genre of aesthetic production that performs intersubjective connection. Phenomenologically, the miniature’s combination of close viewing and corporeal scale creates a sense of intimacy. It compels viewing at close proximity. As the head bends and the eyes change their focal length, the tiny image grows to occupy almost the whole of the visual field. The viewer’s hand becomes the measure of the little world it encompasses, and representation is anchored in the body in an unusually immediate way. This physical tangibility, so characteristic of the miniature portrait object, has powerful psychological effects. Marcia Pointon has pointed out that miniature objects enabled their bearers to navigate the emotional demands of intersubjectivity by oscillating between a closeness to the other (engendered by the miniature’s intimate scale and tangible corporeality) and a subjective autonomy (the result of the bearer’s transcendence and physical control over the object). In this way, Pointon observes, miniature portrait objects are “historically, quintessentially, about the oscillation between self and other.”55 Historically, too, miniatures testify to the bonds between people. Exchanged at moments of union or separation (engagement, travel, emigration, death), they betoken a longing for intimacy or reunion and speak mutely but eloquently of attachment.56 In an age before photography, it was the work of miniature portrait objects to sustain historical and emotional connections between people. Henrietta Hamilton knew this. In her will, she left a treasured miniature of her mother to her niece and goddaughter, Emily, demonstrating her own keen appreciation of such objects’ affective power.57 We also know

FIg. 1.10 Henrietta Martha Hamilton, undated Newfoundland scene in watercolour on birchbark.

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

that in her practice as an artist Hamilton consciously thought in terms of matching her medium to her subject matter. In one of her rare extant drawings, Hamilton used birchbark to act as the support for her image of a settler cabin in the forest, thus creating a continuity between the densely wooded scene she depicted and its material form.58 If the mutual compatibility of form and content was also a consideration in Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit, the powerful intersubjective resonances of the medium bolster the possibility of an affinity or connection of some kind between the two women. There are other, better-documented instances of miniatures’ transculturally connective function from which such an interpretation might draw additional support. In the early nineteenth century, European miniature paintings of First Nations sitters did bear witness to ties of interpersonal affection established against all odds. There is, for instance, no doubting the connective impetus that led London-born Eliza Field Jones to treasure an 1832 miniature portrait of her Anishnaabe husband, Khakewaquonaby, which she had reframed to match that of her own miniature likeness.59 Friendship, too, clearly surrounded an 1805 miniature of the Haudenosaunee chief and diplomat Teyoninhokar’awen, painted by Mary Ann Knight (1776–1851) and cherished by the sitter’s English correspondent and friend, the Reverend John Owen. Significantly, the subjects of these portraits were emissaries, interpreters, and go-betweens, and I have argued elsewhere that their miniatures likewise performed the translational space of intercultural alliance and exchange.60

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FIg. 1.11

IdentItIes

Mary Ann Knight, Captain Norton, Teyoninhokar’awen, a Chief of the Mohawks, One of the Five Nations of Upper Canada, 1805. The miniature was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy that year.

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Nor were such exchanges unidirectional. Tiny wigwams, little canoes, and small-scale mokuks (traditional birchbark containers) were staples amongst Mi’kmaq and Anishnaabe craftspeople producing goods for the nineteenth-century tourist trade. In her compelling analysis of these objects, art historian Ruth Phillips demonstrates the particular suitability of the miniature format to transcultural connection, drawing on the insights of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and literary theorist Susan Stewart to remind us of the almost universal appeal of tiny versions of larger objects.61 Even the severely restricted history of contact between the English and the Beothuk attests to this appeal. In 1826, Shanawdithit fashioned a highly detailed miniature canoe from wood, birchbark, and tree roots, trading it with a captain from the Royal Navy in exchange for clothing.

In the early nineteenth century, then, the miniature format served as a material means to effect transcultural connections between Europeans and Indigenous people. If Lady Hamilton’s portrait was to any extent a site for reciprocal subjective exchange – in which the traumatized state of the sitter was recognized and conveyed through the empathy of the artist – her choice of medium further expressed that connection.

FIg. 1.12 A miniature canoe constructed by Shanawdithit and traded for clothes.

“Horses, Dogs, and Other Animals”

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

The fate of Hamilton’s miniature portrait of Demasduit militates against such an interpretation, however, for when the artist left Newfoundland in 1823, she did not bring her miniature portrait of Demasduit with her but offered it instead as a memento to her friend Eliza Dunscombe, the wife of John Dunscombe, a St John’s merchant and vice-president of the Bœothik Institution.62 While Demasduit’s miniature thus fulfilled the conventional function of personal keepsake, the attachment it betokened was not the usual one between the portrait’s possessor and its sitter. Instead, Hamilton’s use of the miniature instantiated the disparities of the colonial situation by positioning Demasduit as a passive object of exchange between two affective agents. Whatever empathy Demasduit’s experiences may or may not have evoked in Hamilton, the miniature’s provenance stands as a reminder of her implication in larger structures of colonial ethnography and paternalistic curiosity. Other factors too work to disrupt the intimacy that miniature portrait objects usually nurtured. While most miniatures are oval in shape, and easily set into lockets, rings, or brooches to be worn on the body, Hamilton’s painting is rectangular in format, and its large black frame, together with the hardware affixed to it, indicates that it was hung on a wall or in a cabinet, thus diminishing its capacity to effect a physical and psychological bond between sitter and bearer. And while the corporeal dispositions effected

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by Hamilton’s portrait might optimistically be viewed as inducements to intersubjective connection, the work of Susan Stewart also highlights the impossibility of that impetus, which is always already undermined by the extreme disjunction of scale between the miniature’s tiny world and that of the viewer who towers above and irremediably outside of it.63 The miniature exists in a universe of its own, contained by its own boundaries and transcended by its viewer, for whom rapprochement is necessarily elusive: a repeated coming closer that can never quite attain its goal of immersion. As such, the effect of the miniature is encapsulation, and there is room here to wonder at the spatial similarities between the close pictorial confines of Hamilton’s portrait and her sitter’s captive status. The restrictive tendency of the miniature format was recognized by nineteenth-century observers, and the authors of how-to manuals counselled amateur practitioners to avoid creating a boxed-in appearance by placing their sitter’s head slightly to one side and facing in the more open direction.64 While Lady Hamilton’s miniature conforms to this directive, any impression of openness is effectively undermined by her cramped placement of Demasduit’s head against the top edge of the ivory. Add to this the shallowness of the work’s pictorial space, and the miniature seems to announce the colonial restriction of territories and people, mirroring the process by which the Beothuk were driven from Newfoundland’s rich coastal fishing grounds and immured within the island’s rocky interior.65 Yet another physical aspect of Hamilton’s miniature disrupts the hypothesis of subjective reciprocity even more violently. This is its backing paper, which has now been separated from the work for reasons of preservation but was once integral to it. The paper, clipped from an English broadsheet or handbill, announces the services of Mr Sartorius, one of a family of itinerant artists who painted “Portraits of Horses, Dogs, and Other Animals” for those wishing to display either their wealth (in the form of horses and livestock) or their sentimental attachment to their pets. Carefully clipped so that its text would be centred on the back of the image, the advertisement’s prominent reference to portraiture creates a clear parallel between the miniature’s recto and verso sides.66 The bestialization that is implicit here had explicit precedents in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland. Giving evidence before a 1793 British Parliamentary Committee on the state of trade with colony, Chief Justice John Reeves testified that “if an Indian is discovered he is shot at exactly as a fox or bear.”67 Such dehumanization comes as no surprise to students of colonial history, yet the presence of the backing paper is nonetheless shocking – partly because its aggressive implication appears so out of keeping with the gentle face that it accompanies. Knowledge of its presence retrospectively casts the features of that face in a different light. The visible teeth, for instance, now begin to suggest an animal sensuality that had been easily overlooked. Viewed with

FIg. 1.13 The backing paper from Hamilton’s miniature of Demasduit, clipped from an 1815 advertisement. 

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

the clipping in mind, Hamilton’s portrait seems suddenly to slip away from empathy and to fall rather closer to caricature. Like so much about this painting, it is impossible to say with any certainty when, or by whom, its backing was affixed. Perhaps Mrs Dunscombe had the work reframed, or perhaps the backing was added by her daughter Eliza Cammann, who later came into possession of it. But an 1815 date on the clipping does suggest a rough contemporaneity with the 1819 miniature, and the original advertisement – addressed to the English nobility and landed gentry – was clearly circulated amongst individuals of Lord and Lady Hamilton’s social standing. Would the Hamiltons themselves have appreciated the vicious joke entailed in the repurposing of Mr Sartorius’s advertisement? Again, the record leaves little to judge by. In his exchange with the Colonial Office on the subject of Demasduit, Lord Hamilton evoked his “feeling of humanity” towards her, but the presumption of humane benevolence thus created contrasts with other aspects of his correspondence. In his communications with the Island’s chief justice, Francis Forbes, and with the commanding officer of the vessel first charged with returning Demasduit to her people, Hamilton never refers to her by name but speaks of her as a “female Indian,” or simply as “the female.”68 There are biological overtones here, more suggestive of animality than of shared humanity. Other aspects of Hamilton’s correspondence, too, bear witness to the sense of racialized superiority that upheld and justified the imperial project.69

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FIg. 1.14 (opposite) Shanawdithit, Sketch

iii, Captain Buchan Carries the Body of Mary March in January 1820, 1829, as reproduced by J.P. Howley in The Beothucks or Red Indians (1915).

As governor, Hamilton was clear in his duty to extend “to that miserable people the blessings of civilization,” and Marshall notes that his letters demonstrate support for the project of taking Beothuk captives as a first step towards this goal.70 We know that the expedition that led to the capture of Demasduit had set out with Governor Hamilton’s express permission, and though in his reports to Whitehall he represented its purpose as the reclamation of stolen property and initiation of trade, the group’s leader, John Peyton Jr, would subsequently claim the governor’s express encouragement “to capture one of the Indians alive.”71 It also appears that Hamilton intentionally downplayed the consequences of Demasduit’s capture in his reports to London, possibly in an attempt to minimize culpability.72 As Governor Hamilton becomes more closely implicated in the actions of the settlers, the assumptions of racial superiority that underpinned the practices of colonialism come more insistently into view, and Lady Hamilton herself seems less and less securely positioned outside the reach of the miniature’s vicious backing. Subsequent developments in Canadian history, including the institutionalized abduction, abuse, and forced assimilation of Indigenous children in Christian residential schools, have amply demonstrated the extreme devaluation of First Peoples that accompanied the “civilizing” mission and the denial of Indigenous subjectivity that subtended the genocidal history of colonization in North America.73 This historical reality suggests another explanation for the blankness and surface orientation characteristic of Demasduit’s portrait; the absence it embodies may reside less in a sitter unable to feel than in an artist unable to recognize the full humanity of her subject. In this scenario, if the subjective reciprocity of portraiture posited by Nochlin may be assumed to hold good at all, it must have functioned in a manner quite different from the bond of empathy between traumatized sitter and compassionate artist that my initial reading evoked.

IdentItIes

Mimicry and Colonial Intersubjectivity

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A clue to how this exchange might have played out is offered by Nochlin herself when she describes the occasion of the portrait sitting as a moment in which the artist’s evaluative gaze is matched by the sitter’s power to “watch and judge back.”74 Turning our attention away from the miniature and focusing on this historical moment of intersubjective exchange, it is not difficult to imagine the captive Demasduit looking back at Lady Hamilton and sizing her up. Indeed, we know as a certainty that the Beothuk were watching and assessing British settlers at moments when the Europeans were entirely unaware of being surveilled. One of Shanawdithit’s most powerful drawings depicts Captain David Buchan’s party returning the body of Demasduit to Red Indian Lake. During this voyage, Buchan and his crew encountered no Beothuk at all, but as Shanawdithit’s map

IdentItIes

makes clear, the Beothuk themselves were intensely aware of the movements and location of British sailors.75 Indeed, on the very evening of the thefts that would prompt Demasduit’s kidnapping, John Peyton had kept a lookout for the Beothuk, unaware that they were observing him from beneath an overturned canoe. How attentively must the captive Demasduit have watched the actions of those around her as she assessed their intentions towards her. The appeal of this scenario is, of course, in its foregrounding of Indigenous agency. In the contemporary context of renewed Indigenous activism and a growing emphasis on decolonization, there is considerable political weight in a reading of Hamilton’s image that gives pride of place to a Demasduit who is not victimized but active, resilient, and aware. The discerning gazes of Indigenous subjects have, indeed, fascinated postcolonial art historians for some time, and never more so than when they are registered by the unwitting representational practices of the colonizers.76 Returning to Hamilton’s miniature, however, this scenario would appear ill-suited to the portrait, for its sitter does not look back towards the artist’s position but stares vacantly off into space. The active looking that we might well ascribe to the historical Demasduit sits uneasily with the air of psychological hollowness in Hamilton’s image. Even assuming that Demasduit’s vibrant subjectivity had not been extinguished by distress, how is her scopic agency at the moment of the portrait sitting to be aligned with the blankness of the miniature that Hamilton produced? Unexpected insight into this question is to be found in the pages of the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal. While the paper makes no reference at all to any encounter between Lady Hamilton and Demasduit, it does offer a detailed account of a meeting between another English artist and Indigenous sitter on the northeastern coast of British North America the following year. The incident is recounted in a lengthy extract from Captain William Parry’s first journal of Arctic exploration. In September 1820, while exploring the western coast of Baffin Bay, Parry’s crew encountered a party of four Inuit hunters – an elderly man and three younger ones. One of the officers on board was Frederick William Beechey, son of the portraitist William Beechey, later father to the painter Frances Anne (Beechey) Hopkins. Beechey himself was a skilled draughtsman who put his graphic skills to use during the encounter. Captain Parry’s description of Beechey’s meeting with one of the hunters highlights the complexity of subjective positionings that might attend such portrait sittings:

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Although we were much at a loss for an interpreter, we had no great difficulty in making the old man understand, by showing him an engraved portrait of an Esquimaux, that Lieutenant Beechey was desirous of making a similar drawing of him. He was accordingly placed on a stool near the fire, and sat for more than an hour with

very tolerable composure and steadiness … [When] he became impatient to move, I endeavoured to remind him that we wished him to keep his position, by placing my hands before me, holding up my head, and assuming a grave and demure look. We now found that the old gentleman was a mimic, as well as a very good-natured and obliging man; for, whenever I did this, he always imitated me in such a manner as to create considerable diversion among his people as well as ours, and then very quietly kept his seat.77

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

It is a striking scenario. What begins as an already-mediated exhortation for the sitter to conform to the representational conventions set out in an ethnographic engraving becomes something substantially different when the exercise in imitation changes course and the Inuit man begins to mimic the pose and expression of the British officer. The humour of an elderly Inuit hunter cannot be uncritically transposed onto a young Beothuk captive, but the possibility that a similar reversal might have occurred between Demasduit and Lady Hamilton is bolstered by contemporary testimony that she too was an adept mimic. Before she could speak English, Demasduit was said to convey her meaning by reproducing the expressions and gestures of those around her, caricaturing the people she encountered “with a most happy minuteness of imitation.”78 To be sure, European observers’ fascination with the mimetic adroitness that they so frequently perceived in Indigenous peoples is a trope of colonialism almost as pronounced as the propagation of more blatantly negative stereotypes. Nevertheless, juxtaposing these two portrait sittings – one on Baffin Bay in 1820, the other in St John’s a year earlier – creates a complex context for the miniature’s affect of psychological emptiness and calls forth a new mental image: that of a captive Demasduit politely mimicking back to the governor’s wife a portrait of gentility and blankness. Existing theoretical discussions of mimicry open up a variety of perspectives on Hamilton’s miniature. Amongst naturalists, “mimicry” signifies a kind of camouflage adopted by organisms that protect themselves from predators by assuming the appearance of their surroundings. Author Roger Caillois has influentially recast this process as a metaphor for the disintegration of human subjectivity. Describing mimicry as “depersonalization by assimilation to space,” Caillois also ties it to “a decline in the feeling of personality and life.”79 Perhaps Demasduit’s active mimicry is the source of the painting’s affective blankness. Such protective imitation does not seem an unreasonable option for a young woman exposed to danger and thrust into an unfamiliar environment. Newspaper accounts of her tractable nature, “sensibly alive to every mild impression,” seem only to strengthen the likelihood that she used imitation as a line of defence while living amongst settlers in St John’s.80 Complete camouflage was, of course, unavailable to her; the anonymous inscription on the back of Hamilton’s

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miniature reminds us just how impossible it would have been for a female “Red Indian” to achieve the invisibility required to blend into white settler society.81 Nevertheless, the depersonalized vacancy of her miniature portrait – what I have called its superficial blankness – speaks to a measure of success in the endeavour. On this hypothesis, the source of the absence that haunts Lady Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit lies neither with the sitter nor the artist alone but rather in the interchange between them, where it is governed by the modalities of colonial representation. These modalities have been thoroughly analyzed by Homi Bhabha, who notes that the mimicry practised by colonized peoples always produces “a partial vision of the colonizer’s presence.”82 This “partial vision” would help, certainly, to make sense of the Europeanized features that Lady Hamilton has portrayed. Seen retrospectively through the stereotype of the Indian princess, the doe eyes, narrow nose, and cupid mouth of the miniature bespeak a suspiciously Caucasian forerunner of Disney’s Pocahontas. All the more likely, then, that the partial presence who stares unfocusedly from the picture plane is not so much Demasduit as it is Mary March: the anglicized reflection of her colonizers, whose blankness belonged, at least partially, with them. Blankness was a position that, as a woman living in early nineteenthcentury English society, Lady Hamilton might well have known something about. Beyond her last will and testament, a notice in Debrett’s Peerage, and few passing mentions of her philanthropic bent, she has come down to us as an appendage of her male relatives: the great-granddaughter of a banking magnate, and the first governor’s wife to live in Newfoundland. That she came to the island at all suggests no small degree of pluck, but history bears no record of the person she actually was, and those hoping to catch sight of her can do little more than look to her husband’s written words. The researcher sleuthing through the pages of the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal will find that she is mentioned in accounts of official toasts given in her honour at public gatherings, but that it is her husband who replies in her stead, doubtless because it was not seemly for the lady herself to be present in the public houses that served as meeting places on such occasions.83 In 1819, then, Henrietta Hamilton had blankness thrust upon her by a society that still considered women to be the legal property of their husbands. We cannot now know if she embraced or resented that position. To consider the codes of western femininity as a potential source of the blankness that pervades Demasduit’s portrait is not only to court feminist analysis, however; it is also to place the work squarely within the context of colonial power relations, for, as Bhabha has taught us to recognize, mimicry is inherently destabilizing in the way that it opens the authoritative subject up to an unfamiliar scrutiny. Through the actions of the Indigenous mimic, the colonizer’s identity is cast back upon itself, but only ever partially. The result of this incommensurability, this almost-but-not-quite

image, is to show up the insufficiencies that lie within the authoritative position – the bankruptcy of a genteel western femininity or some other lack: the alienation, conceivably, of a metropolitan aristocrat displaced into a rude colonial outpost.84 Recognition of this insufficiency on the part of the artist, whether conscious or not, could not have failed to be unsettling, and might offer further insight into the fate of Lady Hamilton’s painting, left behind in foggy St John’s. Even if it doesn’t, however, the structural effects of mimicry reconcile the presumption of the historical Demasduit’s subjective agency with the pictorial affects engendered by the miniature. The vacancy that underpins the portrait does not, in this scenario, contradict an acknowledgment of Demasduit’s subjectivity but rather embodies it as the effect of her mimicry. To make room for the possibility of mimicry within Hamilton’s miniature is, to this extent, to give serious consideration to the notion of a portrait as a meeting point for two subjectivities, while also making room for the possibility that colonial ideology limited Lady Hamilton’s power to fully recognize the equal humanity of her sitter.

Blindness

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

Who, then, stares so unfocusedly forth from the surface of this portrait? Is this the face that looked at Lady Hamilton, the face that Lady Hamilton was able to see, or some still more complex interplay of positionings? The questions to subjectivity posed by this miniature refuse to settle down into a unified, coherent whole. Image and context raise a range of possibilities. All of them are plausible, and some of them are mutually contradictory, but even the contradictions provide no assurance that one scenario rather than another must have had historical validity, for contradiction itself is endemic to settler situations, and even the most benevolent and philanthropically inclined of colonizers lived in its grip. They may, indeed, have been especially subject to it. Various observers have noted that the visual and literary texts produced by English colonizers are “rife with contradiction and ambivalence.”85 Consider, for example, the editorializing coverage of the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal in 1819 as it exhorted readers to forgo the distinctions of modern racial science so as claim their common humanity with Demasduit: “If any one, coldly conversant in the relative estimates of human life, will tell us that, the blood of a Red Indian is not so valuable as that of an African or an European, let him pay a short visit to the delicate, the sensible being who is lately come amongst us, and say, if he saw her life attacked by a murderous savage, for the value of the simple raiment she has on, whether he would not rush to defend it with his own.”86 This fantasized scenario of a settler protecting Demasduit from a murderous attack by savages stands as an almost hallucinatory inversion of the violence she had so

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recently experienced. The rhetoric itself, however, was fully in keeping with a colonial discourse. Since the mid-eighteenth century, apparently wellintentioned governors had issued decrees offering to reward anyone who might promote the “friendly intercourse” with the island’s inhabitants that was said to be “so desirable for the sake of humanity.”87 The safety of the Beothuk was declared to be “so precious to His Majesty, who is always the support of the feeble; that if one of ourselves, were to do them wrong he would be punished as certainly and as severely as if the injury had been done to the greatest among his own people.”88 And yet no one ever questioned the propriety of kidnapping Demasduit. Indeed, the same journalist who so readily defended her against imaginary attack also congratulated Newfoundlanders on her capture: “By judicious management we have now the means, which have long been desired by the more humane inhabitants of this Island, of communicating to the Native Indians the friendly disposition of our people towards them, and their desire to punish all those, who shall violate their rights.”89 Hindsight is notoriously acute, but even so, in the face of the brutal violence that Demasduit was known and acknowledged to have experienced, and the exoneration of the expedition’s leaders from wrongdoing, it is difficult to interpret such optimism as anything less than massive blindness to the philanthropic community’s structural implication in the very circumstances it wished to allay. Indeed, the editorialist for the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal seems to have chosen such blindness knowingly, explicitly refusing a responsibility to consider the actions that had resulted in Demasduit’s presence in St John’s: “It is not for us to point out the means of bringing about this highly desirable measure – but we regard it as one of national importance.” Again and again the editorialist comes to the verge of acknowledging the injustices of the colonial enterprise, only to turn away from them more fully: “We might remember that as far as priority of possession can convey a right of property, they have the better title to the Island. But without searching for reasons of right among lawyers and commentators, the interests of humanity and the claims of honour, are all powerful advocates in the cause of these unfortunate people, whom GoD has placed within our power.” Ultimately, the solution that the paper offered to the problems wrought by colonization was a greater deployment of colonial force: “It is high time the British Government should interpose its authority, and restore these injured people to confidence, security and the enjoyment of their full rights … We look at [the matter] from that high ground, which dictated the abolition of the slavetrade.” In this way, the taking of Demasduit was presented to readers as a step on the road to a better and more humane world. Inability to see is here concomitant with the refusal of knowledge that seeing entails. Faced with the contradiction between the philanthropic impulse and the ignominious deployment of colonial power, the choice sim-

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

ply not to see is an understandable option. The failure of recognition that this choice betokens has erased Demasduit from view. Blindness to the historical contradictions of colonialism may thus be the most convincing explanation yet for the blankness of Henrietta Hamilton’s miniature. Again, the work’s phenomenological qualities as a miniature are centrally important, for one of the most pronounced effects of miniaturization is to encapsulate an imaginary reality, cut off from real-world implications. Of the many leads that Susan Stewart’s work on miniaturization offers those seeking to understand the impact of small-scale portraiture in colonial contexts, perhaps the most useful is her delineation of the temporal effects that stem from the miniature’s spatial dispositions. For example, researchers have discovered that subjects in reduced-scale environments lose track of the passage of time.90 Such temporal rupture is important, for it foregrounds the extent to which the spatial transcendence of the miniature effectively undermines the possibility of historical understanding. Stewart’s example of this effect is the miniature railroad; removed from the labour and movement of commodities that shaped the course of nations, the miniature railroad is emptied of its use value. Cause and effect are erased; the time of the miniature is nostalgia rather than history.91 But if the miniature exists in a world outside of history (and Stewart is tremendously persuasive on this), I wish to insist on the possibility that this is precisely its historical significance. In the miniature’s “infinite time of reverie,” the change and flux of lived reality may effectively be negated, but this very process feeds into the historical exigencies of the colonial situation.92 In the context of settlement and human extinction, the miniature’s suppression of use value thus assumes an ironical twist, for the evacuation of reality becomes the miniature’s use value most exactly understood. It is here that the miniature’s potential as a mechanism to mediate settler subjectivity emerges most clearly, for it denies the ravages of colonial power relations and feeds into a wilful blindness that can quite plausibly be imagined as the most manageable option for the upholders of an empire whose benevolent discourse was so emphatically in conflict with the realities of colonial practice. Read in this manner, as an artifact of contradiction and the blindness it engenders, Henrietta Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit becomes an ideological artifact par excellence, for it is the work of ideology to offer representations that enable people to navigate the gaps between their imagined and real conditions of existence.93 The colonial agents of nineteenth-century Newfoundland were not cardboard villains but complex historical subjects. If we are to give credence to the newspaper reports of Lady Hamilton’s humane and philanthropic disposition – and there is no compelling reason to disbelieve them – her miniature claims a certain status as a monument to the subjective presence of two women and the reciprocal (though by no means balanced) exchange

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between them. Yet if it is to be conceived as a portrait of connection, Lady Hamilton’s likeness of Demasduit must be made to stand oblivious in the face of history, and that option is no longer tenable; the yellowing handbill clipping affixed to the back of the miniature will not allow us to forget that horses, dogs, and other animals may also have their portraits taken, and that human beings may be treated with less regard than family pets. Faced with this contradiction, the tiny miniature of Demasduit emerges as a monumental effort to forestall recognition – whether of the sitter’s trauma, the artist’s cultural complicity, or the hollowness of the interaction between them. In its blankness, the Hamilton portrait of Demasduit facilitates a failure to see, not only in its pictorial content (the vacant stare, the surface orientation) but also in its phenomenological form (its timelessness and transcendence). Silent and enduring, the hermetic space of the miniature offers the consolation of a world outside of history – “a world,” in Stewart’s inimitable phrasing, “whose anteriority is always absolute, and whose profound interiority is therefore always unrecoverable.”94 This is the painting’s bitter irony, for the very format that permits the fantasy of attachment is that which ensures that attachment remains out of reach. For all its untutored naïveté, then, there is something quite sophisticated at play in Lady Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit – more sophisticated, certainly, than the topos of the “vanishing Indian” that enabled later settlers to cement an exclusive claim on their new world by denying a continued and adaptive Indigenous presence. Painting in the face of actual extinction, Lady Hamilton, it seems, could not unequivocally enjoy that fantasy. Instead, her portrait of Demasduit invokes the reassuring possibilities of what Stewart refers to as the “always there” quality of the miniature. With its powerful aspect of phenomenological presence, the portrait offers the consolation of attachment to a figure whose blankness could threaten no disruption to the miniature’s ahistorical moment of transcendence. Secure in the instant of an ever-present placidity, Hamilton’s portrait embraces the comfort of a Demasduit too silent to speak the fact that the Beothuk, by contrast, would not be always there.

IdentItIes

Always There?

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What, then, can we conclude about the connections between women, art, and subjectivity at work in Lady Henrietta Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit? It is the task of portraiture, traditionally understood, to represent a subject: to capture and convey something essential about the self – and possibly not just about one self but two: the artist who looks and the sitter who gazes back. The miniature format, with its history of affective intersubjective attachment, only increases the expectation that someone will always be there behind the image, guaranteeing its fidelity and anchoring its claim to truthfulness in a dynamic of presence.

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

Yet I began this chapter by noting an absence – a blankness, a vacancy, a surface orientation – that disrupts the easy correlation between Lady Hamilton’s portrait and Demasduit’s personal history, placing in jeopardy the work’s function both as a portrait and as historical illustration, for both modalities depend on a straightforward connection between signifier and signified. As I have run through the potential sources of the blankness in Hamilton’s miniature, that connection has become destabilized; the image has slipped its moorings. The multiple and divergent answers that arise in response to the simple question “Who are we looking at here?” exert a pressure on the image, breaking open the assumption that there is a unified, integral, and authentic subject for the work. This slippage is, in part, a matter of the limits of mimesis and the failure of an image to ever fully coincide with that which it represents. But it is just as much a matter of the limits of subjectivity – split at its core, riven by conflicting drives, and blind to its own self the greater part of the time. If Hamilton’s work is considered as a representation of subjectivity, it cannot escape its aporetic condition. The upshot of this line of thinking is that a portrait, no matter how skilfully (or unskilfully) executed, cannot simply and transparently express subjectivity, letting it shine forth unmediated and whole. Such insights have changed the interpretative burden that rests on twenty-first-century viewers of Lady Hamilton’s image, making it difficult now to believe in the portrait in quite the same way that its contemporaries did. But if Hamilton’s portrait does not simply express or reflect a subjective presence, it may yet call subjectivity forth – in the sense of bringing it into being. This, at any rate, is what Louis Althusser argues when he claims that representation helps to constitute subjectivity by giving individuals a way to make sense of their relation to the world and a means of navigating the gaps and aporia that beset them.95 In early nineteenth-century Newfoundland, as in the rest of the colonies that would eventually become Canada, subjectivities were being shaped and reshaped on a terrain where traditional presences were being disrupted by new ones and where absences were emerging where none had been before. Representation played a crucial role in enabling people to register these changing circumstances and to chart their own relation to them. The subjectivity at stake in this formulation is not a matter of individual selfhood so much as it is a structurally determined condition one comes to occupy. We will never know how closely Henrietta Hamilton’s portrait of Demasduit approximated aspects of her individual selfhood as artist or of Demasduit’s selfhood as sitter. Both are lost to us now. But we do know that the absences and presences that the image both inscribes and navigates are articulations of the structural conditions of subjectivity within the settler-colonial context. And we know this because these conditions continue today. To this extent, the dynamics of Hamilton’s miniature continue to work today much as they did in the nineteenth century, for the portrait’s

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basic tension is as unresolved today as it was two centuries ago. This claim needs some further elaboration.

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Still There?

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As a settler-colonial nation, Canada has been forged through a shifting series of actions, representations, and beliefs regarding Indigenous absence and presence. From the beginning, it would seem, settlers were conflicted, setting out terms for the co-presence of settler and Indigene through metaphors of friendship like the Covenant Chain, while founding their claim to sovereignty on the principle of terra nullius, the empty land. More recently, the failed attempt to eradicate Indigenous people through forced assimilation has given birth to a resurgent Indigenous political presence, arguably stronger now than at any time since the War of 1812. In this ebb and flow of presence and absence, the subjectivities of settlers and Indigenes are informed by discourse and representation. Discourse and representation about the Beothuk are particularly fraught. Indeed, the political, ethical, and emotional charge that accompanies discussion of Beothuk presence and absence has, if anything, grown more intense since settlers first proclaimed their extinction. There is no small amount of realpolitik at stake here. Until very recently, the provincial government of Newfoundland and Labrador used the fate of the Beothuk to circumvent claims for Aboriginal status by the Indigenous inhabitants of Newfoundland, asserting that the island no longer had an Aboriginal population to treat with. The numerous Mi’kmaq residents of the island were, according to former premier Brian Peckford, merely one of several immigrant groups who, like the English or the Irish, had arrived in the eighteenth century.96 Mi’kmaq were not only denied Aboriginal status but, in a particularly perverse twist of the colonial knife, they were blamed for Beothuk extinction through stories that Cape Breton Mi’kmaq had come to Newfoundland as bounty hunters, paid by French colonial authorities to take Beothuk lives.97 No documentary evidence for this claim exists, but it was long used to instil shame in the Mi’kmaq population, whose recent political resurgence has been accompanied by a questioning of settler narratives, including the basic premise of Beothuk extinction.98 A number of Newfoundland Mi’kmaq now lay claim to Beothuk ancestry.99 The idea of a continuing Beothuk presence is not only genealogical, however. It has also been mobilized by filmmakers, novelists, and visual artists, who have sought to make the Beothuk present again in the minds of their audiences. Cultural producers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have assumed the creative privilege of reconstructing the thoughts, words, and emotions of their Beothuk characters, a pattern most dramatically exemplified in Bernice Morgan’s assertion that she heard the voice of Shanawdithit speaking to her while she was writing her novel Cloud of Bone.100 The 2006

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter

documentary Stealing Mary endeavoured to recreate Beothuk presence by means of a CSI -style forensic re-enactment of Demasduit’s abduction, going so far as to commission the facial reconstruction of Nonosabasut based on his human remains.101 The atypical way that colonization unfolded in Newfoundland has contributed to this pattern of creative output. The dearth of direct encounters between colonizers and colonized has meant that a few female and child captives provided British settlers with the sum total of their knowledge about the Beothuk, which in turn has meant that memorializations of them are personified to an unusual degree. The figures of Shanawdithit and Demasduit in particular have captivated public imagination: Shanawdithit for the knowledge that she passed down through William Eppes Cormack and for her status as the “last of the Beothuk,” and Demasduit because, through her alone, we have a face to put alongside the historical details preserved in the accounts of her abduction and captivity. Emotive retellings of the two women’s personal stories have amplified the possibilities for empathetic identification with them. Such identifications typically pull in two directions. On the one hand, they reinforce awareness of the irreparable loss effected by Beothuk extinction, for no matter the results of DNA testing, it remains the case that there are no existing Beothuk communities and that extant knowledge of Beothuk language, spirituality, and customs is insufficient to sustain a cultural revival. On the other hand, however, the intensity of affect produced by these retellings creates a strong sense of presence in which the Beothuk become living forces once again. This, certainly, is the impact of Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2008 video installation March 5, 1819, which confronts viewers with a harrowing re-enactment of events surrounding Demasduit’s abduction. In contrast to the meticulous reconstruction of detail that characterizes Stealing Mary, Belmore (b. 1960) pares her narrative down to the laboured breathing and terrified cries of the Beothuk couple as they struggle through deep snow in a futile attempt to flee their pursuers. Jagged camera work reinforces the vocalizations of distress. Describing the work as “a visceral rendering that focuses on imagining the trauma of the moment,” Belmore relates her desire to amplify affects of presence and presentness through the work’s formal characteristics: “I wanted to make room for visitors to consider Demasduit and Nonosabasut as individuals, as flesh and blood. My decision to clothe this historic couple in contemporary dress, reaching out for each other across two large opposing projections, was an attempt to see them as a woman and a man desperately trying to escape their unseen captors. By placing the viewer in the middle of this trauma, I was casting the gallery visitor in the physical role of witness and perpetrator.”102 March 5, 1819 seeks not only to make historical Beothuk figures come alive once again but to implicate contemporary viewers in their histories, calling attention to the ways in which Canadians continue to be

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immersed in dynamics of colonialism that are more commonly, and more comfortably, consigned to the past. At the same time, both video and description emphasize absence by driving home the ultimate fate of the Beothuk: the video ends with the death of Nonosabasut, while Belmore’s use of the word “perpetrator” emphasizes the criminal nature of his murder and reminds viewers of the enormity of the ensuing loss. Belmore’s evocation of an ongoing Beothuk presence in the face of that people’s patent historical absence is a strategy also employed by EuroCanadian cultural producers who have brought the Beothuk back to life in novels, poetry, and films. This phenomenon has received considerable scholarly attention, both from literary historians and anthropologists, who recognize that the effective extinction of the Beothuk has not led to their disappearance.103 Indeed, the opposite is true. The genocidal impulse by which settlers sought to secure their sovereign identity as “native” Canadians merely anchored Indigenous presence at the heart of the settlercolonial psyche.104 This phenomenon – known as the “postcolonial uncanny” – has given birth to a whole genre of literary production in which voices that were violently expelled from the national consciousness return to it in dreams and creative imaginings.105 The return of the colonial repressed is most commonly experienced as a haunting, in which Beothuk presence vies with Beothuk absence in an exquisite dialectic that anthropologist John Harries astutely describes as state of non-absence: “It is a past that will not go away, but neither will it come wholly to us and so allow for resolution.”106 Harries observes that the Beothuk past calls to us, and he argues that it does so with particular force in the material objects that anchor us to this distant time. A ghost, then. An object and a figure that draws us but does not come wholly to us. As a description of the woman in Henrietta Hamilton’s miniature portrait of Demasduit, this is not a bad approximation. In light of the art-historical discourse on portraiture, however, perhaps it is better to figure the dynamic as a non-presence. The Demasduit who fills the frame of Hamilton’s miniature, whose representation physically draws the viewer to come and meet her, is nevertheless not there: perhaps because she could not afford to be, perhaps because Lady Hamilton could not afford to see her, or perhaps because this is the uncomfortable state of mimetic representation in general. What is certain is that this very combination of absence and presence continues to shape contemporary subjectivities – not only for settlers but for Indigenous people as well. It is activated in the absent bodies of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and in the place they occupy in the hearts of those who love them. It shapes the experiences of Indigenous children removed from their communities and placed in foster care with settler families. It motivated the actions of Chief Theresa Spence when she used her body in an effort to force Canadians not to ignore her community any longer.

In his propositions for a settler-colonial art history, New Zealand scholar Damian Skinner remarks that the art history of settler nations is necessarily transhistorical.107 The ongoing social formation of settler colonialism means that in Canada today we still find ourselves navigating, confronting, or turning our backs on realities of violence and inequality that link us with our historical predecessors in an as-yet-unbroken line of descent. If we are attentive to the visual cues of Hamilton’s miniature, it is clear that women artists at the beginning of the nineteenth century already struggled with the conflicting requirements of recognition and disavowal, with competing impulses to see and to remain blind, and with the challenge of relating to Indigenous people across a horizon of possibility in which the terms of their mutual absence and presence were not yet resolved. It is only possible to see all this in Hamilton’s miniature because all this still exists. So too does settler subjectivity, although there is tremendous pressure to refuse it by relegating settlers to the status of the villains of yesteryear. The Lady Hamiltons of the world now seem quite far removed from us, and from this distance it can be easier to judge them than to acknowledge the parallel realities that continue to structure settler society and its inhabitants. In this way, Henrietta Hamilton’s miniature portrait of Demasduit continues to hold out blindness as the most manageable option for the settler subject. And that blindness continues to offer refuge from a structural implication in a system that we cannot change if we do not recognize it.

Henrietta Hamilton, Demasduit, and the Settler-Colonial Encounter 63

D

FIg. 2.1 Frances Anne Hopkins’s Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior was the artist’s debut work at the Royal Academy in 1869. She was thirty-three at the time.

FIg. 2.2 This work, now known as Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall, 1869, was exhibited by Hopkins in the 1870 Royal Academy under the title Canoe Travelling in the Backwoods of Canada.

DISPLACEMENTS Displacements chaPter 2

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins What is at stake in the discourse of [travel] writers is that most fundamental of all properties, the property or properness of the proper name, a name whose properness becomes suspect the moment its signature is stamped with the sign of the voyage georgeS van den abbeeLe

In 1871, the Art Journal called attention to a scene of canoe travel in the Canadian wilderness, contributed to that year’s Royal Academy exhibition by a relative newcomer to the London art world, the painter Frances Anne Hopkins (1836–1919). A thirty-five-year-old Englishwoman, formerly resident in Canada, the artist had first made her mark on the Academy two years previously with an atmospheric scene based on her own travel by birchbark canoe through the mists of Lake Superior. A year later she followed up with a more detailed portrayal of voyageurs transporting two European passengers through the fur trade territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company – one of them, again, a woman.1 The canvases stood out for a number of reasons. To begin with, such patently Canadian subject matter was relatively unusual in the 1860s and early 1870s,2 and although travel-based imagery had long been a mainstay of the Academy, it was rarely contributed by women, and more rarely still depicted them engaged in their own adventures. All things considered, the London art press was not quite sure what to make of Hopkins’s offering; the artist’s “general style,” readers of the Art Journal were told, “seems to be derived from the Art of the American aborigines.”3 As a stylistic observation, the comparison borders on the ridiculous, for Hopkins was a thoroughly English artist. The niece of a British marine

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painter, daughter of a topographical draughtsman, and granddaughter of the court painter to two British monarchs, she adhered closely to the western pictorial conventions in which she had been trained. Her highly narrative canvases are worked with an eye to mimetic representation, while her handling of mid-nineteenth-century material culture – from the taxidermied swallow that adorns a pillbox hat to the striped ticking that peeps out from the edge of a pillowcase – is almost Pre-Raphaelitic in its meticulousness. The paintings, in other words, are Victorian to their core. In view of this, the Art Journal’s characterization of Hopkins’s style as “derived from the art of the Aborigines” is perhaps most plausibly interpreted as a thinly veiled barb. Primitivizing in intent long before this constituted praise, the commentary marks the artist with the taint of the colonial even as it authorizes the authenticity of her claim on spectatorial attention. While the review praised Hopkins for her sense of spirit and action, it critiqued her colour as “crude” and subtly dismissed her work by recommending it as “a capital illustration to a book of travels.”4 In this chapter, however, I propose to take the journal at something like its word. In doing so, I do not intend to examine Hopkins’s paintings for the influence of Indigenous modes of aesthetic production, for despite the works’ renderings of Kanien’kehá:ka voyageurs, Anishnaabe iconography, and Siksika clothing, evidence of intercultural stylistic exchange is minimal. Rather, I want to assess the artist’s work for signs of the profound destabilization of her identity that made such a comparison possible in the first place. In her canoe, Hopkins was a woman in a world of men, an upper-middle-class tourist among labourers, a Londoner in the wilderness, and a European dependent on the skill of First Nations voyageurs. Given the tensions produced by these displacements, the Art Journal’s observation may be noteworthy less for the implausibility of its stylistic claim than for its inadvertent pinpointing of an element of uncertainty that played itself out in the artist’s own subject positioning. Travelling at the precise moment when women in England had begun to demand a renegotiation of the social contract that regulated their identities, Hopkins was also painting at the pinnacle of Canada’s long transition from imperial outpost to settler colony, and her early Academy pictures rehearse a precarious positioning of the self at this nexus of gender, travel, and colonialism. With their attendant troubling of divisions between home and away, the domestic and the foreign, self and other, Hopkins’s travel paintings emerge as sites for personal exploration. The place that the artist claimed within the record of her own experience was to be an ambivalent one, however. In her early Academy oils, a combination of presence and absence already familiar to us from the portraits of Mary Ann Scrimes-Graham and Demasduit comes here to be reconfigured as a dynamic of placement and displacement, an inquiry into the shifting meanings of home, and a demonstration of the multiple instabilities engendered by the artist’s lived experiences and by an authorial position that was stamped with the sign of the colonial voyage.

The Artist Herself ?

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

The most palpable indicator of this instability resides in the artist’s ambivalent inscription of her own body into the canvases on which she built her professional reputation. Each of the large canoe scenes that Hopkins exhibited during her initial showings at the Royal Academy includes a fashionably dressed female passenger. An unexpectedly genteel presence, she was once thought to be Lady Monck, the wife of Canada’s first governor general.5 Since the pioneering scholarship of Grace Lee Nute in 1947, however, the female figure has been widely accepted as an image of the artist herself. Hopkins’s biography lends ready credibility to this identification. Born into a prosperous English family with extensive imperial and artistic connections, the artist came to Canada in 1858 as the twenty-two-year-old bride of Edward Hopkins, a gentleman fur-trader sixteen years her senior. The couple lived first at Lachine, the eastern terminus of the fur trade in Canada, then moved downriver to Montreal three years later, when Edward was promoted to chief factor in charge of the Montreal Department of the Hudson’s Bay Company. On three documented occasions, Hopkins accompanied her husband on canoe trips through the vast tracts of land under his jurisdiction. In 1864, they travelled along the north shore of Lake Superior from Fort William (now Thunder Bay) to Sault Ste Marie; in 1866, they journeyed along the upper Ottawa River into the Temiskaming district; and in 1869, they undertook their most extended trip, travelling over 1,500 kilometres from Fort William to Montreal along voyageur routes that were then being displaced by steamboat and rail travel.6 Once Hopkins returned to London, where she effectively lived from 1866 onwards, these trips would furnish her with visual material for over fifty years of professional artistic activity. As late as 1914, in an exhibition at Walker’s Galleries, the seventy-eight-year-old artist was still giving pride of place to her watercolours of “Canada in the Days of the Bark Canoe.”7 The notion that Hopkins painted herself in the midst of the very activity on which she would base her career clearly has much to recommend it. As a professional strategy, it established the painter in the popular Victorian persona of the “lady traveller.” As with the work of Anna Jameson, her most famous Canadian predecessor in that capacity, the self-referential character of Hopkins’s travel narratives authorized the legitimacy of her authorial position by demonstrating the experiential character of her bona fides. In this manner the artist’s claim to credibility was firmly grounded in her firsthand knowledge of the scenes she painted, and her visualizations of herself worked hand in hand with the detailed nature of her paintings to validate her art as the product of intimate and informed observation. Perhaps as a result, commentary has consistently bound Hopkins’s studio oils back onto her life, often with an uncritical assumption of interchangeability between them.8

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FIgs. 2.3–2.5 Frances Anne Hopkins, The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls, 1877 (with details). Although the two figures in puggarees have been variously identified as Hopkins, she was not present on the expedition.

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And yet Hopkins did not always paint herself into her scenes of canoe travel. In the numerous watercolours that form the bulk of her known work, she is almost never present, and even in the early oils, viewers have sometimes been overly quick to identify her. The upright passenger in the central canoe of The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls is a case in point. Extrapolating on the basis of the fabric that hangs from the back of the figure’s hat, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior, commentators have eagerly pointed to the artist’s presence, both in the painting and on the expedition itself.9 But despite frequent claims to the contrary, there is no convincing evidence that Hopkins accompan-

ied or even visited the Red River campaign to suppress Louis Riel’s first Métis rebellion. In actuality, the artist was seven months pregnant at the time and can be firmly placed in London during the episode that her canvas depicts: a gruelling portage up the Kaministiquia gorge in June 1870.10 The passenger often assumed to be the artist is, as Janet Clark and Anna Hudson have subsequently noted, the expedition’s leader and the owner of the canvas, Colonel Garnet Wolseley.11 Still, spectators’ desire for Hopkins to appear in her painting has remained strong, and even well-informed commentators such as Hudson have not completely evacuated her from the canvas. Instead they have pointed to another, similarly hatted passenger off to the right, seeing this second traveller as the canvas’s moment of artistic self-representation – even if her presence is now acknowledged to have been retrospectively imagined into the scene from the comfort of a London studio.12 However, there is no more compelling reason to identify this second figure as the artist than there is with the first. Even assuming the passenger to be female (a tenuous assumption at best), there are at least two other potential candidates for the position: Kate St John, the wife of an embedded reporter for the Toronto Globe and the only woman known to have accompanied the expedition, and, more likely still, Lady Wolseley, who visited her husband’s campaign at the time of the portage and eventually gifted the painting to the Dominion of Canada.13 In the face

FIg. 2.6 Frances Anne Hopkins, Shooting the Rapids, 1879.

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of these stronger claims, the likelihood of the artist’s inclusion in the scene becomes almost vanishingly thin, and only Hopkins’s broader practice of self-representation explains the continuing currency of the idea. Yet even this broader practice is open to question, for on close consideration, each of the artist’s presumed self-portraits admits of an analogous uncertainty, as Hopkins repeatedly obscures her identity or renders it in some way indistinct. Consider the female passenger in Shooting the Rapids. Unlike The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls, this work is based on a securely datable event in the artist’s life. On Saturday, 25 July 1863, Hopkins took a day trip with her husband and two of his business colleagues, travelling by rail from Montreal to Lachine and returning by way of canoe.14 The journey, which included passage through the Lachine rapids, seems to have been planned largely for the enjoyment of Edward Watkin, a member of the HBC board of directors then just arrived from London. Watkin would later describe the excitement of the day in his memoirs, and when Hopkins painted the scene from memory some years later, she included a highly legible portrait of him, instantly recognizable by his broad face and mutton-chop sideburns.15 Her husband’s portrait too she rendered with care, and Edward’s red beard and fine bone structure make him the most consistently identifiable figure in her oeuvre. Yet Hopkins does not paint herself with equal clarity. Instead, she has chosen to partially hide her face behind the elbow of one of the paddlers, leaving us little more than her hat to go by.

IdentItIes

FIg. 2.7 (left) Edward William Watkin, pictured here in the Illustrated London News in 1864, was a key figure in the 1869 reorganization of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

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FIgs. 2.8 and 2.9 (opposite) The female passenger seated next to Edward Hopkins in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall, 1869, bears little obvious similarity to photographs of Hopkins taken by William Notman in Montreal.

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

This choice to obscure her own portrait was, in fact, something of a pattern for Hopkins. In Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior (fig. 2.1), both passengers are depicted from behind, leaving a hat to function once again as our main point of reference for the artist. Even the most explicitly depicted of Hopkins’s female passengers is subject to this uncertainty of identification. The woman who gazes at the water lily in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall is by far the most legible of Hopkins’s female figures, but she is not fully convincing as a self-representation, for the generically pretty woman bears no clear resemblance to photographs of Hopkins at the time. The structure of the face is wrong, and whereas the artist had dark hair, the woman in the canoe is blond.16 Other details further disrupt any certitude that we are looking at Hopkins. Although the seated woman’s posture, gaze, and rapt attention would all appear to signal an artist poised to make a botanical drawing, the corroborating details are missing: look for it as one will, no pencil protrudes from the woman’s clasped fingers, and where a sketchbook should be visible, there is only an ambiguous fold of blanket.

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And yet surely this figure is meant to be Hopkins. Indeed, we can quite confidently infer the artist’s presence from that of her husband. But if his facial hair and physiognomy are familiar to us, the artist we know only by her signs: dress, female torso, and hat. In a sense, and despite her presence, Frances Anne Hopkins isn’t really there in her image so much as a woman is. Her handling of her own reflection in the glassy waters below her canoe encapsulates this dynamic, for even as the artist attends with special care to the watery echo of her face and hat, she chooses to eliminate her body completely. Just as surely as Hopkins has put herself in her canvases, then, she has also painted herself out of them. There are a range of plausible reasons why this might be so. The artist’s biographer, MaryEllen Weller Smith, proposes that the presence of a generic figure enabled Hopkins’s prospective female clientele to imaginatively project themselves into her scenes, thus investing her work with the nostalgic appeal engendered by recollections of their own travels.17 Certainly, Hopkins was a canny businesswoman who made a market niche for herself by capitalizing on the Canadian experiences of her customers.18 And yet the male passengers in Hopkins’s canoes are not similarly generic. Nor do large oils such as these appear truly to have been the artist’s commercial bread and butter; that role was reserved for her watercolours, where European passengers rarely figure at all. In this chapter, I would like to develop an alternate explanation for the artist’s ambivalent placement within and displacement from her early oils, by tying it to other tensions and moments of ambiguity in her work. Given that her canvases are otherwise so deeply concerned with the specificities of identification – this hat, that pipe, this particular piece of luggage – such moments of personal ambiguity are significant. Reading these details against their realist grain, I argue that they are not simply objective records of experience but may also be viewed as indices of the precarious and destabilizing nature of that experience. From her carefully balanced position within an HBC canoe, Frances Anne Hopkins lived brief and intense periods of displacement, travelling through Canada’s vast territories in the company of Indigenous men, just at the moment of the nation’s official formation. She then painted them for over half a century. While the sheer longevity of her pictorial engagement suggests that these experiences mattered to her in a profound way, the conflicted dynamic of presence and absence that marks her early oils also gestures towards a difficulty in anchoring her experiences to an integrated and securely defined subject position. Before long, Hopkins would effectively resolve the matter by removing herself from her paintings altogether, but it is her early, self-representational work for which she is best remembered. The task of this chapter is to unpack this difficulty, assessing the factors that contributed to it and gauging the pictorial strategies that the paintings marshal in response.

“Canoe Travelling Agrees with Her”

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

As with the woman in her paintings, Frances Anne Hopkins is known to us largely by way of her husband. His business correspondence offers the only direct commentary on her thoughts and emotions at the time of her Canadian residence. Edward’s record of his wife’s mindset is of course highly filtered, both through the lens of his perceptions and by the constraints of professional correspondence, which limited his discussion of family considerations to passing mentions. That said, the fragmentary picture that emerges from his letters suggests that the most immediate cause for the artist’s ambivalent relation to her Canadian scenes may have been deeply personal. Pregnancy, childbirth, and infant death constitute the factual backdrop against which Hopkins’s canoe voyages played out. Immediately upon her arrival in Canada, she became stepmother to her husband’s three children, deprived of their own mother by cholera.19 Almost as quickly, she was pregnant herself. A son was born in June 1859, another infant was stillborn in 1860, and three more children followed at two-year intervals beginning in 1861.20 While Edward travelled for work, Hopkins painted and drew the waterfront environs of her home in Lachine and the timber rafts on the nearby Lake of Two Mountains. Her avid interest in her surroundings is apparent from sketches and oils, while the couple’s decision to name their first child after the St Lawrence waterway on which they resided suggests that her interest in place rapidly became an attachment to it.21 Suddenly, in the winter of 1864, their youngest child, Julian, died of croup – an event described by Edward as “a sad blow to his poor mother.”22 There is no other record of Hopkins’s grief, but when the weather turned warm again, she made her first lengthy canoe journey through the Canadian wilderness. If the change of scenery was calculated to do her good, Edward’s letters suggest that it served its purpose. “I have never seen Mrs. Hopkins so hearty in my life,” he wrote at the end of their voyage. “Canoe travelling agrees with her.”23 Canadian winters, however, were another matter entirely, and that autumn a newly pregnant Hopkins returned to London with her children, remaining there until the birth of her baby in the spring.24 Tragically, the precaution would come to nothing, for shortly after the artist’s return to Montreal a sudden summer illness would claim this child as well. Edward’s correspondence now conveys a new bitterness towards Canada: “The loss in so short a time, of two children has made my wife and myself take a dislike to this climate & country. We would willingly quit it if we could.”25 It was, indeed, to be the beginning of the end of the artist’s Canadian sojourn. If winter had seemed unsafe, now summer did as well, and Edward began making plans to send his family back to England in June to avoid the next cholera season.26 In the event, however,

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Hopkins chose to make a different summer voyage than the one envisaged by her husband, for she was back with him in their canoe at the season’s close, travelling along the upper Ottawa River.27 The trip was likely something of a leave-taking, as she and the children relocated permanently to England that autumn.28 Edward would offer differing explanations of his wife’s absence from Montreal. Typically, he tied it to their children’s welfare: “My life out here is very lonely, as my wife and children are in London; nor can they come and join me, as the children are at schools in different places in England … and it is necessary to have a home for them during the holidays and in time of sickness.”29 At other times, however, he wrote more candidly: “My wife and children are all in England; the former because she does not like the climate, customs and people of Canada, the latter to be schooled.”30 No further mention was made of the more intimate causes of Hopkins’s antipathy, nor did Edward ever allude to his wife’s desire for a career, though this may also have factored into the equation. In the 1860s, the Canadian art infrastructure was still in its infancy, and although Hopkins eventually secured a Montreal dealer for her work, she found that her pictures did not sell.31 Once re-established in London, she immediately began exhibiting professionally, showing paintings based on her travels of the preceding summer.32 Despite her departure for England, however, Hopkins’s enthusiasm for canoe travel in the Canadian interior seems to have remained undampened, for her lengthiest voyage was still to come. In the summer of 1869, fresh from the opening of her first showing at the Royal Academy, she returned to North America for a holiday, planning to accompany her husband on a pleasure trip to mark the beginning of his gradual departure from the HBC .33 By June, the canoes for their journey were in readiness at Fort William, having been built there at Edward’s special commission.34 Almost immediately on the family’s arrival in Montreal, however, ten-yearold St Lawrence contracted scarlet fever and died, the third such death in five years.35 The wilderness travel that had followed Hopkins’s earlier losses now became part of her grieving in an immediate way, for barely a month later she was setting out from Fort William, travelling with her husband along the north shore of Lake Superior, through Sault Ste Marie and Georgian Bay into Lake Nipissing, and thence down the Ottawa River and home to Montreal. But Montreal was not really home for either of them any longer, and they took their leave for London almost immediately thereafter.36 Although they would return for some months the following spring – she for a showing of her work at the Art Association of Montreal, he to finalize his business arrangements – their lives would henceforth be lived together in England, where two more children would be born and grow to adulthood.37

Self-Actualization and the Victorian Lady Traveller Across the British Empire, women painted and sketched their new environments.38 In pre-Confederation Canada, an important part of women’s cultural production stemmed from their travel in the context of colonial administration. The wives of governors, including Elizabeth Simcoe (1762– 1850), Amelia Falkland (1807–58), and Anna Maria Yorke Head (1808–90), all voyaged and sketched in the lands under their husbands’ jurisdictions.39

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

Returning to Hopkins’s work with this narrative in mind, a certain affective congruence comes into view, as the ambivalence with which the artist wrote herself into and out of her scenes of canoe travel is paralleled by the artist’s contradictory feelings of attachment and antipathy with regard to Canada. On one hand, the fact of her repeated journeys, the testimony of her husband’s correspondence, and the reality of her decades-long dedication to the theme all attest to an abiding passion for her travels in Canada; on the other, her premature departure coupled with Edward’s correspondence indicates that day-to-day life in the country gradually became insupportable to her. Even the canoe trips – marked as they were by enthusiasm mingled with loss – must have taken place within an emotional landscape as complex and variable as the terrain through which she travelled. In view of her losses, Hopkins’s reticence to too publicly display herself to a curious audience on the walls of the Royal Academy makes sense as a personal safeguard: a bulwark of reserve around private recollections of voyages that were nonetheless too personally significant to be rendered with complete anonymity. So much is highly conjectural, of course, and failing the unanticipated rediscovery of a diary or trove of personal letters, it is likely to remain unsubstantiated. Did the artist’s fluid movement along fur-trade waterways mirror a destabilizing lack of emotional moorings brought about by the deaths of her children? Or did it rather provide an opportunity to recentre herself in the face of their absence? Such questions are impossible to answer. Nor do they explain the tangled connections between loss and creative production. But if knowledge of the artist’s biography does not unlock the meaning of her canvases for us, it does serve to underline the subjective ambivalence that they contain. That ambivalence comes still more clearly into view if the placements and displacements of self effected by the artist are further examined in the broader contexts of social and cultural identity-formation with which they were contemporaneous. For as much as they are statements of personal experience, Hopkins’s scenes of canoe travel also bear witness to the wide-ranging effects generated by the movement of English bodies – particularly Englishwomen’s bodies – through colonial space in the nineteenth century.

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FIg. 2.10 Anna Jameson, Voyage down Lake Huron, in a Canoe, 1837.

FIg. 2.11 (opposite, above) Frances Anne Hopkins, Timber Raft, Quebec, c. 1868.

FIg. 2.12

IdentItIes

(opposite, below) Frances Anne Hopkins, Parliament Buildings, Ottawa, 1867.

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Others, such as Anna Jameson, Millicent Mary Chaplin (1790–1858), Katherine Jane Ellice (1813–1864), and Amelia Frederica Dyneley (1830–1901), did likewise on trips connected to their husbands’ military and diplomatic commissions or colonial appointments.40 Frances Hopkins is unique among these visitors to Canada in that her travels became the cornerstone of a lengthy career. What distinguished her from her Canadian peers, however, also located her squarely within the broader phenomenon of Victorian women’s public accounts of their travels. Between 1837 and 1910, more than fifteen hundred narratives of female travel were published, attesting to the enormous popularity of the genre amongst readers.41 Women artists were somewhat slower to take up the mantle, but by the last quarter of the century their journeys too had become a recognized mainstay of onewoman exhibitions in the metropolis.42 For many such women, travel was an appealing counter to the fixities of Victorian patriarchy, offering a space in which to cultivate their identities free from the structural and psychological barriers imposed upon them at home in England.43 As Anna Jameson made clear in the more jubilant moments of her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, to move freely through the vast spaces of British North America was inescapably to break the gendered conventions of her age and place, following a trajectory of self-actualization.44 There is reason to see a similar trajectory at work in Hopkins’s oeuvre. From the time of her arrival in Canada to the estab-

FIg. 2.13 Frances Anne Hopkins, Sketching on Île Dorval, from The Lachine Sketchbook (1859–60), 1860.

lishment of her exhibiting career in the 1870s, her progressive movement away from her home in Lachine is accompanied by a gradual move towards self-referentiality. Her earliest known works are drawings that document her domestic environment: a perspective study of her house and verandah with her husband sitting on the porch; a line drawing of children in the garden as seen from a second-storey window.45 As she began to travel within Canada, however, her firmly emplaced domestic vision began to broaden. The change is instantiated in her scenes of the enormous timber-rafts that floated down the St Lawrence and Ottawa rivers. Large enough to support dozens of men and upright trees, these fascinating craft were liminal structures that straddled the stability of land and the fluidity of water. With their campfires and multiple log cabins, they were domestic environments serving an economic function in the middle of nature. A similar broadening of the domestic attends Hopkins’s scene of the Houses of Parliament, and as the notion of home is reconfigured on a national scale, its inclusion of a couple in a canopied rowboat foreshadows the canoe travel to come. Indeed, the more Hopkins travelled, the more likely she was to include herself in her images. Whereas her drawings of home in Lachine give pride of place to her husband and children, her travel – even to nearby Île Dorval – gave the artist room to depict her own creative activity, and she positions

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

her monogram below a sketch of herself drawing as if to insist upon the point. While no marking would ever again so indisputably identify the artist, most of her probable self-representations come when she is far away from home – in her drawing of the Camp at [the] Head of Chute des Arables, for instance, or the paintings that bear her off into the mists of Lake Superior.46 It was, finally, with just such scenes of personal displacement along watery trade routes that Hopkins came into her own as an artist. In this way, physical dislocation was contiguous with the artist’s creation of a place for herself within the professional sphere. The arc of self-actualization that arguably takes shape in Hopkins’s progressive and water-borne displacement from the domestic was a common feature of female travel writing, where women’s physical journeys were often paralleled by voyages of personal realization and self-discovery.47 In view of Hopkins’s ambivalent presence in her art, however, this process was clearly not straightforward. Signs of tension are particularly apparent in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall (fig. 2.2). Here, a series of pictorial stresses takes hold of the image and adds subtly to its charge: a tension, for instance, between the forward-gliding motion of the canoe and the radical stillness of the canvas, an air of looming claustrophobia despite the wilderness setting, or the slight sequential disjunction produced by temporal condensation, as the voyageur plucks for his passenger the lily that she is already looking at. Most striking of all is the vivid juxtaposition between the natural colours of the paddlers’ clothing and the aniline dye of Hopkins’s pastel hat and jacket. Here, colour enables the artist to insist on the female passenger’s placement within the scene, while it simultaneously emphasizes just how out of place she seems. Literary critic Norman Feltes has commented on these disjunctions, suggesting that they are best understood as symptoms of the gender-based anomalies of Hopkins’s position on her voyage: a Victorian woman, fragile water-lily, assuming the physical strength to make an arduous journey and the creative power to record it afterwards.48 Certainly it is reasonable to assume that the artist was acutely aware of her physical difference from her companions; on a trip that lasted more than a full menstrual cycle, there would have been no way of avoiding it. Voyageur society was, moreover, an aggressively masculine one, as the men who paddled forty-five strokes a minute and portaged with 180 pounds on their backs met the almost inhuman exigencies of their employment by embracing a competitive culture of rowdiness, endurance, and strength.49 The highly formulaic narrative of chivalry that Hopkins constructs around the water lily seems almost calculated to relieve these gendered tensions through recourse to a time-honoured formula for the courtly management of sexual difference. To Feltes, however, the pictorial stresses that mark Canoe Manned by Voyageurs signal something more complex than mere awareness of gender difference, and he draws on feminist theories of the gaze to suggest that

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the painting also visualizes a moment of doubled consciousness, in which Hopkins not only “savours the oddness of her presence in the painting, but savours also for a moment the oddness that it should be odd.”50 Our clue to this reflexivity lies in the artist’s adoption of a detached viewing perspective: not seated in her own canoe but rather looking at it from the water. By this means, Feltes observes, the artist separates herself from her own subjective position; as the traveller Hopkins stares at a conventional floral symbol of femininity, the artist Hopkins stares at herself looking at herself. It is the culminating disjunction in a series of tensions that, when taken together, “not only portray Hopkins as obviously incongruous but emphasize the constructedness of the incongruity.”51 In this scenario, the presentyet-absent quality of the artist’s self-representation comes into focus as doubled consciousness, a subjectivity both inhabited and observed. Such dual sensibility was not uncommon amongst female travellers, whose narratives cumulatively demonstrate a particular awareness of themselves as objects of vision. In her work on women’s travelogues, cultural historian Sarah Mills notes that, unlike their male counterparts, female authors often remarked on how they must appear to those around them.52 Taking oneself as an object for objective consideration could function in different ways: as self-surveillance, for example, or as a prelude to interpersonal connection through empathetic projection into someone else’s perspective. But the externalization of self-reflexivity also had a subtle protective function, for it enabled Victorian lady travellers to mount a defence against charges of putting themselves too much forward. As literary scholar Shirley Foster notes, the travel genre facilitated “self-exploration under cover of response to an external reality,” enabling women to construct subjective identities for themselves within a context of objective exploration that shielded them from moral critique.53 Here, then, is another way of understanding the mixture of personal placement and displacement in Hopkins’s oils, for it is just this balance between subjective self-awareness and objective externalization that they achieve. That balance was, moreover, absolutely pivotal to the success of Hopkins’s aesthetic project as a whole, for if we move out from Feltes’s consideration of the gaze to assess the wider stylistic language in which it was embedded, we shall see that the artist’s sophisticated mobilization of realist detail functioned in a precisely analogous manner: as a mechanism through which to manage her contradictory placement in and displacement from her work.

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All in the Details

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The tenuous balance of subjective presence and absence that suffuses Hopkins’s early oils is not only a question of vision but also of voice. According to Foster, Victorian women who wrote about their imperial travels alternated between two pre-eminent narrative voices.54 The first was

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

a model of neutral and objective detachment that aimed descriptively to document “abroad”; in view of the exceedingly strong associations between Victorian women and domesticity, female authors were under special pressure to authenticate accounts of their travel, and they not infrequently did so by adopting a tone of impartial and detached reportage. This paradigm, however, was offset by a second, more participatory approach, in which authors immersed themselves in their environment and invested in the idea of self-expression, often by presenting dramatic narratives of shared encounters with Indigenous inhabitants. Hopkins’s painting speaks with both of these voices. From the moment when The Times first praised her “truthfulness” in 1869, the artist’s credentials for documentary observation have remained virtually unsurpassed in nineteenth-century Canadian art.55 So technically accurate are her renderings of canoe construction considered to be that when the Canadian Museum of Civilization decided to build a replica of a fur-trade canoe, it took a Hopkins painting for its model.56 Yet works like Shooting the Rapids and Canoe Manned by Voyageurs also leave a distinct impression of the artist’s sympathetic engagement with her scenes. Here, Hopkins’s objectivity is balanced by a subjective investment, established through her careful particularization of fellow participants and her only partially veiled selfreferential practices. Such participatory immersion in a dramatic narrative is a hallmark of travel literature’s more subjective authorial voice, and it is clear that Hopkins has mastered this voice as well. Viewers’ eagerness to find the artist in her paintings only underlines the point. Ultimately, the combined effect is one of objective subjectivity. Much of this effect comes down to her handling of details. Hopkins’s meticulous inclusion of non-essential minutiae – earrings, lichen, pipe smoke – creates the canvases’ pronounced reality effect, deepening their air of factual precision and gratifying English viewers’ curiosity about an unfamiliar colony. Yet the credible reality that Hopkins created was very much the product of her own artistic choices: which elements to include, which to leave out, and which to put together. Examined closely, the works reveal signs of these choices; water lilies do not grow at the foot of waterfalls, after all (fig. 2.2), nor do drinking cups remain perfectly poised on the seats of canoes hurtling down rapids (fig. 2.6).57 Yet both water lily and cup are there for a reason. While Janet Clark has observed that the flower was something of a personal symbol for the artist, accentuating her participation within the scene, seemingly random narrative details like the cup pull viewers into the works in turn, lending intimacy to Hopkins’s renderings of the Great Outdoors while further enhancing the impression of authenticity that attaches to the images.58 In this manner, the proliferation of realist detail works simultaneously to enhance our belief in the artist’s objectivity and to promote a sense of her very personal attachment to the scene. Once again, the artist is both present and absent.

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FIg. 2.14 Frances Anne Hopkins, Woman in a Field, 1904.

Tellingly, however, not all of Hopkins’s paintings function in this way, for the French landscapes that make up the other half of her known oeuvre are distinctly painterly, almost impressionistic. The difference in approach inscribes Hopkins’s stylistic development as an artist and conforms to audience expectations for visualizations of the French countryside in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But the difference is also one of the artist’s subjective inscription within the work: the degree to which she is visibly engaged with the scenes she portrays. Traveling within the comparative safety and familiarity of Western Europe, it appears that she could allow herself to be fully written into her art through expressive brushwork and fluidity of personal aesthetic response. When it came to travelling through the backwoods of Canada, however, she would be more circumspect. Far from home, in the company of Indigenous men, Hopkins relied on detail to carefully manage her connection. The scene is only so personal, and the artist never lets us see through her eyes.59

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Domestic Economies, or, a Teakettle in the Wilderness

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As it happens, there was cause for circumspection, for the mobility, freedom, and activity associated with travel were not readily conceded to Victorian women. Within the western cultural imaginary, the very notion

of the voyage has been linked to the masculine sphere on an Odyssean scale; almost by definition, the adventurer has been he who travels far enough to leave the feminized realm of the domestic behind him.60 Restrictions on female mobility were particularly pronounced during the mid-Victorian era and, given this, it comes as no surprise to find more than one nineteenth-century reviewer mistaking the Canadian travel paintings of “F.A. Hopkins” for the work of a man.61 To the extent that Victorian lady travellers flouted the gender-based assumptions of their era, they were open to censure as adventuresses who overstepped the bounds of appropriate feminine pursuit. In the early 1890s, for example, women’s campaign for admission to the Royal Geographic Society prompted especially public denunciations of their travels. “The genus of professional female globe-trotters,” Lord Curzon wrote in a letter to The Times, “is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century.”62 What Curzon found transgressive in the 1890s had been all the more so at the beginning of Hopkins’s career two decades earlier. And so while the elements of self-reflexivity in the artist’s early oils may indeed make sense as an index of personal actualization, their concurrent aspects of self-effacement are no less comprehensible as a means to deflect disapprobation. Nor was the modesty of self-effacement the only aspect of Hopkins’s art to function as an affirmation of conventional femininity. The fashionably dressed woman in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs is the visual analogue to dozens of written accounts in which female travellers emphasized the strictly conventional nature of their dress in an endeavour to forestall accusations of impropriety in their comportment. Time and again, these authors counteracted the risk of moral censure by finding ways to recast their

FIg. 2.15 Frances Anne Hopkins, Voyageurs at Dawn, 1871.

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adventures as essentially womanly activities, framing them in terms of duty and fidelity and foregrounding the aspects of their journeys that most recalled features of “home.”63 In a similar manner, Hopkins tied her travel closely to the conjugal bond, offset her freedom through the close confinement of the canoe, and courted convention with pervasive reminders of the domestic.64 In Voyageurs at Dawn, the artist attends to the daily activities of home away from home in an HBC encampment, while in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs her husband’s domestic comfort reigns supreme – visible in the pipe that Edward smokes, the pillow that cushions his back, and the blanket that keeps them cozy. It is apparent above all in the teakettle that sits like a signal of domestic felicity, only ever so slightly off balance. If Hopkins’s paintings reinstate the domestic into the moment of travel, however, they do not turn their back on the power of the voyage so much as they broaden its import. Recent cultural analyses of travel have advocated for such a broadening, drawing on the mutual imbrication of “home” and “away” to disrupt any simple conceptualization of the journey as a risktaking, masculinized antithesis of comfortable feminine domesticity.65 In this vein, literary theorist Georges Van Den Abbeele supplants the binary model of travel (home versus away) with the metaphor of an economy of the voyage, highlighting the processes of exchange that characterize travel’s momentum; as “there” becomes “here” over the course of the voyage, experiences of location and displacement, loss and gain, confinement and liberation, circulate and must be navigated in relation to each other. Narrative reactivations of travel, such as we see in Hopkins’s paintings, are exemplary of this process for the way in which they supplement the spatial and cultural dislocations of travel with the supportive structural embrace of a good story. “The travel narrative,” writes Van Den Abbeele, “is one in which the transgression of losing or leaving the home is mediated by a movement that attempts to fill the gap of that loss,” a smoothing of travel’s “initial discontinuity into the continuity of a [story] line that can be drawn on a map.”66 Or, we might add, a canvas. And indeed there is much in Van Den Abbeele’s account that rings true, both for Hopkins’s art and for women’s travelogues more broadly. For as literary historian Maria Frawley has observed, home and away coexist in women’s travel narratives, where the authority of the female writer was “dependent on an ability to comfortably occupy several positions displaced from but relative to the [domestic] centre.”67 In this manner, Frawley continues, cultural representations of the voyage functioned as a means of inscribing their authors’ simultaneous sense of proximity to and detachment from their own home culture. If, as Frawley also argues, the authorial voice of the female travel writer was an intrinsically ambivalent one, this ambivalence is partly a function of the economic character of the voyage, understood as an ever-changing manifold in which a range of subject positions are exchanged and negotiated. As travel alters established patterns of

A Daughter of Empire in Copper Bay More aptly than most, Frances Anne Hopkins (née Beechey) may be characterized as a daughter of empire. The Beechey family name that was hers by birth marks Canadian geography from the Arctic archipelago to the tip of Vancouver Island. Her grandfather, the portraitist Sir William

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

strangeness and familiarity, clear-cut identities built on positionality begin to dissolve. To this extent, Hopkins’s conflicted acts of subjective inscription and self-erasure articulate a dynamic intrinsic to all cultural narratives of travel but magnified amongst Victorian women, for whom associations of hearth and home were so prescriptively normativized. Then, too, when it comes to Hopkins’s travels in particular, the appeal of an economic understanding of the voyage is more than merely metaphorical. In 1864, when the artist accompanied her husband on his annual tour of inspection, she was participating in a business trip meant to ensure the proper management of a commercial interest worth £2 million.68 The corporate history of that interest is integral to the shifting imbrication of “home” and “away” that Hopkins’s paintings embody, for with furs dwindling and Canadian expansion imminent, the years of the artist’s residence in Canada coincided with a corporate restructuring that saw the HBC shift its emphasis from resource extraction to speculation in settlement. In 1869–70, the company selectively sold its lands to the new Dominion of Canada and refocused its commercial activities on expanding its trading posts into the full-fledged retail outlets so necessary to settlers.69 As the HBC transformed itself from an intrepid trader of furs to a domestic purveyor of teakettles, attendant changes in ownership and management marginalized old “wintering partners” like Edward, who was soon to complain that his income no longer sufficed to meet his expenses.70 With his wife and children already living in England, and his administrative decisions increasingly being called to account, he decided to resign from company service to pursue a second career as an investor. By the time of the couple’s 1869 journey from Fort William to Montreal, both were effectively tourists, and Edward paid for the cost of their canoes personally.71 Against this backdrop, the economic imbrication of home and away in Hopkins’s art shifts aspect once again, and the teakettle that so effectively symbolized her ambivalent relation to securely gendered domesticity now gains eloquence in relation to the imperial project of creating new spheres of domestic belonging, and to the patterns of economic development that spurred that process on. In this context, the dynamics of presence and absence so central to Hopkins’s canvases also speak to the shifting nature of the British Empire at a moment when Indigenous territories were being reconfigured as Canadian homelands and colonial functionaries were being displaced by the advent of the settler nation state.

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Beechey, memorialized the political and military leaders of empire in the New World, while her father, the naval explorer Frederick Beechey, used his abilities as a topographical draughtsman to re-encode colonial territory, structuring it for European consumption.72 For both men, art and imperial identity were linked, and Hopkins participated enthusiastically in this larger tradition, commemorating colonial spectacle in her scenes such as The Visit of the Prince of Wales to Lachine Rapids (RA 1902) and celebrating colonial might in The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls. Characteristically, she used detail to link her own travel to the imperial project. Consider the Red Ensign that distinguishes Colonel Wolseley’s canoe in The Red River Expedition and flies from the stern of the vessel in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs. The same flag that in one instance signals the imperial nature of a military mission to establish territorial sovereignty and suppress Indigenous rebellion serves in the other to denote the chartered commercial interests that underpinned the empire. In a very real way, the HBC was the commercial face of colonization in British North America, for it was invested by the British crown with both economic and political authority over the territory it occupied. At the time of the company’s official formation in 1670, it based its flag on the Red Ensign of the Royal Navy, with the letters HBC added in white in the lower right quadrant. During the years that Hopkins was painting, the Red Ensign designated ships of the Merchant Marine and was rapidly becoming the de facto flag of the new Canadian Dominion. In Canoe Manned by Voyageurs, the artist’s decision to render the Ensign partially furled and so partially obscured leaves the question of its exact corporate or political referent open, all the more effectively underlining the ties that bound the empire together across political, economic, and military lines.73 Looking still more closely at the painting, however, the Ensign’s prominent display of empire is haunted by an echo: a second flag, painted onto the birch bark immediately beneath it, pennant shaped, and red towards the tip, with a blue saltire and seven blue markings on a white ground. The detail, which appears in a slightly altered form in two other Hopkins paintings, is part of a larger motif, Indigenous in appearance, in which a flagpole is supported by a figure smoking a pipe.74 As with the Ensign and most of the canoe’s passengers, the precise identity of the motif remains uncertain, but we know that during the nineteenth century flags were in use as tools of diplomacy by both the Anishnaabe-Ojibwe (who made and decorated the canoes that transported Hopkins from Fort William) and by the Kanien’kehá:ka (who crewed them and sometimes added to their designs).75 The presence of the pipe-smoking figure further strengthens a suggestion of Indigenous diplomacy, for amongst First Nations, the ceremonial sharing of tobacco was integral to the making and ratification of formal agreements. Together, flag and pipe cast the painting in another light, reorienting its story of presence and absence towards questions of

FIg. 2.16 Detail from the stern of the canoe in Hopkins’s Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall, 1869.

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

treaty negotiation and land appropriation – questions that were particularly germane to the northern Great Lakes regions through which Hopkins travelled, where ownership and use had recently been altered by the Robinson Treaties of 1850. The economies of loss and gain effected by colonization are well encapsulated in the history of the Robinson Treaties. Together, the two agreements (one for Lake Huron, the other for Lake Superior) were the negotiated outcome of five years of concentrated Anishnaabe opposition to settler encroachments in the area.76 With the discovery of rich mineral

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deposits in the 1840s, settler interest in the region had intensified, and as mining companies pushed to establish their ownership of sites that they were already developing under government licence, provincial surveyors moved in to parcel out lands that – according to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 – were not actually theirs to take.77 In the face of growing Anishnaabe resistance to these incursions, including the armed interruption of mining operations, the settler government came under pressure to regularize its ownership of the territory, and it did so by means of the Robinson Treaties.78 From the perspective of the imperial and provincial governments, the treaties secured the legal surrender of Anishnaabe land in exchange for the creation of reserve territories and the payment of cash annuities. From an Indigenous perspective, however, the agreements are better understood as stipulating the terms on which the Anishnaabeg were willing to share their land.79 To this end, Anishnaabe chiefs secured their people’s continued hunting and fishing rights over ceded territories so long as these remained undeveloped. Through the treaty’s augmentation clause, which stipulated that the annuities were subject to increase as revenue from development rose, the chiefs also established the principle that Indigenous inhabitants of the region could expect to benefit from industrial development in an ongoing and proportionate way. Within a decade of the treaties, however, significant disputes over interpretation and implementation had arisen. The parties did not agree on the boundaries of the land covered by the agreements, or on the principles and practices for payment of the annuities. Post-Confederation, the transfer of authority to the settler government only deepened the rift. Hunting and fishing rights were unilaterally revoked except on reserve lands, and even those lands became subject to sale or expropriation, as many bands were coerced into parting with some or all of the territories initially negotiated for their exclusive use. By 1870 the Lake Huron and Superior chiefs were formally seeking redress for non-fulfilment of the augmentation clause. While the newly established federal cabinet endorsed their complaint, financial responsibility now lay with the province, which delayed action for another four years. Finally, in 1874, payment was increased on a one-time basis; the chiefs responded by claiming arrears, giving rise to a legal dispute that lasted for twenty-five years. While arrears were eventually paid, the annuity itself would never again be augmented, so that to this day beneficiaries of the Robinson Treaties receive four dollars annually, representing their share of the revenues generated by Northern Ontario’s extensive natural resource industries.80 Edward and Frances Anne Hopkins were linked to these treaties both through the terms of Edward’s employment and by their private financial interests in the region. The treaties were negotiated in HBC warehouses, and the company, ever mindful of the potential for increased sales revenue

at its trading posts, willingly assumed the obligation of distributing the annual cash annuities agreed within them.81 Because Edward was the chief factor of the department responsible for the region, oversight of the arrangement would have devolved to him after the death of Governor George Simpson, who had initially put it in place. More significantly, the Hopkinses were privately invested in the region’s economic development. At the time of the couple’s trips in the 1860s, Edward was a director of the Copper Bay Mining Company on the north shore of Lake Huron, one of the principal commercial interests then active in the region.82 In this way, the couple’s financial prosperity was straightforwardly linked to developments made possible by the terms of the treaties, and their travels through the region thus assume the further aspect of keeping an eye on their investments.83 The history of the Robinson Treaties, like the detail of the flags and the pipe at the stern of Canoe Manned by Voyageurs, calls into relief the negotiated nature of relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples just prior to Canadian Confederation. It was a moment when First Nations had lost their hold on the geopolitical balance of power but had not yet been declared wards of a triumphant settler state. If the Indian Act was clearly coming, it had not quite arrived during the years of Hopkins’s Canadian residence. In her art, the Red Ensign might fly from the back of the canoe, but Indigenous paddlers still outnumbered European settlers. Hopkins’s paintings, like the Robinson Treaties, are carefully considered statements of cultural coexistence. What more can be gleaned from her art about the nature of that coexistence? And how does the history of settlement feed into the story of absent presence that Hopkins’s paintings rehearse?

A Water Lily for Frances

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

The men who powered the fur trade were of three principal ethnic backgrounds – First Nations, French Canadian, and Métis – but the voyageurs that Hopkins painted were, to her mind, Mohawks from Caughnawaga. She made the specification explicit in a 1910 letter to collector David Ross McCord, in which she offered to paint him a canoe “and put ten real Caughnawaga Indians in it.”84 While her phrasing clearly plays into early twentieth-century nostalgia for an authentic indigeneity then assumed to exist only in the past, there is also considerable historical evidence to indicate that the crewmen who conducted her on her travels through the Canadian interior were in fact Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawks) from Kahnawá:ke. Edward’s long-time employer, Governor George Simpson, had particularly esteemed the abilities of the Kanien’kehá:ka, and men from Kahnawá:ke formed the majority of the crew that had paddled the governor and his secretary, Edward Hopkins, on their travels in the 1840s and ’50s.85 After Simpson’s death, Edward appears to have maintained the practice. In June of 1864, the year of his first long canoe trip with his wife, he solicited

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the missionary priest in the village, Father Burtin, to provide a list of voyageurs available for travel that summer.86 All of the names on the list are Kanien’kehá:ka, and the check-marks (or occasionally x’s) that have been added to Father Burtin’s list give us a fair idea of the men likely to have served as voyageurs on the couple’s journey from Fort William that year.87 The history of Kanien’kehá:ka voyageurs is a reminder of both the variability and the complexity of the relationships between colonized and colonizing peoples. In 1870, men from Kahnawá:ke had guided Garnet Wolseley’s forces on their mission to suppress the Métis rebellion in the Red River Settlement. Some served under Wolseley again in 1884 when he coordinated a military expedition up the Nile to rescue forces besieged by Mahdist rebels in the Sudan.88 Within the fur trade, employment contracts show that Kanien’kehá:ka voyageurs were not only at ease within the money economy of the British but that they often negotiated more advantageous terms than French-Canadian engagés.89 Like all voyageurs, their working conditions were harsh and dangerous, but their steady recruitment into the trade suggests that many found such employment preferable to continuous residence on the reserve, where lack of economic opportunities led to increasing anger.90 From the fact that their contracts are not infrequently marked “Deserted,” it also appears that Kanien’kehá:ka voyageurs preserved a comparative independence among fur-trade employees; once they had made their way to the unsettled regions of present-day Alberta, British Columbia, and the northwestern United States, they often chose life as independent freemen.91 The ability of Kanien’kehá:ka voyageurs to navigate the waters of colonial authority draws attention to their agency within a hierarchical fur-trade system organized around racial discrimination, “indentured servitude, paternalism, and cultural hegemony.”92 In the company world of “masters” and “servants,” voyageurs of all ethnic backgrounds worked to further their interests and preserve their autonomy; they stretched out smoking breaks to modulate the intensity of their physical labour, stole provisions to augment their wages, and temporarily deserted to secure changes to their working conditions. Employers responded with demonstrations of corporeal discipline and threats against future employment. Yet, as fur-trade historian Carolyn Podruchny observes, masters and servants also needed to cultivate good relations with each other, for they worked and lived in extremely close quarters and shared many of the same hazards and adventures.93 While crewmen needed wages to provide for themselves and their families, masters depended on the skills, knowledge, and continuing good will of the men who transported them, cooked for them, and erected their shelter. The need to create a workable relationship led both parties to engage in what Podruchny describes as “ritual theatre of daily rule”: a dialogue in which the parties enacted the differing bases of their authority through

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

displays of accommodation and confrontation.94 Voyageurs demonstrated their physical strength and skill in exhibitions of masculinity and either affably accepted or sullenly refused to perform tasks outside the normal scope of their duties; employers emphasized their superiority through resoluteness, social distance, and access to creature comforts. Trader Alexander Ross’s description from 1855 is particularly germane: “The bourgeois is carried on board his canoe upon the back of some sturdy fellow generally appointed for this purpose. He seats himself on a convenient mattress, somewhat low in the centre of his canoe; his gun by his side, his little cherubs fondling around him, and his faithful spaniel lying at his feet. No sooner is he at his ease, than his pipe is presented by his attendant, and he then begins smoking, while his silken banner undulates over the stern of his painted vessel.”95 Other descriptions of the “indulgences” allowed to masters expressly note the presence of their female companions in company canoes.96 It is exactly such a ritual theatre that Hopkins gives us in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall. Here, the same genteel clothing and leisured status that is intended to signal bourgeois economic privilege and British cultural superiority also makes visible just how vulnerable such passengers were outside of their accustomed sphere of metropolitan influence. The most obviously theatrical aspect of the scene, however, is the episode with the water lilies, plucked for Hopkins by a chivalrous crewman. Such chivalry is a routine feature of white women’s accounts of their travels amongst voyageurs in the nineteenth century. In Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Anna Jameson revelled in the “gallanterie” of her Indigenous and Métis “cavaliers” who, she informed her readers, never failed to accompany her breakfast with freshly picked flowers.97 A comparable moment is described by Frances Simpson (1812–1853) in the journal of her travel to York Factory in 1830. Freshly married to the company’s governor and newly arrived from London, the eighteen-year-old takes evident pleasure and pride in recounting how her largely Kanien’kehá:ka crew had “agreed among themselves” to cut a lopped stock, or maypole, in her honour.98 Yet Simpson’s sense of the men’s courtliness is undermined by her awareness of their volatility, culminating in desertion. Employees whom she describes as singing and laughing one moment have become violent the next, prompting a retaliatory show of force on her husband’s part, and whereas the men appear to her to be as contented “as if on an excursion of pleasure,” by the following day, two more have gone.99 When they are recovered, they are sentenced by the senior crewmen to twelve lashes, but their punishment is commuted on the special pleading of the new bride. Female passengers’ role within this theatre was heavily overdetermined. The advent of white women into fur trade society led to the abandonment of many Indigenous and Métis “country wives” and the social exclusion of others. Kinship networks between settlers and Indigenes were ruptured,

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and racial prejudice within the fur trade increased. Class differences were also reinforced, as the HBC began to use marriage to European women as “one of the most striking tools at the company’s disposal” to distinguish between its high-ranking officials and the rest of its employees.100 Yet the roles thus thrust upon company wives were lived differently by different women. Incipient within Frances Simpson’s account of her experience is a suggestion of empathy that contrasts strongly with the supercilious tone adopted by her sister, Isobel Finlayson (1811–1890), who undertook a similar journey ten years later. Finlayson’s aloofness from the men who cared for her comfort is patent: “Two of the Indians attached themselves particularly to me during the voyage, and were always called my Indians. Whenever we came to an encampment, I found one waiting to carry some of my things, while the other had bounded off to the woods to cut down Pinebrush, to strew under my bed to make it softer and more comfortable. It was quite amusing to see the attention of these poor sons of the forest, for which Finlayson did not forget to reward them at the end of our journey.”101 It is more difficult to discern the impulses of connection and differentiation that link and divide the participants in Hopkins’s drama of the water lily (fig. 2.2). In her analysis of the painting, Anna Hudson highlights the interest in flowers shared by both the work’s European artist and by the First Nations women who added floral decorations to fur-trade canoes, such as the one depicted by Hopkins here.102 As Ruth Phillips has pointed out, flowers were an important locus of transcultural exchange at midcentury, and for Hudson their presence signifies “the intercultural alliances between Indigenous peoples and settlers created as a result of the fur trade.”103 But what does the painting tell us about the terms on which this alliance was conducted? Should the central episode of the water lily be read as a moment of shared fascination with the natural world? Or is it rather a classed and racialized statement of Indigenous deference to the master’s white wife? Examined closely, the canvas itself appears to articulate a divided perspective on the question. Notably, the female traveller does not obviously connect with any of the paddlers and focuses her attention on the flower to the exclusion of their efforts to obtain it for her. Yet the artist nevertheless links the figures in a compositional chain. Characteristically, that chain is held most strongly together at the point of its greatest disjuncture – the clothing – for while the colours, style, and fit of the female passenger’s hat and jacket set her off from the crewmen around her, their shared accessories have evidently been calculated to pull them together as an outfit. Like the crew, Hopkins wears earrings, and her hat, like theirs, has avian detailing.104 In similar manner, Edward is both linked to and set off from his crew through the detail of the pipes: his clay-bowl, theirs wooden. Here the artist’s impetus to link the protagonists in her drama evidently exceeded

her allegiance to the claims of realism, for fur-trade discipline would have demanded that the men wait for their breaks to partake in the pleasures of tobacco that their superiors enjoyed at will. Connection and distance are thus fostered simultaneously, suggesting the precarious balancing act that this ritual theatre of shared coexistence entailed. In this way, the social import of the painting’s drama is as difficult to pin down as the identity of its female passenger. Like the treaties that governed the land and the social contracts that regulated its inhabitants, the patterns of negotiated coexistence that prevail in Hopkins’s imagery are open to interpretation. Turning from the images to the titles she gave her works, however, it appears that one particular instance of this coexistence played itself out somewhat differently for Hopkins than the rest.

Name-Giver During her time in Canada, Hopkins painted a number of studies of individual voyageurs, such as the oil sketch now known as Stern Paddler. Typically, the titles she attached to these works were generic. Examples from her 1870 exhibition at the Art Association of Montreal delimit their subjects through a conventional combination of ethnicity and occupation: Indian Canoe Guide, Indian Steersman, and the only marginally more informative Iroquois Voyageurs. No suggestion of interpersonal connection emerges. At the end of her exhibiting career, however, Hopkins was to rupture this anonymity in a watercolour that she offered for sale in 1914 at the Walker’s Galleries in London: Baptiste Assanienton, Canoe Guide. The name, only slightly misspelled, is Kanien’kehá:ka, and its presence in the

FIg. 2.17 Frances Anne Hopkins, Stern Paddler, undated. 

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record of Hopkins’s oeuvre opens up a new perspective on the subjectivities that are inscribed there. Ultimately, the reasons for Hopkins’s choice to name one of the men who brought her safely through the wilderness remain unknown, but the choice itself is revealing, for although the painting to which it was originally attached cannot now be traced, the same is not true for the history of the man it designates. Jean-Baptise Asennaienton was born in Kahnawá:ke in May 1802, the son of Agnes Skonsaksenni and Jacques Tonitarionne, who brought him to be christened in the village church.105 He married there at the age of nineteen, and his wife, Kaheriennentha, bore a daughter the following year. As with Hopkins, however, Asennaienton would come to know what it meant to lose children, and like her, he would travel in the wake of his loss. All four of the offspring from his first marriage died in infancy, and his young wife followed in 1830, at only twenty-four years of age. Asennaienton hit the waterways, first appearing in the account books of the Hudson’s Bay Company the following year, a twenty-nine-year-old voyageur working a three-year contract far from home in the Columbia District. He was not, however, to become one of those Kanien’kehá:ka paddlers who began life anew in the Rocky Mountains. Instead, he returned to Kahnawá:ke, and in 1838 he remarried. The following spring he arranged for employment as a “summerman,” a position which (by voyageur standards) kept him closer to home. After the death of the first child from his second marriage, however, he was back on the long trail, a bowsman on the hand-picked crew that brought Governor George Simpson on the Canadian leg of his journey around the world in 1841. This voyage was shared by Edward Hopkins, then a novice in the HBC on his first lengthy canoe trip. Asennaienton returned to Kahnawá:ke where, over the next two and a half decades, he raised seven children, married once more, and worked summers transporting goods and passengers along the route between Lachine and York Factory on Hudson’s Bay. By the time that Frances Hopkins met him in the early 1860s, he was a guide, notable for his age, position of responsibility, and long acquaintance with her husband. From what we know of her travels, it seems likely that he led her first trip from Fort William in 1864, for his name appears with a checkmark against it on the list of available men that Father Burtin had sent to Edward in June of that year. Whatever the case, the period of the artist’s acquaintance with Asennaienton was brief, for he was buried on 8 November 1865. Much like the detail of the flag and the pipe, the interruption of Asennaienton’s name in the narrative of Hopkins’s art marks the return of the territorially dispossessed, here by means of the most personal and symbolic possession of all: one’s name. Through this nominative register of their commonality – her monogram on the work, his name on the page of the catalogue – the prospect of human connection that the artist only hints

at in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs is now more robustly affirmed. It was the only time that Hopkins would so explicitly recognize one of the Indigenous men with whom she shared the boundary-shifting experience of the voyage, and her acknowledgment effects yet another shift in the economy of subject positions that circulates within her art, for by means of his name, it becomes possible to know Asennaienton as an individual with a life history just as poignant and compelling as the artist’s own. If we cannot now firmly correlate his name to a face on a canvas, this hardly seems to matter, for neither can we do so with her. What counts is that his placement within the tale momentarily decentres the artist. But unlike the decentrings and displacements I have previously been at pains to evoke, this one opens onto the prospect of gain rather than loss, for as Hopkins recognizes Asennaienton’s claim to the property of his own name, the “Indian Canoe Guide” becomes a person. As a subject emerges from the more typical position of otherness, the possibility of genuine intersubjective exchange comes into view for the first time. By now, however, it is abundantly apparent that when it comes to Hopkins’s art, no straightforward acts of naming are possible. In the case of Asennaienton, the gesture of naming that establishes him as an historical subject is complicated by the meaning of the name itself, for Asennaienton translates into English as “he/she has bestowed a name.”106 Remarkably, the name that Hopkins has recorded refers back to the very action of giving a name. There is a striking metadiscursivity at play here, and the gender-neutral character of the pronoun only makes matters more complex. Once in Hopkins’s hands, the appellation’s self-referential character means that the name not only gestures outward, to the Kanien’kehá:ka man who guided Hopkins’s canoe, but also back to the settler artist: she who gave us his name. In a sense, then, “Asennaienton” also translates as “Hopkins.” Clearly, this is a problem.

Indigenization and the Imperial Woman Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

The cultural move by which Indigenous identities are appropriated by colonizing subjects has come to be known as settler indigenization: the making native of the foreign.107 In their writings on the art of settler societies, Damian Skinner and Nicholas Thomas have identified indigenization as one of the principal aesthetic strategies adopted by colonizers faced with the task of culturally encoding their belonging in a new world, and its belonging to them.108 Typically, the process is twofold. In an initial moment, Native peoples are expunged: shunted to the margins of the picture plane, depicted as a dying race, expurgated from the landscape. This displacement once effected, western artists then become free to appropriate Indigenous forms and identities to their own ends. To translate Asennaienton as Hopkins –

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FIg. 2.18 Frances Anne Hopkins, Minnehaha Feeding the Birds, c. 1880.

even if the artist herself never did so – is to interrogate her place within this structure and to question its role within the narrative of ambivalent identification that was so central to her art. Both moments in the drama of indigenization are apparent in Hopkins’s 1874 canvas Minnehaha Feeding the Birds. The work is based on Henry Longfellow’s popular Song of Hiawatha (1855), an epic ballad that enshrines the topos of the doomed Aboriginal through its account of Hiawatha’s voluntary departure from his homeland at the point of European immigration.109 In turning to Longfellow, Hopkins abandons the cultural complexity of modern Kanien’kehá:ka voyageurs in contemporary dress in favour of a stock Indian princess, clothed in a deerskin dress from Edward’s ethnographic collection and idealized into a garden of Eden whose temporality can only be the past.110 The paradigm of the vanishing Indian was one that the artist was evidently comfortable with, for she returned to it more than once. In Relics of the Primeval Forest (the title is another nod to Longfellow) Indians are likened to charred stumps of old-growth trees, slowly decaying at the water’s edge. Left to Die is comparably gloomy in its outlook for an Indigenous future, and the explanatory caption attached to it offered Academy audiences the added reassurance that outcomes such as the one it depicted were the result of the customs and choices of the Indians themselves.111

FIg. 2.19 Frances Anne Hopkins, Relics of the Primaeval Forest, Canada, 1885. FIg. 2.20 Frances Anne Hopkins, Left to Die, 1872.

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

All of this is straightforward othering. But Minnehaha Feeding the Birds also bears traces of indigenization’s second, more appropriative moment, raising the possibility that Hopkins identified with aspects of the character she depicted and adopted them to encode her own subjectivity and desires. She would not have been the first nineteenth-century artist to do so.112 And we know that Hopkins was no stranger to practices of disguised self-representation; during her time in Montreal, she repeatedly had herself photographed in fancy dress.113 The possibility that she was effectively donning a similar disguise in her treatment of Minnehaha arises from a comparison of her painting with Longfellow’s poem. At the level of small details, the correspondence is scrupulously faithful. Robin, bluebird, and swallow are all, as Janet Clark notes, faithfully transposed from verse to image.114 But a larger discrepancy has gone unremarked, for Minnehaha

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never actually feeds the birds in The Song of Hiawatha. More importantly still, she never sits in a canoe; that much is pure Hopkins. And, indeed, there is something of the artist’s personal history in Longfellow’s poetic tale of a bride who leaves her home and follows her husband to a faraway land. Like the woman in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs, Minnehaha is the ideal Victorian wife: a chaste companion on her husband’s travels. In this context, the water lily placed so conspicuously beneath the Indian princess symbolizes more than feminine purity; as in Canoe Manned by Voyageurs, it reads as a sign of Hopkins. The painting thus offers more than it would seem to: not a straightforward self-portrait (for when does Hopkins ever give us that?) but rather a parallel: the cipher of a fellow-traveller. Paying attention to the aspects of self-referentiality in Minnehaha Feeding the Birds, what are we to make of the gesture that repositions the artist from carefully safeguarded tourist to solitary Indigenous woman? If Longfellow has been roundly criticized for his Europeanizing of Native subjects, Hopkins’s apparent reversal of the scenario – wherein a European self is “nativized” – surely amounts to much the same thing: a refiguring of alterity as a veil for subjective expression. But why the need for disguise? What did indigenization offer to Hopkins that she could not achieve on her own? Thomas’s account of the phenomenon focuses on issues of home and belonging. In the psychodynamics of colonial settlement, the drive to indigenization has been central to the legitimation of settlers’ occupancy of their new environs. But while the circumstances of Hopkins’s art and life were unavoidably shaped by settlement, she herself was not a settler, and Canada was no longer her home. By the time she painted Minnehaha Feeding the Birds, she had been back in London for years, and the subjective displacements effected by her travels were a rapidly receding reality. Domestication to a foreign land could thus no longer have been a matter of pressing concern for her, if indeed it ever had been.115 But there is another motivation for indigenization at work in the history of art, where the painterly co-option of First Nations identities has not only served to counteract alienation from a new place but also to register a sense of alienation from within. The classic Canadian example of this is Antoine Plamondon’s 1838 canvas Le dernier des hurons, now widely recognized as an allegorical statement of French Canadian nationalism.116 In the wake of Britain’s violent suppression of the patriote rebellions of 1837–38, artists and poets in Lower Canada repeatedly cast the Wendat (or Huron) as stand-ins for a French-Canadian identity then perceived to be under a parallel threat of extinction from the British. In this way, identification with Indigenous people became a vote of non-confidence in the dominant social formation and a strategy adopted by those who perceived themselves to be at odds with it in some way. Within Victorian society, women were a prominent source of such internal dissention. The year that Hopkins returned to live in London, fifteen

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

hundred suffragists presented the first in a series of parliamentary petitions. By 1873, eleven thousand women were clamouring for change. Their names have not been preserved, and so we cannot know whether Hopkins’s was among them, but the artist’s choice to host an 1863 costume ball dressed as Portia is suggestive of her sympathies in the matter, for during the Victorian era the figure of Portia – a woman in the guise of a male professional – was commonly linked to the cause of female emancipation.117 The artist’s own professional accomplishments and socio-economic background certainly fit the profile of many early suffragists, whose political protest coexisted with a sense that their needs and capacities were not adequately encompassed by the roles that Victorian society held out to them. Significantly, however, the role of Portia could cut both ways, for Shakespeare’s heroine could also be made to figure as a champion for the patriarchal control of women’s property.118 Since Hopkins herself enjoyed a fortune beyond the legal reach of her husband, she seems unlikely to have shared in this perspective, but her choice of an ambiguously coded figure through which to publicly present herself is characteristic.119 Returning to Minnehaha, it becomes clear that Hopkins’s handling of the figure conforms to this pattern of ambiguity. In Longfellow’s poem, Minnehaha is an impossible embodiment of Victorian femininity; without desire of her own, she passes placidly from father to husband. Yet as far as it is possible to judge, Hopkins herself was not such a woman, and her choice to return to London apart from her husband and embark on an artistic career signals an independence of spirit that is in keeping with her own image of Minnehaha: a woman alone in her canoe, at one with her surroundings, and in sole control of her own mobility. Judging from Hopkins’s more straightforwardly autobiographical paintings, this was a degree of autonomy and belonging never open to the artist during her own carefully escorted canoe travels, but if the Indian princess that Hopkins invents enjoys a freedom that the artist herself did not, the painting’s scope for identificatory fantasy is only enhanced by the difference. One of cultural appropriation’s more pressing motivations is the relief that comes when a part of the self that cannot be recognized within one’s own culture momentarily takes flight through another’s. Unlike Hopkins’s dream of Minnehaha as an unrestricted figure, fully and harmoniously integrated with her environment, Victorian women were pushed to the margins of their national contexts and struggled to attain the recognition of full belonging that is so fundamental to any experience of being truly “at home.” In view of this, perhaps Hopkins did, after all, use indigenization in a manner analogous to that proposed by Skinner and Thomas: that is, to inscribe a wish to be at home in her native land. But if so, that land was not Canada but England, where women found themselves excluded from a sphere that was ostensibly their own. At the intersection of gender and colonialism, then, the transpositions set in motion by the

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economy of the voyage were tangled and circuitous indeed, bridging positions of subjectivity and alterity, belonging and exclusion, the domestic and the foreign.

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Stamped with the Sign of the Voyage

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In a variety of ways, then, Frances Anne Hopkins engaged materially with the practice of ambiguous self-representation. On the one hand, we cannot avoid the fact that she painted herself into her canoes; to fail to consider these works in relation to her biography would surely be to go against their grain. But neither should we ignore the ways in which she painted herself out, erased her body, gave no clear self-portrait. She is there but she is not there. Meaning, in Hopkins’s early oils, unfolds through the detailed construction and management of this connection to and distance from her scenes: a working-through of the subject position. The reasons for her ambivalence were multiple and overlapping, but they gravitate around the shifting meanings and experiences of “home” brought into relief by her travel. Transplanted from England to Canada, Hopkins appears to have been conflicted about her relation to the colony, relishing her canoe journeys and her early days on the river in Lachine but ultimately unwilling to sustain a permanent residence. As the safety and stability of her new home life was shattered by loss, she reassessed her connections to place, painting herself into and out of the Canadian context. As much as the simultaneity of subjective emplacement and displacement in the artist’s early oils bespeaks her personal reasons for ambivalence, however, her experiences were also shaped by larger social, political, and economic circumstances. In mid-nineteenth-century Canada, as indeed in England, claims to space and mobility were very much in flux. Against the restrictions of a patriarchal Victorian society, Hopkins appears to have embraced travel for the elements of self-actualization that it afforded, whilst also safeguarding her place within the existing social formation. Her work inscribes this ambivalence through an unstable relation to the domestic and through moments of tension and dual consciousness. To be a woman in a patriarchal society, as Hopkins was, is to be constantly negotiating one’s place in the face of a place that is already given, while to be a traveller is to undertake similar negotiations but under opposite conditions of flux and instability. Hopkins’s mobility, moreover, was a function of her privilege as a white English woman, held in the firm embrace of an empire whose negotiated displacements of Indigenous people were dramatically reconfiguring the meaning of home in British North America. As a beneficiary of these dispossessions, the artist enjoyed a licence and security not available to the Indigenous men with whom she travelled, but they likewise enjoyed freedoms and knew powers that were unavailable to her. In the intercultural, interpersonal space of the canoe, even the most

Self and Home in the Art of Frances Anne Hopkins

carefully stage-managed articulations of connection and distance sometimes gave way to moments of intersubjective recognition that destabilized the fixities of centre and margin and gave rise to an elasticity of the subjectobject interval. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find Hopkins working through her subject position by means of her art. The manipulation of realist detail was one of her chief instruments in this regard, for it enabled her to be both present in and absent from her scenes. An unremitting specificity of detail imbues the work with the aura of factual objectivity even as it draws viewers into an intimate sense of the artist’s lived experience. As a realist, Hopkins’s aim was to make her artistry invisible, but her professional success nevertheless depended on recognition of that invisible exercise of skill. Her use of the realist detail thus gave material form to the same paradoxical conjuncture of emplacement and displacement that her travels wrought at the level of subjectivity. In this way the detail’s simultaneous inscription and erasure of the absent/present artist served as a mechanism whereby the meaning of her work could be embodied within its form. Hopkins’s art is thus deeply auto-referential, and in this it is representative of what Georges Van Den Abbeele has identified as one of the most striking characteristics of the travel narrative: its use of the uncertainties of the voyage to mirror uncertainties in authorship itself.120 The mise-enabime of subjective objectivity that Hopkins’s realism sets in motion echoes travel’s blurring of boundaries and unsettles the artist-traveller’s claim to the certainty of property, whether of home, of body, or even of name.121 As much as that of any artist in Canada, Frances Anne Hopkins’s name has been stamped with the sign of the voyage, and it has cast her identity into question. But what is so significant about Hopkins’s own act of naming is – as the Art Journal so imperfectly and inadvertently recognized – that the destabilizing thrust of its self-referentiality is most strikingly unavoidable at the moment of Indigenous presence. As a name that means name-giver, “Asennaienton” is the colonial claim writ large – even as it is a counterassertion of Indigenous survivance.122 In fantasy, Hopkins’s art plays out indigenization’s reaffirmation of a claim to native belonging and property, altered to her own needs and contexts, but in reality such claims had been undermined by the settlement to which her travel was inextricably bound. Ultimately, Hopkins’s position as a beneficiary of colonialism meant that the very real instabilities of her position were played out against a material, political, cultural, and economic infrastructure that was profoundly stabilizing and empowering to her. Perhaps, then, rather than considering the uncertainties and ambiguities in Hopkins’s art as signs of subjective instability, these might be better cast as expressions of a successful balancing act. Voyaging between Canada and Rupert’s Land on the eve of a transition from colony to nation, Frances Anne Hopkins was also on an edge between feminine domesticity and masculine adventure, between

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travel and tourism, work and leisure – a witness to a corporate movement from primitive accumulation to consumer capitalism. She was British and Canadian, traveller and resident, and she occupied a position of ambivalence between the empowerment accorded to her race and class and the restrictions attendant on her gender. As a woman adventuring in a canoe manned by voyageurs, her actions were suspended between activity and passivity, and this tension finds its way into work that treads the boundary of looking and being seen, of physical presence and corporeal absence. Most importantly of all, Frances Anne Hopkins’s early oils inscribe the ambiguous edge between self and other, the domestic and the foreign, that accompanies any displacement of home and away. Balancing in her canoe, she was immersed in the waters of another culture whilst managing to remain dry, warm, and comfortable.

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GAPS

Gaps

chaPter

3

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Impressionist Canvases For a woman to be an Impressionist made sense. It was tantamount to a realization of self. taMar garb

There is something intractable about the relation between art and subjectivity that I have been describing – a relation in which absence figures as prominently as presence and any hopes or expectations for subjective fullness are undermined by dynamics of blankness and displacement. If I have drawn subjectivity out as a focus of interest and investigation for Henrietta Hamilton and Frances Anne Hopkins, I have nevertheless insisted that their works do not inscribe the self in any simple or straightforward manner. In early twentieth-century Canada, however, discourse on art was increasingly insistent that the artist’s primary task was just such subjective inscription. Whether traditionalist or modern, portrait or landscape, art was held to be most effective precisely when it was most thoroughly infused with personality. Thus, in his 1904 book, The Subjective View of Landscape Painting, Montreal collector E.B. Greenshields elaborated the view that artists only attained true greatness through the “self-revealing” aspects of their work and that the task of the landscape painter was not to capture the objective appearance of a scene but rather to convey “how intensely their feelings were affected by the wonders and beauty of nature.”1 The great artist, for Greenshields, was fundamentally an interpreter of mood

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and emotion: “In his selection of these he reveals himself. What he takes from nature, he puts back out of himself.”2 The attenuated romanticism of this perspective carried forward into Canadian modernism as well, and by 1922 the Toronto artist C.W. Jefferys was noting the ubiquity of the modernist cry for self-expression: “We hear it continually from the mouths of both artists and critics. Every brush paints it, every pen writes it … But it is no new revelation. All art, in the very nature of things, is self-expression.”3 Art’s subjective valence was a matter of course for informed opinion on painting in Canada. While the expression of selfhood was considered to actuate both male and female artists, discussions of art by women often mobilized the subjective link with peculiar intensity. Jefferys’s observations, for instance, were made in the context of his posthumous tribute to the painter Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921) who, together with her husband, George Agnew Reid, had occupied a prominent position in Toronto’s turn-of-the-century art scene. Hiester Reid’s landscapes and floral still lifes were greatly admired by her contemporaries, for whom she exemplified the Aesthetic principle of the union of art and life. “In the case of Mary Hiester Reid,” Jefferys observed, “the fusion of the art and the personality is exceptionally complete. There is no incongruity, no gap, no inexplicable contradiction. In subject matter, in point of view, in manner of presentation, her art is an entirely satisfactory reflex of her own temperament.” So intent was Jefferys upon this theme that he returned to it more than once in the space of his short text: “And, we repeat, in the case of Mrs. Reid, the art and the personality are so completely fused that her work is, in the widest and truest sense, self expression.”4 As a one-time student of the Reids, Jefferys spoke from personal knowledge of the artist, but his conflation of women’s characters with their canvases was also a commonplace of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury discourse. While critical reaction to French Impressionism had long associated it with the expression of a particular temperament,5 observers of the style’s female practitioners would come to limit their view of temperament to its most narrowly gendered traits. George Moore’s assessment of Berthe Morisot is the classic example: “She has created a style,” Moore opined in Modern Painting (1893), “and has done so by investing her art with all her femininity; her art is no dull parody of ours: it is all womanhood – sweet and gracious, tender and wistful womanhood.”6 Three decades later, Jefferys employed closely comparable language in his encomium to Hiester Reid, extolling her as an “unusually gracious and attractive” figure whose work possessed “in a superlative degree those qualities which we regard as being essentially womanly. Her … particular value to Canadian art will be found to consist in that spirit of femininity, of maternity, of womanly strength and tenderness which pervades all that she has done.”7 In this way, works by women coded for femininity.

FIg. 3.1 Mary Hiester Reid, Flowers, 1897.

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

What is notable, of course, is that they could do so even though their artworks looked markedly different from each other. Whereas Morisot had dissolved form in an Impressionist flurry of dynamic brushwork and pure colour, Hiester Reid explored subtleties of tone in a diffuse Aestheticism that never abandoned the vestiges of her Academic training. Such evident differences lay bare the cultural expectations that influenced reception of the two artists’ work. In the 1890s, when art writers in France had begun to critique Impressionism as a passive and superficial art of sensorial transcription, devoid of intellectual depth, commentators also began to assert the style’s inherent suitability for women, whose diminished mental capacities, greater sensuality, and heightened nervous sensibilities were matters of common belief. “Only a woman has the right to rigorously practice the Impressionist system,” one writer claimed, for “she alone can limit her effort to the translation of impressions.”8 “Woman” and “Impressionism” are notoriously slippery terms, however, and the qualities attributed to each have changed according to the work they have been expected to perform. In Canada, where comparatively few women artists were firmly committed to Impressionist practice,9 the style did not become feminized in the same way, and Jefferys (who was himself a painter of Impressionist canvases) would consider Aestheticism to be better suited to the task of feminine self-expression by virtue of its

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sympathetic attunement to mood. Mary Hiester Reid’s art was feminine precisely because it went beyond the Impressionist transcription of perception in order to connect with the “selves of others, and … that vast domain beyond ourselves that we vaguely name Life and Nature.”10 In both cases, however, women’s art was held to directly embody their female subjectivities. In view of this critical tradition, the public reception of Canada’s most widely acclaimed female Impressionist, Helen Galloway McNicoll (1879– 1915), assumes particular interest, for during her lifetime McNicoll was subject to neither the intense personalization nor the pronounced feminization that attended critical commentary on Hiester Reid and others.11 In fact, contemporaneous press coverage of McNicoll and her art was unusually devoid of personal detail and actively refused predictable associations with female subjectivity. Thus, an obituary notice in Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine was at pains to distance McNicoll from “the prevailing type of feminine painter” by emphasizing the “aggressive and active intellect” that she brought to problems of light and colour, thus associating her Impressionist technique with precisely that element of intellectual rigour from which it had been so resoundingly divorced in France.12 Commentary on McNicoll was to change considerably over the course of the twentieth century, however. In the mid-1970s, the artist’s estate released a significant number of her paintings for exhibition and sale, and the new availability of work combined with a growing interest in Canadian Impressionism to restore McNicoll to public view after almost half a century of disregard. Now, however, commentators began to note the “charm,” “grace” and “tranquillity” of her “loving and sensitive interpretation[s],” imbuing her work with an aura of sympathetic self-expression similar to the one that had attended her turn-of-the-century peers, with whom she was increasingly compared.13 While such characterizations were broadly positive in tone, they also pigeonholed McNicoll’s work as typically feminine, and the artist did not receive sustained attention until 1999 when the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a major exhibition curated by Natalie Luckyj, who reappropriated the artist’s “resolutely female” perspective as a source of strength and interest seriously to be reckoned with.14 In her feminism, Luckyj clearly differed from earlier commentators, yet her fundamental premise of a close bond between McNicoll’s art and her gendered subjectivity was not entirely removed from the perspective that C.W. Jefferys had brought to Mary Hiester Reid in the 1920s. For Luckyj too, the artist’s paintings spoke powerfully of “the lived reality of her female world”; indeed, she argued that their “prime achievement” lay in their ability to reconnect viewers “to the imaginative and psychological space of McNicoll the artist.”15 In this way, the feminized and personalized notes that were initially absent from McNicoll’s public reception came to be considered as chief determinants of her work’s value.

Such shifts and continuities in historical perspective call attention to the connections that bind artists’ lived experiences to the art that they create. Precisely how, and to what extent, can McNicoll’s subjectivity – gendered or otherwise – be considered as present in the work she created? While popular fascination with artists’ biographies may be tempered by scholarly caution against reducing art to the purely diaristic, the conviction that a statement cannot be wholly dissociated from its speaker continues to underpin the hermeneutic enterprise. The stakes of this critical practice are raised when the artist is a woman, for the tendency to reduce women’s art to the visual expression of feminine psychology is now widely recognized as limiting, if not straightforwardly pernicious.16 Yet the insight that women’s experiences of the world have been historically different from men’s, and that the effects of that difference did not cease when women picked up their brushes, has been one of feminism’s most productive contributions to art history. To engage meaningfully with that insight while avoiding the perils of reductive readings of femininity in art is one of the principal challenges encountered by those writing about individual women artists.17 That challenge, in turn, opens onto the broader task of understanding whether and how the self might be inscribed, invested, or embedded within a work of art. In this chapter, I explore such considerations by looking closely at the art and life of Helen McNicoll. Focusing on four structurally overlapping factors – the artist’s deafness, her gender, her painting style, and her colonial status – I consider her artwork as a terrain of intersection between cultural narratives and personal experience. Subjectivity too can be considered as such a terrain: a psychological framework we build for ourselves at the point where our lives come into contact with the symbolizations that our cultures offer us as means of making sense of them. To the extent that art inscribes this intersection, it inscribes subjectivity as well. Yet this inscription is no straightforward transcription; just as lived experience is not fully encompassed by symbolization, art and life do not unite in perfect correspondence. Careful attention to McNicoll’s art helps to illuminate the ways in which this is so, for as her canvases move back and forth between affects of cohesion and disjunction, integration and disruption, they mediate the irreducible gap between experience and symbolization. For McNicoll, that gap played out on multiple registers simultaneously, as she navigated her position as a deaf woman, and as a Canadian, living and working in a tenuous relation to the dominant styles and metropolitan centres of modern art.

Reconsidering the Idyll Like many Impressionist paintings, Helen McNicoll’s artworks are supremely agreeable. Fresh in colour and light of touch, her moderately sized 107

FIg. 3.2

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Helen McNicoll, The Blue Sea (On the Beach at St. Malo), c. 1914.

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canvases cast a plein air glow over scenes of rural life and seaside leisure, effortlessly integrating people and their natural surroundings through effects of sunlight and shadow. Discussions of such work have emphasized its idyllic aspect: its “ability to capture the serenity of a lazy summer day,” its invitation “to indulge in a moment of peaceful contemplation.”18 Born to affluence and free to paint how and what she wished, McNicoll is remembered as an artist whose works evoke the privileged pleasures of an endless Edwardian summer. Here, for instance, is Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, in the preface to the 1999 catalogue that constitutes the major reference on the artist and her work: With a colourful palette fully expressing the pleasures of seeing the world intensely, and with a subject matter that celebrated the carefree world of leisure, McNicoll linked the Arcadian idyll with early twentieth-century artistic freedom. This was no small achievement. Hers was a world of relative innocence that suggested an

optimism widely shared before the outbreak of the First World War. It is noteworthy that McNicoll’s career came to an end with her early death, just a handful of years after Matisse’s great breakthrough into Fauvism and Picasso and Braque’s leap into the conceptually cased Cubist movement, because it makes all the more apparent McNicoll’s heartfelt and deeply experienced nostalgia for an art that communicated the values of an earlier time. She expressed these values in a wonderful and confident homage to Impressionism.19

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

For Teitelbaum, clearly, agreeability had its limits, and what the passage gives with one hand it takes with the other, granting the work’s pictorial appeal while simultaneously dismissing it as the backward-looking manifestation of a fading world. The female artist is cast in the familiar role of devotée, paying belated homage to artistic masters who had already slipped from sight in the rear-view mirror. Yet in truth neither McNicoll nor her art were anachronistic, and subsequent interpretations have sought to change this view of her work as an idyllic refuge from modernity. In this vein, Samantha Burton has persuasively argued that the artist’s touristic engagement with the English and French countryside was in fact quintessentially modern, a product of rail travel, the rapid expansion of intercontinental steamship lines, and a fully up-to-date desire to escape the city.20 Artists colonies such as the ones where McNicoll worked (most notably at St Ives, but also at Walberswick and Grez-sur-Loing, and in Yorkshire, Brittany, and Italy) constituted a key facet of the western artistic infrastructure at the turn of the century. Through them she was implicated in an alternate but no less thoroughgoing modernity, not of avant-garde style but of art-world structures and social relations. Her painting, moreover, was very much in keeping with that of her English contemporaries. To recognize McNicoll as modern in this way is to bring history to bear on a fantasy from which it has been banished, raising the possibility that the nostalgic longing unleashed by her paintings in the late twentieth century was more accurately a measure of the desires and expectations of contemporary viewers than those of the artist herself. Ironically enough, recognition of this modernity was at the heart of the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition. From its opening words, Luckyj’s curatorial essay broadly refused the Arcadian trajectory laid down in the director’s preface to the catalogue, presenting gallery-goers with an alternate vision of McNicoll’s art as more disruptive than its appearances might first suggest. At the heart of Luckyj’s interpretation are the young women and girls who populate so many of McNicoll’s canvases. Within the history of western art, women have often been made to serve as signifiers of pleasure, purity, and social order, and such connotations do much to bolster the lyric idealization that attends McNicoll’s work. Dressed chiefly in white,

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Helen McNicoll, The Chintz Sofa, c. 1913.

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their eyes lowered as they quietly mind children or work at their sewing, these female subjects appear to inhabit their accepted gender roles fully and with reassuring calmness. For Luckyj, however, the impression of serenity lodged within McNicoll’s apparently peaceful procession of women and girls was an illusion to be dispelled by historical contextualization. A passionate advocate for women’s history, the curator enmeshed McNicoll’s white-clad sitters within the social and political upheavals of first-wave feminism, embedding canvases such The Chintz Sofa in the battles over women’s suffrage that had so bitterly divided English society at the time of their creation. Drawing on old photographs and the research of Paul Duval, Luckyj reminded viewers that the chintz sofa in question was not a signifier of some generic space of domestic femininity but had been a staple feature of the professional studio that the artist shared with her companion and fellow painter Dorothea Sharp (1874–1955), whose presidency of the Society of Women Artists was characteristic of the professional leadership roles often assumed by suffragists.21 With this in mind, Luckyj proposed an

explicitly political interpretation of the painting, in which the sitter’s white garb did not signal feminine purity but rather the habitual dress of suffrage militancy. The fabric she worked at was similarly transformed: no longer a domestic article for home or family but one of the commemorative handkerchiefs so often stitched by members of the movement. The interpretation is a provocative one, as fascinating in its détournement of anticipated significations as it is frustrating for its failure to bring historical context into conversation with the visual cues of the image itself – cues that would seem to reinforce tranquillity, balance, and order far more thoroughly than they upset them. Certainly it is difficult to reconcile the calm peacefulness of the painting with the noisy interruptions of suffrage demonstrations, to say nothing of the violence of smashed windows, imprisonment, or forced feedings. Ultimately, however, it would be these very affects of stillness and quietude, so common in McNicoll’s art, that Luckyj returned to as best instantiating the painter’s disruption of a patriarchal agenda, and this through their aspect of withholding. McNicoll’s female sitters, she wrote,

Once again the idyll is ruptured, but on this occasion the paintings themselves provide the visual impetus for the challenge. In place of the “optimism” and “lyric happiness” that Teitelbaum and others saw in McNicoll’s work,23 Luckyj picked up on the muted colour and contained body postures also present in many of her images, disrupting expectations of carefree pleasure and leisure through observations about stillness, quietude, absorption, and a silence that is found not only in their female subjects but which, revealingly, is said to be shared by McNicoll herself. Such language is a veiled allusion to the artist’s deafness, a connection that the curator would make more overtly in her gallery talks at the time.24 Building on Joan Murray’s early observation of a “particular quality of stillness” in McNicoll’s oeuvre, Luckyj took the further step of tying it to the silent world that the artist inhabited as a deaf person.25 Intriguingly,

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

are not merely decorative or coyly resistant of the viewer’s gaze. They, like McNicoll herself, appear to act from positions of silence evoked in the muted colours, simple compositions, and contained body postures. Stillness and quietude permeate. The contemplative mood continues in later plein air images of the seaside. For example, in Under the Shadow of the Tent ... the quietude and serious absorption of the two women as they read and paint asserts the image of middle-class women whose presence, authority and ability to act allows them to dominate the pictorial space. Neither passive, nor purely aesthetic objects, they remain contemporary women who resist the more conventional and popular poses of the fashionable young women who seek to engage the male viewer.22

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FIg. 3.4 Helen McNicoll, Under the Shadow of the Tent, 1914.

in the passage cited, Luckyj seems to draw an implicit analogy between this aspect of McNicoll’s corporeal experience and the “serious absorption” that lent feminist potential to her work by investing its female figures with authority and self-sufficiency. While deafness and gender are nowhere explicitly tied together, the passage hints that they somehow overlap. I would like to push further at this possibility, for I believe that it holds a key to understanding the connection between art and subjectivity that is made manifest in McNicoll’s canvases, and that it also helps to elucidate the combination of affective charges that these works hold, as they both rupture and reinforce the idyll that is their ultimate subject.

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Silence and Stillness

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Helen McNicoll’s deafness first enters the art historical record in Colin MacDonald’s 1974 Dictionary of Canadian Art, where it is described as resulting from a bout of scarlet fever during childhood.26 Some sources place

the illness in infancy, others at the age of two.27 On account of her hearing loss, the artist is said to have received her early education at home with a tutor, a family recollection borne out by the fact that she is not included among the students listed in the annual reports of the school that serviced Montreal’s Anglophone deaf community.28 That McNicoll was nevertheless connected to that community is indicated by her drawings of students from the “Montreal Oral School,” a name that references the techniques of lip-reading and vocalization then taught at the Mackay Institution for Protestant Deaf-Mutes.29 McNicoll is known to have been a proficient lipreader.30 The extent of her hearing loss is now impossible to establish, but as the cultural historian Jonathan Rée has observed, deafness is, in any case, a “relative rather than absolute” condition.31 The effect of McNicoll’s deafness on her art has been touched on both by Paul Duval and by Natalie Luckyj. Duval speculated that deafness may have

FIg. 3.5 Helen McNicoll, Fishing, c. 1907.

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Helen McNicoll, A Welcome Breeze, c. 1909.

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sharpened her orientation towards visual production and also notes that it “limited her social life, except for her closeness to her immediate family and to her artist friend Dorothea Sharp.”32 Luckyj further maintained that McNicoll relied on Sharp to conduct negotiations with their child models.33 While such statements draw our attention to corporeal experience as a condition of artistic production, they stop short of asking the further question of whether and how McNicoll’s deafness is inscribed in her art. That question is necessarily of interest to an inquiry into artistic self-expression. But what, we might well wonder, would deafness look like if we saw it in a painting? One possible answer to this question – and the one implied by Luckyj – lies in the quality of “stillness” and “silence” that she and Joan Murray have observed in McNicoll’s work. Of particular interest here is the well-established western artistic tradition of celebrating silence through an aesthetic of radical stillness. The frozen interiors of Johannes Vermeer are an exponent of this tradition, as are the musicians of Edouard Manet, the symbol-

ist dreams of Theodore Rousseau, and the urban environments of Edward Hopper.34 In Canada, we might point to the still lifes of Antoine Plamondon or Ozias Leduc. All of these artists emphasize the mute eloquence of painted objects. From their place within the hearing world, they make of silence a positive value: not simply the absence of sound but something palpable and atmospheric. It is not, however, an atmosphere that McNicoll’s canvases share. From fabric flapping in the summer breeze through to the dynamism of fully articulated brushstrokes, her paintings are too frequently about motion to participate in the almost mythic calm that characterizes the visual depiction of silence as this has been undertaken in the history of western art. In McNicoll’s work, by contrast, vision and touch far outweigh sound and its absence as a focus of sense perception. The effects of sunlight in the summer air, the reflected colour that enlivens a shadow, the thick materiality of rapidly applied paint: these are the things that McNicoll cared about. Perhaps this was a logical consequence of the artist’s deafness, for quiet weighs far more heavily on those who can hear it than on those who cannot. The historian of deafness Douglas Baynton makes this point when he observes that silence is not one of the most pressing concerns for deaf people, who are far more affected by issues of language, communication, and community.35 Following Baynton, I would like to suggest that deafness is not an essence that can be expressed in the work as silence so much as it is a position of distinction occupied with respect to the hearing world. It is, I think, in this manner that deafness most thoroughly pervades McNicoll’s canvases, manifesting itself in a quality of detachment that the artist also maintains in her work.

Deafness, Distance, and Alienation Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

It is an unfailing characteristic of Helen McNicoll’s art that the subjects in her paintings do not connect with their viewers. Whereas contemporaries such as Laura Knight and Dorothea Sharp fostered such connection by means of stance and gaze or contemporaneity of costuming, McNicoll maintains an impermeable zone, a type of scission, between herself and the world her sitters occupy. Many canvases establish this effect through a lack of physical proximity, yet the nearness of the model in a canvas like The Open Door only renders her psychological distance more pronounced (see fig. 3.10). Even the fondness the artist so obviously feels for her child sitters cannot surmount the obstacles entailed in establishing connection with them. And so the question arises: was such distance an effect of McNicoll’s own experience of the world as a deaf person? Duval’s and Luckyj’s accounts tend to suggest that it was. On the other hand, it is clearly the case that McNicoll was exceptionally integrated into hearing society. She played the

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Laura Knight, The Beach, c. 1909. With her direct outward gaze, the girl in the lower right of the canvas acts as a focalizer, drawing viewers into the world of the painting.

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piano, pursued advanced art training, gained recognition from her peers, and attended the meetings of her professional association. She travelled extensively and appears to have changed studios and lodgings with great regularity. That she chose to work in artists’ colonies also suggests that she valued the company of those who shared similar pursuits. Whether she did these things with ease or difficulty we do not know, but she certainly did them with success. In all of this, the artist made her way in a hearing society that was increasingly receptive to deaf acculturation. In the 1880s and ’90s, during McNicoll’s childhood and adolescence, the education and social integration of deaf people underwent major transformations, with extensive pedagogical reforms directed towards enhanced social acceptance and mobility for the deaf within hearing society. Techniques of oral communication were first emphasized and then enforced as the best way to ensure the full participation of deaf individuals within the wider society. The new oralist education was time-consuming and expensive, but the economic costs of the lower student-teacher ratio were offset by the emergence of a new class of professional women teachers, conveniently available at half the cost of men.36 Women who had been denied access to college-level sign-language training were now recruited into deaf education, since they were considered to have the patience and personal compassion required to teach the

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

labour-intensive skills of lip-reading and vocal articulation. Sanctioned in their professional pursuits by the air of philanthropic benevolence that attended their labour, this new corps of female teachers helped to reorganize establishments like Montreal’s Mackay Institution on a middle-class model of domestic familialism aimed at promoting social integration. For much of the nineteenth century, deaf people had been recognized as forming a distinctive community with particular needs and interests as well as a unique form of gestural communication. By century’s end, however, as hearing society showed itself to be newly receptive to the possibility of deaf acculturation, it also proved itself to be increasingly hostile to deaf culture.37 Acting under the influence of social evolutionist thought and the increasingly powerful eugenics movement, promoters of oralism dismissed sign language as a “primitive” linguistic form and an impediment to the development of human intellect.38 With integration established as the goal, deafness itself became categorized as deviancy, and deaf people were pathologized as defective individuals in need of therapeutic intervention. This transformation had far-reaching effects; the bigoted were furnished with additional ammunition for their intolerance, while the compassionate were exhorted to refuse all specificity to the deaf. “I think we should get accustomed to treat our deaf children as if they could hear,” wrote Alexander Graham Bell, a prominent proponent of oralism. “We should try ourselves to forget that they are deaf. We should teach them to forget that they are deaf … and avoid … anything that would mark them out as different from others.”39 The ostensible goal of such treatment was, as Baynton notes, “to make difference disappear in the name of equality,” but its effect was to deny the realities of deaf existence and the particularities of deaf identity and culture.40 The most debilitating of these denials was the refusal to recognize gestural communication as a bona fide language. Instead, the signing techniques widely practised by deaf people were banned from deaf education at the Milan Congress of 1880. During the whole of Helen McNicoll’s life, deaf people were forced to assimilate to the communication techniques of the hearing and officially denied access to education in the language of signs that was properly their own. We cannot know how Helen McNicoll responded to these changing realities, nor, indeed, how extensively she was affected by them. Rée makes the point that a minority of deaf people benefited from oralist regimes, growing up to be “grateful to the exacting teachers who, by forbidding them to use signs as children, had forced them to cultivate lip-reading and articulation to the point where their handicap was almost undetectable in much of the everyday business of their lives.”41 For the large majority of deaf people, however, pure oralism was devasting.42 During McNicoll’s lifetime, representatives of the deaf community were uniformly and consistently hostile to the prohibition of sign language, which they viewed as tantamount to a theft of identity. Far from promoting integration, deaf speakers at the

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1910 World’s Congress of the Deaf argued that oralism’s inherent limitations effectively closed “both hearing and deaf society to the orally taught … There is absolutely no social side to pure oralism for the average deaf person.”43 Rather, these advocates insisted that the effortless and fluid communication that characterizes real sociability was only to be experienced by deaf people through the sign language that was their own most fluent and self-assured medium of communication. Seen in this context, the air of distance and disconnection that characterizes McNicoll’s paintings permits differing interpretations. To the extent that the artist was cut off from people around her, such distance may have registered her disconnection. Yet as Baynton observes, an emphasis on social detachment is more typical of the hearing world’s response to deafness than it is amongst deaf people. Commenting that “the most persistent images of deafness among hearing people have been ones of isolation and exclusion,” Baynton also asserts that such images “are consistently rejected by deaf people.”44 There is, however, another way of framing the affect of distance in McNicoll’s work, and that is not as an expression of alienation from others but as the mark of a more interior estrangement, wrought by the early twentieth-century’s newly virulent discourse of normativity, according to which deaf people were measured and found wanting. Feminism and queer theory have sensitized art historians to the deeply alienating effects of normativity for those who do not conform to it, and this alienation has been no less injurious for people who are stigmatized by their physical capacities. The transformation of deaf people into “disabled” hearing people estranged deaf people from themselves by effectively cutting them off from their own sensibilities.45 In establishing conformity to the norms of the hearing world as its primary goal, oralism insisted that deaf people strive for a standard that they could never truly attain. For those who accepted that standard, as McNicoll appears to have done, experience of the world would almost unavoidably be attended by a degree of estrangement from it. On this view, the detachment that characterizes McNicoll’s work becomes a register of the gaps and incommensurabilities, perhaps even the pain, inherent in accommodation to a symbolic order that is not one’s own. As a lip-reader, McNicoll knew what it was to pay exceptionally careful attention to the language that people used and the stories that they told, yet close as she might come to these stories, she could never experience them fully; oralism’s ideal of normalcy was both acutely present and necessarily just beyond reach. Something similar, I argue in the next section, holds true for women living within the ideology of gender. As with McNicoll’s connection to the spoken words of the hearing world, so too with her relation to the conventional narratives of femininity. She was, I think, both deaf to the stories and very acutely aware of them.

Narratives of Femininity Aside from her paintings, there are few indicators by which to gauge McNicoll’s encounter with gender. The only significant primary source is a carefully assembled picture-scrapbook. Dates on some of the pasted images indicate that the book was begun when she was only fourteen, but loose clippings post-date her move to England and suggest that she kept the book with her, casually slipping in images she wished to preserve. Those images were overwhelmingly of women and children; men figure only occasionally in the scrapbook, and then usually in jest – as mad professor, knife-wielding fishmonger, or comic participants in cartoons that gave the young Helen evident pleasure. The exception to this pattern lies in those images that present the narratives of femininity. Here a woman’s life emerges as a story framed by men. The tale is told most clearly in a two-page spread of pictorial vignettes that follows its subject from girlhood to old age: a little girl plays with her doll and her younger brother; briefly she is an independent teenager out golfing in the dress of the “new woman”; but soon she is a young debutante walking proudly on the arm of her father; inevitably she becomes the doting mother gazing down at her newborn. In middle age she is a mature socialite commanding the attentions of young and old men alike; in her sixties she is once again alone,

FIg. 3.8 An open page of Helen McNicoll’s scrapbook, c. 1900.

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reading at the seashore but taking no apparent pleasure in the view. Finally, in old age, she sits conjuring phantoms of her departed husband. The young Helen McNicoll, then, clearly knew and responded to a story in which women married, had babies, and experienced brief moments of independence in light of their past and future relations with men. She herself was not to live such a life, however. She became a working professional who left the bosom of her family to pursue a career, who had no children, and who shared her life with a fellow woman artist. Her choice to work, travel, and eventually live with a fellow painter conformed to a pattern of female friendship not infrequently adopted by women artists.46 Among her approximate contemporaries in Canada, the painters Florence Carlyle and Harriet Ford lived with Judith Hastings and Edith Hayes respectively, the photographer Edith Watson lived with Victoria Hayward, and the sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle lived together. In most cases, important facets of these relationships are lost to historical understanding through lack of documentation. Were these women lovers who experienced their partnerships in terms of a fully lived sexuality? Were they “romantic friends,” passionately attached but untouched by modern conceptions of lesbianism?47 Were they colleagues and comrades who lived together for mutual support and convenience? Or were they all three, at different times or simultaneously? In McNicoll’s case it is unlikely that an historically supported answer will ever be available. What is certain is that in her relationship with Sharp, McNicoll forsook the gendered and heterosexual contract of marriage. Her work, leisure, and maturity she shared with another woman. In choosing her domestic environments, she sought to preserve her autonomy, writing to her father that she was glad of a recent decision to change lodgings for she had “never felt quite independent” in her previous situation.48 In all of this she ran counter to the normalized regimes of separate spheres, family alliance, and reproductive sexuality that her scrapbook so prescriptively illustrated. And yet the depiction of the conventionally feminine theme of women and children fascinated McNicoll like nothing else. The tenor of her treatment of these subjects shares much with the popular images she collected as a girl, and with representations of femininity that were customary amongst her male peers. Compare, for instance, McNicoll’s Chintz Sofa (fig. 3.3) with a strikingly similar canvas, Chintz, by the Newlyn-based artist Harold Knight (1874–1961). The two painters were close contemporaries, both working in Cornish artists’ colonies at roughly the same time, and the iconographic and stylistic similarities of their works are marked. But there are subtle differences as well. One might say that there is a slight sense of urgency in McNicoll’s sewing woman that is absent from Knight’s reading one; or that Knight’s canvas, with its row of pictures, is more selfconsciously about representation than that of the Canadian artist, and that the interplay of pattern and colour between the woman’s garments and

FIg. 3.9 Harold Knight’s painting Chintz was illustrated in a 1912 issue of The Studio, the premier British arts periodical of the time. It is likely that McNicoll was a frequent reader.

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

the sofa emphasizes her incorporation within that regime. On their own, however, these observations do not amount to much, and if McNicoll’s art is to be distinguished for its disruption of conventional representations of femininity, this distinction will only be established cumulatively. Staying, then, with one of the artist’s recurring motifs, we might look to other images of women performing textile work. In The Open Door, the familiar figure of a white-garbed, dark-haired woman working a piece of fabric is repositioned at the doorway of a cottage interior, in an apparently natural scene of everyday female activity. Yet the canvas is marked by signs of ambiguity and a certain restless indeterminacy of meaning. Comparison with Knight’s Mending Stockings illustrates the point. Where McNicoll’s use of the threshold motif instantiates an obvious liminality, Knight’s figure is securely contained within her space. The ambiguity that McNicoll courts is echoed more subtly in her imprecise delineation of the woman’s activity: is she sewing, darning, tatting, embroidering?49 Where Knight resolves the issue clearly, both through the title and by the dark stocking pulled over the sitter’s hand and forearm, McNicoll leaves it open. The fact that the question cannot be settled instates an element of inscrutability, an

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uncertainty about this interior and the woman on its edge that Knight’s image does not share. It is echoed, perhaps, in the inscrutability of the mirror’s surface, reflecting nothing of the room around it but only an empty light that harmonizes with the silvery grey of fabric and distempered walls. On close inspection, this grey too becomes somewhat enigmatic, initiating an understated game between tonal emptiness and fullness, a neutral non-colour that yet encompasses all the hues around it – yellow, brown, blue, green. The most suggestive marker of equivocation, however, is the woman’s standing position. It is, on consideration, decidedly unusual.

FIg. 3.10 (opposite) Helen McNicoll, The Open Door, c. 1913.

FIg. 3.11 Harold Knight, Mending Stockings, c. 1909–12.

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

Whereas Knight’s choice to depict his model as seated conforms to a long tradition of English seamstress and lace-maker paintings, McNicoll’s adoption of a standing pose is atypical. Certainly the position would be tiring if undertaken for any length of time. No cushion eases the figure’s back, no footstool supports her feet. It is not the posture of a woman settled to her occupation but of one engaged in an activity recently taken up, or perhaps about to be put down in favour of the out-of-doors sunshine. For both artists, textile work operates as a classic signifier of femininity, but McNicoll’s vision of the picture jars just slightly. There are elements in her pictorial narrative that do not fit. And of course the gendered implications of textile work are not stitched down so firmly as one might first imagine. While sewing and embroidery were often blatantly calculated to inculcate virtues of feminine patience, neatness, and conformity to established models, women also used textile activities to other ends. In her now-classic analysis, The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker recounts the story of the novelist Colette (1873–1954), discomfited by the sight of her young daughter, Bel-Gazou, sewing. Colette’s uneasiness did not stem from a sense that sewing bound Bel-Gazou to a limited world of docile feminine domesticity, but rather from the writer’s fears that it also liberated her daughter into a world of private, interior speculation where her mother could not follow. “Why not write down the word that frightens me – she is thinking … ‘What are you thinking about, Bel-Gazou?’” Colette asks. “‘Nothing, Mother,’” comes the disingenuous reply, “‘I’m counting my stitches.’”50 Echoes of Bel-Gazou’s independence

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pervade the intensely interior expression of the girl sewing in McNicoll’s 1910 canvas Beneath the Trees. In a similar vein, family connections and responsibilities in Minding Baby are subtly put aside, for these girls quite patently do not mind the baby who sits behind them, so wrapped up are they in their individual pursuits. My suggestion, then, is this: Helen McNicoll’s canvases of women and girls are idylls of femininity, but they are not exclusively or unproblematically so. Despite their air of peaceful accommodation to quotidian female activity, something faint but perceptible about these initial examples suggests that femininity does not reside straightforwardly in the world that McNicoll envisions. Rather than constructing this tension as a strictly oppositional one, however, I wish to suggest that, like many Edwardian women, McNicoll struggled both within and against the received narratives of femininity. Firsthand narratives by the artist’s female peers suggest that

FIg. 3.12 Helen McNicoll, Beneath the Trees, c. 1910.

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FIg. 3.13 Helen McNicoll, Minding Baby, c. 1911.

Metaphors for Emptiness McNicoll’s paradoxical position both inside and outside received narratives of femininity is most clearly instantiated in her pictorial relation to maternity. Stories of happy motherhood were at a premium in early twentieth-century England, as concern for the health and future of the empire brought the rhetoric of maternal care and fulfilment to new heights.53 The cultural imperative of maternity was pervasive, and extended to women’s professional formation as artists. While the Slade School of Art offered the most progressive art training available to women at the turn of the century, the encouragement that they received followed normative channels, and the vigorous and gritty painting of contemporary life that was encouraged in a William Orpen or an Albert Rutherston was criticized in a female

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

there was no settled relation to gender amongst Canadian women artists who studied and pursued their careers abroad at the beginning of the twentieth century. While separation from their immediate familial and social environments appears to have brought some female art students respite from normative behavioural expectations, others felt these to be intensified.51 Even radical suffragists chose to counter conservative opposition by embracing traditional positions of feminine purity and maternal responsibility.52 Helen McNicoll’s art presents parallel ambiguities.

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An open page of Helen McNicoll’s scrapbook, c. 1900.

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student such as Winifred Matthews, and contrasted with her more felicitous scenes of babies.54 The encounter between maternity and women’s professional artistry was familiar to McNicoll long before she arrived at the Slade, however. In her scrapbook, the themes are brought together most vividly in a clipping of Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s famous self-portrait with her daughter, a quintessential statement of mother/daughter unity by a woman who had immediately consigned care of her newborn to nurses in order to return to work. Yet McNicoll’s own work is not characterized by scenes of the sort of maternal bliss that she collected in her scrapbook. This fact comes as something of a surprise, for she is often classed together with contemporaneous Canadian women painters of maternité, such as Laura Muntz Lyall (1860–1930), whose canvas Lullabye was exhibited together with McNicoll’s work at the annual exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal in 1915.55 The conceptual jump from women and children to maternity has proven easy for observers to make. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography describes McNicoll as primarily a painter of “maternal themes in outdoor settings,” a perception that was shared by J. Russell Harper and Paul Duval and further reinforced by the Art Gallery of Ontario at the time of the 1999 exhibition.56 Close examination of McNicoll’s oeuvre, however, reveals that she preferred almost every other combination of female subjects to that of mother and child. She painted girls together; she painted girls alone.

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

She painted women together; she painted women alone. She painted small children with older siblings. But during her lifetime McNicoll never exhibited a painting that categorically specified a maternal theme. Among the 141 works shown at her memorial exhibition at the Art Association of Montreal in 1925, only two titles make reference to motherhood, and these may well have been assigned posthumously.57 Among the canvases in the AGo retrospective, the image that is most likely to be a scene of maternity – In the Shadow of the Tree – might as easily be a depiction of a nursemaid with her charge (fig. 3.15). Whatever the woman’s identity, she clearly pursues her own interests, creating a mental space for herself far removed from the madonna and child motif. Like Vigée-Lebrun, McNicoll relies here on a rotating compositional movement, drawing the eye in a circular pattern along the curved lines of pram and umbrella. But unlike the unbroken chain of arms, heads, and hands that performs a similar function in the Vigée-Lebrun example, McNicoll breaks the circumference on its right-hand side; this circle has an egress. A similar dynamic is at work in the circle’s centre. Consider the hand that connects the spaces of woman and baby – or seems to. Certainly the hand is a particularly charged point, treated with a greater degree of realism than the rest of the canvas. The detail of the fingernails and the soft sheen of their smoothness contrast with the rest of McNicoll’s pictorial handling, characterized as it is by broad strokes of dappled light. The careful shadow underneath the fingertips lends them a depth that finds no parallel elsewhere. Examined closely, this charged point near the centre of the canvas detaches from its surroundings – a meticulous detail floating on a sketchy surface. The point of unification between woman and child may thus also be read as a point of disjunction, a caesura at the midpoint of the poem, caught between surface and depth. Looking still more closely, however, this detail is more accurately seen as slightly off to one side. At the true centre of the canvas, between the hand that seems to link and the book that certainly separates, is a comparatively empty semiotic space: an apparently meaningless jumble of carriage frame and blouse that also happens to be located at the midriff of the seated figure. This seeming emptiness at the centre of the painting, caught between the hand and the book, resides in the corporeal core of the depicted woman: in the pit of her stomach, so to speak. A significant number of McNicoll’s paintings speak of such distance, absence, or emptiness. But let me be clear: in no way do I wish to attribute this to a lack of maternal fulfilment. I am, rather, noticing a break in the tale. Like McNicoll watching lips, I am looking carefully at the physical traces of the stories of femininity that are told, and I am acknowledging the emptiness that these signifiers may have had for her – a professional woman, childless, separated from her own family by an ocean.

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The emptiness that gives McNicoll’s work its intensity finds its most haunting expression in the fabric of the domestic – a metaphor that assumes literal form in Tea Time (fig. 3.17). Situated in the enclosed space of the cottage garden, the work exemplifies that pictorial engagement with the “spaces of femininity” so commonly associated with women working within the conventions of impressionism.58 From garden setting to tea service, from snow-white fabric to pure white lilies, the signs of domestic femininity are everywhere. The very fullness of their presence, however, invites viewers to notice the absence of the female form itself. The open door is dark and empty. At the heart of the canvas, the circular table, set for tea, is absent of guests – absent even of the possibility of guests, for no chairs offer repose in this garden of delight. Ineluctably, the composition draws us down the garden path, directly to the heart of the scene, but like the woman in The Open Door (fig. 3.10), we are to be kept on our feet. From this vantage point, it is not so much the table or the tea that invites participation as it is the tablecloth, shining white in the dusky shadows. It is linen; on close examination its roughness is visible in the texture of the canvas apparent beneath the thinner applications of white paint. The fabric is tangible, and while it lies still in the afternoon calm, there is yet a suggestion of movement, the hint of air currents at play in its folds, the possibility that the cloth might catch in a breeze and billow out, like a skirt, giving access to that which it drapes. The fantasy of such a gesture comprises two

FIg. 3.15 (opposite) Helen McNicoll, In the Shadow of the Tree, c. 1914.

FIg. 3.16 Helen McNicoll, In the Shadow of the Tree (detail), c. 1914.

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FIg. 3.17 (opposite) Helen McNicoll, Tea Time, c. 1911.

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

moments: the pregnant swell of fabric borne on a breeze, and the promise of something to be unveiled. My language is heavily metaphorical here, as it is heavily gendered: an allusion to childbirth, to the special forms of the female body, to the hint of femininity as a secret, hidden. McNicoll’s works hinge on this kind of veiled communication; they are metaphors for an emptiness within the fullness of gendered identity. Like metaphor itself, which is always marked by traces of the gap that it purports to bridge, McNicoll’s painting evinces a core of difference. The appeal of her art lies in its fantasy of wholeness, unity, and the harmony of the endless Edwardian summer, but if one looks closely (as at the tablecloth in Tea Time) the tangible form of that fulfilment is illusory. The fabric hides only the impossible shape of the breeze, and if one reaches for it, there is nothing there. The pregnancy of the nothing-there is a contradictory drama that McNicoll rehearses again in Interior (fig. 3.18). In the intimacy of the bedroom, feminine presence is inscribed in the traces of a corporeal absence: the vague impression of footprints intermixed with the pattern of the cutpile carpet; the pillow tossed aside to make space for a body (or bodies) on a bed that remains invisible. Even the mirror seems to beckon the absent figure forth, for its angle is slightly off alignment with the bureau, and in this small inclination towards the viewing position resides an expectation of visibility; the hope is that in looking closely enough, creatively enough, the artist herself might be brought into view, reflected in the glass, or in the paint. The most eloquent register of this mute desire is the soft heaviness of the empty robe draped with apparent carelessness over the back of a rocking chair – for in pulling the chair just a little further backward than one might expect, it bespeaks the weight of a human body. The fabric of the domestic is powerful here, as is the fabric of the feminine, but its relationship to its corporeal support is troubled. As in Tea Time, the body has absented itself from an environment where all the signs point to its presence, and there is a gap between expectation and its fulfilment. A similar discrepancy characterizes The Victorian Dress (fig. 3.19), a quiet, domestic scene of a young woman in a formal ball gown, eyes lowered as curtained sunlight glances obliquely off her collarbone and bared shoulder. The overall impact is one of muted grace and serenity, yet once again aspects of the canvas subtly disturb its tranquillity. The lemon yellow and strident green of the central curtains are in jarring contrast to the work’s general air of muted tonalism. Space is oddly uneasy as well, for the precise nature of the woman’s position in relation to the sofa is unclear. Neither sitting nor standing, she is yet too centrally positioned to be perched on its arm. Most significant, however, is a certain disjuncture between the woman’s body and her gown, and it was on this point that a contemporary reviewer chose to level the sole criticism the painting received when it was shown at the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1914. While praising McNicoll’s handling of the “pretty girl who

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wears the garment,” the reviewer drew attention to a discontinuity between the well-developed modelling of the figure and the undifferentiated handling of her white dress: “The frilled crinoline skirt … has apparently not interested the artist, and so forms an unattractive patch in an otherwise attractive picture.”59 In short, the pretty girl and her garment do not mesh.

FIg. 3.18 (opposite) Helen McNicoll, Interior, c. 1910.

FIg. 3.19 Helen McNicoll, The Victorian Dress, c. 1914.

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

Lack of interest was surely not at question, however, for McNicoll was a painter of white fabric, and its connotations are central to her art. If these connotations comprise the freshness and purity appropriate to a “pretty girl,” they also suggest a degree of emptiness, a blankness that translates here as an element of structural vacancy. The canvas’s contradictory plastic relations parallel the paradoxical nature of whiteness itself, in which the presence of all colours registers as absence of colour, and in which fullness is translated into emptiness. I have proposed that McNicoll’s subjects exist in strongly gendered environments that they nevertheless do not fully inhabit, and so it is with The Victorian Dress, which both reveals the female body through the bodice and, through the skirt, so conceals it as to render it absent – the pure confection of imagination, all surface and no form. By 1914, when McNicoll dressed and posed her model together with the sofa from her working studio, the gowns of the Victorian era had long been consigned to the scrap bag and dress-up bin, yet they maintained their pull on

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the cultural imaginary, speaking of a moment of high Victorian femininity that still enthralled. Conventional femininity in McNicoll’s oeuvre is like the Victorian dress: more than just a costume, but less than natural attire. There are spaces where the living woman does not conform to her cultural guise. And there are spaces where she does. With this in mind, it is now possible to discern a parallel with the issue of McNicoll’s deafness. The key lies in the narratives of correspondence that accompanied the ideological construction of each.

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Idylls of Correspondence

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In their most negative constructions, women and deaf people shared the bond of a common pathologization. Like the uncontrollable gesticulations of the female hysteric, the manual signs of the deaf were viewed as visible symptoms of mental degeneracy.60 For a scholarly community under the sway of social Darwinism, sign language was newly cast as an evolutionary relic of an earlier stage of human development, now surpassed by speech. The “achievement of speech” was, in the early twentieth century, perceived as “the distinctive trait of man,” and “the gate by which he emerged from his pre-human state,” and with spoken language thus firmly tied to the modern capacity for higher thought, oralists found theoretical support for their claims that sign language retarded intellectual development.61 But as Nicholas Mirzoeff explains, all was not thereby held to be lost, and many oralist educators believed that deaf people could attain to “‘normal’ intelligence … as long as there was no intermediary, such as a sign, between the word and the thing.”62 An age-old linguistic fantasy of direct correspondence – with no gap or mediation between the spoken word and its object – thus came to parallel a social fantasy of deaf assimilation to the world of the hearing, where differences would be erased and even the deaf would cease to think of themselves as such. Considered from the vantage point of deaf people, however, such fantasies betray their unreality. Lip-reading, for instance, may be seen not as removing a layer of semiotic detachment but as imposing one, for unlike the sign reader, who is able through vision to have direct access to the essence of a manual sign, the lip-reader is perpetually detached from the sonic essence of spoken language; moving lips are but an index of an aural signifying component to which the lip-reader can never have unmediated access. Thus, despite claims to the contrary, the lip-reader’s experience of spoken language is marked by an element of distance or alienation that was echoed by a social arrangement wherein deaf people were expected always to conform to the terms of the hearing world. Something similar is true for women living within the patriarchal ideology of gender. Like oralist justifications for lip-reading, gender as ideology works by means of the illusory appeal of a representation that corresponds

directly to the real. As a set of cultural narratives masquerading as reality, gender as ideology hides the gap between women’s lives and the stories they are told about them. In a patriarchal society, however, this gap is always there. In this way, Helen McNicoll’s relation to the symbolic order as a deaf woman who read lips came to echo her position as an independent woman living at a time when narratives of feminine fulfilment centred resolutely around men. McNicoll’s applications of paint to canvas are visible indices of the ambiguous relation to symbolization wrought by this conjunction; the Arcadian dream of the deaf woman fully integrated into the symbolic order of Edwardian England is the idyll that her work gestures both towards and away from. In managing this dream, the most effective tool the artist had at her disposal was her Impressionist style, for I will argue that Impressionism too was deeply implicated in its own idyll of direct correspondence between experience and representation, and as such, resonated forcibly with the ideologies of femininity and language that were available to a deaf woman painter at the beginning of the twentieth century.

An “Extraordinary Oneness of Nature and Artistic Vision”

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

Helen McNicoll has been described as one of the few Canadian painters who consistently practised “‘pure’ Impressionism” – a description supported by references to her broken brushstrokes, plein air technique, and luminous colour, as well as by comparisons to the art of Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley.63 Yet as a Canadian in London – not Paris – McNicoll was twice removed from Impressionism’s art-historical epicentre, a distance still further reinforced by the fact that she was only a child when the Parisian group held its last exhibition in 1886. As Matthew Teitelbaum has insisted, by the time that McNicoll was creating her most significant work, French Impressionism was a thing of the past, long since outstripped by a rapid succession of avant-garde styles. We might wonder, then, just how “pure” McNicoll’s Impressionism could have been. It is in fact no easy matter to unravel what the word “Impressionism” might have meant to McNicoll, a Canadian artist who lived in London and travelled in France during the first decades of the twentieth century. Even in France, Impressionism had by no means constituted a unified aesthetic project, and by the time the movement reached England, the job of sorting out who made what of whom was tortuous indeed.64 There, the term was not limited to art that showed the pictorial impact of Monet or Degas but was also applied to plein air Naturalism, Whistlerian Aestheticism, Symbolism, and even Decadence – and this notwithstanding active animosities between these camps.65 McNicoll’s teachers at the Slade – Fred Brown, Henry Tonks, and Phillip Wilson Steer – are now generally numbered among the foremost exponents of Impressionist style in Britain, while her teachers at St Ives also espoused Impressionist principles, such as Algernon Talmage’s

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Henry Herbert La Thangue, A Provençal Stream, c. 1903. La Thangue had a solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1914. The subject matter, bold facture, and concern with the optical sensation of light find parallels in McNicoll’s work.

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often-cited exhortation to seek “sunlight in shadows.”66 Formal comparison further suggests that McNicoll knew the work of British painter Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859–1929), whose choice of themes and handling of brushstroke and colour closely paralleled her work. None of these men had any direct contact with their Parisian peers beyond a familiarity with their art, and they neither understood nor practised Impressionism in the same way as its French progenitors. In general, British artists preserved vestiges of a narrative orientation that had been eschewed by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley, and they reinstated a degree of structural integrity that their counterparts across the channel had preferred to dissolve.67 Under the influence of Tonks and Brown, Academic drawing continued to constitute the backbone of McNicoll’s education at the Slade. Other differences were more philosophical in nature. Thus, for example, while prominent supporters of French Impressionism had emphasized its practitioners’ heightened subjective capacity for visual perception, in England, La Thangue expressed his belief that retinal physiology was such that all eyes objectively see the same thing.68 On this question of art’s primary orientation – subjective or objective – McNicoll almost certainly received contradictory wisdom. Crucially, the conflict was rarely acknowledged or perhaps even perceived as such. In

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

London, for example, Phillip Wilson Steer emphasized the importance of strict fidelity to nature while simultaneously emphasizing the important role of personality and temperament.69 A similar ambiguity characterized the views of McNicoll’s Canadian teacher William Brymner (1855–1925), whose impact on students at the Art Association of Montreal is widely recognized. In 1897, the same year in which his pupil won her first scholarship to the school, Brymner delivered a public lecture enthusiastically defending Impressionism on the grounds of its truthfulness and sincerity.70 He invoked the language of truth to signal the artist’s ability to faithfully capture the exterior manifestations of nature. In this vein, he praised the representational precision of Monet’s use of colour and his capacity to convey a scene’s “actual appearance at a given time or under a given effect.”71 He explained how difficult the task was of really seeing the world’s true appearance unfettered by stale conventions, and he extolled those artists who were motivated by “intense love of and respect for nature and determination to give the exact character as they themselves see it of what they paint and its characteristic lighting, movement and surroundings.”72 But if it was the job of the artist to be true to nature, it was no less essential for Brymner that he remain similarly true “to his own nature and express fearlessly what has been born in him to say.”73 This was another, more subjective side of the truth as Brymner saw it, and he readily acknowledged that “the art produced by a given man depends on the quality of his mind and how he is affected by the nature he represents.”74 In view of this, the task of the truthful artist was to “get as near nature as possible, be inspired by her first hand and be allowed to express his emotions.”75 This was where “sincerity” came into play, but this term too had multiple significations in nineteenth-century artistic discourse. For the Romantics, it had meant the honest expression of personal feeling, for the Realists, the rejection of idealization and the refusal of inherited prejudice; for the Impressionists it centred largely on fidelity to sensory perception.76 For Brymner, it seems to have meant all three. Brymner’s multivalent commitments to truth and sincerity were by no means anomalous but rather cut to the heart of Impressionism’s basic project. The view of Impressionism as an objective and scientific art form, which dominated much twentieth-century commentary, has now been radically revised to recognize the movement’s equally profound subjectivism, as art historians have developed more nuanced understandings of the positivist psychology that influenced Impressionist discourse.77 In his influential writing on the psychology of impressions, French philosopher Emile Littré had, in 1863, reaffirmed the Kantian claim that the actual nature of external objects could never be truly known and that truth could only be claimed for the individual’s perception of them. At the same time, however, Littré considered that such perceptions also maintained the imprint of that from which they originated; they were thus neither strictly internal

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and subjective nor external and objective.78 Rather, as art historian Richard Shiff elucidates, such “impressions” were held to exist prior to the subject/object distinction and also to follow on from it as the ground upon which the two might subsequently interact.79 Littré’s ideas, which circulated widely in popular scientific and philosophical discourse at the end of the nineteenth century, were embraced by advocates of Impressionism like the French poet and critic Jules Laforgue. Writing in 1883, Laforgue emphasized that the constant flux of both the physical world and the observer’s own optical and emotional state meant that for most people, at most times, “subject and object are irretrievably in motion, [mutually] inapprehensible and unapprehending.”80 In the highest achievements of the new painting, however, Laforgue held that their unity might exceptionally be obtained: “In the flashes of identity between subject and object lies the nature of genius.”81 Here, then, is an idyll worthy of the name. As Impressionist criticism endeavoured to overcome human alienation from the physical world, it joined its optimism to the task of repairing the rift between man and nature that had plagued philosophy since Kant had first rent them asunder. Whether he knew it or not, when William Brymner praised the work of Edouard Manet for its “extraordinary oneness of nature and artistic vision,” he was invoking this artistic idyll.82 A student of Brymner, McNicoll too was taught to strive for such unity, and her art activates similar longings in turn. We see them, for instance, in Natalie Luckyj’s conviction that her canvases enable us to connect with both “the psychological space of McNicoll the artist” and with the historical world of her “lived experience.”83 Here, with this reference to experience, a secondary aspect of the Impressionist idyll emerges, for it was not enough simply for an artist to perceive nature directly in the form of an impression: she must also develop her painterly skills to the point where that impression could be fully and accurately conveyed in paint on canvas. Lodged deep within the stylistic dream of an unmediated perceptual interface between subject and object, then, is the corollary quest for a representation that corresponds directly with the reality of perceptual experience. And so the old fantasy of the perfect language, unmarred by any gap between signifier and signified, resurfaces in pictorial guise. These are powerful desires indeed. Yet as the stylistic customs of Impressionism became familiar, such dreams were increasingly difficult to sustain, and by the second decade of the twentieth century, Impressionism was quite obviously visible as a heavily mediated pictorial convention dependent on its own visual tropes and codes – a set of techniques that one might learn. We have seen that McNicoll did not just look at the world and record her sensory perception of it; she also looked at the works of other painters and learned from them. In this she did no differently than artists have always done. But as a style that stakes its ground on the immediacy of its perception, Impressionism

can ill afford to recognize its own arbitrated character. Nor has it been easy for art historians to grant the historical viability of its progeniture, for by their very receipt of an aesthetic legacy, the inheritors of Impressionism necessarily undo the claims upon which their inheritance is based. As Matthew Teitelbaum’s comments so clearly demonstrate, the achievements of subsequent generations of Impressionists are likely also to be perceived as failings. And so once again McNicoll appears as an artist caught between a dream of perfect unity and the gap of its historical unsustainability. Like the assimilated deaf lip-reader, or the woman at home within the patriarchy, McNicoll’s chosen pictorial style aspired to an ideal of correspondence that her own position within it could not sustain.

Canadian Girl in London

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

One final aspect of McNicoll’s Impressionism helps to bear out the claim that her life and work disrupt narratives of correspondence in which they nevertheless participate – and that is the question of its Canadianness. When the Art Gallery of Ontario restored McNicoll to prominence in 1999, it did so under the joint banner of nationality and style – Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist – thus mobilizing national enthusiasm for the distinctly Canadian along with Impressionism’s perennial popularity. Stylistic considerations have in fact long been the mainstay of McNicoll’s claim on Canadian art history, and her paintings have been included in a range of exhibitions and catalogues that, cumulatively, have established “Canadian Impressionism” as an object of scholarly investigation. As the characteristics and borders of this hybrid geo-stylistic entity have been debated, time frames have varied along with the roster of artists included, but McNicoll has invariably been present, one of only two women to be consistently recognized in this way.84 The most intriguing aspect of the literature on Canadian Impressionism as it pertains to McNicoll is the question of its primary geographic orientation. In most discussions, Paris constitutes a privileged point of reference. “Every serious young artist in Canada aspired to study in Paris,” asserts Dennis Reid, “and by the early 1890s they all did.”85 The “French Connection” also forms a starting point for Carol Lowrey’s account of the field, and Paris looms larger than ever in the recent overview by Ash Prakash, which includes a chapter-length résumé of the original French movement as well as detailed information about the exhibiting and collecting histories of French painting in Canada. The orientation is natural enough. Since 1990, however, scholars have begun to forge alternatives to the assumption that Paris and Parisian Impressionism necessarily constitute the reference points by which other Impressionisms are best understood. As Norma Broude has observed, such a premise has typically relegated artistic production outside France to

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a subordinate position, stigmatizing it as “a ‘diluted form’ of the real thing … lacking in relation to an avant-garde standard” exemplified by a French school whose dominance is measured by the rapidity of its stylistic innovations, each leading inexorably towards abstraction.86 Almost inevitably, such premises have given birth to a certain cultural cringe on the part of those who, despite their efforts to validate exponents of Impressionist style outside France, have laboured under a sense of their retardataire failings. Consider, for example, Paul Duval’s 1990 entreaty that Canadian Impressionists should not be “peremptorily dismissed” for having added “their minor grace notes to the original Gallic score.”87 Such thinly veiled chagrin is a natural consequence of the teleological orientation of the modernist art history in which it is grounded, yet formalism’s storyline is clearly not the only starting point available for the critical study of Impressionist work, and it is Broude’s central claim that when the forward march of modernism is put to the side, Impressionism more properly emerges as a global aesthetic phenomenon that occupied a position of central importance in world visual culture for more than fifty years.88 France, on this accounting, is only part of a much larger and much longer story. In Canada, Broude’s call for a less francocentric focus has been taken up by Robert Stacey, who reassesses Impressionism’s place within the history of Canadian art. Guarding the nation’s practitioners against charges of “generic derivative dilution,” Stacey turns away from Paris in order to emphasize adaptations of the style to the specific exigencies of Canadian climate and topography.89 It is, he argues, a paradoxical condition of Impressionism in Canada that those artists who remained most faithful to the French example were precisely those who understood the need to alter its pictorial conventions to better capture their own localities, for in effecting such alterations, these artists were in fact adhering to its founding imperative: to capture the specific sense perceptions engendered by local conditions. While this imperative explains the global reach and adaptability of the Impressionist style, Stacey contends that it should also alert us to Impressionism’s true place within the development of Canadian art, for while conventional accounts of that development have tended to portray the style as a passing French hiccup within the longue durée of Canada’s growing cultural autonomy, he suggests that it is better understood as aesthetic “midwife” to nationalism’s fullest manifestation in the post-Impressionist painting of the Group of Seven. In this way, he concludes, Impressionism in Canada “evolved from being a classifiable style to a way of claiming native identity in paint.”90 Thus an aesthetic teleology grounded in formalism is replaced by one focused on the achievement of Canadian identity; the solution to francocentrism, on this accounting, is nationalism. It is not, however, a solution in which McNicoll can be enlisted. As an expatriate artist with a preference for European scenery, McNicoll’s adherence to a landscape-driven narrative of Canadian exceptionalism is virtu-

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

ally impossible to conjure. Nor is she satisfactorily French, for despite the likelihood of her early access to canvases by Monet and her unwavering interest in the play of sunlight and colour-filled shadows, art historians have remained puzzled by the “mystery [of ] why McNicoll did not spend more time in Paris.”91 While part of the explanation likely lies in her family’s British connections, her turn to London means that the artist remains an outlier in discussions of Canadian Impressionism despite her invariable inclusion within them, neither quite Canadian enough nor quite French enough to correspond with their prevailing orientations. Instead, as we have seen, McNicoll’s training, influences, and stylistic choices were as much English as French, a fact not lost on her peers. As one reviewer noted on the occasion of her 1925 memorial exhibition, while the artist had been born in Canada and “remained always a Canadian,” her pictures showed her “rather as an English painter.”92 To the extent that this was so, attempts to accommodate McNicoll within existing discussions of Canadian Impressionism are bound to remain unsatisfying. Yet McNicoll was in truth Canadian, not English, and her status as a colonial outsider would not have been overlooked in the imperial centre, which cultivated a particular posture of distanced acknowledgment in relation to its “white dominions.”93 Samantha Burton has explored the significance of this ambivalent connection for those Canadian women artists who studied and made their careers in England at the height of its imperial reach. As participants in a political system that recognized them as both British subjects and Canadian citizens, women such as McNicoll were simultaneously “at home” and “away” in England, where they conformed to social norms of ethnicity, race, and language at the same time as they differed from more locally determined cultural expectations.94 McNicoll, whose father was Scottish, enjoyed a common British ancestry that contributed materially to her affluence and professional success. Travel to the mother country bolstered a sense of kinship entrenched in the familial rhetoric of empire, and as settler artists of British descent exercised the opportunity to participate in the venerable cultural institutions of their ancestral homeland, they further solidified ties between Great Britain and her colonies. Yet as Burton details, the accents, dress, and customs of these “Canadian Girls in London” also unavoidably marked them as outsiders, generating anxiety amongst those wishing to succeed and be accepted in their new environs.95 In this way, the dynamic of belonging-yet-not-belonging that marks McNicoll’s relation to retrospectively constructed art-historical narratives of Canadian Impressionism finds itself paralleled by the ambiguities of her status as an affluent white colonial in the heart of empire, where she was necessarily both “the same” and “different.” While her wealth secured her training and access to the art world, her colonial identity meant that she would not have enjoyed the same social status that she would have experienced growing up in Montreal, a member of the city’s Scottish elite.96

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As sensations of rootedness and affinity contended with dislocation, Canadian women artists working in Britain negotiated the terrain of their difference with care, employing a variety of strategies to establish themselves more securely within the dominant aesthetic styles of the metropolitan centre.97 From this vantage point, the Britishness of McNicoll’s Impressionism becomes significant as a means of navigating her inclusion within the metropole, where her adoption of a domesticated form of modern French painting enabled her to cultivate an identity as up to date but not too daring, different but not too different. Perhaps a related dynamic was at work in Montreal as well, where along with William H. Clapp, McNicoll was one of the earlier anglophone adopters of a style that the city’s art milieu would have already associated with francophone painters like Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté and Henri Beau. In letters home to her family from London, McNicoll took obvious pride in the difference of her modernist style, highlighting the discomfiture her paintings occasioned amongst that city’s hidebound traditionalists and recounting how her election to the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA ) had been “a bitter pill” for those who felt that if she was “right, then the National Gallery is all wrong.”98 Confrontation was never really the artist’s aim, however, and against such professions of pride in her stylistic audacity we must set the fundamentally conservative character of the institutional venue in which she sought and achieved professional belonging. True, the RBA had fleetingly stood at the forefront of Britain’s avant-garde when J.A.M. Whistler had assumed its presidency some thirty years earlier, subsequently departing with two dozen of his most progressive colleagues, but that defection had long since restored the society to the stalwart conservatism that it had hitherto exemplified.99 That such conservatism would have no real difficulty accommodating the restrained modernism of a Helen McNicoll is amply confirmed by the fact that by 1913 even the Royal Academy had been welcoming British Impressionists to its ranks for over two decades.100 Similarly in Canada, the choice of both McNicoll and Clapp as joint recipients of the inaugural Jessie Dow prize for the outstanding oil painting at the 1908 exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal, shows just how acceptable Impressionism had become to the Montreal viewing public by the early years of the twentieth century.101 In London, acceptance within established networks of metropolitan orthodoxy was deeply important to Canadian artists whose own national cultural institutions were founded on the British model, even if such institutional tutelage had begun to sting. In 1897 McNicoll’s Impressionist peer Harriet Ford had decried the entrenched academicism that England exported to her colonies. “The Royal Canadian Academy,” she protested, “is the youngest of a whole group of Academies which propagate the Academic idea to the British Philistine at home or abroad: – The Royal Academy; The Royal Scottish Academy; the Royal Hibernian Academy; The

Difference and the “Other Otherness” of Subjectivity In many ways, then, Helen McNicoll’s art rehearses a complex play between integration and opposition, accommodation and difference. The appeal of her work lies in an idyll of wholeness, unity, and harmony that it invokes on different levels: in its sun-drenched images of women and girls pleasantly integrated with the world around them, in its adherence to an Impressionist dream of untroubled correspondence between self and world, and in its retrospective naturalization by an art-historical frame of

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

Royal Cambrian Academy. They are all modelled upon the constitution of the central planet in London, of which they are largely the satellites, and which, in the eyes of Britain generally, and of Philistia in particular, dominates the art universe.”102 Imperial ties were not to be unseated by such Whistlerian rhetoric, however, and London’s values and priorities continued to shape Canadian experience long into the twentieth century. Indeed, recent research by Christine Boyanoski establishes the extent to which even settler colonies’ most vaunted assertions of cultural and aesthetic autonomy (including the Group of Seven’s Wembley triumph) were actively supported, even orchestrated, from the metropole.103 In McNicoll’s case, membership in the RBA established her professional bona fides not only in the imperial centre but on the colonial periphery as well. Newspaper notices in Montreal and Toronto kept the Canadian public informed of her successes abroad,104 and it is surely no accident that her election to associate membership in the RCA followed closely on the heels of validation from London.105 The full impact of settler colonialism on Canadian cultural formations is only beginning to be recognized by a national art history that has so long been intent on rehearsing the classic settler narratives of separation from the mother country and assertion of a distinct identity. But as the insufficiencies of nation-based art histories increasingly become apparent, McNicoll’s art opens up a different perspective on the construction of cultural identity: not as a position of sovereign distinction determined by correspondence to some intrinsic Canadianness but rather as a process in which similarities and differences are continually navigated, in this case through the transnational encounters generated within a relational context that has been dubbed “the British world.”106 This too was a world bolstered by a rhetoric of intrinsic distinction – the inherent superiority of the British race – but for the inhabitants of settler colonies who were only intermittently admitted to that superiority, the imperial idyll of unity under the flag was also offset by a more ambivalent reality in which belonging was perpetually undermined by strangeness, as similarities sustained through race, ethnicity, culture, and language were subtly but ineluctably offset by the vagaries of colonial difference.

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reference to which it only uncomfortably adheres. Faced with McNicoll’s art and life, however, these narratives of correspondence fail to maintain themselves. Like the table that sits unoccupied within the bounteous space of residential hospitality, or the emptiness in the pit of a maternal stomach, her work is defined by the interruptions that unsettle its more pleasant harmonies. They are visible in the chintz sofa that unexpectedly signifies professional space, in the empty dressing gown that yet has weight, and in the lower body too fully veiled by a skirt that has too little form. Such interruptions speak to us through the artist’s unexpected silence on questions of maternity, and are manifest also in the stylistic and geographical choices that have kept her at a remove from dominant art-historical narratives. The subtle sense of distance, of disconnection and of separateness that commentators have perceived in McNicoll’s imagery is not to be ignored. It stems, perhaps, from her deafness. I believe that it also resides in her remoteness from gendered expectations and the ambivalences of her colonial identity; in more ways than one she was a woman cut off from the hegemonic ideals that her society had to offer. While her Impressionism can be understood as an antidote to this detachment, it too enmeshed her in narratives of correspondence that her art does not fully sustain. The phenomenon of difference, so richly exemplified in McNicoll’s art and life, has been subject to intensive study within feminism. While gender is clearly only one of the overlapping axes of differentiation that McNicoll’s work lays open to view, feminism’s ways of thinking about difference can also be extended beyond their frame of reference. By way of conclusion I wish to effect such an extension, bringing feminism to bear on the broader question of the relationship between art and subjectivity posed at the outset of this chapter. I propose that, much like McNicoll’s paintings, feminist conceptualizations of difference can open the way to non-reductive understandings of the connection between art and life, representation and experience. Among the multiple ways of conceptualizing difference active within feminism, those that engage with representation have been of special interest to scholars of the visual. A generation of feminists has matured under the influence of Teresa de Lauretis’s memorable formulation of femininity as a sign that sticks to women like a wet silk dress, marking their outlines, defining their borders, and closing them in.107 Feminism, on her account, is the task of looking for resistances to that confinement – not through the simple assertion of an alternative femininity but rather through a more troublesome movement “back and forth between the representation of gender (in its male-centred frame of reference) and what that representation leaves out or, more pointedly, makes unrepresentable.”108 Various ways of theorizing this feminine unrepresentability have been proposed, notably within psychoanalysis and deconstruction, but as it pertains to McNicoll I suggest that the gaps and aporia through which difference plays itself out

Lived Experience and Cultural Narrative in Helen McNicoll’s Canvases

function largely as textual markers of social contradictions. Literary theorist Rosemary Hennessy has noted that women’s creative texts are shot through with such moments of disjuncture, which she characterizes as “symptoms of dis-ease in the coherence of the social … that which the text contains but cannot speak.”109 Difference, here, neither signifies nor constitutes an essence but stems instead from collisions of values, priorities, expectations, and desires. Within art history, these ideas have received the most sustained attention from Griselda Pollock, who advocates a feminism that does not come to women’s art anticipating the coherent and unmediated expression of a pre-existent feminine experience. Rather, she calls for a critical practice that searches out visual moments wherein women artists make their differentiation through their encounters with pre-existing discourses and social practices. As with de Lauretis and Hennessy, for Pollock this making is a process that only achieves visibility in the aporia it produces – disjunctures that come from “working within the predicament of femininity in patriarchal cultures.”110 If women have been ideologically and materially relegated to positions of otherness, Pollock argues that their encounter with that marginality has been productive of still an “other otherness” – a dialectical double negative that does not quite reduce to a simple positive. To work from a position of “other otherness” is not to be consigned to the far margins of an outer darkness in which difference can only figure as irreducible lack. Rather, it is to place oneself in a relation of sameness and difference, calling attention to the gaps between the possibilities of articulation that hegemonic regimes of representation make available to us and the shape and needs of subjects who do not conform to them.111 The break in the story wherein differentiation is inscribed is less a silence (the feminine as the non-dit, deafness as lack) than “an answer which does not correspond to any question posed.”112 I suggest that Helen McNicoll’s applications of paint to canvas are indices of this process of differentiation. To argue this position is to occupy a terrain of fine but productive distinction with respect to biography. By focusing on the gap between the experiential realities of McNicoll’s life and the dominant narratives that were available to her, it is possible to take biography into account without collapsing an artist’s production into a reductive expression of her life. To be clear: McNicoll did not paint her life so much as she impressed its differences in her materials. The disjunctions that appear in McNicoll’s painting are not pure expressions of her individual temperament and experience; neither are they simply a reflection of the socio-symbolic structures that help to determine subjectivity. Rather, they lie on the border between these two positions, in a terrain that has been described as residing between “a necessary and an alien otherness.”113 There is a necessary othering process involved in all symbolic expression; the art is not the life and cannot be reduced to it. The subject’s very separation from the pre-existing codes of

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visual and pictorial language renders it impossible that experience should ever find a pure translation into representation. The best one can hope for is metaphor. But there is separation, and there is alienation. There is a difference between a language that doesn’t speak you, and one that speaks of someone else; as scholars of women and of deafness have variously demonstrated, the “prison house of language” is not equally oppressive to all those housed within it. Helen McNicoll’s paintings are impressions of difference, but not in the sense that they express the positivity of her unique subject position through art. Rather, their difference is situated in their subtle deviations from the symbolic formations of which they nevertheless partake. McNicoll was a deaf woman, an Impressionist, and a Canadian expatriate in England. She read lips, played the piano, and otherwise adapted to the patterns of a patriarchal, metropolitan, and hearing society to which she was broadly accommodated, but from which she also remained multiply detached. With skill and concentration, she watched the lips of her culture move around her, yet the intensity of her observation was not matched by a fullness of experience. In the impressions she created, McNicoll paid close attention to the stories of her culture, but the gaps and disjunctures in her canvases signal the ways in which she was also cut off from them. That cut is precisely where we can look for the operation of “difference” in her work. This is not a project without inherent risk. To examine the work of a particular artist for formal signs of its difference is to raise the spectre of essentialism and to participate in still-contentious debates about otherness. Within areas of scholarship centred on constituencies that have been historically marginalized, otherness has been both rejected as an abnormalizing mark of discrimination and embraced as a privileged site for social critique. In both cases, it has too easily been reified. Once “femininity,” “deafness, or “Canadianness” are posited as positive entities, reservations about the restrictive and falsely universalizing thrust of identity politics come rushing to the fore. But is it possible to find another way of thinking about difference? The possibility suggested by McNicoll’s art is that we might formulate the dynamic in terms of acts of distinction – to consider difference as a process rather than a thing. Configured thus, difference becomes a relational function that signals interactions amongst individuals and between individuals and social frameworks. Like Helen McNicoll, who never made the switch to signifying in sign language, the space of the colonial woman in modern imperial culture was the space of the lip-reader: the subject who understood the communications of her cultures but who did not, could not, and perhaps would not fully accede to them.

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PART TWO Part Two FORCESForces

FIg. 4.1 An example of the lily drawings that Sophie Pemberton did towards the end of her life, sharing them with family and friends.

DIVERSITY Diversity

chaPter

4

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

Tucked away in the vaults of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria are a few fragile scraps of paper. They are flower drawings, of lilies, mostly, created by the British Columbia artist Sophie Pemberton (1869–1959) when she was in her eighties. By comparison with the highly finished salon painting for which the artist is now remembered (see fig. 4.18), the lily drawings are unmistakably humble affairs, the failing efforts of an old woman, made on cheap paper in the coloured pencil typically marketed to schoolchildren. Little surprise, then, that they are stored by the gallery not amongst its artworks but with its archival papers and ephemera.1 Yet for all their flimsiness, the drawings have a certain poignancy. Here, at the end of a life that had seen the artist abandon a promising career in favour of the demands of marriage, motherhood, and society, Pemberton held fast to the depiction of flowers. The images themselves seem palpably to bear the weight of her subjectivity: it is there in the uncertain lines of her signature, which have begun to tremble with age, and in the relative coarseness of her markings, which bespeak the artist’s failing vision – as if something of the aging woman has been captured in her encounter with the flowers she drew. Certainly there is reason to believe that Pemberton’s flower drawings were personally important to her. As a young woman, she chose wildflowers as her subject when she wished to memorialize the spring and summer days of 1895 – days she had spent with her family in Victoria between stints at the Slade School of Art in London and the Académie Julian

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Sophie Pemberton, Lilium parviflorum, 15 June 1895. The drawing is part of the album of wildflowers of British Columbia that Pemberton gave to her sister. A second album pairs flowers with poetry.

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in Paris. Her wildflower drawings, executed in the confident hand of a welltrained twenty-six-year-old, have all the visual facility that her later nature studies lack. Pale washes and vivid colours are fluidly handled, and delicacy of detail is counterbalanced by sureness of touch. Each plant is carefully identified according to genus and species, and some are also accompanied by lines of verse. At summer’s end, Pemberton collected her dated drawings and assembled them into two albums, which she gave as “affectionate souvenirs” to her sister Ada and her brother Frederick and his wife.2 The

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emotive resonance of her gifts combined with the unbending strictures of binomial nomenclature to situate Pemberton’s project within a popular tradition of women’s botanical practice that united science with sentiment.3 Pemberton’s personal connection with flowers was one that she never lost. In middle age she painted the blossoms she found in the places where she travelled with her husband. Flowers figured prominently too in the domestic spaces that she redesigned and decorated: a bathroom wall was transfigured with hand-painted delphiniums; interior space was divided with wildflower drawings on paper screens.4 For decades Pemberton repaired lacquered trays and repainted them with blossoms, and in the years before her death, flowering plants were part of a limited selection of natural objects that she returned to repeatedly, moving with the seasons from depictions of lilies to those of autumn leaves and seashells. These drawings she sent faithfully to family members and old friends at Christmas, on birthdays, and in times of mourning – along with a note or a line of poetry. When a local journalist came calling on the occasion of her eighty-ninth birthday, she made sure to be found at work on them.5 In this way, flowers and their depiction punctuated the rhythms of Pemberton’s life. Images of the artist amidst flowers adorn her photo albums, and references to plants and gardens appear regularly in the quickly scribbled entries of her diary: “April 10 1906 To Cordova Bay a picnic alone to get ferns, gorse, arbutus trees and wild currant … April 11 1906 Effie and I luncheon at the Arden. The daffodils and lilies in the garden … June 1 1907 Painted the Broom at Beacon Hill. The winding road & lupins … June 28 1907 Rose show Victoria.”6 As such entries indicate, Pemberton used flowers to mark the passage of time, the pulse of social life, the landscape that surrounded her, and the moments of her creative engagement with it. Her life, her connections to family and friends, her position as a social subject in a natural world – all these she mediated through flowers. It is the work of this chapter to consider the intersection of personal identity and the depiction of flowers as it appears in drawings such as those made by Sophie Pemberton. While Pemberton looms large in its pages, however, she is not the focus of attention. Instead, the chapter explores the broader question of how particular ways of seeing and representing natural objects might intersect with understandings of identity and the self. Sophie Pemberton deployed various modes of floral seeing during her lifetime: the decorative, the descriptive, the symbolic, the botanical. My focus here is on the last and most specialized of these – the botanical mode – in which flowers are removed from their natural settings and isolated on a blank page, to be closely observed and rendered frontally with an eye to morphological correctness. The look of such works is distinctive. Building from the example of Pemberton’s intimate connection with flowers, I attend to this pictorial specificity by considering it together with the forces that conditioned women to think of themselves in floral terms.7 Botanical drawings

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brought scientific practices of identification and classification into contact with the Victorian discourse of femininity, and their unique visual organization presents a compelling pictorial framework for reflection on the status and function of women’s identity. This claim is not a straightforward one. Certainly there can be no question of a direct causal connection between the identities of Canadian women and the distinctive pictorial appearance of botanical imagery – not least because the conventions of botanical seeing and representation were developed by a highly specialized group of male artists in order to meet the needs of an elite network of eighteenth-century European scientists.8 Canadian women were greatly drawn to the botanical format, however, and their more vernacular articulations of its scientific idiom were tied up with a larger social context in which flowers were freighted with ideas about female identity.9 These phenomena – scientific, pictorial, and social – combined in ways that contribute meaningfully to the overall project of this book as it explores how senses of self are engaged and made visible in historical art by women in Canada. Indeed, botanical drawing occupies a pivotal position within the trajectory of the book as a whole. Up to this point, my analysis has spoken primarily to the trauma, gaps, and absences that lodge deep within women’s imagery, subtly registering the strains and violences that attended their membership in aggressively colonial and profoundly patriarchal societies. One of the effects of such an approach, however, is to heighten the allure of that which is implied to be missing from the work; the elusive ideal of an integral and intact identity is conjured forth as an effect of the very absences I observe. With women’s botanical drawing, however, the entire premise of identity is itself called into question, and in the process, a new possibility comes into view: the possibility that the coherent identity I have implicitly evoked as missing from women’s art may be no more satisfactory than the gaps and absences that seem to call it forth in longing.

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Women’s Botany and Botanical Drawing in Canada

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From one end of the country to the other, women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada were broadly interested in botany and the range of activities associated with it. Women collected, pressed, and exchanged specimens; they organized expeditions to search for rare species; they joined and even founded scientific societies in order to discuss the world around them.10 Their collections of pressed plants, known as herbaria, now form part of the national botanical record in Ottawa, and their specimens are preserved in provincial museums and in important herbaria around the world, including in Kew, Paris, Edinburgh, New York, Chicago, Harvard, and Philadelphia. Canadian women also authored and illustrated popular works of natural history and albums of regional flora.

FIg. 4.3 “Eureka, Buttercupus!” A friendly cartoon shows Marion Moodie gathering specimens while her peers, probably fellow nursing sisters, enjoy other pursuits. The sketch may have been drawn by a patient.

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

Among the best remembered of these women are the earliest: the wives of British colonial administrators and early landowners who came from Britain to govern its North American colonies and to benefit from their resources. In Lower Canada during the 1820s, three friends – Harriet Campbell Sheppard (d. 1853), Anne Mary Perceval (1790–1876), and Christian Broun Ramsay, the Countess Dalhousie (1786–1839) – were all active botanists. Together with her husband, then governor general of British North America, Countess Dalhousie was instrumental in founding the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec and published her botanical observations in its Transactions.11 All three women corresponded with leading scientists domestically and abroad. They were intimately connected with Frederick Pursh’s ill-fated project for a Flora Canadensis, and the information and plants they collected informed important publications by British botanist William Jackson Hooker and his American counterpart, John Torrey.12 The picture of Canadian botany that emerges from the early example of these women is that of an elite pursuit: an extension of the Enlightenment tradition of amateur scientific discovery, undertaken by impeccably educated individuals from the upper echelons of society. As the century progressed, however, botanical study became increasingly democratized, recommending itself to the growing middle class as a readily undertaken means of self-improvement and, sometimes, much-needed financial support. This, certainly, was the case for author Catharine Parr Traill (1802– 1899) and her niece Agnes Fitzgibbon (1833–1913), who was widowed with

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A herbarium specimen of Convallaria bifolia, collected by Harriet Sheppard at her home near Sillery, Qc , in June 1825 and sent to William Jackson Hooker.

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four children when she illustrated and spearheaded the publication of a selection of her aunt’s botanical writings. Published in 1868 and widely regarded as Canada’s first coffee-table book, Canadian Wild Flowers was also the first work on Canadian botany with an easily accessible scientific text, written in English rather than Latin, and neither prohibitively expensive nor

too technical for the general public (see figs. 4.23–4.26).13 Such illustrated publications helped broaden the base of public interest in Canadian flora, while popular books and articles on gardening by Annie Jack (1839–1912) contributed to a growing horticultural literature.14 As established municipalities grew and newer ones sprang up across the country, women’s collecting practices also came to be part of a trend towards civic education and public betterment. In Ottawa, the collection of rare specimens gathered by Sarah Agnes Saunders (1836–1915) became a core component of the new national herbarium at the Department of Agriculture in Ottawa,15 while in

FIg. 4.5 An orchid (Galearis rotundifolia) drawn by Marion Moodie.

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Alberta, Barbara Mary George (1867–1936), an Irish immigrant and wife of a doctor, exhibited her collection of pressed and mounted Alberta wildflowers in the natural history museum that she and her husband founded and ran from a wing of the family’s Red Deer home.16 Similarly, in Calgary, a Canadian-born nurse, Marion Moodie (1867–1958), displayed her pressed wildflowers regularly at the city’s new Carnegie library and was instrumental in founding the Calgary Natural History Society in 1913.17 Like Catharine Parr Traill, who had contributed many specimens to the Kew herbarium, Moodie sent hundreds if not thousands of plants to herbaria at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the Smithsonian Institute, the New York Botanical Gardens, and the Field Museum, gladly accepting their fee of ten cents for each plant.18 Similar stories could be told across the country. None of these botanical activities were exclusive to women, and indeed many Canadian women shared their passion for plants with their fathers, husbands, and sons.19 The principal figures in Canadian botanical history were, moreover, men.20 Yet despite male leadership of the field, botany came to assume a distinctly feminized air during the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in its more popularized forms. English-language botany books recommended the practice to women as a healthful and morally sound activity that was “admirably adapted to the tastes, feelings and capacities of females.”21 Such gendered associations, first established in England and France, were especially pronounced in North America, where a strong link between women and gardening had also developed.22 In the United States, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, botany was considered to be the science most appropriate for girls,23 and judging from the membership patterns in Canadian botanical societies, the gendering of botanical practice was felt north of the border as well. So great was Canadian women’s interest in botany that by the beginning of the twentieth century they had come to dominate the membership of the natural history societies that had once been open only to men.24 This shift was not universally welcomed. Some men viewed feminization as a stain upon the seriousness of botanical pursuit, and responded with a gradual but stringent imposition of professionalism that worked to exclude women once more.25 The locus of botanical research shifted during the early twentieth century from amateur societies to universities and government, and though women occasionally breached these bastions, their admission to scientific careers was negotiated on vastly unequal terms. At McGill University, botanist Carrie Derick (1862–1941) had the distinction of becoming Canada’s first female professor, but the salary she earned was less than half of that paid to her male counterparts.26 Derick’s student Faith Fyles (1875–1961) also forged a professional career, working at the federal Department of Agriculture where she was appointed to the post of Dominion assistant botanist in 1911. Commenting on her contributions the

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

following year, Dominion botanist Hans Güssow reported that his division was “exceedingly fortunate in having a member on its staff whose skill in the work is so exceptional.”27 By 1919, however, a reorganization of the department had resulted in Fyles’s effective demotion. The gendered considerations that factored into Fyles’s career with the Canadian civil service have been explored by historian Amber Lloydlangston. Intriguingly, Fyles’s identity as an artist also affected her professional fortunes. After receiving her degree, the botanist had pursued artistic training with the painter Robert Wickenden, then based in Montreal, and a sketchbook still preserved in the Department of Agriculture shows her sensitive pictorial handling of plant morphology. But as Fyles’s plant drawings began to enliven government reports, ministry officials arrived at the conclusion that she was an artist rather than a scientist and cut her pay accordingly. Though her immediate supervisor sought successfully to overturn the decision, Fyles’s new title – “junior technical assistant” – did not fully recognize her qualifications.28 Whatever the impact of Faith Fyles’s dual training on her professional fortunes, her status as both a trained botanist and an artist offers a unique point of entry into the character and uses of botanical artworks made by women in Canada. One of the projects that Fyles had responsibility for during her time with the Botany Division of the Ministry of Agriculture was the 1920 publication The Principal Poisonous Plants of Canada.29 As the project’s author and illustrator, Fyles was able to ensure that its images were botanically accurate and tailored to the publication’s needs. In some cases she employed plant photography as the most effective means of visual communication, retouching the plates where necessary to achieve greater clarity of outline. In other instances, as with her illustration of bloodroot, she used lithographs based on her own watercolours to emphasize the distinctive vascular structure of the plant’s leaves, as well as their appearance at various stages of development. Elsewhere in the book, she found line drawings to be best suited to the task of efficiently delineating up to fifteen different poisonous specimens in one plate.30 In terms of her training, position, skill, and experience, then, we might reasonably expect Fyles’s drawings to be paradigmatic of the genre of scientific botanical illustration. But are they? The standard overview of botanical illustration is Gill Saunders’s Picturing Plants. In it, the art historian distinguishes among three modes of illustrating plant life typical of the modern era: botanical illustrations, horticultural drawings, and the images in floras and field guides.31 Saunders reserves the term “botanical” for the most technical and restricted of this imagery: namely, the illustrations that accompany scientific treatises as analytic tools and aids to classification. Reaching an apex of refinement in the hand-coloured copperplate engravings of eighteenth-century Europe,

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FIg. 4.6 Faith Fyles’s cameraready lithograph for “Bloodroot,” plate 18 of her Principal Poisonous Plants of Canada (1920). 

FIg. 4.7 An undated botanical illustration by Sarah Lindley Crease. Crease’s scientific work ceased after her marriage and move to Canada.

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

such illustrations provided the detailed morphological information necessary to specialized botanical reflection, particularly taxonomy. The engravings are highly stylized and often include cutaways and exploded details of a plant’s anatomical structure, typically its reproductive parts. In Canada, however, such works were excedingly rare. Among female artists discussed in this chapter, perhaps only Victoria’s Sarah Lindley Crease (1826–1922) ever created the kind of analytical accompaniments for scientific treatises described in Picturing Plants. The daughter of famed British botanist John Lindley, she was probably trained in the various techniques of the genre by Sarah Ann Drake (1803–1857), the artist most closely associated with her father’s work. From the older artist, Lindley learned the various techniques required to see a botanical drawing through to its published form, including woodblock printing and copperplate engraving. She contributed images to The Gardeners’ Chronicle, a periodical founded by her father in 1841, and illustrated his book The Vegetable Kingdom (1846). Remaining examples of her illustrations, now preserved in the British Columbia Provincial Archives, show that she expertly employed a range

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of scientific and analytic conventions. Lindley’s botanical work, however, appears to have entirely predated her move to British Columbia in 1858. Separated from her father’s scientific community by marriage and geographical distance, Lindley (by then Crease) immersed herself in her new surroundings, abandoning the anatomical analysis of flora in favour of documenting life in the young colony.32 The botanical drawings preserved in her archive have no real parallel amongst the production of her Canadian peers, who more typically engaged in the other modes of picturing plants delineated by Gill Saunders: horticultural drawing and work in the flora and field guide tradition. Yet closer examination of such imagery demonstrates that, despite its evident departures from taxonomic illustrations, the plant drawing produced by women in Canada is no less “botanical” than its more analytic counterparts. Horticultural drawings are created with farmers, gardeners, and florists in mind, combining vibrant colour with a focus on the blossom and/ or fruit of a plant in preference to its overall morphology or reproductive mechanisms. Fyles’s exquisite illustrations of raspberry varietals are characteristic of this kind of imagery.33 The drawings were undertaken after her move to the ministry’s Horticultural Division, and they reflect the different mandate of her new professional context. Yet even during her years with the Division of Botany, Fyles’s drawings had not served a primarily analytic or taxonomic function.34 Her illustration of the bloodroot plant is a case in point. While its drawing is morphologically impeccable, the image does not accord any special emphasis to the reproductive structures of the plant’s flower, whose yellow anthers and filaments are neither carefully delineated nor enumerated. This lack of intensive detailing creates a less technical appearance, but the absence of cross-sections and exploded details does not indicate a lack of scientific rigour so much as it registers the artist’s sensitivity to the purpose of her publication, which was intended to teach Canadian farmers how to identify the plants that might harm their livestock. With settlement rapidly expanding and agriculture assuming an increasingly important role in the Canadian economy, botanical science was put to work in the service of the young dominion’s citizenry. Indeed, the founding in 1886 of a “Central Experimental Farm” as the ministry’s main plant-research facility marks the extent to which scientific botany and agricultural development were entwined in the colonies. Because they participate in this practical application of scientific research, Fyles’s drawings may best be understood as exponents of economic botany – that branch of the science dedicated to the uses of plants by people. Consideration of the Canadian context thus helps to nuance historical understandings of art’s multiple functions within botanical science as it developed over time and across continents. As the taxonomic priorities of eighteenth-century Europe gave way to pragmatic exploitation of scientific knowledge in Britain’s rapidly expanding colonies, artists such as Fyles played their part in

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

the task of enabling the Canadian economy to meet the needs of a selfsustaining settler society. Colonialism would also be a central force in the development of Saunders’s third category: images in the flora and field guide tradition. Floras are comprehensive catalogues of the plant life of a given geographical area. Typically, they are large and lavish publications, while field guides are intended as small, portable references for use on the fly. Both forms are geared toward the task of plant identification, and to this end they combine images with short descriptive texts. As with horticultural drawings, it would be a mistake to see such imagery as somehow “unbotanical.” Indeed, the historian of science Sara Maroske observes that during the nineteenth century the undertaking of a flora was the high point of many botanists’ careers.35 European imperialism had provided an unparalleled impetus for this form of knowledge production, and at Kew, in England, the Royal Botanic Gardens launched a project to produce a flora for each of Britain’s colonies. Managed from London, such projects relied on contributors from around the globe to provide specimens and data. Although the flora of British North America projected by Sir William Hooker in the early 1860s was never undertaken,36 numerous specimens in Hooker’s earlier Flora Borealis-Americana were contributed by female correspondents from Canada. From her home at Sillery, Quebec, for example, Anne Mary Perceval, daughter of the lord mayor of London and wife of the chief royal customs collector, contributed 150 species to the project, engaging the help of Harriet Sheppard and Lady Christian Broun Dalhousie to maximize the geographic coverage of their specimen-gathering.37 On more than one occasion, Hooker would memorialize his connection with Countess Dalhousie in print, and the herbarium she compiled during her husband’s subsequent posting as commander-in-chief of India was later central to the Flora Indica published by Hooker’s son.38 In Labrador, Hooker recruited Mary E. Brenton, the daughter of a St John’s magistrate, to collect specimens that she gathered while accompanying her father on work-related trips.39 The artwork for Hooker’s flora was done in London, but later Canadian publications, such as Maria Morris Miller’s Wildflowers of Nova Scotia (1840) and Catharine Parr Traill and Agnes Fitzgibbon’s Canadian Wild Flowers (1868), followed the tradition of the genre in being handsome, large-format productions that combined illustrations and botanical description, often on facing pages.40 While the women’s works made no claim to comprehensively survey the plant life of their respective areas – as a rigorously scientific flora would seek to do – both projects were undertaken with input from professional botanists, and they furthered the spread of botanical knowledge amongst the settler population.41 As women enlisted the sanction or participation of botanists in their work, scientists too turned to them as collaborators. In 1867, Professor George Lawson, the founder of the Botanical Society of Canada, then teaching at Dalhousie

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Maria Morris Miller, Asclepias Amcena vel Asclepias Syriaca. Indian Hemp – Milk Weed, plate 6 from part 1 of Wild Flowers of Nova Scotia (1840). 

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College in Halifax, assisted the reissue of Morris’s early drawings to accompany his text Wild Flowers of British North America, and in the 1880s, Ottawa’s John Macoun employed mycological illustrations by Agnes Fitzgibbon (then Chamberlin) to illustrate his public lectures, including one that enabled residents of the region to distinguish between edible and poisonous fungi.42 In this, Macoun and Fitzgibbon’s collaboration shaded over into the terrain that was soon to be served by the developing genre of field guides designed to facilitate immediate recognition of plants by users on their rambles. Here too, women were enthusiastic participants. Mary Schäffer’s 1907 field guide Alpine Flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains had thirty fullpage colour plates and ninety-eight other images. A Philadelphian by birth, Schäffer (1861–1939) had undertaken the project with her amateur-botanist

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

husband after falling in love with both him and the Canadian Rockies on a summer visit to Western Canada in 1889.43 After her husband’s death, she secured the participation of another botanist, Stewardson Brown of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, to write the entries that would accompany her images. Though Brown is officially credited with authorship of the work, it was Schäffer who saw the project through to publication, retaining control of its creative vision and its finances.44 Another field guide, Wild Flowers of Newfoundland, was published by Agnes Marion Miller Ayre (1890–1940) in 1935. Ayre, whose herbarium is now part of Memorial University, produced well over a thousand botanical watercolours during her lifetime. In preparation for publication, she washed the paint off many of her drawings and outlined the illustrations in ink. She then had them photographed by a friend, reduced them to uniform size, and selected 250 for inclusion in the third and only volume of a planned five-volume field guide.45 Such published works are the best-remembered instances of women’s efforts to identify and illustrate the flowers native to their regions, but many more projects of this nature never secured widespread circulation. Before embarking on the publication of her Wildflowers of Nova Scotia, for example, Maria Morris Miller (1810–1875) created handmade albums of regional plants for local patrons, including Lady Campbell, wife of the governor general.46 Similar albums and collections were produced across the country. Most do not appear to have been commissioned and were probably undertaken from personal interest. In Victoria, British Columbia, Emily Henrietta Woods (1852–1916), an art teacher and Irish immigrant, made an ambitious three-volume collection of over 250 life-sized and botanically accurate drawings in Wildflowers of British Columbia (fig. 4.15).47 In Fredericton, New Brunswick, Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen (1840–1935) made over two hundred drawings of provincial wildflowers during the 1860s and ’70s.48 In Windsor, Nova Scotia, Annie Prat (1861–1960) recorded the region’s wildflowers and mushrooms from the 1880s until the 1930s, and in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, Ellen Trapnell (d. 1925) painted local wildflowers for fifty years.49 Most of these works were executed in pencil and watercolour, and in this respect the oil-on-linen compilation of Flowers from the Woods, Fields and Swamps of Canada, assembled by Ontario’s Lucy Goslee (1837–1919) in the 1890s, is a unique articulation of the widespread enthusiasm for pictorial collections of the flora indigenous to particular localities (fig. 4.27).50 Because such practices of collecting, naming, and organizing plants into European classifications systems supplanted Indigenous ways of knowing, they have been widely discussed as colonial impositions of epistemological authority, parallel to those of a military and political nature.51 In Great Britain, plants transported from the colonies – such as those carefully cultivated by Countess Dalhousie at Dalhousie Castle, Scotland – served as material demonstrations of Britain’s imperial reach, while

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FIg. 4.9 Agnes Marion Miller Ayre, Rhodora – one of 1,876 botanical drawings donated to Memorial University. Ayre’s collection of specimens, including 2,440 she pressed herself, forms the core of the university’s herbarium, which is named after her.

in Canada women proudly sent their plant drawings to London for inclusion in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1866. The exhibition, which aimed to “strengthen the bonds of union now existing in every portion of her Majesty’s Empire,”52 included watercolours of Ontario and Manitoba wildflowers by Agnes Fitzgibbon Chamberlin and her daughter, Geraldine Moodie (1852–1945), then a homesteader in Manitoba, as well as an album created by Agnes Hill during the years when her amateur-botanist husband was employed as a railroad engineer, helping to open British Columbia to colonial expansion.53 As settlement progressed, the tradition of recording local plants was enlisted in the project of making newcomers feel knowledgeable and at home. When Londoner Eleanor Cripps (1825– 1913) married John Kennedy, a retired Hudson’s Bay Company trader, she brought her album of English and Welsh wildflowers with her on a missionary posting to the Red River settlement in 1861, expanding it to include new flora from the land that quickly became her home. Notably, the first Canadian plant to appear in the album was one that she urgently needed to know: poison ivy.54 Settler interest in botanizing as a means of claiming the land received fresh impetus with the transition from colony to dominion in 1867. The burst of patriotic pride that accompanied Canadian Confederation is captured in the preface to the first edition of Canadian Wild Flowers (1868),

FIg. 4.10 The cover of Wild Flowers of Canada, which was published by the Montreal Star in serial installments. Images and text were contributed “by special artists and botanists” and the public was assured that information was “endorsed by university botanists of both continents.”

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FIg. 4.11 A drawing attributed to Jane McCord shows brightly coloured flora and fauna, pleasingly grouped and displayed. The work, in chromatic inks and gouache on rice paper, dates from c. 1869.

which emphasizes Agnes Fitzgibbon’s determination that the book should “be entirely of Canadian production, without any foreign aid.”55 In this manner, women’s floras participated in the cultural and symbolic work necessary for settlers to portray themselves as truly “native” Canadians, the legitimate holders of a land they increasingly thought of as uniquely theirs. By the 1890s, the Montreal Star was spreading knowledge of Canadian flora to the masses, with its popular supplement Wild Flowers of Canada aiming “to familiarize our people with their incomparable wild flowers.”56 Skills of floral identification were wrapped in a rhetoric of national or regional pride, and over the course of the twentieth century, each of the provinces and territories in turn adopted an official floral emblem. Flowers and identity were firmly linked in the public imagination.

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Femininity and Floral Culture

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Important as botany was to Canadians, however, it was not the only or even the pre-eminent means by which the nation’s women were initiated into the drawing of plants. The majority of female artists did not enjoy the same degree of specialized training as Faith Fyles or Sarah Lindley Crease, but

came to botanical imagery as a development out of the flower drawing that was such a conventional part of a polite education for girls. From their teachers and from popular illustrations, young women learned to colour their blossoms brightly and to group them in attractive bunches. Those who went on to more concertedly botanical efforts brought their early training with them, continuing to rejoice in colour and in blossoms. As often as not, however, the interests behind their drawings were only very loosely “botanical.” Girls might be set to trace or copy floral imagery in order to refine their appreciation of line, as appears to have been the case with Montreal’s Mary Frary (d. 1875), whose plant drawings are preserved in a personal album. While she has given Latin names to some of the species, most are not so distinguished, and it seems unlikely that scientific considerations were uppermost in the young artist’s mind as she executed them. Instead, bound keepsake albums like Frary’s offer a vivid glimpse into a much broader culture of floral imagery, in which botanical drawings kept company with pressed flowers, poems about flowers, floral greeting cards, and school prizes wound round with blossoms. In Quebec, midnineteenth-century albums compiled by Jacques Viger (1787–1858), MarieReine-Josephte Belleau (1812–1884), and Sophie Amelie Bruneau (active

FIgs. 4.12 and 4.13 The cover of Mary Frary’s album, with her ink drawing of a Guernsey lily, c. 1813.

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A page from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s album, created when the writer was twenty years old, with pressed and lithographed flowers assembled as keepsakes.

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c. 1860) include a range of women’s floral imagery, from skilled botanical illustrations and intricately découpaged flower drawings to flowers pressed in memoria to loved ones and mass-produced chromolithographs.57 Some women made a point of drawing their flowers “d’après nature,” while others copied the flower drawings of friends as a way to memorialize their acquaintance, and still others hand-coloured floral engravings imported from London purveyors of drawing materials. On Prince Edward Island, by the end of the century, the young Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) was combining commercially marketed horticultural imagery with pressed flowers in order to create elaborate scrapbook compositions. The construction of such albums afforded the occasion to craft intimate personal reflections that were closely allied to the construction and expression of subjectivity.58

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

Flowers were indeed an integral part of the strategies for self-representation that were available to nineteenth-century women. Take the example of Anne Ross (1807–1870), a well-heeled Montrealer who married John Samuel McCord in 1832. The first gift that Ross received from her fiancé after their betrothal was a copy of Elizabeth Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary, which he had purchased on a trip to Boston the preceding year.59 McCord was an avid amateur naturalist and was doubtless drawn to the fairly extensive botanical information presented at the beginning of Flora’s Dictionary along with a biography of Carl Linnaeus, the founder of modern taxonomy. Botanical instruction was not the book’s real purpose, however. Rather, its aim was to provide readers with a lexicon of the “language of flowers,” a literary convention that ascribed precise emotional significance to dozens of species by means of selections from poetic verse. Flora’s Dictionary was the first book to introduce North American readers to this sentimental genre, which had developed in France in the late eighteenth century and soon jumped the English Channel. The author’s promise to enable lovers to “speak their feelings with far more tenderness and force than words can impart” clearly had widespread appeal, and the book became a runaway success.60 In its pages, botanical information was aligned with personal affect, and flowers were linked to the innermost workings of the human heart. Through drawing, the flowers that mediated romantic feeling were also marshalled to the task of transforming girls into marriageable young women of sound reputation. With female education firmly centred on the arts of accomplishment for much of the nineteenth century, the care and training of young girls was not infrequently entrusted to women who were proficient botanical artists. In Victoria, Emily Woods taught at Angela College and Mrs Cridge’s School for Girls, and in Halifax Maria Morris Miller opened a school for drawing and painting where she undertook to provide training “valuable to the female character.”61 Some insight into the values such training was held to instil may be had by looking to the popular reception of Miller’s own student drawings, which were said to bring credit to the pupil by their “neatness and command of pencil” and their “pleasing and appropriate regard to delicate delineation.”62 Neatness, delicacy, appropriateness: Morris’s art pleased Haligonians for its well-regulated display of feminine virtue, and when her albums of Nova Scotia wildflowers began to appear in the 1830s, they were lauded in the pages of the Novascotian as adornments to the drawing-room that would advertise its mistress’s cultivated taste and dedication to female industry.63 The paper’s “Man about Town” columnist went straight to the matrimonial point: “For my own part, my heart would warm to the whole family circle in which the book appeared; and I should be half induced to propose to one of the daughters, if anything could tempt me to forego the luxury of a bachelor’s ease.”64 Less tongue-in-cheek were the comments of rising naval surveyor Henry Bayfield the following year, as he reckoned his chances for conjugal happiness.

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Emily Henrietta Woods, Cornus nuttallis, undated. Woods, an early teacher of Emily Carr, also contributed to the Souvenir of Victoria album presented to Princess Louise in 1882. The album included arrangements of pressed plants as well as photographs and watercolours by local women artists.

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Sharing news of his marriage in a letter to London, Bayfield similarly factored his new wife’s drawing into the equation: “My wife’s name is Fanny, she is 25 years of age, handsome, amiable, religious, and accomplished. She plays and sings English and Italian, and draws extremely well. Our union has been the result of a long intimacy of 3 years and as our opinions, tastes, etc. are similar … we stand as good a chance of happiness as most couples.”65 The two were married in Quebec City in 1838 while Fanny (1813–1891) was working on the album of Canadian wildflower drawings that she would continue during the early years of her marriage and motherhood. After the couple’s move to Charlottetown in 1841, Fanny would undertake the moral and aesthetic education of that city’s young

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

women, giving drawing lessons to the more affluent of its daughters. At her death she was remembered in the local press as an “accomplished lady, of high Christian character.”66 The religious conviction that served as a measure of personal probity was also integral to the logic that took women’s drawings of flowers as outward manifestations of their inner characters. Throughout the 1830s and ’40s, botanical practices of all sorts were closely tied to the precepts of natural theology, which held that God’s existence was made manifest to those who would attend closely to the natural world. Aesthetic appreciation of plants thus came to be combined with religious feeling, and the study of nature’s botanical arrangements became an avenue by which the attentive observer might access divine beneficence and gain insight into the moral lessons made visible in the organization of nature.67 It was thus entirely fitting that when a group of prominent Fredericton women sought an appropriate gift for Margaret Medley, the wife of the city’s first bishop, they decided to commission an album of botanical drawings by local artist Mary Rebecca Wilkinson (1808–1874).68 In Newfoundland, during the late 1880s, Kate Waghorne (1864–1891) made botanical drawings for her brother, the Reverend Arthur Waghorne, who was a mission priest with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and a significant figure in the colony’s early botanical history. She was joined in this work by her fellow parishioner Mary Southcott (1862–1943), who was briefly engaged to Waghorne’s brother.69 Ottawa’s Faith Fyles too was raised in an environment where natural history and natural theology merged – the daughter of an Anglican minister and amateur artist who, in his spare time, published findings with the Entomological Society of Ontario. Well into the twentieth century, the connections between women, botanical art, and religious faith remained strong; when Calgary’s Marion Moodie died in 1958, she left her estate to the Knox Presbyterian Church.70 Botanical notions about an overall design in nature, a regularity in the operation of its laws, and a rank and order in the chain of life lent themselves particularly well to social conservatism and reinforced conventional constructions of femininity.71 From the beginning, Linnean taxonomy had naturalized distinct boundaries between “male” and “female” attributes, despite the fact that both were to be found in the same plant. It then ranked them, assigning the taxonomic unit based on the male part of the plant (the class) a higher position than that based on the female part (the order).72 As literary historian Sam George observes, such allegiance to heteronormative principles of well-regulated identity made botany into “a means by which women could become acquainted with – and, implicitly, socialized into – an ordered system.”73 Within that system, women were conditioned to think of themselves as flowers: delicate and passive, with an ornamental beauty that was quick to fade. From the books they read to the sheet music they played from, the

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Mary Rebecca Wilkinson, Arrow Head, Sagittaria variabilis var. latifolis, c. 1868, from the album commissioned as a gift for Margaret Medley, wife of the bishop of St John, nb .

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visual culture of the Victorian era drove the message home, and women’s creative production suggests that they took it to heart. In 1897, Sophie Pemberton was rewarded for her internalization of this popular precept by seeing her inaugural professional effort, Daffodils, hung on the line at

the Royal Academy. Viewers would have had little difficulty in perceiving that the painting’s title, while literally referencing the yellow blooms that had fallen to the floor, also encompassed the graceful young woman who stooped to gather them. Significantly, however, the rhetoric that linked women and flowers oriented itself as much towards their inner emotions as to their outward appearance: “Remember,” opined the author of one late nineteenth-century advice manual for girls, “that in learning to know nature you are learning to know yourselves.”74 In this way, the depiction of flowers became a tool of subjectivization. As much as the careful and correct delineation of flowers was enlisted in the service of fostering well-regulated female identity, botanizing also presented a means by which that identity might be fully internalized as a sense of self.

FIg. 4.17 Sheet music for the 1904 song Les Ressemblances emphasizes similarities between women and flowers. FIg. 4.18 Sophie Pemberton, Daffodils, 1897.

Subjectivity and the Pictorial Logic of Botanical Drawing Drawing was an integral aspect of this process. With their unique formal characteristics and instantly recognizable patterns, botanical images 173

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present us with a distinctive mode of encoding sense experience. Remembering botany’s multiple connections with identity, I wish to enquire into the possibility that the visual codes and pictorial structures of its associated art form might also have generated a framework for thinking about the self. Intrinsic to this line of investigation is the capacity for subjective interpellation that attaches to acts of observing and recording objects in the world. Connections between the visualization of objects and dominant models of subjectivity have been much discussed by commentators on visual perspective.75 Just as Renaissance humanism valorized individuals and their capacity for achievement, the linear perspective perfected by Quattrocento artists centred the world around the autonomous subject’s viewing position. More recently, historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have linked changing understandings of human subjectivity to the emergence of the twentieth-century ideal of objectivity in scientific illustration, arguing that “to embrace objectivity was not only to practice a science but also to pattern a self.” Crucially, that patterning was assisted by means of representational practices – built up and reinforced through such concrete acts as the keeping of dated observations, the adoption of grid-guided drawing, and the training of voluntary attention: “To constrain the drawing hand to millimeter grids or to strain the eye to observe the blood vessels of one’s own retina was at once to practice objectivity and to exercise the scientific self.”76 Thus, they argue, even the most neutral and impartial practices of scientific illustration may be understood as Foucauldian “techniques of the self,”77 which both register and bring into being a certain disposition in relation to the world. Botanical drawing, by contrast, is the least objective of all scientific art forms. While the rigorously objective position suppresses human judgment in favour of the mechanical recording of sense data, botany has always depended on the subjective judgment of its practitioners, who hone their ability to distinguish the essential elements of a species from the idiosyncratic or accidental aspects of a given specimen. This process of “extract[ing] the typical from the storehouse of natural particulars” requires the active implication and discernment of both naturalist and illustrator: not just the recording of sense impressions but their analysis and synthesis as well.78 In botany, then, the observer’s subjective propensities are not contaminating elements to be eradicated so much as they are the foundations of understanding. In view of this, together with the field’s extensive associations with femininity, it becomes logical to enquire whether the modes of seeing and knowing embodied in botanical drawing practices might also have engaged women’s subjectivities in ways that were – and perhaps still are – especially relevant to them. To frame a response to this inquiry, it is necessary to look more closely at the genre’s distinctive visual mode of encoding sense experience – its pictorial logic, if you will. Two watercolours from the late 1830s or early

’40s help the characteristics of this logic to come clear. One is by Fanny Bayfield, then newly married and still living in Quebec City. The other is by her friend Millicent Mary Chaplin (1790–1858), an older woman who had come to Lower Canada in 1838 as the wife of an officer in the Coldstream Guards, a British regiment posted to Canada to quell political rebellion. Both women were participants in the city’s active anglophone community of amateur naturalists.79 As is readily apparent from their images, the two women drew side by side; their choice, arrangement, and depiction of flowers are almost identical. Almost … but not quite. The same is true of their techniques, which, though similar, are readily distinguishable when the works are seen at firsthand. This combination of sameness and difference, while clearly occasioned by the women’s shared sketching practices, is more than an historical accident. Rather, I wish to propose that it is visually paradigmatic of the genre. Indeed, patterns of sameness and difference repeat like a refrain across the botanical field. The drawings now carefully preserved in museum and archival storerooms across the country were made by women with differing levels of botanical knowledge across a tremendous geographical expanse

FIgs. 4.19 and 4.20 In Quebec City, Fanny Bayfield (left) and Millicent Mary Chaplin (right) made botanical drawings side by side, such as this lady’s slipper (Cypripedium spectabile) c. 1840–42.

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FIgs. 4.21 and 4.22 Two drawings of Sarracenia purpurea: the 1851 watercolour by Anne Ross McCord (left) and the 1840 lithograph by Maria Morris Miller (right).

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and over the course of a century; yet within a comparatively small margin of deviation, they all adhere to the same pictorial organization.80 Stems, leaves, buds, and flowers are isolated. The visual idiom is realist, and accurate depiction of detail is privileged over aesthetic bravura. Perspective is frontal, with the flower placed at eye level and no horizon line given. The separation of figure and ground is unambiguous, and the lighting is uniform. The artist may choose to include cast shadows or to exclude them, but in either case the pictorial space is shallow in the extreme. Backgrounds are typically blank or neutral, but even the occasional unorthodox addition of vibrantly coloured washes, as in some sketches by Sophie Pemberton, does not significantly affect the formula, which remains substantially unaltered

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

whether one plant is depicted or flowers of several varieties are grouped together. When the same species is represented, commonalities are especially pronounced – as evidenced in images of the Sarracenia purpurea of Anne Ross McCord in Montreal and Maria Morris Miller in Halifax. There are, nevertheless, important differences between botanical artworks. In works intended for commercial reproduction, such as those by Agnes Fitzgibbon for Canadian Wild Flowers, the translation of original drawings into printed lithographs produces changes in the quality of line and shading and in intensity of colour. Even from one edition of the book to another, there are differences, particularly after Fitzgibbon switched from opaque to transparent pigment to facilitate the use of stencils and

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FIgs. 4.23 and 4.24 Agnes Fitzgibbon’s original watercolour of Nymphaea odorata; Nuphar advena, 1868, painted for Canadian Wild Flowers (with detail). The book, with text by her aunt Catharine Parr Traill, was a milestone in Canadian publishing.

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thereby speed the hand-colouring process.81 Within media too, there are variations in colour palette, in the size, location, and orientation of plants on the page, in the parts of the plant selected for inclusion, and in the exactitude of detail. Skill levels in particular vary considerably, with a world of difference between the confident and considered compositions of Maria Morris Miller (fig. 4.8) and the apparently haphazard placement of plants on the pages by Barbara George now preserved in the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. But the differences amongst botanical illustrations are much more than a matter of variation between artists and techniques. Indeed, the whole point of the genre is that it isolates difference in order to distinguish one species from another – to help show, for example, the difference between the edible fungus and its poisonous near relation, or, in a somewhat less dramatic comparison from Nova Scotia artist Annie Prat, to show the change in colour that a particular species of mushroom undergoes between July and August. In one sense, then, to draw attention to aspects of sameness within botanical art is quite spectacularly to miss what is most significant about it. To these women, who made dozens, often hundreds, of drawings, each plant, each leaf, each petal was uniquely important.

FIgs. 4.25 and 4.26 The printed lithograph of Nymphaea odorata; Nuphar advena, published as plate 8 in the second edition of Canadian Wild Flowers, 1869 (with detail). Fitzgibbon created new stones for this edition at Burland L’Africain Chromolithographers, Montreal. The artist and her children hand-coloured the edition’s 5,500 plates, using stencils to speed the work.

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

What, then, are we to make of this repetition of sameness, coming together as it does with an insistence on distinction, difference, and specificity? The tension is at the heart of the genre’s considerable visual appeal. Aspects of repetition impart a decorative power to works whose interest is enriched, made almost addictive, by its subtle variations. To browse through a collection of botanical albums is a mesmerizing experience in which repetition of form creates a pattern of visual expectation that is never fulfilled in exactly the same way twice. The insistence on specificity that keeps viewers’ interest piqued functions only within a framework of rigorously secured parameters. Differentiation and sameness thus form the affective and conceptual hooks on which the genre’s pictorial fascination depends. A parallel logic informs the conventional understanding of gender, which establishes masculinity and femininity as internally cohesive identities defined by opposition to each other. The gendered self is subject to two principles: a principle of conformity to sameness (women are like this) and one of opposition through difference (because they’re not like that). Botanical pursuits reinforced such understandings. Ann Shteir observes that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanists “naturalized the sex and

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gender ideologies of the day” by rigidly insisting on the incommensurability of those parts of plants that they designated as “male” and “female.”82 The feminization of botany that occurred in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was, moreover, part of the massive restructuring of social organization occasioned by the industrial revolution that removed economic activity from the private sphere.83 As distinctions between public and private spheres intensified, botanical pursuits were drawn into the hardening of gender relations that supported these larger social changes. In this way, the characteristics that determine the pictorial organization and visual appeal of botanical illustrations resonate with the mechanisms by which women and men alike have been situated in the social field as “equal but different,” and this parallel presents a tool with which to analyze a genre of artistic production that was for a time virtually synonymous with femininity

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The Logic of Sameness: Identity in Botanical Art

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We have seen that, in key respects, all botanical illustrations look alike, conforming to the same basic set of pictorial strictures. If this is the most obvious way in which the genre registers sameness, however, it is not the most significant. With its clear lighting, controlled outlines, and implacable distinction between figure and ground, the pictorial logic of the botanical formula is in fact much less about sameness between examples than it is about rigorously establishing the parameters for species self-sameness – in other words, “identity” in the sense that philosophers mean it: an entity that is demonstrably the same as itself and not something other than itself. Thus, to the extent that botanical illustrations are intended as rigorous and exact delineations of the essential attributes of a given plant – setting forth their morphological features as unambiguously as possible – they also stand as one of visual culture’s clearest pictorial articulations of two of the logical principles on which western philosophy has grounded itself: the “law of identity” (A is A ) and the “principle of non-contradiction” (A is not not-A ). To make a botanical drawing, then, is to participate in a practice of determining, and so affirming, principles of identity. This was especially true in the visual production of Canadian women, which oriented itself to plant identification rather than analysis of the functioning of the organism. As much as it celebrates species self-sameness, however, the practice of botanical identification necessarily proceeds by inserting organisms into a field of differential relations. This process, indeed, is the essence of taxonomy. In the Linnean system, relations unfold by arbitrarily picking out one physical characteristic (say, number of stamens) and then delineating all the different variables of species sharing that same characteristic. In the natural method that succeeded Linnaeus, classification began from consideration of the totality of a plant’s different characteristics, which were

FIg. 4.27 A page from Lucy J. Goslee’s bound collection of over four hundred wildflowers, painted when the artist was in her fifties. Order, genus, and species are carefully (but intermittently) indicated on the works.

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only subsequently grouped according to similarities. Despite the apparent inversion of approach, however, philosophers have concluded that both systems of classification ultimately privileged a logic of identity rooted in sameness. While difference may appear to run riot through botany’s panoply of individuated species, its celebration of species diversity is carefully contained within a bigger envelope of generic similarity. The very idea of “specific difference,” philosopher Gilles Deleuze points out in Difference and Repetition, “presupposes an identical concept in the form of a genus.” and in this way, an idea of continuity becomes “the prerequisite of any possible classification.”84 His contemporary and colleague Michel Foucault makes a similar point in the opening pages of The Order of Things when he claims that to tell “the history of the order imposed on things would be [to tell] the history of the Same.”85 The logic of sameness embedded in the heart of identity comes at a considerable price, however – a price most keenly exacted by means of a subsumption of difference. Thus, when Deleuze laments that “we tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it,” botany is his example.86 Within this hierarchical framework, to be different has necessarily meant to come in second. The Aristotelian heritage of the western philosophical tradition brings with it a tendency to limit difference to a framework of opposition and contradiction – to speak of A and not-A , for example – that has ensured that difference has been almost impossible to think of affirmatively. When difference appears always in the guise of a negative, there is never really room for it to emerge on its own terms. Women and minority groups have been among the many losers in this philosophical system. As feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray has influentially observed, within a conceptual system that reduces all difference to a logic of the Same, women are necessarily positioned as secondary and lacking, relegated to a position of deviation from a norm that is presumed masculine by default.87 Normativity, then, is a crucial aspect of an approach to identity grounded in a principle of sameness. Returning these ideas to women’s botanical illustrations, the drawings’ ties to the more disciplinary aspects of scientific practice begin to come into focus. The rules of botanical identification impressed themselves firmly upon female artists who were also positioned (indeed, often pinned down) in a field of hierarchically structured normative relations. Consider the example of Mary Schäffer. Looking back on the early days of her first marriage, Schäffer recalled that when she first placed her artistry at the service of her husband, she found herself subject to the requirements of a “very determined master” who demanded obedience to the rules of a pictorial practice that was largely foreign to her.88 Trained to group flowers for their aesthetic effect and to prioritize pleasing compositions, Schäffer was dismayed to find her efforts to be unsatisfactory to her botanist husband: “Many a sketch had to be destroyed for what to me, was a mere kink.”89

FIg. 4.28 Mary Schäffer, Lonicera involucrata (Bracted Honeysuckle/Twinberry), c. 1890–1910.

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

It was an experience by no means unique to female artists. The history of botanical illustration is shaped by an imbalance of power that placed illustrators at the service of scientists, and it is similarly punctuated by the complaints of male artists who chafed at the harness.90 Yet Schäffer soon came to think of the botanical correctness of her drawings in terms that suggest a tutelage as much moral as technical. “I learned my lesson,” she continued, “and any sketch that passed his eagle eye, simply HAD to be

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correct. In this way I really learned to know right from wrong and the Dr. began to appreciate his much younger wife.”91 The new standard of correctness placed upon Schäffer may have left her feeling like “a dumb-bell,” but her ready acceptance of it led her to impose it upon others in turn.92 Writing to her protégé Humphrey Toms in 1937, Schäffer wielded charges of scientific inaccuracy as a weapon against Mary Vaux Walcott, whose own drawings of North American Wildflowers had been published by the Smithsonian Institute in 1925: “She [Walcott] once said I was her inspiration and I gently said I trusted not as she had made so many mistakes.”93 Choosing to abide by rules that were imposed on her by men whose authority she respected (in addition to her husband, she cited the impeccable teachings of her father and his friend Joseph Leidy of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences), Schäffer resented the success of women whom she perceived to be less conscientious. “Don’t think I mean to be spiteful about anyone,” she wrote to Toms, but “I have been hurt enough and I weary at people not playing the game.”94 As Schäffer’s comments indicate, women’s pictorial inscriptions of botanical identity transpired within a relational field that was regulated by authority. Nowhere were the demands of well-regulated identity more stringently felt than in the matter of scientific naming, which was conducted in a specialized Latin language that most women had little access to. In the introduction to Studies of Plant Life in Canada, Catharine Parr Traill recounts her struggles with the terminology of her major reference book, Frederick Pursh’s Flora Americae Septentrionalis, recalling that when its Latin was too advanced for her, she would turn for advice to her classically educated husband.95 Like Traill, many women artists also wrestled uneasily with nomenclature. Barbara George’s folios, for example, contain numerous attempts at scientific naming and subsequent corrections. Sophie Pemberton’s albums contain similar corrections, and Mary Schäffer’s watercolours have some of their scientific designations in another hand entirely. Other women, such as Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen and Geraldine Moodie, never made the attempt at scientific naming but turned to professional scientists to add the botanically correct terminology (in Beckwith Hazen’s case, to Loring W. Bailey, a professor at the University of New Brunswick, in Moodie’s case, to the Geological Survey’s John Macoun). Even Agnes Marion Miller Ayre, whose botanical knowledge was extensive, needed to turn to a male authority, Merritt Fernald of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University, to correctly name the plants in her book.96 Correctness was an important facet of botany’s investment in identity, and visible certainty was its lynchpin. With Linnaeus’s inception of modern taxonomy, botanical designations came to be determined by the visible structure of the plant, and the view of identity that botany presented thus bore an aspect of absolute security. In this way, taxonomy promised to deliver what Foucault has termed a “well-made language” – that is, a system

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

of representation so grounded in physical reality that it offered conclusive knowledge of it. This, indeed, was taxonomy’s early project and its allure: that through its articulation of the visible, it would permit “an absolutely certain knowledge of identities.”97 And yet botanical drawings are not reliable transcriptions of the visible onto the surface of the page. Once we are alerted to them, botanical imagery’s deviations from nature are everywhere visible. The leaves that so reliably face the viewer in botanical drawings, for example, are quite differently oriented in nature, where they more reliably face upwards to the sky. Because individual specimens are subject to vagaries of soil, climate, and anatomical peculiarity, they were widely considered inadequate to the task of fully exemplifying the species to which they belonged, and illustrators regularly smoothed over imperfections, enhanced colours, or modified proportions in order to capture species’ most distinctive elements. Plants, moreover, change considerably over the course of their development, and so in order to document all the key visual indicators of a given species, botanical illustrators not infrequently found themselves representing different stages of development simultaneously. This, for example, was the path chosen by Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen in her image of the Fragaria vesca strawberry, a species that never flowers and bears ripe fruit at the same time on the same plant. So common are the deviations from nature in botanical imagery that the Victorian illustrator Walter Fitch humorously warned readers of the rashness of drawing just what they saw, as “it might tend to upset some favourite theory, or possibly destroy a pet genus – an act of wanton impertinence which no artist endowed with a proper respect for the dicta of men of science would ever be wilfully guilty of!”98 Significantly, such deviations from empirically observable reality were not perceived as departures from the truth but as a commitment to expressing the larger truth of nature’s underlying plan. Working under the banner of “truth to nature,” the European botanical illustrators who set the norms for the genre effected such alterations with the aim of capturing a common object of study whose essential reality was held to exist most purely, and most perfectly, in a realm of morphological archetypes.99 Paradigmatic nineteenth-century botanical illustrations – such as those in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine – presented impossibly perfect plants as exemplars against which botanizers might judge the conformity (or lack thereof ) of the specimens in their gathering baskets. All of this amounts to a specific perspective on identity, understood as something removed from the realities of specific individuals and bound to idealized types that were nowhere concretely to be found. In their efforts to be “true to nature,” however, Daston and Galison pithily observe that botanists found themselves compelled to decide what nature was in the first place.100 Unsurprisingly, ontological decisions about what was shaded easily into moral prescriptions about what ought to be, and historians of

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Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen, Fragaria vesca, Strawberry Flower, Berry, June 1873, shows the same plant flowering and fruiting simultaneously, thus participating in a long tradition of intentional inaccuracies in botanical drawing.

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science have analyzed the multiple ways in which “nature became a resource for those Victorians who consciously wished to put forward … particular visions of society.”101 In this respect, botanical drawing’s mobilization of idealized and normative principles of well-regulated identity had significant ideological potency. A snippet of verse from Tennyson in one of Sophie Pemberton’s wildflower drawings put the matter clearly enough:

“Men are God’s trees,” the poet laureate proclaimed, “and women are God’s flowers.”102 The interpellation that botanical imagery held out to women was at least partly an invitation to assume their parallel place within the well-defined schemas that they so attentively delineated. In the meadows of the botanical specimen gatherer, it would seem, Tennyson was reliably to be found whistling softly. But was his the only melody to be heard there?

Botanical Life: An Interlude

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

Again, we might turn to Sophie Pemberton as a touchstone. A devout member of the conservative Anglican elite of colonial Victoria, Pemberton had a highly developed sense of feminine duty and propriety. She married a clergyman, collected edifying quotations, and kept her diary in the margins of a book of daily scriptures. If the evidence of her photo album is to be believed, she also saw herself – or was at least willing to be seen – as a living correlate of the demure and idealized women who peopled her canvases. In all this she conforms to the normative model of Victorian feminine identity based, like all such identities, on a principle of generic similarity familiar to us from the botanical model. I have proposed that through her engagement with flowers Pemberton embraced Victorian articulations of feminine identity and bound herself to their constraints. In the pages of the floral album she made for her sister, Tennyson walked arm in arm with Robert Browning: “O world / as God has made it / all is Beauty, / And knowing this is love / Love is Duty / What further may be / sought for / or declared.”103 But Pemberton’s engagement with flowers and nature extended beyond feminine grace and womanly Christian duty. It never subverted these, to be sure, but it did on occasion simply leave them behind. Thus, the moralizing of Tennyson, embraced in the album on 27 May, falls entirely away in a passage from the decadent poet Swinburne on 13 May: “[E]ven to the upland verge / Whence the woods gathering watch new cliffs emerge / Higher than their highest of crowns that sea-winds fret / Hold fast, for all that night or wind can say / Some pale pure colour yet / Too dim for green, too luminous for grey.”104 In place of the clear identities and identifications propounded by Tennyson and Browning, Swinburne is evocative, celebrating ambiguity in nature and, in his attentiveness to the subtleties of colouration, affirming a capacity for differentiation that exceeds pre-established categories. There is a possibility here for plants to inhabit a world of subtle indeterminacy and for nature to surpass our vocabulary for it. What I’m getting at here is a combination of strong cultural coding on the one hand, and naturalism on the other. It is a combination that runs like a refrain through Pemberton’s engagement with flowers and her relation to the world. One day she is lunching in society, garden flowers demarcating the well-tended spaces of social convention, the next she is

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FIg. 4.30 A photograph of Sophie Pemberton in her home, c. 1906, shows her posed to echo the position of the woman in her painting Un Livre Ouvert, hanging on the wall behind her.

FIg. 4.31 A snapshot of a woman in a tree, from Pemberton’s family photograph album.

The Logic of Difference: Individuation in Botanical Art Whatever modifications to strict empirical fidelity they may or may not have effected, the botanical paintings of Canadian women do index their makers’ encounters with plant life. The nature and import of these encounters are not easy to access, however. References to them appear only

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

picnicking alone, the gathering of wild plants offering an occasion for solitude and independence. Photographs in her album are suggestive of this doubled experience: the excessively civilized dresses and hats of Edwardian decorum coexist with the wild, windswept shoreline of Vancouver Island. For Pemberton, it was never an even contest. Judging from her diary, she lived a daily routine of highly cultured social intercourse: dinners, plays, lectures, European travels, and hotels. Only occasionally does her glory in something less orchestrated emerge: the diary – “July 19 Picnic with Mic the rocks on fire her on fire the horse getting free + lost 1905”; the photo album – a snapshot of a woman climbing high in a tree, in defiance of her long skirts; the botanical album – a verse extolling wildflowers in preference to their more refined garden counterparts. Like the poets who sang the praises of uncultivated flowers in highly cultivated language, Pemberton’s view of the flowers she drew was never free from cultural overdetermination; even in her final years, her correspondence made overt comparisons between the women she loved and the flowers she drew.105 Yet these highly coded metaphors do not encompass the entirety of her late drawings or speak to all they contain. Alongside the metaphors, arguably underneath them, lies the more fundamental fact of the artist’s encounter with a living object, scrutinized closely, repeatedly and to the exclusion of all else. Her family and friends remembered that “an outing with her on the beach or in the park was a lesson in observing the beauty and colour of generally overlooked details.”106 It is the force of such attentive encounters, I think, that accounts for Pemberton’s stubborn persistence with her late drawings throughout the 1950s: a persistence maintained in the face of age and loss and infirmity, a persistence that borders on insistence, a kind of tenuous holding on to life itself. With failing eyesight and shaking hand, she returned again and again to the nature study – to the basic description of floral life, the sheer fact of a flower’s existence, and her desire and continuing ability to record it. There is something very basic at stake here. For now, I will simply call it life. It is that which we share with our environment outside our cultural coding, outside the categorization of individuals, even perhaps outside of individual subjects. What becomes of the subject – and especially of the gendered subject – in the encounter with life? What potentials are contained in that moment? What risks are run? And what edifices has our culture erected in response? These are the questions I wish now to consider.

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rarely and in passing: a mention in Geraldine Moodie’s letters to lonely years spent scrambling over rocks and moss; a reminiscence in Barbara George’s memoirs of gathering flowers while her husband made his medical rounds; a tired combination of scientific terminology and sentimental anthropomorphizing in the published writing of Mary Schäffer.107 On the whole, it seems that for these women who spent so many hours poring over living objects with such attentiveness, there was little to narrate about their experience. Perhaps it lacked an established storyline. Or perhaps the storyline that their society provided did not suit their experience. But if autobiographical writing about artists’ botanizing is thin on the ground, the drawings that remain to us are richly carpeted with traces of the moments when individual women attended closely to the world around them. Consider the botanical drawings of Nova Scotian artist and poet Annie Louisa Prat. One of three sisters, all of whom pursued careers in the arts, Prat trained as a painter at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1890s before moving to New York City where she and her sisters operated a professional studio.108 A miniaturist and art teacher, she eventually settled with her family in Windsor, Nova Scotia, serving as the first dean of women at King’s College and painting the wildflowers and fungi that she found in neighbouring localities. Her extensive collection of drawings, now preserved in the Nova Scotia Archives and at Acadia University, was made over the course of six decades of botanical observation and illustration, and it charts her changing perspective on the genre. Prat’s earliest works are unremarkable and follow the norms of the genre closely: they present flowers against plain backgrounds, with short, straightforward labelling of genus, species, and common names. Handwritten plate numbers suggest that she was either copying from an as-yetunidentified book or, more likely, creating a youthful version of her own local flora, perhaps on the model of Maria Morris Miller, as the font of the plate numbers and their positioning on the page is similar.109 As she gained experience and confidence with the practice of botanical illustration, however, her drawings became more accomplished, and her approach to the genre changed. Inscriptions became much more idiosyncratic, as in this note on the back of a watercolour of choke cherries (Prunus virginiana): “Later (with a lot more berries and some apples) made into jelly. Good!”110 Many of her drawings of mushrooms have no identifications at all. Presumably she did not know exactly what they were, but while she sometimes found and noted the names later, the large number of untitled drawings suggest that identification was not really at the heart of Prat’s project. More important, it seems, was her observation of the thing itself: plant after plant, each richly coloured and skilfully delineated with the precision she had earlier developed as a miniaturist. The feathery gills on an Amanita mushroom, the veined and velvety surface of the underside of a mandrake leaf, the coloured striations on the petals of a violet: these and thousands

of other physical details claimed her active attention over a span of five decades. Of the two series of botanical illustrations that Prat created – one of wildflowers, the other of mushrooms – the mushrooms are particularly successful. In them, she often abandons the strict botanical formula of isolating the specimen against a white background, opting instead to provide a limited indication of its surroundings as well: the mosses, grass, and leaves in which it nestles. Little is known of Prat’s drawing practice, but occasional notes about specimens being collected for her by friends indicate that she did not paint them in situ – or at least not always. Nevertheless, images such as these vividly evoke the terrain of the botanical encounter. The inscriptions she provides strengthen this impression: dates are always recorded, along with information, often detailed, about the environment in which the specimen was found. At times, she records the pains that were taken to secure it. Thus, the back of her drawing of the common field mushroom (Agaricus campestris) describes the necessity of rising at early dawn and covering “many weary miles of long or short wet grass,

FIgs. 4.32–4.35 Four watercolours by Annie Louisa Prat, including (clockwise from top left) a stinkhorn (1916), a beefsteak mushroom (undated), another unidentified mushroom (1916), and cup fungi (1915), are part of her collection of over two hundred local fungi and flower drawings, now in the Nova Scotia Archives. 

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FIg. 4.36 Annie Louisa Prat, Trailing Arbutus – ‘Mayflower’ – Nova Scotia’s Emblem / Snow-Berry Vine, 18 May 1926 / May 1932. Prat was especially active as a botanical artist from the 1910s to the 1930s.

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wearing heavy long rubber boots and the warm clothing suitable for the hour.”111 While Prat sometimes supplements her inscriptions with information gleaned from books, she more often emphasizes her own observations and impressions of the specimens she records. A mushroom found near Starr’s Point is an “evil smelling thing,” the sea lungwort has “stalks 3 times the length of this sheet of paper,” and the leaves of a gentian “seem to catch reflections from the beautiful blossom colours.”112 Comments such as these tangibly convey her personal experience. In this way, Prat’s botanical images appear to the viewer not only as records of things but also of events. The inscriptions that accompany them are both aids to memory and guides to future encounters. Brief jottings describe specific localities and the hour of day, or the weather in which she gathered a particular specimen; others note the companions who accompanied her, or her difficulty in resisting the temptation to over-pick a particularly beautiful species of orchids. Aside from reliable indications of place and date, Prat follows no formula or given order. She remarks on the month when one plant flowers, on the morphology of another, and on the soil in which another grows.

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

Sometimes her observations are playful: “Mayflower,” she observes, is an anagram for “Wormy Leaf.” The more unusual her encounter with a plant, the more she appears to value it. Her drawing of a wild white orchid she describes as “my most precious plate … the only thing of the kind we have seen or even heard of in all Canada!” The rarity of the edible shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus) is likewise celebrated as “the only one I’ve found.”113 Overall, the effect created by Prat’s many drawings is one of the richness and variety of the natural world, and of a woman who fully appreciated the tremendous individuality of each and every flower or fungus that she drew. In Annie Prat’s records of her encounters with plants, then, the task of botanical identification is brought to a point where it gives over onto the significantly different realm of individuation. It is a shift that does not seem quite to be accounted for by the clear outlines, uniform lighting and figure/ ground distinction that I have previously emphasized. Instead, the effect of individuation emerges only slowly upon perusal of the whole of Prat’s collection. As page after page is arrayed for consideration, a panoply of plant life comes into view, each object with its unique appearance and traits. Individuation in Prat’s art, then, is a cumulative effect. A product of the serial nature of her endeavour, it calls our attention to repetition as another defining aspect of the visual logic of botanical imagery. In Prat’s hands, however, repetition is not the simple reiteration of sameness but becomes a vehicle for differentiation. Each iteration of the botanical formula both engages and produces singularity. This is an effect well known to philosophers. “To repeat,” writes Gilles Deleuze “is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique … which has no equal or equivalent.”114 As a succession of encounters with individuated entities, the serial nature of botanical illustrations is the foundation of the genre’s principle of difference. Crucially, it is also the grounds for a destabilization of the logic of identity inherent in the genre’s other wellspring – the principle of sameness. For if, as we have seen, sameness is tied to the realm of idealized and normative identities, the principle of difference leads altogether elsewhere: to fields in which no flower is quite like another and where the richness and variety of existence are there to be reckoned with. The implications of this line of thought are perhaps best evoked by Friedrich Nietzsche in the course of his loosely botanical observations on leaves in the essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Here, in a discussion of how deception comes to be taken for truth, Nietzsche comments on the difference between an individual leaf and the preconceived idea “leaf” that is given to us by language. While we credit language with a capacity for speaking truth about leaves, it is inherently compromised in this regard, limited by the fact that neither word nor concept “is intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit

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FIg. 4.37 (opposite) Mary Schäffer, Rubus parviflorus, 15 September 1903. Named by Schäffer as Mountain Raspberry, it is also widely known as Thimbleberry.

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innumerable, more or less similar cases – which means … in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept ‘leaf’ is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions.”115 By subjecting a leaf to the strictures of the symbolic order, one subjects oneself in turn to a kind of amnesia, in which the richness of the botanical encounter is forgotten. In their paradigmatic formulations, botanical art and science were firmly committed to such forgetting. The taxonomic orientation towards species type rather than individual specimen eschewed complete descriptions of individualized differentiations, and the objective was much the same amongst elite botanical artists: to illustrate what mattered about a plant rather than to accurately record its appearance.116 As we have seen, however, the idealizing shift from perception to conception, and from visualization to typification, came at a cost. Botany’s rhetoric of shared essences was readily turned to restrictive account, as clearly marked boundaries were promoted to truths, and identities (botanical or otherwise) were ranked in pyramidal order of privilege and subordination. How fascinating, then, that botanical art’s lessons in the conventions of conceptualization were ones that many women artists didn’t take to heart. Mary Vaux Walcott was explicit on this point in the introduction to North American Wildflowers, where she stated that her aim was “to depict the natural grace and beauty of the plant without conventional design.”117 True, most of the women I have considered here painted their leaves frontally, and they occasionally let their strawberry plants fruit and flower at the same time, but by and large their works are as true to the specimen as they are to the species. In place of the impossibly perfect flowers of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, Anne Ross McCord’s Sarracenia purpurea has an insect hole in one of its leaves (see fig. 4.21). Mary Rebecca Wilkinson also faithfully portrays the holes that individualized her particular specimens of hedge bindweed (Convolvulus sepium), mayflower (Epigaea repens), and wintergreen (Pyrola elliptica).118 Brown and misshapen leaves also appear repeatedly in the drawings of Elizabeth Hazen and Sophie Pemberton. Even Mary Schäffer, elsewhere so concerned that the botanical “game” should be played according to its rules, distinguished the verisimilitude of her drawings through the inclusion of specimen-specific details: an imperfection in her Lonicera involucrata; a dying, insect-bitten leaf in her mountain raspberry. In this, Schäffer was doubtless influenced by her own parallel practice of botanical photography, where exactitude of reproduction militates against idealization. Photography’s accurate recording of botanical specificity so pleased Geraldine Moodie that she entirely abandoned the watercolour technique she had learned from her mother, Agnes Fitzgibbon, when compiling her extensive collection of the wildflowers of the Hudson’s Bay region.119

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Geraldine Moodie, botanical photograph on glass negative, c. 1906–09. The annotations that accompany Moodie’s photographs show her keen eye. This one is captioned White Yellow Centres. Like Daird Woosters Dryas but the Leaves Are Not Serrated so Markedly – Nor Are They Quite as Large. It was photographed during Moodie’s years in Churchill, Mb .

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Canadian women adopted various means of emphasizing that their botanical drawings were representations not of types but of their own firsthand encounters with the natural world. While leading European botanical artists worked as much from other illustrations as from life,120 Canadian women stressed that they did not do so. Thus, Maria Morris Miller inscribed each plate of the 1840 edition of Wild Flowers of Nova Scotia with the indication that they had been “drawn from nature,” while Anne Ross McCord went still further in describing her Convallaria trifolia as being “copied from nature” (italics mine). In a similar vein, Catharine Parr Traill took evident pride in explaining that her niece, Agnes Fitzgibbon, had drawn the illustrations for Canadian Wild Flowers “from NAtuRe ’S OwN Book ,” while Fitzgibbon herself informed readers that the drawings she made in this way were far more successful than her earlier attempts based on prints.121 Inscriptions on many of Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen’s drawings show her parallel concern to highlight that she too was drawing “from nature.”122 As women deepened their personal encounters with plants through experience, they came to trust more thoroughly in the force and relevance of their investigations. Not to be cowed by a sense of the insufficiencies

of her access to scientific learning, Traill turned to her “own powers of observation” for information, grouping her plants not by scientific families but “in the order in which they appear in the woods,” and bestowing her own names on plants when she could not find any others.123 “I suppose our scientific botanists in Britain would consider me very impertinent,” she noted, not too apologetically.124 English artist Julia Bullock Webster (1826– 1907) did something similar when encountering unfamiliar plants on her son’s Okanagan homestead.125 So too did Annie Prat, as a note on the back of her drawing of the mushroom Polyporus sulphureus indicates: “I’ve called [it] golden glow as it looks like nothing else.”126 Through such acts of alternative naming, women distanced themselves from the rules and rigour of scientific identification as a means of pinning

FIg. 4.39 Anne Ross McCord, Convalaria trifolia. Orchis fimbriata. Copied from Nature 18th June 1837, Temple Grove, 1837.

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down. If binomial nomenclature functions largely by putting plants (and sometimes people) in their place, not all acts of naming are geared to a similar function, for names can also serve as introductions. To enquire after a name is a first step on the road to familiarity. In this way, names do not just identify objects but help us orient ourselves in relation to them. The fact that Annie Prat attempts to ground her act of botanical naming in her experience of the plant bears testimony to her encounter with its exteriority. As a point of entry onto alterity, names – scientific or otherwise – stand as recognition that the world beyond us is so characterized by abundance, wealth, and diversity that some means of differentiating its entities must be found. While the flora and field guide tradition is about identification, then, it is also about introduction and orientation, and in this, another aspect of its potential appeal for women comes into view, as a means of giving symbolic form to the experiential nature of the botanical encounter. As much as the history of women’s botanical art and writing in Canada demonstrates the restrictive strains of identificatory practice that are intrinsic to the genre, then, the examples of Catherine Parr Traill and Annie Louisa Prat also reveal that women did not necessarily permit themselves to be confined by botanical authority or its definitions of identity. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have described the function of natural history illustrations as providing a kind of containment that replaces the infinite variety of nature with knowable types.127 For Canadian women, however, less committed on the whole to the exigencies of science, and not quite so well served as men by the dominant typifications of the day, the experience of specificity could be a powerful thing. As women both adopted and adapted the norms of botanical practice to fit their needs and to match their experiences, their mobilization of specificity, differentiation, and individual encounter stands as a challenge to botany’s orientation towards an identity predicated on relations of sameness, as well as to its rigidly hierarchical classifications. Tennyson, it is tempting to conclude, might go whistle in the wind. Whatever their more conservative elements, then, botanical art and study also offered Canadian women the possibility of forging their own place within botanical culture. Indeed, this place may well have been larger in Canada than it was elsewhere. In his history of Victorian science in Canada, Carl Berger emphasizes that the newness of the British presence and the vastness of the Canadian terrain meant that the Victorian equation of scientific knowledge with the accumulation of information assumed special relevance and longevity here. This “science-as-inventory” mentality was apparent in both the name and the mandate of the Canadian Geological Survey, which was charged with making collections in all branches of natural history throughout the new dominion’s immense territory. As Berger comments, “This altogether engrossing task of collection and amassing

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

of information made science accessible and egalitarian … contributions of permanent value could be made by part-time amateurs” who maintained close links with the new government and institutional professionals.128 From the early nineteenth-century work of Harriet Sheppard, Anne Mary Perceval, and Countess Dalhousie through to the mid-twentieth-century contributions of Agnes Marion Miller Ayre to the eighth edition of Gray’s Manual of Botany (1950), women were active participants in the vast networks of exchange – both formal and informal – that built and circulated knowledge about North American plants. Ainley observes that, unlike most women in Britain, those in Canada had “the opportunity to explore new areas, observe geographical differences in plant and animal distribution, and ‘discover’ new plants.”129 They found opportunities to enrich their stores of knowledge, rely on their judgment, and consider their relation to the world around them. Botanical art also offered Canadian women opportunities to explore their own powers of investigation, to learn new skills and information, and, above all, to negotiate very individual trajectories for themselves through the cultural, social, and economic terrain of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Canada. These trajectories did not always fit the typical narratives that botanical art purported to offer. Thus when the young Maria Morris took out her advertisements in the pages of the Novascotian offering training “valuable to the female character,” it seems unlikely that she was referring to the importance of developing women’s capacity for financial independence.130 But this is, in fact, what botanical drawing would represent for Morris, both as a young woman teaching together with her mother and sisters and after her ill-fated marriage to Garret Miller ended in separation. Her decision to embark on a new edition of Nova Scotia Wild Flowers shortly after the failure of her marriage speaks volumes to its importance as an engine of financial stability.131 In Toronto, Agnes Fitzgibbon had much the same aspirations when she undertook to learn the art of lithography and colour all five hundred copies of the first edition of Canadian Wild Flowers by hand. Commenting on women’s success as botanical illustrators in England, Ann Bermingham has noted the potential of botanical illustration to serve almost as a kind of camouflage for professional ambitions that were out of the ordinary. “Precisely because it was so closely associated with women, flower painting legitimated women’s artistic endeavours, and so gave women a kind of cultural agency and, finally, authority … Like the language of flowers, flower painting was a veiled language, an expression of self-assertion as much as self effacement.”132 For women like Morris and Fitzgibbon, botanical illustration offered a socially sanctioned route to atypical careers as middle-class businesswomen. For Mary Schäffer, botany appears to have served as a gateway to a much more unorthodox life than she had known previously, where she

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A hand-tinted lantern slide of Mary Schäffer crossing a makeshift bridge. The photograph was probably taken by Mollie Adams, a geology teacher at Columbia College and Schäffer’s travelling companion between 1905 and 1911. 

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was free to expand beyond the well-regulated outlines of typical feminine identity. Limited by her husband’s ill health, she spent ten years gathering her specimens of Rocky Mountain wildflowers within the safe compass of the railroad line, but her determination to complete the project after her husband’s death necessitated more ambitious travel. Significantly, the extended summer expeditions that she began for the purposes of botanical collecting continued long after her work for the book was complete. Botany was an impetus for Schäffer, but it was clearly the exploration that she loved most. That she devoted the majority of her later creative output to writing about her expeditions rather than painting flowers comes as no surprise, for with her highly developed respect for taxonomic correctness and masculine scientific authority, botanical art could not offer Schäffer the freedom from gendered restriction that she craved.133 And she did crave it. Writing of the decision she and Mollie Adams made to embark on a major expedition in 1907, Schäffer described her longing for “emancipation from frills, and furbelows … There are few women who do not know their privileges and how to use them, but there are times when the horizon seems restricted, and we seemed to have reached that horizon, and the limit of all

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endurance, – to sit with folded hands and listen calmly to the stories of the hills we so longed to see … so – we planned a trip.”134 The trips that began with Schäffer’s botanizing freed her, at least temporarily, from the usual parameters of her identity as a woman. Many of the botanical artists whose work I have discussed in this chapter were out of step in one way or another with the gendered expectations of their day. Faith Fyles, Marion Moodie, Annie Prat, Mary Southcott, and Emily Woods all remained single, pursuing professional careers instead of marriage and motherhood. Some women, like Agnes Fitzgibbon, had independence thrust upon them, while others, like Maria Morris Miller and Elizabeth Hazen, left their husbands by choice. Botanical author Catharine Parr Traill was her family’s primary breadwinner, and though her belief in natural theology aligned well with Victorian ideals about women as the bearers of moral values, she nonetheless took a certain pride in her self-declared botanical “impertinence.” Such impertinence was characteristic too of Mary Southcott, whose lack of compliance to male authority in the health-care system led to a Royal Commission.135 Agnes Marion Miller Ayre’s family learned to accommodate her unannounced leave-takings to pursue her botanical interests; Ayre’s grandson recalls, “Her disappearances became a fact of life.”136 Like Agnes Hill in British Columbia, both Ayre and Southcott were active suffragists. What might botanical art have been to such women? Doubtless it was many things. One of them, I suggest, was a meditation on identity. In a world where women were so often not seen for what they were but rather told what they could be, botanical art reproduced the framework of normative identification within which women operated on a day-to-day basis, yet it also offered extensive opportunities for close looking and a vivid appreciation of an individuation and difference that worked against such typification. In comparison with the work of Europe’s more widely known botanical illustrators, most of the art produced by Canadian women is technically unsophisticated. In place of the scientific conventions developed in order to meet the needs of taxonomic practice, their drawings offer records of encounters with living objects, scrutinized closely, repeatedly, and to the exclusion of all else. In this, they bespeak the promise of empiricism: to see something plainly, for what it is. It is an impossible dream, for empirical objectivity is necessarily countervailed by the cultural and subjective forces that frame and direct our observation. But success in the venture arguably matters less than the allure of its promise, which is one of understanding unfettered by prior categories. Despite all taxonomic pressures to the contrary, botanical drawing’s close empirical observation grants primacy to nature’s constant presentation of specificity. Through the value that they accord to acts of perception, botanical drawings open up to view a world in which experience does at times exceed our pre-existing conceptual frameworks for it.

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Where, then, have we arrived? Strong empiricism triumphant, and the differentiation of the individual rescued from the distorting and homogenizing lens of social categorizations such as gender? Is such an apotheosis of individualism the model of subjectivity that botanical drawing by Canadian women ultimately puts forward? The tenor of my questioning doubtless betrays my scepticism. As botanical art exists – even if only partly – in tension with modes of thought based on the rigorous upholding of welldefined identities, it seems to me that this tension cannot be maintained through a model of differentiated individualism alone. Classical taxonomy, after all, has a long history of naming plants after individuals. Feminist thought, moreover, has been highly critical of individualism’s inability to account adequately for the social forces that collectively structure one’s sense of selfhood; certainly the art discussed in the first part of this book bears ample testament to women’s inability to escape those forces. And yet the element of individuated encounter so present in these works must somehow be accounted for. There are different angles from which one might approach the conundrum of subjectivity posed by botanical illustration. One approach might take its lead from the subject matter of the artworks, following plants themselves along lines set forth in the work of feminist philosopher Elaine Miller. From Kant to Deleuze, Miller points out, plants have fascinated philosophers seeking metaphors for an alternate mode of subjectivity. For plants both are and are not individuals in the classic sense of a selfcontained purposive unit that is identical to itself and different from anything else. Unlike an animal, a plant does not grow from an essentially formed infant to a larger but essentially-the-same adult. Rather, parts of plants evolve into each other: “A plant’s leaf becomes the flower, the flower the fruit.”137 All taxonomic idealization to the contrary, there is no one point at which a plant can be definitively designated as the individual that it essentially is. Whereas the individual is typically considered as a fully formed being, a plant is in a constant state of metamorphosis. It is unique and differentiable from its surroundings, but in a real way it is not always identical to itself. It is the same plant but different. Another possibility is to come at the issue of individuation from the perspective of the botanical artist in relation to social and even pre-social forces. In her writing on women’s botanical art, Ann Bermingham argues that the genre held out to women the opportunity to perform their selfhood as active agents – as, say, professional artists and illustrators.138 Bermingham is here implicitly adopting a model of performative subjectivity, in which the self is created through the very acts that are more typically thought to express it. Because of the room it makes for agency, this model

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has been highly influential in feminist studies. But in her work on feminism and the natural world, Elizabeth Grosz argues that we need to get away from such subject-centred vision in order to think about how individual identities are secondary to the forces that produce them.139 Like flowers whose size, form, and colour might depend on the composition of the soil, and the amount of sunlight, wind, and rain they received – not to mention the animals and people who moved their seeds and pollen around – artists and their images were the products of a range of different impulses. And like the diversity of species that their images document, the variety of individual intentions, drives, and forces that underpinned women’s botanical endeavours in Canadian art-making was tremendous. Women created these paintings from financial need and from filial duty, out of curiosity, boredom, homesickness, wanderlust, and a desire to be of some practical use to farmers. Their drawings sprang from friendship and from loneliness, from happy marriages and from miserable ones. They fostered companionship and precipitated fallings-out amongst friends, fuelled careers and facilitated marriages. They were tied now to the worship of God, and now to the exploitation of colonial resources – to the assertion of social position and the development of regional pride, to social class, to nationalism. If each drawing is the active performance of a subject position, it is also the realization of a set of extra-subjective forces and impulses that preceded the individuals who instantiated them. Not least among these forces was, I think, that of existence itself, of something quite basic and quite powerful that we share with the world around us. What, if anything, happens to the subject in the encounter with existence that botanical attentiveness entails? Contemporary botanical artist Valerie Cousins has described the subjective effect of her sustained and detailed observation of another living being as a spiritual practice  based on a “connection with the inherent beauty and complexity of the plant,” which she experiences as a personal relationship. Through close looking, Cousins observes, the nature of her appreciation and her understanding changes: “No matter how common the plant, I am getting to know it for the first time. And there is great delight in this.”140 Clearly, this effect is more than just a matter of knowing how to make an identification. It is, rather, a recognition, as if of a kinship. Catharine Parr Traill sometimes referred to flowers as her friends. Such statements, taken individually, might easily seem saccharine. Taken collectively, however, in the context of Traill’s tremendous attentiveness, her texts produce a powerful cumulative sense of her appreciation for the broader existence that human beings and plants share. Her projection of human characteristics onto the world is counterbalanced by an opposite effect – a kind of getting outside the self so as to come into contact with the larger fabric of life. Sentimental botanical discourse taught women to see their personal identities reflected in their

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objects of study, but Traill also achieved the opposite: a welcome forgetting of the self. When she was disheartened with the immigrant life and lonely for her English home, she plunged herself into her immediate botanical environment, finding in it something that she could recognize but that was yet larger than she was. Subjectivity, in Traill’s account, is extended to the natural world, and in the process it is stretched sufficiently far that it ceases to be the property of the bounded and self-identical individual. I will speak to this phenomenon at greater length in the final chapter of this book; for the purposes of the present argument, however, it is enough to note that where its exists amongst botanical artists, the recognition of shared existence works as one of the many pre-subjective forces that decentre the individual who nevertheless persists as their point of conjuncture. There is a final avenue by which we might approach the individuation conundrum called forth by botanical illustrations: not through the drawings’ subject matter, or through the artists who created them, but through their serial nature. For while each botanical drawing seeks to capture the uniqueness of the individual – whether species or specimen – botanical illustration is also inherently tied to the logic of the collection. These are drawings done by the dozen, and each unique instance is also a contribution to a larger whole of which it is but a part: a collection of the wildflowers of British Columbia, or of Canada, or of one particular corner of Ontario. Whatever the case, there is a strong sense that the differentiation of the individual – so meticulously ensured through the realistic delineation of its every particularity – always takes place against a background not of generic sameness but of the diverse yet unified profusion that is nature’s great variety, and that the serial collection represents, if only metonymically. Ultimately, all three avenues of approach converge. The metamorphosing plant is affected by the interplay of pre-subjective forces that affect it and the artist alike, and this interplay in turn is tied to the richness and profusion of nature’s bounty as expressed in the collection. In each case, the bounded, unique, or differentiated individual is present but unsettled. In the first part of this book, pictorial traces of such destabilization – expressed in the form of gaps and absences – were largely a mark of women’s inability to fully recognize and claim themselves within the narratives of unified subjectivity that their patriarchal and colonial societies offered. Non-correspondence to their own identities was a symptom – a sign of something wrong. In this instance, however, the model of identity-basedon-sameness that botanical illustration offered to women fit them only too well. To be a woman was akin to being the well-formed subject of botanical identification: delimited and defined. In the shift from identity to individuation, then, non-correspondence to a typified identity becomes a sign of health. In conceptualizing this, I am aware of my strong emotional temptation to side here with Nietzsche, and with Swinburne, in privileging the

aspect of radical differentiation that emerges in the empirical encounter – to focus on the individual, each specimen untrammelled by the constraints of conceptual labels. Too dim for green, yet too luminous for grey. “We separate things according to gender,” Nietzsche writes, “designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments!”141 When their paintbrushes were in their hands, and the plants before their eyes, I think that this is something these women – even Sophie Pemberton – would largely have understood. Their vision, in the moment, was about the encounter with what is. In the end, however, the particularized and individuated subject of botanical differentiation is also destabilized by the pre-subjective forces that shape plants and human beings alike. What model of subjectivity, then, does botanical art ultimately offer? The dual principles that structure its pictorial logic give us one possible answer: sameness and difference in exquisite dialectic. The import of such an hypothesis is ambiguous. Perhaps it is simply to insist on recognition of the abiding importance of a mainstream “logic of the same” for a group of women artists who, if they were non-conforming in some ways, were also – it is important to acknowledge – quite conservative in others? Doubtless this is part of the picture. But it is not, I think, all of it. For through its dialectical logic, botanical illustration interpellates the subject from a position that not only contains but also exceeds both terms. Perhaps the most fitting word to evoke this phenomenon is one that Rudyard Kipling employed in narrating his encounter with Mary Schäffer and Mollie Adams on the road to Emerald Lake in the Canadian Rockies in 1907. A lively rendering of contemporary expectations around gender and race, the passage is often quoted in the literature on Schäffer, but in the context of the argument I have developed around botanical illustration, it is Kipling’s closing adjective that interests me most: “diversity.”

Identity, Difference, and the Botanical Encounter

As we drove along the narrow hill road a piebald pack-pony with a china-blue eye came round a bend, followed by two women, blackhaired, bare-headed, wearing beadwork squaw jackets and riding straddle. A string of pack-ponies trotted through the pines behind them. “Indians on the move?” said I. “How characteristic!” As the women jolted by, one of them very slightly turned her eyes, and they were, past any doubt, the comprehending equal eyes of the civilised white woman which moved in that berry-brown face. “Yes,” said our driver, when the cavalcade had navigated the next curve, “that’ll be Mrs. So-and-so and Miss So-and-so. They mostly camp hereabout for three months every year. I reckon they’re coming in to the railroad before the snow falls” … The same evening, in an hotel of all the luxuries, a slight woman in a very pretty evening frock was turning over photographs, and the eyes beneath the strictly arranged

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hair were the eyes of the woman in the beadwork jacket who had quirted the piebald pony past our buggy. Praised be Allah for the diversity of his creatures!142

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Diversity: in botanical discourse, it is a word with ecological overtones. To speak of bio-diversity is to signal the importance of individual difference as essential to the shared context of a healthy ecosystem. It conveys a sense of uniqueness in profusion, of richness of the part and of the whole. A straightforwardly ecological impulse is visible in images like Schäffer’s Rubus parviflorus, which not only identifies the mountain raspberry for us but places it in a network of interdependencies, bringing the plant into relation with the insect that took nourishment from its leaves and the fungus to which it serves as host. Thus, the hole and the rust that individualize the plant, marking it out as a particular specimen rather than an idealized type, also implicate it in a larger collective. In conventional botanical illustration, however, the fact of collective belonging is conveyed through idealizing typification. By contrast, Schäffer’s depiction of the mountain raspberry establishes its singularity by enmeshing it in a field of relations. This sense of an individuation that is nevertheless immersed in a shared reality is also captured by the serial nature of botanical art. Taken on their own, individual botanical drawings may be appreciated for their beauty, but the full extent of their impact and the force of their logic only come into view in the context of the collections of which they almost invariably form a part. Deleuze’s ostensibly paradoxical definition of repetition as the “universality of the singular” speaks nicely to this serial quality, for it preserves that which is generalizable across the botanical genre while insisting on the centrality of the particular within it. In these ways, botanical drawings by women in Canada speak back to the model of well-defined, type-based identity that the format conventionally offers. They do not always do so, of course, but it happens frequently enough to matter. And when it does, they draw us into a dialectics of diversity in which identity and differentiation are mutually engaged. This, ultimately, is the structure of subjectivity that such drawings model for us: one that acknowledges the identifications that define us, that values the uniquenesses that set us apart, and that appreciates the overall fabric of existence in which things are, quite marvellously, what they are.

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INCLINATION Inclination chaPter

5

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

Where does the “I” begin and end? Is the self a discrete and singular entity? And if so, how are connections with others forged? Among the artworks that have prompted reflection on such questions – from traditional self-portraits to Romantic landscape painting – one class of historical images is by and large overlooked: that of mothers with their infant children. The oversight is not entirely surprising, and a parallel omission characterizes philosophical accounts of subjectivity. From Descartes onward, the pre-eminent explorations of selfhood have ignored motherhood almost entirely. When the maternal body has been invoked – as in the psychoanalytic literature – it has typically figured as that which must be sacrificed, repudiated, or abjected in order that the subject might emerge.1 Currently, however, a growing cohort of feminist scholars, many of them mothers themselves, is insisting on the importance of maternity for accounts of subject formation.2 In place of the familiar scenario in which the child must break away from a primal state of maternal symbiosis in order to establish its sense of self, feminist scholars of maternity more typically approach subjectivity as a function of connectedness, exploring the impact of the pronounced corporeal and affective continguities so characteristic of pregnancy and perinatal experience.3 As bodies and psyches transform and become plural, maternity fosters new awarenesses that cast doubt on conventional notions of the self as bounded, singular, and differentiated. What, after all, are we to make of the very terms of our analysis when the

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FIg. 5.1 Paul Peel, Mother Love, 1888.

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“other” is part of the “self”? In this way, recent thinking on motherhood prompts a reassessment of identity’s core concepts. At first glance, such considerations do not appear to be much in evidence in the historical iconography of motherhood. While a small body of modernist work by artists such as Paula Modersohn Becker and Käthe Kollwitz points to the radical potential of maternal imagery for refashioning selfhood, a much larger corpus of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting participates in the suppression of maternal subjectivity by yoking it to a conventional and seemingly ineluctable narrative of feminine fulfilment through self-abnegation.4 The “happy mothers” of eighteenth-century French painting, so fully immersed in their children as to have no needs of their own, were well to the fore on the other side of the Atlantic as well, idealizing motherhood as women’s most perfect calling, even as women themselves were envisioning other possibilities for fulfilment.5 Overviews of Canadian art have embedded women within this tradition of socially conservative and aesthetically unadventurous imagery. In this vein, for instance, Maria Tippett has observed that in the later nineteenth century, “Canadian women painters were content, for the most part, with the maternity theme.”6 Looking to the archival record, however, key documents appear to tell a different story. As far as it is readily possible to judge

from the annual catalogues of Canada’s three major exhibiting societies, scenes of maternity did not exceed 1 per cent of the works exhibited by Florence Carlyle or Helen McNicoll over the course of their careers.7 That figure was similar for Harriet Ford, and scarcely higher for Marion Long (2 per cent) and Sydney Strickland Tully (3 per cent). Mary Hiester Reid did not exhibit a single painting of motherhood, and even Laura Muntz, the genre’s most prominent Canadian exponent, chose to publicly exhibit other subjects three times more frequently. In the context of long-standing assumptions about women’s cultural practice, such facts come as a surprise, raising the possibility that it may be time to reassess our understanding of those images of maternity that women did paint, on the chance that they too might offer something more than might be expected.

Conventions of Intimacy and Solitude

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

Early Canadian representations of mothers and their children fall into two main categories. Some are strongly narrative, invoking maternity to add pathos to stories of mortgaged homesteads or husbands gone to sea. Breton women were particularly popular candidates for such dramatizations, but Ontario farm wives could capture the imagination as well, eliciting viewers’ sympathy or igniting their admiration.8 A second class of images is more contemplative. Tightly centred on the figure of a woman with her child (usually a babe in arms), these paintings do not endeavour to capture the drama of family life so much as the emotional tenor of maternity itself. The works are intimate and executed at close range. Some continue the fascination with rural peasantry, others extol the virtues of the bourgeoisie, but all speak of tenderness and love. It is this second group of images – or, more accurately, a select subset of them – that claims my attention in this chapter, where I argue for their capacity to circulate a surprisingly complex set of maternal affects that serve as a fulcrum for new thinking about subjectivity itself. On the face of it, this may seem an unlikely claim, for these images of mothers and their babies are nothing if not supremely conventional. Within their own temporal contexts, they were inextricably imbricated in patriarchal constructions of the family. Indeed, the sentimental idealization of maternity that they offered, or at least appeared to offer, may reasonably be described as one of patriarchy’s most enduring ideological tools, mobilized across generations to convince women that true personal fulfilment is most reliably to be found in their reproductive labour and their care and succour of others. Overdetermined from the start, then, the most readily apparent virtue of such paintings today, at least from a feminist perspective, is that they provided women artists with a socially acceptable entrée into professional practice. For women who give birth, however, the intensities of pregnancy and parturition are likely to beget a far less conventionally scripted circulation

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Marion Long, Maternal Love, undated.

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of passions. The most difficult aspects of such experience – anger, pain, alienation, and despair – would not appear in women’s artworks until well into the twentieth century.9 Even the more agreeable of maternal intensities have been difficult for artists to capture in paint, but perhaps an oil sketch by Marion Long (1882–1970) begins to provide a glimpse of them. Stripped of all narrative trappings, Long’s canvas reduces early motherhood to its barest possible contours: two heads in close proximity, one large, the other small. The sketch is an essay in sensations: the wispy softness of a newborn’s downy hair, the fragility of a skull still not quite fully formed, the curve of a woman’s neck as she bends to kiss her baby. As her lips approach its flesh, the painting beckons us to follow with her: to inhale the fragile scent of the newborn, to feel the surprising warmth that its body generates, or simply to dwell in the extraordinary reality of a being so very small.

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

Such impressions, once experienced, are lasting. In this respect, holding a baby is much like riding a bicycle: one doesn’t forget how to do it. The experience of such intimacy – so deeply lodged but so often hard won – is my primary point of access into maternal imagery by Canadian women, as I endeavour to see beyond their more formulaic aspects. What effects, I want to ask, are wrought by the intimacy these works open to view? What marks do such encounters leave on a mother’s, a child’s, sense of self? What passions do they set in motion? The emergence of motherhood as a field for scholarly inquiry testifies to the importance of such questions. Education, birth control, and doubleincome family structures have combined to change the horizon of women’s expectations, and in this altered context the need for new ways of thinking about motherhood can be pressing. As mothers work to harmonize their lives as individuals with their love for their children, they have all too often felt themselves to be torn in two.10 Perhaps new ways of conceptualizing selfhood through maternity may help to alleviate this ache. In the analysis that follows, I turn to the recent critical literature on maternal subjectivity to understand the images of perinatal connectedness bequeathed to us by Canadian women artists. At their best, I argue, such images offer access to a profound experience of togetherness. The propinquity I wish to claim for them is no resuscitation of maternal symbiosis, however, but one that remains alive to women’s autonomy. The being-with I endeavour to sketch out here is thus critically different from the being-for that has so long served to define maternal experience. Bringing this distinction into view is the primary challenge of this chapter. My principal strategy is that of comparison, for the task of rethinking maternal connection is facilitated by having a counterpoint in relation to which it might be assessed. Fortuitously, such a comparison existed, readymade, on the walls of Canada’s annual exhibitions. During the years between 1880 and 1920, paintings of women together with their infants were offset by what appears, at least initially, to be an inversely related class of images: that of women on their own. Scenes of solitary figures meditating on themselves and their surroundings were popular amongst Canadian artists, particularly those influenced by the Aesthetic movement. Amongst female exhibitors at the Royal Canadian Academy, the two genres were equally popular; for every scene of a woman with a baby in her arms or by her side, there is another in which she sits by herself, staring out of the window, into a mirror, a fireplace, or simply off into space.11 Two works by Florence Carlyle (1864–1923) epitomize the comparison. Mother and Child is a classic of its kind – a tender portrayal of maternal love – while The Moth is an equally paradigmatic depiction of female reverie, in which a familiar object of domestic space gives rise to a young woman’s solitary contemplation. The two works were closely contemporary; the former was shown first at the Ontario Society of Artists exhibition

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FIg. 5.3 Florence Carlyle, Mother and Child, 1910.

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Florence Carlyle, The Moth, c. 1910.

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in March of 1910, the latter just a few weeks later at the Art Association of Montreal.12 The canvases share the same palette, the same studio prop, and the same diagonal emphasis. They may even depict the same model. Both, moreover, are intimate domestic scenes in which a woman gazes at the object of her attention at some length. At this point, however, the works begin to diverge, for while one image shows us a mother engrossed in the baby at her breast, the other depicts its sitter alone and musing over the twists and turns of her inner world.

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

Considered at the level of their differences, the pairing suggests an artistic practice (witting or otherwise) of using images of female subjects existing in and for themselves to counterbalance, perhaps even to counteract, representations of maternal inclination.13 At the level of their similarities, however, the undeniable parallels between the works invite consideration of the unexpected affective consonances between representations of maternal intimacy and those of feminine solitude. Either way, the comparison brings out the potential utility of reverie as a lens through which

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Florence Carlyle, The Studio, 1903.

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to re-examine representations of motherhood for the logics of subjectivity they sustain. While its long associations with inward contemplation make reverie an ideal vehicle for exploring the theme of selfhood, the pairing with

paintings of maternity creates opportunities for seeing both genres anew. Together, reverie and maternity enable both being-with and being-alone to come into view differently.

Reverie and the Solitary Subject

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

“I think therefore I am.” Descartes’s famous formulation epitomizes a western philosophical tradition in which selfhood has been tightly bound to solitary acts of introspection. By thinking about thinking, Descartes argues, the self is established as a certainty – perhaps the only certainty – of existence. The subject, on this account, comes into view as self-conscious and autonomous, the source of its own authority and meaning.14 With titles such as Meditation, Reflections, Memories, or Daydreams, Canadian paintings of reverie offer intimate visual parallels to such Cartesian moments of introspective self-regard.15 The works depart from Descartes, however, in their address to a specifically female self. Indeed, the subjects of reverie scenes are almost unfailingly women, and art-historical discussions of them have been feminist in orientation, drawing a link between scenes of female sitters engaged in their own thoughts and pursuits and women’s increasing insistence that they be fully recognized as “persons,” both legally and by society more broadly.16 For Julia Gualtieri, the first observer to have commented at any length on the genre within Canadian art, paintings of feminine reverie reflect the changing status of women at the turn of the century – a period of new career opportunities, later marriages, and falling birth rates. In this context, Gualtieri casts images of reverie as a positive manifestation of the self-possession, independence, and enhanced sense of personal identity characteristic of the New Woman.17 Other observers have noted a more melancholic tendency that comes with reverie’s self-reflexive gesture, tying it to the increased uncertainty that accompanied social change for women. Thus, in her commentaries on paintings of solitary women by Mary Hiester Reid and Marion Long, Janice Anderson emphasizes qualities of emptiness and even loss of identity.18 Whether the focus is on positive associations of independence and selfsufficiency or more ambivalent ones of loneliness and longing, however, both perspectives on reverie tie it to women’s desires and transitions at a time of social change. There is ample historical support for such an interpretation. As literary scholar Laura Marcus has observed, one of the most common ways of portraying the figure of the New Woman in turn-of-thecentury literature was to cast her as a “dreamer, turned inward to sensation and feeling.”19 Associations between femininity, interiority, and the status of women were also explored by turn-of-the-century psychologists. In Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria, for example, Breuer noted that the “monotonous, simple and uninteresting occupation[s]” habitual amongst women gave rise to daydreams and fantasies.20 Daydreams

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FIg. 5.6 (opposite)

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Marion Long, The Fan, 1914.

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and reverie were further associated with women and teenaged girls by sexologist Havelock Ellis in his writing on auto-eroticism, and by psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé in her work on narcissism.21 Both identified reverie as a key aspect of an inwardly oriented and self-sufficient form of female sexuality. Such self-sufficiency engendered concern amongst those advocating for women to accept and adapt to patriarchal norms. Thus, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who observed that women were “prone from their physical constitution and their lives to desire what they have not,” faulted the inward turn of reverie for only making matters worse.22 Hall contrasted the healthy, outwardly directed sexual orientation of a mature woman (focused on her husband and her child) to the inward-turning, auto-erotic and therefore tacitly homosexual character of young women’s reveries.23 In this manner, reverie amongst women came to be associated with the childless and inward-looking New Woman, damningly described by one prominent anti-feminist author as “a subject without an object.”24 Of particular interest here is the model of selfhood evoked by all of these accounts. The dreamer’s isolation may be perceived as giving her access to a productive space for self-definition, or as plunging her into a morbidly disconnected world of interior fantasy, but either way the inwardness attributed to reverie presumes the existence of a clear boundary between interior and exterior worlds. Andreas-Salomé offers a poignant recollection of this kind of reverie from her youth, as she caught sight of herself, unexpectedly, in a mirror. It was, she wrote, a moment when “the last, spiritual, embryonic membrane” that had insulated her from complete accession to selfhood was torn open: “With a sudden unheralded awareness, I saw my own existence separate from that of all others. It was nothing in my appearance, – such as being less pretty than I had imagined, – nor guilt aroused by the sin of doubt. It was rather the fact of standing forth as a bounded individual that left me homeless and impoverished, – as if hitherto I had found a welcome place for myself as part of everyone and everything.”25 A friend of Freud, Andreas-Salomé followed him in considering such a rupture to be necessary to the formation of the ego. Selfhood, on this accounting of it, is individuation, and inwardness is predicated on the existence of a sovereign subject whose limits come clear through introspective acts of separation. A reverie painting such as Long’s The Fan exemplifies this dynamic pictorially. As the whiteness of wall and floor encircles the subject, it describes her boundaries and severs her almost completely from any context save that of the mirror that reflects her separateness back to her. Long’s symphony of whites is beautiful, but its beauty lies in a bareness that borders on barrenness. Against it, the upright shape of the woman’s body marks out her solitude like the number “1,” or perhaps the letter “I.” The fan and richly flowered kimono, likewise, serve less to establish any genuine sense of cross-cultural exchange than to suggest the western woman’s

isolation – perhaps even alienation – within her own cultural sphere. Lost in her thoughts, the bounded subject of reverie lives, at least for the moment, by herself.

“Mother Communings”

FIg. 5.7 Laura Muntz, Mother and Child, c. 1885.

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On the surface, at least, it is very much otherwise with paintings of maternity. A watercolour by Laura Muntz (1860–1930) drives the contrast home. In it, the privacy so fundamental to paintings of reverie is transformed into the intimacy of two beings closely united. Solitude is replaced by relationship and, just as G. Stanley Hall and the social theorist Ellen Key prescribed, the inward orientation of daydreams is transformed into the communion of mother and infant. As the woman nestles the child in her lap, she inclines her head towards her precious charge, bringing all her attention to bear on its activity. The evident attachment between the figures finds a formal expression in the airy and delicate handling of the medium, which unites the two figures’ bodies, wrapping them together in softly applied pigment. Warm pinks infuse the connection with a sense of well-being, while the matching tones of honey-red hair pay visual tribute to the figures’ familial bond. The echoing curves of shoulders and heads

FIg. 5.8 Frederick Simpson Coburn, Mother Nursing Child, 1903.

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

focus our attention downward, bidding us to enter the mother’s loving absorption in her child’s world. Add to this the satisfied pleasure of the woman in Carlyle’s Mother and Child (fig. 5.3) and we are witness to all the main components of the turn-of-the-century maternal ideal: tenderness, security, proximity, and fulfilment. Fulfilment was, indeed, a watchword for turn-of-the-century discourses on maternity. Disregarding the pain of labour and breastfeeding, the misery of sleepless nights, and the shock of the newborn’s continuous demands, authors of manuals on female health hastened to assure their readers that early motherhood was the “happiest period of a woman’s existence.”26 MidVictorian platitudes were passed on to early twentieth-century women as established dogma. “The pleasure of the young mother in her babe, is said to be more exquisite than any other earthly bliss,” quoted physician Henry Pye Chavasse, drawing his evidence not from the women under his care but from an 1860s periodical tellingly entitled Good Words.27 Concomitant with this rhetoric was a call for the immersion, even sublation, of the maternal self in the needs of the child. Thus, for example, Ellen Key praised the impulses that, in her view, had dignified women before the corrupting advent of feminism: “The one desire of their souls,” she wrote, was “to lose themselves in the lives of their dear ones, in their own world, often narrow indeed, yet for them a world grown great and rich through the joy of motherhood.”28 Such rhetoric found its pictorial counterpart

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in popular images of doting peasant mothers, whose relations with their children were often presumed to be more “natural” than those of urban women from the educated middle classes. F.S. Coburn’s Mother Nursing Child, from 1903, is emblematic in its depiction of such limitless maternal devotion. Here, the young mother who kneels before her infant’s cradle gives no thought to her own physical well-being but offers her breast to her child in what must have been for her an extraordinarily uncomfortable position. Key’s appreciative intonations are almost audible in the background: “Motherhood [is] the most perfect human state; that in which the individual happiness is a constant giving and constant giving is the highest happiness.”29 The ultimate guarantor of such happiness was physical proximity. From artists and poets to early childhood educators and eugenic polemicists, commentators on motherhood idealized physical closeness as the cornerstone of the maternal relationship, drawing on the intrauterine reality of physical unity between woman and foetus to set the terms for their relations post partum.30 A kindergarten song entitled “Mother Communings” captures the emotional fulfilment held to be wrought by physical proximity: Hands holding hearts and neither left alone. Around my neck one soft, weak arm can go. “It is so nice when mother holds me so.” ................................

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Now let your feet stand firm on mother’s knee – So close to her how happy you must be! She will gladly be the sun Of your life, sweet little one. But now, my dear, you’ll softly rest On darling mother’s faithful breast, And you and she will both feel blest.31

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Such maternal togetherness assumes different aspects within Canadian painting. Among artists given to Symbolist influence, such as Charles de Belle (1873–1939) and Laura Muntz, it appears as a compositional, even physiological unification of bodies. In de Belle’s Madonna of 1918, the heads of woman and infant come together at the apex of a central pyramidal shape, while the separation of their bodies dissolves in the plenitude of a world without clearly drawn boundaries.32 Similarly, in Muntz’s Protection, the woman’s breasts are replaced by the heads of the children she clasps to her bosom.33 The heavily symbolic elision of Muntz’s drawing is a not-too-oblique reference to that most tangible postnatal manifestation of physical connection between mother and infant: breastfeeding.34 Canadian artists approached the depiction of nursing with varying degrees of candour. In Mother and

FIg. 5.9 Laura Muntz, Protection, c. 1906.

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

Child, for example, Florence Carlyle deploys a filmy gauze to veil the exposure of the nursing mother’s shoulders and upper chest, but the disposition of the baby’s head is unmistakable, and the gestures of its hands – the left cupped possessively against a breast, the right gesticulating with enthusiasm – are easily recognizable as expressions of the nursing infant’s delight and contentment. In Maternity, a 1906 work by Mary Riter Hamilton (1867–1954), the artist makes the bond explicit. The canvas, which she kept until her death, depicts the exact moment of the latch between mother and child, as the woman’s splayed fingers guide her nipple to connect with her infant’s open mouth. The artist’s obvious familiarity with the mechanics of

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Mary Riter Hamilton, Maternity, 1906.

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breastfeeding is also evident in the tea things scattered across the table in the foreground. The dishes that bear literal witness to the nursing woman’s increased need for fluids are also symbolically suggestive, evoking a dynamic of reciprocal fulfillment: as the mother nourishes her child, so too shall her own thirst be quenched. Even such a supremely acceptable moral could not circumvent the social anxieties engendered by such open depictions of the nursing process, however. When Hamilton gifted her painting to the City of Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), the scene was deemed inappropriate for public display and consigned to the city’s storerooms.35

More than any other issue, indeed, breastfeeding provoked the prescriptive ire of experts. Take the bombastic prose of Dr Laing Gordon, whose feverish admonitions in favour of nursing stand as ironic testaments to women’s growing inclination to bottle-feed: The aversion of mothers to the feeding of their own infants is a regrettable feature of modern civilization. The ostensible reason is often want of ability when the true reason is lack of desire, owing to the interference with the mother’s freedom of action during the period of lactation; in other words, the woman shirks her responsibility … It might be justly laid down that if a woman is unfit or refuses to nurse her infant she is unfit for matrimony – she is either too deficient physically or is so constituted mentally that she is not a proper person to undertake the responsibility of bearing and rearing offspring … The woman who cannot nurse her baby is to be pitied, she who will not merits contempt.36

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

Writing in 1909, Gordon linked the refusal to breastfeed to modern women’s unwillingness to immerse themselves in their children, and he condemned bottle-feeding mothers as likely to be given over to “morbid introspection.”37 For Gordon and others like him, thoughtful contemplation of one’s self and one’s needs slipped easily into self-indulgence and flew in the face of good mothering’s principal demand: that of unselfishness.38 And yet the same texts that so resolutely exhorted women to make the personal sacrifice that breastfeeding was generally agreed to entail (nursing mothers’ diets, schedules, and social lives were all subject to serious restrictions) also scolded nursing mothers for suckling their infants too often and too easily. From birth, babies were to be placed on a rigid feeding schedule and never indulged to nurse for the physical and emotional comfort it provided. Indeed, when experts shifted from general moralizing to practical instruction, the advice given to women on the care of their children emphasized physical separation to a surprising extent. While the literature on motherhood is sufficiently broad to offer an opposing view for almost every piece of specific advice, there was a general agreement at the beginning of the twentieth century that babies were not to be rocked, dandled, or bounced over-much. Increasingly, they were not even to be picked up when they cried, unless at a designated feeding or changing time. The Mothers’ Book, a 1909 collection of essays “regarding the mental and moral development of children,” advised, “The first thing that a baby must learn, by experience, is that he must lie in his bed almost all the time no matter how much he likes to be taken up.”39 Babies were to spend their days out of doors in a pram, and their nights by themselves in a darkened room, and even a nursing baby must “never be allowed to realize the delightful comfort of sleeping beside its mother’s breast.”40 The 1911 edition of the popular

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manual Mother and Child summed up the general mood succinctly: “In the interest of both mother and child it is best that the child should not be with the mother continuously.”41 In a final stroke of irony, the mother who was unable to relegate her baby “to a warm, safe, happy background” was castigated for her selfishness, and urged to develop the “Spartan self-control [necessary] to let him lie peacefully by himself most of the time.”42 Various factors contributed to the current of separation that complicated the ideal of the unity and mutual attachment that was supposed to obtain between mother and infant. Physiologically, a rudimentary but flawed understanding of postnatal development in the brain and central nervous system led to anxiety that overstimulation through excessive contact would injure the growing infant.43 The greater potential for injury, however, was undoubtedly held to be psychological. Maternal attention too quickly or unstintingly bestowed would spoil a child and hinder the development of healthy independence. Mothers alert to their culture’s messages were thus caught in something of a bind. As pyschotherapist Rozsika Parker has observed, “There is a curious contradiction at the heart of the maternal ideal. While harmony, unity and the attainment of ever-greater emotional closeness through the employment of empathy are held up as the goal of mothering, the pursuit of a sense of oneness is simultaneously considered to be a symptom of maternal inability to separate. Oneness is itself both idealized and denigrated in our culture.”44 Then as now, women’s experience of connectedness with their children was both emotionally fraught and politically contested. In art, the effects of this conflict are subtly expressed in a latent ambivalence that troubles images of maternal togetherness more frequently than might be expected. The dynamic is already a familiar one, apparent in Helen McNicoll’s In the Shadow of the Tree (see fig. 3.15), where woman and infant are compositionally united through the device of the circle while being psychologically distanced by immersion in their respective activities of reading and slumber. The resulting tension culminates in McNicoll’s treatment of the hand on the baby carriage, narratively connecting the separate worlds of woman and infant while remaining formally detached and floating on the surface of the canvas. The fact that the baby is barely seen further reinforces the sense of detachment, and in this regard too, McNicoll’s canvas is typical of maternity images. Indeed, the genre seems aptly named, for it is undoubtedly the mothers who are the principal subjects of these paintings. Their babies, by contrast, are usually minimized; we see the backs of their heads but rarely their faces as they lie asleep in cradles made of wood and iron or maternal flesh and bone. In this manner, the maternity genre offers a quite particular and paradoxical articulation of privacy: that of being alone together. While the message of mothers’ closeness to their children could not be clearer, the women are also quite frequently the sole psychological subjects of the canvases.

FIg. 5.11 Laura Muntz, Mother and Child, c. 1895.

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

This current – let us provisionally call it one of separation, distance, or differentiation – interrupts the fusional aura of maternity images in different ways. Laura Muntz, for example, was Canada’s premiere painter of maternity and her decades-long engagement with the mother and child motif produced work in different stylistic veins. At times this imagery is straightforwardly sentimental, but at other times it reveals a deeper, even melancholic sensibility. Muntz’s sensitivity to the ambivalence of motherhood is apparent in one of her earliest treatments of the theme, an oil sketch painted in Paris during the 1890s. The panel depicts a woman reclining in an armchair and staring abstractedly at the space in front of her, towards (but not directly at) a lighted hearth. Draped against the woman’s upper body is the figure of a sleeping baby. Her arms encircle it, securing the child in its rest. Physical proximity is emphasized through the extensive line of contact between the figures, which stretches more than halfway along the diagonal axis of the work. From the midpoint of the panel down to its bottom right corner, the boundary between their bodies is difficult to distinguish, as similar brushstrokes indicate both maternal and infant forms. Look, for instance, at the way in which the blue of the baby’s gown is swept over into the area we are meant to understand as the mother’s wrist. Yet all this closeness is not productive of peace, and there is an atmospheric intensity to the work. The red tones of the fire saturate

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the scene with a light more passionate than serene, and while the child is asleep, it is apparently not at ease; the foreshortening in the face and the shadow under the chin suggest a head more nearly flung back than nestling calmly. The infant’s face is upturned, yearning and dependent, but the mother’s gaze is elsewhere, lost in thought. There is a heaviness to her aspect that structures her face along a downward trajectory, evident in the set of her mouth and the descending stroke of purple that shadows her eye and defines her cheekbone. The resulting emotion is hard to read; it may be boredom or sadness, the weight of concern or even anger, but in no case does it approximate the rapturous affection given to us by Florence Carlyle. This interruption of maternity’s idyll of oneness persists throughout Muntz’s oeuvre, like a discordant note that intensifies over time. In her later Symbolist works, the togetherness of the woman and infant pairing is troubled by connotations of death, and as Elizabeth Mulley has noted, a subtext of infant mortality is legible in more than one of Muntz’s canvases. The woman who holds the children to her breasts in Protection (fig. 5.9), for example, is both a maternal figure and a winged angel who ferries her precious charges towards the afterlife.45 Still other works by Muntz disturb the easy sentimentality of the maternal ideal through formal rather than narrative means. Slowly, the artist’s representations of motherhood calcify into a pattern of embattled juxtaposition, in which the strained nature of the painter’s markings undermine her own too-insistent iconographic professions of maternal happiness. Thus, in Mother Reading to Her Baby (1912), the peaceful theme and doll-like prettiness of the woman’s profile are subverted by a jarring colour scheme and agonized facture. Although the mother leans solicitously toward her infant, the two are held forcibly apart by the pronounced value contrast of their respective figures: baby glowing in an aura of white, mother sunk into blackened gloom. Purples and greens, blacks and oranges contend uneasily with one another, while a bilious chartreuse leaches down the wall behind the slumbering child. There is, indeed, something sickly here that insinuates itself into the harmonious narrative of the bedtime story, interrupting the maternal idyll with an almost visceral force. Paint is worked and reworked over the surface of the canvas, scumbled and dragged, excised and built up in an anxious gesturality that displaces the tranquillity of the mother and child theme and infuses the work with an air of fraught animation. It is as if the painter is at loggerheads with the meanings of motherhood. And in fact, for Muntz, this had proven to be the case. Writing to her niece, an aspiring sculptor, the artist voiced her belief in the incompatibility of painting and maternity as life choices: “It [being an artist] is such a hard life for any woman, and I wanted you to marry and have children, but you can’t do both – don’t try to do both.”46 Coming from a painter whose professional reputation was based largely on her scenes of motherhood, there is a sharp irony in this advice, but Muntz spoke with the authority of

FIg. 5.12 Laura Muntz, Mother Reading to Her Baby, 1912.

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

experience, for her own career had been dramatically curtailed by her decision, later in life, to marry her brother-in-law and assume the position of stepmother to her deceased sister’s children. Her artistic production dropped in proportion to her assumption of maternal responsibilities.47 Nor was Muntz alone in her conviction. With the exception of Mary Riter Hamilton, who lost her only child before becoming a professional

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artist, none of the female painters whose works are reproduced in this chapter gave birth to children. The classic dilemma of the modern woman – motherhood or career – seems to have loomed particularly large for artists, who faced the additional spectre of a deeply ingrained division between ideals of artistic creativity and those of reproductive procreativity.48 Nor was the conflict necessarily resolved for women who chose to combine both. In her eloquent address to the experience of female authors, literary scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman has movingly captured her subjects’ sense that the physical and psychological exigencies of their own creative production were often directly opposed to their children’s needs for attention, care, and affection. Exceptionally, artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker were able to translate maternal experience into the very condition for their own artistic creativity,49 but as Suleiman observes, creative mothers have more often experienced a wrenching alternation between resentment at the loss of their autonomy and separateness, and tenderness for the children whom they love with an exquisite intensity. Such conflict speaks loudly to women’s need for practical provisions such as high-quality, affordable childcare, but it is also symptomatic of a more philosophical disjunction that the idea of the creative maternal self puts into play, for, since Romanticism at least, the modern conception of artistic production has been grounded in a notion of individual expression that runs directly counter to the relational discourse of motherhood. Female artists contemplating motherhood are thus caught in the crossfire of the competing psychological thrusts of opposition versus integration, and the choice presented seems to be between eking out a place for the self or immersing oneself in the demands of one’s children. Here, then, is another explanation for the current of separation that often (though not always) troubles images of maternal togetherness by female artists: namely, that it manifests a conflict in women’s own priorities and perceptions. Speaking to women’s experiences of this conflict, Rozsika Parker offers a distinction between the hegemonic ideal of maternity that western culture offers and women’s own hopes for themselves. “The culture’s maternal ideal,” she observes, “is founded on a representation of the unity of mother and child, while the moments mothers themselves define as ideal are founded on mutuality … The maternal ideal suggests that mother love means oneness, while what mothers long for are loving moments of at oneness.”50 As Parker goes on to elaborate, this ideal is one in which both parties contribute to an encounter in which there is room for the needs and desires of each to be met: “The cultural ideal insists that the mother’s gratification springs from gratifying the child. The mother’s desires are subsumed in the child’s. The ideal moments mothers themselves describe sometimes look superficially like a living out of this oneness but in fact the mother’s needs for sustenance and pleasure are met not in a state of fusion with the child but through a shared gratification … in these moments of

FIg. 5.13 William Blair Bruce, Mother and Child (Giverny), 1887.

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

shared pleasure neither mother nor child experiences the other as the source of either plenitude or deprivation.”51 Here, then, is an alternate way of seeing the hand on the baby carriage in McNicoll’s In the Shadow of the Tree (see fig. 3.16): not only as a rupture of the dominant narrative of maternal oneness but as a very carefully achieved balancing act – a pictorial inscription of at oneness. Moments of such mutuality are rare in Canadian art, but they do exist and have been captured by artists both male and female. Hamilton painter William Blair Bruce (1859–1906) was alert to the dynamic when he depicted his wife and daughter on a summer’s day by the banks of a quiet river. The two sit peacefully together on a shaded lawn, one sewing, the other playing with a doll. There is a distinct separateness about the figures; they do not talk or overtly interact, their bodies are oriented in different directions, and they engage in different pursuits. And yet there is also an element of closeness between them. The child leans against her mother and their bodies overlap in pictorial space, coming together compositionally to form a white, pink, and golden pyramid against a green and lemon background. A psychological sense of mutual enjoyment adds to these physical manifestations of proximity, further connecting the two figures. Each is absorbed in her own occupation even as they share in the pleasures of a beautiful day. Their different activities harmonize and build a shared reality.

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FIg. 5.14 Mary Bell, Mother and Child, undated.

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Sharing, then, offers one way to rethink the ideal of maternal connection while maintaining scope for difference. Increasingly, such sharing is thought to be crucial to the development of selfhood. The looking at and looking away of peekaboo, the touching and being touched over the changing table, the mutual exchange of laughter and other sounds: from birth, an extraordinary choreography of shared gestures, smiles, gazes, and other actions embeds the importance of being-with in the very fabric of the self.52 Some of the richness of such exchanges is captured in a pastel drawing by Mary Alexandra Bell (1864–1951), dating, perhaps, from her stay in Pont-Aven in 1899. In the drawing, a Breton peasant mother plays with a baby seated on her knees, happily untroubled by the professional injunctions against bouncing, dandling, or jiggling that beset the educated bourgeois woman. As is so frequently the case, the child’s face is obscured, yet its alert posture and outwardly stretched arms indicate that it is an enthusiastic participant in their play. This is an image of maternity premised on engagement, in which the space that exists between mother and child is enlivened and made precious by their coming together across it. Yet for all that these works bring something desirable to the discourse of maternal connection, the interactions they depict are also anomalous within the history of Canadian art. It is unusual for Canadian scenes of

maternity to show children as active participants, and while the lowered eyes and upturned lips of Bell’s mother are familiar elements of the maternity genre, her expression has in it something that we have not seen before: an element of humour, and what might be described as a kind of focused fondness. In part, the difference is a matter of class. The expectations of maternal comportment that governed Bell’s representation of Pont-Aven peasantry were significantly different from those at play in Bruce’s depiction of his own wife and child (or, indeed, in Bell’s representations of mothers from her own socio-economic milieu; see fig. 5.17). Whether animated or demure, however, the mode of subjective encounter that governs these works betokens a similar vision of mutuality as a bridge that spans and joins two independently existing selves. As such, these images of sharing bring us to fundamental questions about the nature of subjectivity – both in general, and for mothers in particular. Is the self coextensive with the individual? Is the self-awareness that mothers experience adequately encompassed by that sense of being bounded within one’s own skin, an autonomous self with sovereign desires, whose limits come clear through introspective acts of separation and opposition, only then to be brought into contact with others who are similarly defined? Are mothers, in short, fully coincident with the subject of reverie? In formulating an answer to these questions, it is worth taking a second look at reverie, for just as representations of maternal unity have turned out to contain surprising elements of differentiation, images of reverie may bear an equally unanticipated capacity to lead towards an experience of connectedness. As we will see, the state of reverie is not necessarily as isolated and inward-looking as it has thus far appeared.

“An Opening to a Beautiful World”

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

The women in turn-of-the-century reverie paintings are typically surrounded by items from the object world. Frequently enough, these objects are made of glass: a mirror, a window, a vase, or a bowl of some kind. The dialectical potential of reverie is metaphorically encapsulated in the dual nature of this glass, both reflective and transparent. In its reflective mode, glass mirrors the subject back to itself as object for introspective contemplation. This is reverie as it is already familiar to us from works such as Long’s The Fan (fig. 5.6), where the woman’s prolonged but apparently fruitless gaze in the mirror captures an uneasy sense of the self as standing forth from the flow of existence. But for every scene in which that reflective surface fosters an inward-turning trajectory, there are others, like Mary Bell’s 1890 canvas Twilight Reverie, where glass instead opens outward, a window onto the exterior world. The young woman Bell gives us looks not to herself but to the gathering dusk and the trees and houses of the world beyond the window pane. The curtain is slightly pulled aside, as if to facilitate her

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FIg. 5.15 Mary Bell, Twilight Reverie, 1890. The image has been digitally modified to remove cracking in the paint.

FIg. 5.16 (opposite)

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Clara Hagarty, In the Window, 1909.

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access to the twilight evening. Indeed, her whole body inclines towards the gathering darkness. The effect is one of yearning, as she searches the gloaming, waiting for something whose outlines are unclear – even, we suspect, to herself. The painting’s formal qualities seem calculated to fulfill her longing: like dusk itself, Bell’s monochromatic treatment renders distinction difficult, and the figure’s right shoulder blurs with the exterior world of its desire. The effect has only become more pronounced with the passing of time and the darkening of paint. There is something ghostly now about the young woman’s presence, for, while value contrasts lend continuing solidity to the figure’s head and face, it is as if the rest of her is dissolving, merging with the space she gazes at through the glass beyond. Reverie’s potential to embrace the world continues in Clara Hagarty’s 1909 canvas In the Window. Here the glass is opaque, and the sitter’s reveries centre instead on a vase of flowers. As she pauses in her task of removing withered leaves, she lapses into stillness, momentarily caught by the wonder of the luxuriant blooms. Whereas Bell’s image is one of yearning, Hagarty (1871–1958) offers a peaceful scene of richness and plenitude,

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its beauty lodging in its amalgam of delicacy and fullness: insubstantial light filters in through stained-glass windows adorned with ripened fruit; fragile petals conjoin in lush blossoms; gauzy fabric covers rounded arms and generous breasts and hips. This is a sitter profoundly at home in the gracious world she occupies. Housebound and house proud we may well imagine her to be, but her domestic environment also occasions moments in which her thought wanders freely, released from its moorings in any particular project. There is, moreover, no obvious indication that this reverie is internally directed. Certainly, it goes against the image’s overall tone of gentle tranquillity and peace to insist too forcefully on any vanitas symbolism, whereby the lush but fading blossoms might stand as heavyhanded symbols for the sitter’s awareness of the passing nature of her own beauty. Hagarty’s picture is too luminous, too free from worry, too infused with well-being, to offer much support for such moody introspection, and while woman and flower are pictorially harmonized (the auburn colour and the shape of her hair, for example, pick up similar colour and shape in the blossoms she gazes at), there is little to suggest that such parallels serve as the subject for her particular train of thought. What reverie, then, is this? For Bell, reverie is a longing that attenuates the self, extending it out towards the world. For Hagarty, it is a fullness of immersion in which the dreamer finds herself in harmony with her surroundings. In both cases, however, we have travelled quite some distance from the inward-turning kind of daydream that so concerned turn-of-thecentury psychologists. Contemplation here does not result in the standingforth of the bounded individual, self-sufficient and self-assertive, but rather opens up a connection between the individual and her environment – intensifying an awareness of shared existence, weaving the self into the fabric of the world. It is a sensation with a lengthy pedigree. The aging Jean-Jacques Rousseau experienced it as he passed his political exile in the gardens of a faithful supporter. Sitting and dreaming amidst flowers, trees, and water at Ermenonville, Rousseau described the peculiar state of consciousness fostered by reverie as an exquisite melding with his environment – a “thorough conjunction of everything,” in which natural surroundings are incorporated into awareness to such an extent that it becomes difficult to differentiate the self from the world that it inhabits.53 A similar description is to be found in the phenomenological writings of Gaston Bachelard, where moments of reverie call forth awareness of the intimate interface between the subject and that which surround us. Reverie, for Bachelard, is “an opening to a beautiful world,” where the daydreaming subject and the object of thought “are as close as possible; they are touching; they interpenetrate. They are on the same plane of being.”54 Reverie such as this is a different matter entirely from inwardly oriented solitude; indeed, it would seem that there is no question of solitude or inward orientation at all but

rather a special state of awareness, removed from the focused, speculative thinking that constitutes the Cartesian cogito. Instead, this reverie blurs the subject’s boundaries, diffusing it outwards even as it intensifies receptivity: “The I,” Bachelard writes, “no longer opposes itself to the world.”55 Cogito and cogitatum are intimately entwined. For the subject, the consequences of this view are clearly profound, loosening selfhood from the grip of the “not-me, not-that” so fundamental to accounts of identity that are premised on a logic of separation. And yet it would seem that the self is not thereby extinguished. Chroniclers of reverie in its more connected sense do not offer it as a paradigm for the sacrifice or loss of self so much as a claiming of mutual presence – compearance, it is sometimes called – in which subject and object are immediately in touch with each other.56 By drawing attention to moments of immediate coexistence, experiences of this kind of reverie effect a radical unsettling of the either/or model of selfhood. The question now on the table is: Can such experiences help us to move our thinking about art and maternal subjectivity beyond the mutually exclusive possibilities of separation (of the me) or immersion (in the you)? Another drawing by Mary Bell, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, opens such a possibility to view.

Maternal Reveries

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

In 1892, Bell, recently returned from study in Paris, executed a highly finished chalk drawing of a young woman set against a background of brightly coloured flowers and trees, cradling a baby in her arms. In many respects it is a classic example of the “modern Madonna” genre.57 The sitter’s modernity is apparent in her clothing and hairstyle, while her wedding ring confirms the sanctified nature of her reproductivity and situates her squarely within popular constructions of motherhood as “the holiest thing alive.”58 The bromides continue in the work’s title, Happiness, with its accustomed rhetoric of maternal bliss. So far, so familiar. Turning from title to image, however, the happiness proclaimed so unconditionally in one quarter is surprisingly muted in the other. If this is happiness, it appears to be a particularly quiet and introspective kind of joy. Nor does it spring from any of the more obvious encounters between woman and child that we might imagine. Certainly there is no saccharine devotion here. Indeed, this mother does not even look at the child she holds in her arms but gazes off into the distance, abstractedly. Lost in her thoughts, the modern mother of Happiness does not appear to epitomize the sentiments typical of maternité so much as the internalized reflection of the reverie genre that the artist knew so well. As much as her dress and hairstyle, the modernity of this madonna resides in the interiority of the contemporary psychological subject. The flat softness of the artist’s medium emphasizes the effect, creating an impenetrable,

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FIg. 5.17 (opposite) Mary Bell, Happiness, c. 1892.

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unreflective surface that renders the sitter all the more inaccessible to us. Whatever emotion she experiences, it is unreservedly hers, something private and barely alluded to by the hint of a smile around her lips. Even the highlights in the deep brown eyes, which usually do the work of adding definition to a sitter’s gaze, in this case add rather to its dreaminess by virtue of their slight misalignment. Bell’s mother, then, is a woman very much in her own psychological space. Quite possibly, she is not thinking of her child at all. This prospect is called into relief by the contemporaneous writings of Jane Ellen Panton, an author of popular domestic manuals and an exceptionally unsentimental observer of women’s maternal experiences. Writing in an 1896 book of advice and consolation for the new mother, Panton holds up the ideal of maternal reverie and punches it full of holes: “The dreams a young mother is supposed to dream over the cradle of a newly born baby are about as real as her supposed passionate desire for children. She does nothing of the kind; she may wonder at … the mysterious fact that she is responsible for its existence, but I think her principal dreams are about herself. She is often impatient … and she is madly anxious to be ‘out of bondage,’ and about her ordinary life once more.”59 In stark contrast to the orthodoxy of her day, Panton emphasized the emotional separateness, even alienation, experienced by the first-time mother who “is dismayed to find herself feeling that she does not and cannot realize the intense rapturous affection that she has been taught to believe is the normal condition of the young mother.”60 As she recognizes that “she is not her own property any more, and that she has mortgaged her future for some months at least,” maternal reverie becomes, for Panton, a matter of a young woman’s dreaming herself elsewhere.61 Reverie, on this accounting, is a reassertion in fantasy of the mother’s autonomy as a self-determining subject. Yet Panton’s ruminations on the life of “complete martyrdom”62 that awaits the first-time mother no more ring true to Happiness than the blithe assurances of its title, for if Bell has endowed her sitter with psychological independence, she has also emphasized a corporeal intimacy between woman and infant. Whereas Panton had little doubt that any sane young woman would be eager to transfer the physical care of her newborn to a qualified nanny as soon as possible, Bell’s young mother holds closely to the infant nestling in her arms. The convincing plastic illusionism of the drawing gives the baby a certain weight; the pressure of its head in the crook of the mother’s arm is tangible, and a sense of security is imparted by the encircling, containing gesture of the mother’s left hand as it rests on the flank of the baby. To be sure, the proximity thus established is principally a physical one, but it is no mere dumb physicality. Rather, we might speak of a certain somatic awareness, apparent, for example, in the different modalities of encounter suggested by the mother’s hands: the left one calm and reassuring, the right more energized, feeling the baby with sensitive fingertips. The woman touches her child almost as if taking its

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pulse – sensing it, reading it, like Braille. Is there, then, is a kind of psychological closeness contained in her reverie after all? Support for this possibility is found in yet another understanding of maternal reverie. Writing in 1962, the British psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion first used the language of reverie to pinpoint a specific kind of non-focused maternal awareness that he identified as characteristic of successful mothering: a state of floating attentiveness that creates a safe psychological space in which an infant can dwell.63 The little baby, completely at sea in the extrauterine world, introduces its chaotic and confusing states of mind into the mother, who provides crucial existential support by giving them back to the child in some more manageable form. While Bion’s account of this process focuses almost exclusively on its importance to the infant’s developing psyche, feminist thinkers have more recently taken up the maternal side of the equation, emphasizing the “exquisite receptiveness” that reverie demands of mothers, who can only “receive the full impact of infantile feelings” if they are able to quiet their minds enough to enter its particular state of free-floating attention.64 At such times, maternal consciousness exceeds speculative thought, and awareness of the baby is lived more in the fibres of the self than in the directed activity of the mind. The fatigue so common to new mothers may help the process along, while the hormones produced during labour and breastfeeding recalibrate mental awareness, releasing thought from its well-defined cognitive moorings, relaxing attention, and orienting the self towards others.65 As the borders of the subject loosen, even to the point of porosity, the reverie that Bion and his commentators identify comes quite close to that described by Rousseau and Bachelard, but with this key difference: that attention no longer flows between subjects and the objects around them but rather transsubjectively. The possibility thus emerges that Bell’s dreamy mother, while not actively thinking about her baby, may nevertheless quite crucially be holding her infant in mind. Bringing the maternité painting together with reverie’s tradition of diffused awareness, Bell calls attention to the subjective experience of mothers as they allow a complex play of perceptions and affects to flow between themselves and their infant children. Understood in this manner, Bell’s drawing of maternal reverie is an art of being-with.

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The Art of Being-With

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Increasingly, accounts of subjectivity emphasize the foundational importance of such being-with. Close examination of infant behaviour by Daniel Stern, a developmental psychologist and psychiatric theorist, have been particularly ground-breaking in this respect, showing that the agency, coherence, affectivity, and experiential continuity that constitute a sense of self do not emerge as the result of an infant’s separation from an originary state of symbiosis but are formed instead by repeated engagements with

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

their primary caregivers.66 Studies of maternal-foetal movement have recently pushed the time frame for the development of a sense of self back into the womb, with research now leading to the conclusion that infants come into the world already possessed of the bodily schemas that form a cornerstone of their subjectivities.67 Such schemas are not simply given, however. Rather, they develop in utero by means of the interconnected movement of foetal and maternal bodies. This sensory stimulus is now believed to initiate the growth of the cerebral cortex and, along with it, the development of an ipseity that is experienced primarily as an affective sequence of augmenting and diminishing sensations, brought on by the interface with the mother’s body.68 In the wake of birth’s sudden rupture of this physical connection and the intensification of sensation outside the womb, the most important psychological sustenance newborns can receive is simple physical support for their ongoing being-with.69 The provision of such support is no easy matter, however, for it runs counter to caregivers’ need to go on being in their own accustomed and more autonomous way. In her extensive interviews with new mothers, psychologist Wendy Hollway identifies the existential toll that attunement to infantile experience takes.70 As adults fully initiated into the symbolic order, most mothers are already in habitual possession of the ipseity that their children are building. Conditioned by long familiarity with their independent bodily movements and by western habits of thought and language, most adults come to rely on their sense of stable and invariant self-identity, so different from the trans-subjective becoming that is the everyday reality of the newborn. Faced with this difference from their children, the challenge of returning to a more originary state of consciousness can be considerable. Not every woman can achieve it, or even wishes to, and some mothers are compelled to take refuge in psychological flight from their children, back into the coherence of their own established subject positions.71 Mothers who do accompany their children in this way, however, often experience a profound sense of rightness. There is a quiet joy in re-experiencing, with and through one’s child, this originary stratum of subjective experience, and a satisfaction in the ability to ease their way. In Canadian art, the provision of this support is signalled by one gesture above all others: that of a woman inclining her head to the body of her child. Again and again, images of mothers with their infants signal connectedness in this way – though a gesture so natural, so familiar, as almost to pass without comment. It is there in Laura Muntz’s Mother and Child and again in Mother Reading to Her Baby (figs. 5.7 and 5.12); it is a central aspect of Florence Carlyle’s sole treatment of the motherhood theme (fig. 5.3), and it is there once more in Mary Riter Hamilton’s Maternity (fig. 5.10). Marion Long’s oil sketch Maternal Love (fig. 5.2) consists in little else; almost the entirety of the work’s affective tenderness is contained in this one gesture of embodied propinquity.72

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FIg. 5.18

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Clara Hagarty, Asleep, c. 1914.

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The definitive pictorial statement of inclination by a Canadian artist is Clara Hagarty’s 1914 canvas Asleep, first exhibited at the Canadian National Exhibition and now, regrettably, lost. In it, a seated woman lowers her head towards the child who nuzzles at her breast. Formally, the appeal of the work lodges in its harmonious accommodation of understated opposites. The roundness of heads, bosom, teacup, and oil-lamp is offset by the linear elements of chair, sideboard, picture frame, and striped cloth. But for all the softness and fragility that the work implies, there is also a vigour to its pictorial organization, visible in the play of lightness and dark across the picture plane and especially in the brushstrokes, which the artist has managed to infuse with both suppleness and structure. Even in black-and-white

reproduction (all that remains to us), we can appreciate how the artist has applied her paint in fully articulated but sensitively modulated strokes, visible, especially, in the mother’s left shoulder, torso, and upper arm, where subtle variations of value lend both delicacy and force. The work’s visual sophistication stems from this ability to harmoniously encompass complementary tendencies. A similar complexity informs the painting’s depiction of maternal beingwith. Closeness, as Hagarty gives it to us here, is no simple matter of undifferentiated maternal unity. While this mother inclines her whole being towards the baby she holds so tenderly, she is not one with it for all of that; she remains awake while the infant is asleep, large while the child is small, nurturing while it is dependent. Nor does the artist offer us the sharing that connects independently existing selves. There is no sense here of the mutuality of subjects jointly engaged in a common activity. What, then, is the disposition of human beings toward each other that inclination suggests? And how does this paradigmatic gesture of maternal being-with contribute to an understanding of selves and the relations between them?

Inclination

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

There are competing philosophical accounts of how inclination positions individuals within the field of existence. Noting that “‘every inclination … leans out of the self,’” Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero casts the gesture as an allegory for a primary orientation of human beings towards that which they are not – an ontological predisposition towards others that grounds ethical behaviour.73 The figure of the mother bending her head to the infant in her charge is, for Cavarero, a metaphor for that which makes care possible: the choice of one who is large and powerful to attend to another who is helpless and in need. The separation and incommensurability of adult and infant is central to this narrative. Through inclination, Cavarero tells us, the mother retires from the position of the upright solo subject and reaches out towards an other from whom she is fundamentally different. Certainly, such care and nurturing is quietly proclaimed by every image in this chapter. And yet a close look at Hagarty’s Asleep does not reveal the radical asymmetry of power that the philosopher invokes. Instead, as we have seen, Hagarty builds her work around a harmonious accommodation of understated complements. Here, softness and structure, roundness and linearity, balance each other in delicate interdependence.74 At the level of content, this formal equilibrium is carried forward by the mutual orientation of maternal and infant bodies: as her child nuzzles her breast, the mother turns her body inwards to meet it. There is more than a hint of mutual dependence here. It is too much, I wonder, to see the bend of her head as a gesture of acquiescence? For, Cavarero’s invocation of maternal

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power notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that mothers do acquiesce to their newborns, rising to their cries when they long for sleep, submitting to a loss of control over their time, their bodies, their hearts. Such upheavals are transformative. A variety of recent writing explores the extent to which mothers are not just “their old selves” with an additional layer of responsibilities, tasks, and experiences on top but find themselves changed in fundamental ways. They are physically and emotionally different, with new sensibilities, reconfigured relationships, altered mentation, and a different perception of time.75 Children are the agents of this becoming, and sometimes the gesture of the woman in Hagarty’s painting reads to me like a recognition of this: an acknowledgment of the new existence that her child has called her to. Through a subtle play of formal complementarities, Hagarty gives us a glimpse of a mother who not only leans out towards her infant but is also called forth by it. The child who nestles into this maternal body enacts an inclination of its own. And so we catch a glimpse of another possibility: the possibility that inclination is not something that pre-existing subjects do – incline towards the other – but is rather a process that enables selves to come into being in the first place, and then to continue on their paths of becoming. This is the understanding of inclination put forward by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and it resonates too with psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger’s account of subject formation. In his writings on the theme of community, Nancy asks his readers to think of selfhood as inseparable from our continual exposure to other beings.76 Like the beating of wings, or lips, or eyelashes, we brush up against each other continually, and in such moments we are defined through our contact with an outside that is neither identical nor opposed to us. Through such shared exchanges, Nancy argues, subjects are fashioned as beings-in-common, and yet they are not reduced to a common being.77 Ettinger, likewise, offers a vision of trans-subjective co-poiesis, in which subjects become in ways that are mutually determinant but not symmetrically experienced. Grounding her account in the phenomenology of intrauterine experience, the psychoanalyst challenges us to imagine a process of “differentiation-in-co-emergence,” and a state of “distance-in-proximity.”78 Following on from their work, perhaps maternal inclination can best be described as this: an encounter with one’s most intimate other – a not-I who is neither assimilated nor rejected but who travels with us through a terrain where passions circulate and intensities interweave themselves into the fabric of our being. If artworks such as Clara Hagarty’s Asleep and Mary Bell’s Happiness retain a capacity to speak to mothers today, it lies, I think, in such work’s ability to tap into this interweaving, giving us access to the mutual but not symmetrical fashioning that happens when we manage to accompany our children. To the extent that such works rise above mere sentimentality, they achieve their distinction by showing us the originary

interweaving of affective and mental strings that initiates all of our subsequent becomings.79

Conclusion

Maternity, Reverie, and the Art of Being-With

Images of happy mothers closely bound to their children have long been mobilized to counteract women’s demands for social equality and personal development. Take, for instance, the writings of C.W. Saleeby, an early twentieth-century English eugenicist and anti-feminist whose ideas circulated widely in Canada. In 1911, Saleeby issued a call for the distribution of paintings of maternity to “every girl’s school throughout the world,” so that they might serve as guides to the proper “education of girls for womanhood, motherhood and the future.”80 At the very moment when women’s horizons were broadening dramatically, paintings of mothers and babies were tasked with convincing girls that their best shot at happiness continued to lie in an embrace of traditional roles.81 Though Saleeby’s plan was never formally implemented, the circulation of idealizing maternal imagery was widespread, prompting Simone de Beauvoir to decry its power to warp women’s reproductive decisions and naturalize the expectation that the care of children would fall to them.82 Paintings of mommies and babies clearly have plenty to answer for. And yet feminist art-historical accounts of maternal iconography also tell a different story – one in which images of motherhood are not entirely reducible to signifiers of patriarchal ideology. Accounts by Rosemary Betterton and Anne Higonnet, for instance, emphasize the capacity for empowerment that resides in women artists’ handlings of the conjunctions of artistic creation and birth. Similarly, Harriett Chessman, writing on Mary Cassatt, has argued that images of mothers enabled the painter to “move the female object of art into a position of genuine subjecthood.”83 My task in this chapter has been to assess the subjectivity conveyed by a previously unexamined body of maternal imagery, in which harmonious closeness is tinged by separateness and where currents of reverie call forth both solitude and connection. Looking to the pictorial cues of the paintings, I have proposed inclination as a model for understanding this relation, for we are inclined to each other in the intrauterine inception of our being. In painting after painting, the bending and nestling of mother and child capture this reality. As all new mothers know, however, there is both pleasure and pain in responding to our children’s calls. The limitation of these paintings, as of all Canadian painting of the era, is that they don’t show us the pain. Devoid of the sleeplessness, frustration, and inner turmoil so common to mothers, the images discussed in this chapter present the viewer with a one-sided picture of maternal tranquillity and tenderness. As such, they are emotionally incomplete, offering little or no hint of the anger, even rage, that is a

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normal maternal response to the newborn infant’s ruthless demands for unceasing attention and care.84 As important as this limitation is, however, it does not negate the value of what these paintings do offer us through their currents of reverie and inclination: namely, a glimpse into a mode of subjectivity – the maternal mode – that exceeds the paradigm of autonomy conventionally governing western notions of the self, while also disarming its flip side: that of fusion with the other and sublation of identity. There are political implications to this conclusion, for the modern woman’s dilemma of motherhood or career has been exacerbated by this understanding of selfhood structured around a too-vividly articulated divide between self and other. Where self and other are forever at odds, the logic of the either/or runs unfettered, ordering thought along mutually exclusive axes, even when a more inclusive vision would be advantageous. Like the ideology of maternal unity, the trajectory of the fully autonomous self leads in the direction of sacrifice: either my own needs and desires or my child’s. By contrast, as a framework for thinking maternal connection, inclination fosters sensitivity to the conflicting thrusts of the images themselves and enables us to rethink the implications of paintings of the mother and child dyad, loosing them from their moorings in an ideal of maternal unity that has been both politically and emotionally harmful to women, while retaining the element of connection that is so central to them. Elsewhere in this book I have argued for the structuring role of alienation in art by women, emphasizing ways in which the ideology of gender produces a non-correspondence of women to their own identities: the notme, not-that, or not-there that surfaces in the gaps and lacunae painted into representation by Henrietta Hamilton, Frances Anne Hopkins, and Helen McNicoll. And there is, without doubt, ample room to read for the not-me in images of maternity painted by professional Canadian women artists who themselves remained childless. But the paintings considered in this chapter also offer something more. Through their affective currents of reverie and inclination, they afford a vision of motherhood that enables us to rethink the possibilities of women’s connectedness to their world along the lines of engagement rather than refusal. Such a rethinking radically reconfigures the formula of non-correspondence to identity, freeing the not-me from its role as protest statement or marker of ideological and cultural insufficiencies and opening it up to an experience of fullness, immediacy, and presence-to-an-other whose edges are shared with the self, not distinguished from it. The final chapter of this book continues to explore such affective experiences by means of an inquiry into connections between selfhood and the natural environment, looking at ways in which women from very different cultural and ethnic backgrounds have created objects that mediate their connection to the land now known as Canada, and that give voice to their experiences of being-within the all of existence.

LISTENING Listening

chaPter

6

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank)

When it comes to the conjunction of women, art, and selfhood in Canada, one figure in particular towers on the horizon, a woman whose life and work have assumed the monumental proportions of an art-historical incontournable. One look at the iconic 1939 photograph of Emily Carr in her studio, taken by fellow artist Harold Mortimer Lamb (1872–1970), and the explanation for this state of affairs seems evident enough. Carr, the photo proclaims, was a woman to be reckoned with: dour, determined, and unflinchingly direct. When she turned her gaze on herself, as she so often did in her journals and autobiographical writings, she cemented her subjectivity in place for posterity even as she struggled to exceed its limitations. That struggle marked her canvases as well. The gestural work on paper that sits glued to a piece of plywood in Mortimer-Lamb’s photograph is characteristic of the late landscapes through which the artist endeavoured to lose herself in a rhythmic wash of swirling brushstrokes, material translations of her passionately held conviction in a spiritual energy that dissolved the self by immersing it in something larger. The nature of that something larger proved tremendously difficult for Carr to bring into view, however, and during the decades since her death, public interest in it has shifted towards a persistent biographical fascination with the artist’s life, supported by the personal tenor of her writings. Thus, like the closely cropped photographic print through which Mortimer-Lamb’s image was

FIg. 6.1 Harold MortimerLamb, Emily Carr in Her Studio, 1939. For many decades, this cropped print was the version of the photograph that the public knew.

FIg. 6.2 (opposite)

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The uncropped version of Mortimer-Lamb’s photograph shows a Salish cedar basket holding Carr’s painting things.

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long known, Carr’s creative output has served to focus attention squarely on the artist herself. Recently, however, another version of the 1939 image has begun to circulate. In 2006, Mortimer-Lamb’s original photographic negative came on the market and was purchased by the Vancouver Art Gallery. In the wider perspective that the negative affords, the intensity of the pairing of artist and painting is diluted by a host of other apparently less rarified elements: a rack of frames, fragments of other artworks, and the cluttered surface of a marble-topped desk. And there, just to the left of Carr’s brushes, the product of another woman’s creative labour also comes into view. It is a basket, made from coiled cedar root and burnished cherry bark by a Salish

woman whose identity remains uncertain. Like Carr’s paintings, the basket embodies its maker’s long familiarity with the forests of the Northwest Coast. Indeed, there is a sense in which the better-known artist’s heavily metaphorical depictions of trees find a literal counterpart in the basket’s coiled arboreal fibres, harvested from land that settlers and First Nations people shared on terms of rapidly increasing inequity. In this final chapter

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I want to come again at the much-discussed topic of Emily Carr by putting her painting into conversation with baskets such as the one that held bits and pieces of her painting kit, and by bringing Indigenous ideas about personhood into view alongside Carr’s more celebrated subject position. In so doing, I seek to explore differing understandings of the self in relation to what is typically termed “the natural world.” How, I ask, has women’s artistry brought them into contact with forests, fields, and oceans? And how have these contacts affected their senses of selfhood?

Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) The links between Emily Carr’s painting and Salish basketry are deeper and less adventitious than Mortimer-Lamb’s photograph might suggest.

FIg. 6.3 Emily Carr, Salish Woman Weaving, c. 1909.

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FIg. 6.4 Emily Carr, Sophie Frank, 1914.

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

The painter considered basketry to be “a very fine art” and collected baskets from both coast and interior Salish nations – Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stl’át’imx (Lil’wat), and Ts’ilhqot’in (Chilcotin), as well as many that came from Salish territories along the Fraser River.1 Beyond the baskets themselves, Carr’s collection also included specific tools used to make them, such as a bone awl from the Squamish reserve in North Vancouver. Indeed, Salish basketry is present throughout Carr’s working life, from her early watercolour Salish Woman Weaving, likely made during a visit to Lytton or Sechelt in the summer of 1909, through to her thirty-three-year friendship with Sewinchelwet (1872–1939), a Squamish basketmaker known to Carr (and, subsequently, to Canadians) by her English name, Sophie Frank.2

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Frank first knocked at Carr’s door in 1906, hoping to barter or sell her wares to the young painter, who was then living in Vancouver.3 The two women were close contemporaries, and though Carr outlived her friend by many years, a basket by Frank remained among Carr’s most cherished possessions and was bequeathed in her will together with the ring from her finger.4 Over the past two decades, Emily Carr’s relationship with Sophie Frank has become a lightning rod for critical attention, as the ethical ramifications of the painter’s encounters with First Nations people have been thoroughly debated.5 The women’s affection for each other was strong enough to be named by each of them as love, and yet their relationship was inescapably shaped by profound inequalities that undermined the possibility for true mutuality.6 Carr’s descriptions of Frank in the pages of Klee Wyck and in her posthumously published correspondence reveal the painter’s innate sense of racial superiority, combining idealization and devaluation in a manner often found in situations of gross power imbalance.7 The Sophie Frank who emerges from Carr’s writings is a gentle and loving woman, possessed of a strong sense of decorum and patiently bearing the almost inconceivable grief of the loss of twenty-one children.8 For Carr, however, Frank was like a child herself: sincere and simple, almost to the point of simple-mindedness. Frank’s imperfect command of English and unfamiliar domestic customs were a source of mirth for the painter, and the resultant admixture of crushing grief and comic relief is disturbing. Despite Carr’s effort at precise physical description, the “small and square” woman who was Sophie Frank is lost from view behind Carr’s stream of pidgin English and the screen of her own emotional needs and romantic projections. Even the watercolour portrait Carr made of her friend does little to convey an appreciation of Frank as a person. In Carr’s own words, Sophie was “a symbol” – of Indianness, of maternity, and of something good and pure that had been damaged and made to suffer.9 By the 1970s, these emotional projections were fully apparent to those who had begun to critically re-examine Carr. The artist’s one-time painting companion, Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher (1906–1988), was among the first to buck a hagiographic trend in the literature, and her reassessment of the artist’s much-vaunted “‘love’ for the Indians” initiated a critique of Carr’s racially determined paternalism that would intensify in the 1990s.10 By then, however, commentators on the Carr-Frank friendship were seeking to do more than criticize Carr; they were also endeavouring to rediscover Frank. Lack of readily available historical sources made the task of rediscovery difficult, however, and partly because of this, the Sophie Frank who emerged has been heavily fictionalized, notably by Métis playwright Jovette Marchessault, settler authors Susan Vreeland and Susan Crean, and Wabanaki artist Shirley Bear.11 Writing together in the catalogue of a major 2006 exhibition of Carr’s work, Crean and Bear employed a sophisticated

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

combination of fiction and non-fiction to expand the letters Frank sent to Carr (now preserved in the British Columbia Archives) into a provocative meditation on a range of issues including friendship, appropriation, patronage, and intercultural awareness.12 Seeking to counter the demeaning aspects of Carr’s representation, the Frank whom Bear and Crean describe is an accomplished artist, functioning for Carr “as a source of information and inside understanding of First Nations culture and experience, and quite probably, as a source of insight into First Nations art.”13 A rare photograph of Frank with an impressive array of baskets, together with the frequent references to baskets in her letters, support their conclusion that basketry was a central aspect of her life (see fig. 6.16).14 Politically, the decolonizing significance of a focus on Frank as basketmaker is clear: in affirming Frank’s creativity, Bear and Crean seek to restore cultural agency to an Indigenous woman from whom it had been removed; in challenging the public to recognize Frank as an artist alongside Carr, they underline the value of Indigenous forms of creative production. Yet despite considerable critical attention to Carr’s depictions of Indigenous subject matter, and a still more recent willingness to bring historical works of Northwest Coast art into conjunction with her paintings, there has been no substantive discussion of Frank’s basketry, still less a comparative analysis of the aesthetic concerns and productions of the two women. The omission is partly an artifact of the specializations traditional to art history. Visually, the restless energy and movement of Carr’s paintings differ considerably from the regularity and balanced harmony of Salish baskets. While one was the product of looking at the natural world, the other arose from working with it, and despite the discipline’s growing willingness to look beyond the traditionally “fine” art of painting, the divisions that continue to characterize art history have meant that the links between basketry and painting do not present themselves readily to view. Such links do exist, however. Carr’s late landscape paintings, particularly the ones made after 1934, are pictorial statements of her faith that everything in the world was “all connected up.”15 Her quest as a painter was to capture that intertwining: “To search for the reality of each object … To recognize our relationship with all life … To say to every animate and inanimate thing ‘brother’. To be at one with all things.”16 Her words are closely echoed by the teachings of Salish makers: “We have learned through experience that everything is interconnected,” explain weavers Bill and Fran James of the Lummi nation. “Everything in nature is our brother and sister.”17 Such beliefs, shared across cultures and down through generations, constitute a philosophical bedrock that links Carr’s painting to Salish basketry even as cultural differences have meant that the principle of connection has been understood and materialized quite differently across aesthetic practices. To explore these differing articulations in relation to each other, and to the self, is the primary concern of this chapter.

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FIg. 6.5

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Emily Carr, Stumps and Sky, c. 1934.

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That task is made difficult, however, by the long shadow that colonialism has cast on comparative discussions of settler and Indigenous art, both generally and in specific relation to Carr. For decades, the mystical connection with nature that anchored Carr’s reputation was bolstered by spurious assertions of her deep understanding of “the very psyche of the Indian.”18 Since the groundbreaking writing of Marcia Crosby in 1991, however, such assertions have lain shattered in fragments across the Canadian cultural landscape, revealed as facile reductions of complex cultural traditions of which Carr, like Canadian society at large, remained largely ignorant. The painter’s acts of cultural insensitivity are still recounted in the First Nations communities that she visited.19 Canadian museums have been similarly culpable, and recent analyses of comparative displays of settler and Indigenous art have sensitized Euro-Canadian scholars and curators to the dangers of such pairings by revealing self-serving and co-optive settler agendas.20 Nevertheless, the nation’s major museums have begun to reintegrate their historical displays of settler and Indigenous cultural production, hoping to counter even stronger institutional histories of outright dismissal and exclusion.21 The most recent major exhibition on Carr has done likewise.22 The mutually attentive and respectful comparative analysis that would support the aims of such installations is still relatively infrequent, however. In the specific case of Carr and Frank, the two women’s vastly

FIg. 6.6 A coiled cedar basket with cherry bark and grass imbrication. The name of the Squamish woman who made the basket is not recorded.

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

unequal representation within the historical and museological record adds to the difficulty, for while both artists were prolific, the hundreds of works by Carr preserved in the nation’s public collections are counterbalanced by only two securely attributable baskets by Frank, these held privately and in poor condition (see fig. 6.15).23 Similarly, whereas Carr’s voice is captured for posterity in extensive published writings, the record of Frank’s thoughts and emotions is fleeting, restricted to three short letters that may well have been penned for her by another.24 Such challenges are not insurmountable, however, particularly in view of the critical interventions and methodological innovations of Indigenous scholarship, where decolonial concepts, like that of survivance, echo the teachings of Salish makers who stress the continuity of ancestral knowledge and traditions that have persisted despite the best efforts of the residential school system to extinguish them. Basketry is, in this regard, a set of skills and specialized knowledge passed down from one generation of makers to another, but it is also fundamentally larger than this: it is a point of access into a world view. As Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow explains, “Weaving isn’t art, it’s life,” and thus part of a much broader nexus of beliefs, values, and practices that have been carefully preserved and cultivated in the face of repression.25 Basketry’s lifeworld enmeshes Frank within a creative and spiritual lineage whose central principles survive and remain accessible through the teachings of contemporary weavers, even as articulations of those principles change over time. Similarly, Indigenous art history’s focus on community, in preference to conventions that too greatly magnify the importance of individuals, also supports the project of coming to Frank through the traditions of her family and her culture. Recently, the resurgence of these traditions, apparent in a variety of exhibitions,26 has

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engendered a wider awareness of Salish basketry, making it possible to ask the kind of comparative questions that motivate this chapter and helping to restore a missing balance to the shared history of Carr and Frank. The value of such a shared history to the contemporary decolonizing moment lies in its lessons for a jointly lived present in which Indigenous land claims and ecological degradation alike are prompting settler society to rethink its relation to the land, and to rewrite the terms of our shared coexistence on and with it. As the need for new thinking about the relation of human beings to the environment gains in urgency, Canadian art history, with its fraught and belaboured connection to the concept of wilderness, has special cause to welcome such thought. From a settler perspective – the only one I can claim to speak from – learning about Indigenous art opens possibilities for new insight into questions around landscape that have long occupied Canadian scholars. In this regard, Emily Carr’s painting and Sophie Frank’s basketry form a unique point of convergence, examination of which enhances our understanding of an iconic representative of one cultural tradition while fostering the kind of openness to other traditions so necessary to settler discourse if we are truly to divest ourselves of colonialism.

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“Everything Is All Connected Up”

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Emily Carr’s changing relation to nature underpins the most important achievements of her late artistic output. In her paintings and journal entries from the 1930s, Carr worked to articulate her sense that everything was connected through participation in something that she variously called life, soul, spirit, the infinite, and the universal. “I cannot name the thing, and all the books can’t and I do not think it needs a name,” she wrote in 1933. “A name would spoil it, would be too crude for such an elusive – spirit? being? thing?”27 Most of the time, however, Carr was not so circumspect; the thing that she sought so passionately did have a name that she preferred above all others: God. A journal entry from the following year is more typically unequivocal: “All real art is the eternal seeking to express God … the one substance out of which all things are made.”28 But while God might be everywhere, for Carr there was really only one place worth looking for him, and that was out in nature. “Go out there into the glory of the woods,” she urged herself, “to see God in every particle of them … in them is the communion, the myriad voices of God shouting in one great voice, ‘I am one God. In all the universe there is no other but me. I fill all space. I am all time. I am heaven. I am earth. I am all in all.”29 So intense was Carr’s longing for panentheistic union that at times her rhetoric slipped over into the erotic: “Oh, you mountains, I am at your feet … We are of the same substance for there is only one substance … one life … that flows through all … First there is a wooing on both sides, a mutual

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

joyous understanding, quiet growing, waiting, and then … Oh, I wonder if I will ever feel that burst of birth joy, that knowing that the indescribable, joyous thing that has wooed and won me has passed through my life and produced one atom of the great reality.”30 To adequately capture this great reality was the major motivating force behind Carr’s late painting. In considering the relation between self and environment that such statements describe, commentators have tended to encounter the limits of their credulity. Critics of Carr’s communings with nature have argued that she routinely deceived herself: that where she saw Mother Nature, there resided nothing more than a projection of her own passions and concerns. “She created an imaginary nature, thinking she was disclosing its source of truth,” writes Scott Watson.31 Robert Linsley is more sympathetic to Carr’s longing, yet he too considers the struggle to be quixotic. “Such a union of subject and nature is impossible in principle,” he states definitively, “and doubly so for Carr, rooted as she is in a society founded on alienation from nature as the precondition for its exploitation.”32 There can be no doubt that Carr’s encounters with her environment did profit by such exploitation; as Andrew Hunter has ably demonstrated, her powerful late works were not the product of an engagement with pristine natural environments but with liminal spaces at the edge of Victoria’s steadily encroaching urban development, where gravel pits and clear-cuts marked nature with the indelible presence of human intervention.33 Faced with the painter’s persistent longing for unity, then, critics have responded by emphasizing the economic, cultural, and philosophical estrangement that structures human experience under capitalist modernity. In this way the critique of Carr as, at best, a naïve believer in her own fantasy of an Imaginary Indian has also been extended to her relation to the forests, shores, and skies of British Columbia. Close consideration of the artist’s works and words, however, raises the possibility that such observations do not encompass the whole of the matter. When undertaken in conjunction with attention to the processes and traditions of basketry, such consideration creates space for a more generous interpretation of her perspective. A key to this interpretation lies in the changing character of Carr’s articulations of the principle of connection. Over time, she would abandon her abstruse biblical language and erotic rhetoric in favour of a more materially grounded vocabulary that emphasized observation, movement, and the vitality of life. This change in attitude was also accompanied by a shift in her work, roughly datable to 1934, whose broad pictorial outlines were first identified by Doris Shadbolt in 1979.34 Two works, painted a decade apart, demonstrate the distance that she travelled: Grey, an oil on canvas painting from around 1929–30, and Sunshine and Tumult, the painting on the easel in Mortimer-Lamb’s 1939 photograph. At minimum, their comparison suggests that if Carr was deluding herself about the world, the nature of her delusion was not always the same.

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FIg. 6.7 (opposite)

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Emily Carr, Grey, 1929–30.

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Grey is a high point in a series of structural experimentations with nature that Carr undertook in the years immediately following her return to concerted artistic activity in 1927, after a fifteen-year hiatus. In the painting, volume and light are manipulated to heavily symbolic effect, and a simplification of form tending towards abstraction reads as a search for the forest’s essence. The draping and wrapping of vegetation in layers progressing inwards from darkness to light seem to hold the promise of a revelation, lodged somewhere in the tree’s glowing core. For all of its concentric unveilings, however, the painting is ultimately static, the stability of its central triangle easily offsetting the work’s centripetal pull. Although we are invited to penetrate through to a secret, our gaze never reaches its goal; instead it is countermanded by a surveilling force that exerts its own outward energy. There is more than a hint here of the abstruse iconography of the All-Seeing Eye and of Carr’s fascination – then at its height – with the mystical tenets of theosophy. Grey, in this sense, is esotericism made plastic. Thus, at the beginning of what was to be the great landscape phase of her artistic output, we find an Emily Carr who was endeavouring to portray the natural world as a vehicle for spirit, but whose relation to spirit and nature alike remained one of enigmatic puzzlement: “There is a cold, mysterious wonder amid the trees,” she wrote in 1927. “They are not so densely packed but that you can pass in imagination among them, wonder what mysteries lie in their quiet fastness, which creeping things, what God-filled spaces totally untrod, what voices in an unknown tongue.”35 The spirit-filled nature that Carr longed for at this point was one that she could only imagine accessing in incorporeal form. “I should like, when I am through with this body and my spirit released, to float up those wonderful mountain passes and ravines and feed on the silence and wonder – no fear, no bodily discomfort, just space and silence.”36 Written in 1927 from the vantage point of a moving train, Carr’s words, like her canvas, capture the artist at her greatest remove from the world of nature that was ostensibly so attractive to her. Here, one feels, is an artist coming to grips with an idea of spirit in nature but not with an experience of it. All that was to change, however, and Carr herself would later characterize the distance she had travelled as something similar to that between theatre and reality. Her diary from 1937 records a letter from a potential collector: “Mr. Band writes, ‘I am considering “Grey.” Do you like it? I do.’ Yes and no. I did like it and many people have liked it … [but] I was more static then, was thinking more of effect than spirit. [It is like] the difference between a play act and life. No matter how splendid the acting is, you can sit there with your heart right in your mouth, but way down inside you know it’s different to the same thing in life itself.”37 And there is a way in which Carr, in 1929, was still very much rehearsing her lines. From Shadbolt and Maria Tippett, indeed from Carr herself, we know that the canvases of the late 1920s and early ’30s were heavily mediated, both by the

FIg. 6.8 (opposite)

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Emily Carr, Sunshine and Tumult, 1939.

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aesthetic impact of other painters (Lawren Harris, Georgia O’Keefe, and Mark Tobey are the points of reference for Grey) and by Carr’s encounter with the theosophy that she ultimately rejected as a “static, frozen awfulness, sort of a cold storage for beautiful thoughts.”38 Concomitant with this rejection (complete by 1934), Carr’s sense of the natural world and her own relation to it changed dramatically. No longer would she imagine leaving her body behind to float through silent spaces; instead her journal tells of bathing in rivers and rolling in dewsoaked grass, of pressing her face to the earth and squelching her toes in the mud.39 Whereas the diary entries of 1932–33 repeatedly sound a note of unfulfilled longing, these sentiments are increasingly offset by a more joyous awareness of life humming and surging around her. Previously the forest had spoken to Carr only in an “unknown tongue.”40 Now its voices seemed more and more comprehensible, and she began to emphasize the importance of establishing connectedness with the world by listening to it. “I learned quite a bit,” she recorded in September 1934 after a day of “sketching full blast” in the woods outside Victoria: “The whole place is full of subjects. By that I mean that things speak all over the place. You go and look here and there as you go. It’s no good putting down a stroke till something speaks; then get busy. Form is fine, and colour and design and subject matter but that which does not speak to the heart is worthless. It is the intensity of feeling you have about a thing that counts.”41 By the time of Harold Mortimer-Lamb’s photograph, Carr had developed this intensity of feeling and expression into her most aesthetically independent and fully realized pictorial style: the swirling and powerfully physical technique so evident in Sunshine and Tumult. In many ways Sunshine and Tumult is the perfect foil to Grey. The forest setting, the vertical tree, the central pyramidal form all invite comparison. There the similarities cease, however. Where Grey was worked on canvas and carefully controlled, Sunshine and Tumult employs the oil-onpaper technique that Carr innovated to better preserve the immediacy of the sketching experience. Volume gives way to movement here, the machinations of the intellect to the gestures of the hand, and the stillness of mystery to the pulsing course of life. Now at the top of her game, Carr was confident enough in her technical skill to push beyond the limits of composition: “The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fill the bill. There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things … it is a gradual process of becoming conscious of the life of nature, the hum of life in us both, tuning in together.”42 In Sunshine and Tumult, Carr embodies this hum in the swirl. Where once she had admired Lawren Harris’s ability to transport her “above the swirl into holy places,” she now adopted the swirl as an expression of spirit itself, capturing her sense that movement was the essence of life and that life was the trace of divinity on

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earth.43 Tree and sky swirl into unity, and both are absolutely isomorphic with the topography of Carr’s own psychic landscape. This is Carr the romantic expressionist, singing, with Walt Whitman, a song of herself. It is not difficult to characterize this view of nature as being so deeply personal that it ultimately had little to do with nature at all. The sunshine may indeed be out there in the world, but the tumult, we suspect, is all Carr’s; she simply cannot see it as such.44 Certainly it is true that she celebrated the expressive qualities of her painting and valued her achievement in direct proportion to its degree of personal investment. Thus, when she began to assess the potential of her new aesthetic trajectory, she initially did so not in terms of its truth to nature, or even to spirit, but rather of its truth to self: “Two easels stand in the studio and on each is a paper oil sketch of the beach. Unlike my canvases they have no dustsheets – and I watch to see people’s reaction. No one gives them more than a passing glance – some not that – there can be nothing in them. They make no appeal. Yet I am keenly interested and I do feel I put more of myself into them, a great deal [more] than a year or so back when I was thinking design and pattern and painted more or less from memory of things I had seen. I am painting on my own vision now, thinking of no one else’s approach, trying to express my own reactions.”45 For the Carr of April 1934, then, the value of putting herself into her work was clearly that she was no longer putting anyone else there. Yet less than a month later, she was already bumping up against the limitations of the strictly personal view: “Instead of trying to force our personality on to our subject if we could be quite quiet and unassertive and let the subject swallow us and absorb us into it, and not be so darn smart of our importance.”46 The conviction would grow, and by 1936 she had come to understand the inadequacy as belonging to a whole pictorial tradition of which she partook: “The trouble with our painting lies largely with our trying to impose our ideas and our technique on the picture instead of allowing our subject to impose itself on us, asserting ourselves instead of making ourselves a blank and letting the subject express on that blank that which it wills.”47 Increasingly – and in the face of impulses that would remain strong within her – Carr exhorted herself to “cast out the personal” in favour of a less egocentric approach to nature. Already in 1932 she had caught glimpses of the path: “To empty oneself, to come to the day’s work free, open, with no pre-conceived ideas, no set rule of action, open and willing to be led, receptive and obedient, calm and still, unhurried and unworried over the outcome, only sincere and alert for promptings.”48 The forest’s language, Carr came to believe, was its own. “To enter into the life of the trees, to know your relationship, to understand their language – unspoken, unwritten talk. To answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.”49 Or again: “The woods are brim full of thoughts. Just sit and

roll your eye and everywhere is a subject thought, something saying something. Trick is to adjust one’s ear trumpet. Don’t try to word it. Don’t force it to come to you – your way – but try and adapt yourself to its way. Let it lead you. Don’t put a leash on it and drag it.”50 But what does it really mean to say that nature thinks? And what adjustments might be necessary to both hear and understand those thoughts? For Carr, the chief insight – and it was one only fitfully attained – came in the moments when she was able to shift from longing for some “nameless thing” that the woods contained to recognizing the ways in which she was always already connected to the world: I begin to see that everything is perfectly balanced so that what one borrows they must pay back in some form or another, that everything has its own place but is interdependent on the rest, that a picture, like life, must also have perfect balance – every part of it also is dependent on the whole and the whole is dependent on every part. It is a swinging rhythm of thought, swaying back and forth, leading up to, suggesting, waiting, urging the unworded statement to come forth and proclaim itself, voicing the notes from its very soul to be caught up and echoed by other souls – filling space and at the same time leaving space – shouting but silent. Oh, to be still enough to hear and see and know the glory of the sky and earth and sea!51

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

Traces of this shift from seeking-for to existing-with are in evidence throughout Carr’s journal. Her awareness of the possibilities opened by the act of going out into “being to be along with it” produced in Carr a keen sense of chiasmic crossover between the human and non-human aspects of existence.52 Here, for instance, is her description of walking in the forest, in 1935: “If you wrestle with the growth it will strike back … If you listen it will talk, if you jabber it will shut up tight – stay inside itself. If you let yourself get ‘creepy,’ creepy you can be. If you face it calmly, claiming relationship … standing honestly before the trees without words, taking them at face value and expecting them to do the same of you, recognizing one Creator of you and them, one life pulsing though all, one mystery engulfing all, then you can say as the Psalmist said … ‘I looked for a place to build a tabernacle to the Lord, I found it in the fields and in the woods.’”53 While her rhetoric is unequivocally Christian, Carr’s sense of the forest’s ability to talk back to her bespeaks a far broader mix of influences, including American Transcendentalism, the New Thought movement, a heavily filtered Hinduism, and elements of Indigenous spirituality that she only poorly understood.54 More than mere eclecticism, what drew Carr to these widely differing systems of belief was the panentheistic current within each: the positing of a transcendent animating and sustaining force that was, at the same time, fully immanent in every aspect of existence.55 In her youth, Carr had drunk

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deeply at the fountain of Alexander Pope’s “great chain of being” – a metaphor that unites all aspects of God’s creation at the same time that it orders them hierarchically according to their differences – and part of her would never forsake that keen sense of human specialness.56 Yet as she struggled to understand the issues at stake for her in painting, the differences that separated entities faded and came to seem less important than their joint participation in the chorus of divinely imbued existence. For Carr, this belief that God was in all things and all things were in God served as the basis for a universal kinship. Her attachment to animals, for example, which has typically been viewed as compensation for her difficulty in bonding meaningfully with people, can also be understood as an expression of her panentheism.57 At times it brought her close to a belief in an ontological equivalence that spanned conventionally demarcated identities. “Some will say a fish is a fish,” she mused. “No, a fish is an entity, and is its own self.”58 Her ascription of selfhood to animals and plants extended, moreover, to an expressed conviction in their interiority and agency. Trees talked for Carr. So did water and rocks. And they had emotions, just as she did. “I wonder if the pines will miss me?” she mused. “I have loved them.”59 The comment is telling, for it indicates that Carr’s subjectivization of what many would consider to be objects was in fact an intersubjectivization. “I am so lost a person things just willfully hide,”60 she wrote in frustration one day. Such exquisitely attuned relations between entities required a medium within which to operate: something not limited to her or them but intrinsic to both. In 1938, as deteriorating health cast a spotlight on her own fading vitality, she came to consider that life itself might be that medium: “Life. No killing, no stamping down can destroy it. Life is in the soil. Touch it with air and light and it bursts forth like a struck match. Nothing is dead, not even a corpse. It moves into the elements when the spirit has left it, but even to the spirit’s leaving there is life, boundless life, resistless and marvelous, fresh and clean. God.”61 Ultimately, the aesthetic, spiritual, and existential project of Carr’s maturity was that of attunement to the life that, to her, connected all aspects of creation and established between them a fundamental parity of being. In her journal, she struggled to articulate these priorities and concerns in the terms that were available to her with their various and sometimes contradictory precepts and influences; its pages are a testament to a mind seeking its terms of connection with the world. Ultimately, however, it would be in her paintings that Carr’s sense of the exquisite equilibrium of shared vitality assumed its most eloquent form. In her brushstrokes that variously shimmer and swirl, heave and swell, her oils remind their viewers of unseen lines of force and movement that carry all of existence, including the artist herself, along in its flow.

FIg. 6.9 Emily Carr, A Chill Day in June, 1938–39.

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

These, then, are the issues and concerns that most affected Emily Carr when she considered herself and her art in relation to nature. What, on the other side of the comparison, may be said for Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) and her relation to the principle of connection? How do Salish baskets relate to their makers’ senses of self and environment?

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FIg. 6.10 P’elawk’wia (Margaret Baker), berry-picking basket, c. 1910.

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“The Indian Sympathy with Nature”

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Up and down the Northwest Coast and into the interior regions, Indigenous weavers of plant and animal fibres speak of an intricate interconnectedness between maker, materials, and the world that they are part of. Whether Squamish or Sechelt, Lil’wat or Lummi, Haida or Nuu-chah-nulth, the makers of coiled and woven baskets begin their work by speaking to the trees and plants from which they intend to harvest their materials, thanking them for their gift, and honouring their presence in the world. Thus, from its earliest moment, the creation of a basket positions its makers within a web of relatedness that extends across the boundaries that dominant trajectories of western thought have erected between human beings and our environment. For Haida basketmaker April Churchill, the process of gathering cedar roots prompts a type of self-awareness notable for its combination of introspection with an externally focused awareness of the world: “Before I even start cutting into the earth, the most important thing has already happened, and that’s to take a few minutes and feel the wind and to remind myself that I’m part of the wind, and to hear the trees and remind myself that I’m

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

growing out of the land just as the trees are, and to feel underneath what’s happening that I am a part of that earth.”62 As a girl, Stó:lō basketmaker Rena Point Bolton learned to embody this connection physically: “When I went out to get roots, my elder, Elsie Charlie, told me to cut a little thin root and tie it around my waist. Then I would become connected to the tree. I would become like a child to the tree.”63 Still today she speaks of the importance of leaving a part of one’s body and identity – even if only saliva – behind in the forest in recognition of that bond.64 As important as such experiences of connectedness may be to many basketmakers’ sense of selfhood, however, any analysis that ties Indigenous subjectivity to nature necessarily brings unwelcome precedents along with it. Consider, for example, Lawren Harris’s 1941 description of Carr’s “almost primitive oneness with nature, identical one feels with the Indian sympathy with nature.”65 Harris’s reductive typecasting has raised the hackles of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art historians alike, and not without reason, for such superficially positive characterizations of the Indian-as-Natural-Man have also had the more insidious effect of masking the richness of Indigenous cultural traditions and the very real social and political struggles that have attended the inhabitation and use of land.66 Indeed, the longer passage from which Harris’s discussion of Carr is drawn goes so far as to effect an implicit conflation between animals and Indians, revealing the dehumanizing thrust of a discursive trope that flourished in a period of attempted genocide.67 Critical response to Carr’s art has been indelibly shaped by such discourse, leaving weaver Dionne Paul (Sechelt and Nuxalk) sceptical of any comparison that might further entrench the exoticization of “the mystical Indian in the forest.” Paul observes that her own sense of connectedness with the natural world is “very much a part-time thing,” worked into the interstices of a thoroughly contemporary existence, structured by the requirements of her job, the rhythms of family life, and the demands of a burgeoning international art career.68 When it comes to First Nations, then, invocations of connectedness to the natural environment are clearly hazardous business. Yet it is precisely this idea that First Nations people are now invoking in some of their most politicized struggles for social, cultural, and economic change. The opening statement of the Lil’wat Nation website, for example, is a ringing declaration of connectedness: “The Lil’wat have always been, and will continue to be, a people of the land.”69 Arguments for the recognition of First Nations rights and title foreground the importance of land in the construction of Indigenous identities, and the close and abiding connections between the land and its original inhabitants have been the subject of eloquent testimony by First Nations elders and by both Indigenous and settler scholars.70 Weaver Debra Sparrow is fully alive to these complexities:

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Our connection with nature? Of course it was close! You know we sustained ourselves from our environment: the salmon berries, the blueberries, the stinging nettle tea that cleanses your body and your blood, the salmon, the animals. We were in harmony with all of that … how romantic! But at the same time you had to know how to do all the things that they had to do in order to live with nature. In order to do a weaving you’ve got to know a lot of mathematics. And these women were scientists, too. They were botanists who knew all about plants. They were chemists, making dyes and teas and medicines. They were doctors, healing themselves with nature, and looking after themselves. They knew so much that we’ve lost.71

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Indigenous ways of thinking that work with and through nature are at the heart of much First Nations’ political consciousness. Legal challenges to the Canadian government – such as those mounted by the Mikisew Cree and Frog Lake First Nations respecting environmental oversight of waterways – are deeply rooted in a perspective that emphasizes human connectedness to the land.72 Indeed, in its public summary of policy areas, the Assembly of First Nations affirms that “the traditional philosophy of First Nations is centered on the holistic view that everything is interconnected. Humanity is part of the ecosystem. First Nation peoples live closer to the land and are more directly affected by environmental degradation than most other Canadians.”73 Since the 1990s, growing awareness of diminishing natural resources has given political impetus – sometimes even clout – to traditional First Nations practices of sustainable ecological management. In British Columbia, for example, the 1994 report of the government-appointed Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound based its recommendations on the traditional world views of the Nuu-chahnulth leaders who sat on the committee, notably the belief that hishuk ish ts’awalk – everything is one.74 Growing recognition of the ecological soundness of many traditional Indigenous land management practices has, moreover, given rise to a renewed interest in the epistemological, ontological, and cosmological beliefs that are intertwined with them. Where once there was a largely patronizing curiosity about “primitive” animism, now there are thoughtful and engaged accounts of traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom.75 In the context of contemporary Canadian politics and scholarship, then, talk of interconnectedness, the natural world, and First Nations is not necessarily tied to the retrograde and injurious ideologies that Canadian art historians have often found in the work of Emily Carr. And so, perhaps, in turning to Frank and her baskets, there is room after all to look again at the aesthetic and subjective implications of the principle of connectedness that has been so critically received with respect to Carr.

“The Tree Is Like a Person” Sophie Frank was born Sewinchelwet in December 1872.76 She was the maternal granddaughter of Chief Siamcun, from the village of Íkwikws, and one of seven children of Syem’att (Mary) and Kwelkwalxelacha (Old William), from P’uyam.77 Like her younger sister Sut’elut (Monica Williams, 1875–1972), who learned to weave from Syem’att at the age of five, basketry entered Frank’s life as a traditional skill, integral to the daily and seasonal activities of Squamish life: picking berries and clams, hauling water, preparing and serving food, and storing household goods.78 By the

SKWXWÚ7MESH-ULH TEMÍXW

Whistler

P’uyam Ch’ékch’ékts

Ikwikws Squamish

Xwmélch’sten Vancouver

Eslhá7an Sen:ákw

FIg. 6.11 Squamish territory. The map shows key sites from Sophie and Jimmy Frank’s lives.

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FIg. 6.12

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A coiled cedar basket made by Sut’elut (Monica Williams), Sophie Frank’s sister. Bundles of thinly sliced sapling or twigs are coiled and wrapped with cedar roots. An awl is used to punch holes along the foundation layer of coiling; then strands of root are drawn through and wrapped around. 

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time of Frank’s birth, however, these traditions were being dramatically disrupted. New possibilities of trade with prospectors and settlers altered the seasonal migration patterns of her family, which gradually abandoned its winter village of Ch’ékch’ékts in the upper reaches of the river valley and came to reside year round at its summer village of Sen:ákw, on the south shore of False Creek, near modern-day Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge.79 Three years prior to Frank’s birth, in the midst of the rapid territorial dispossession that had accompanied the influx of settlers to British Columbia’s lower mainland in the 1850s, village leaders at Sen:ákw successfully petitioned the colonial government to reserve the land their village occupied for their community’s exclusive use.80 Here, on the False Creek Indian Reserve (later known as the Kitsilano Indian Reserve) Sophie Frank grew up, a ward of the state under the terms of the Indian Act that was passed when she was four years old. False Creek was also the traditional camping ground of Frank’s future father-in-law,81 and it was likely there that her marriage to Kwetsím (Jimmy Frank, c. 1872–1952) was arranged. The teenaged couple baptized their first child in 1889 and four years later, when Sophie was twenty, their marriage was formalized in the Catholic Church at the Mission Indian Reserve No. 1, on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, in what is now North Vancouver.82 The exact date and reason for Sophie and Jimmy Frank’s move across Burrard Inlet to the Mission Reserve are not clear, but the change occurred against

the dual backdrop of Squamish people’s traditional mobility throughout their territory and their gradual expulsion from Vancouver.83 Sophie’s sister Monica was still at the False Creek/Kitsilano Reserve when the community was forcibly evicted from it in 1913,84 but already by the 1880s the extension of the CPR railroad had displaced families from Kitsilano and along the south shore of Burrard Inlet, where Jimmy Frank also had family.85 By comparison, the Squamish settlements on the north shore of the inlet offered comparatively well-paying jobs in a lumber industry that by the 1890s had dramatically transformed the physical landscape. One such settlement was Eslhá7an, recognized by the government as Mission Reserve No. 1 and administered by the church as a strict tribal theocracy. Initially, Squamish response to the Catholic presence at Eslhá7an had been enthusiastic, for the Oblate fathers were early allies in Indigenous efforts to secure land from an increasingly hostile colonial government.86 But as the church’s discipline grew more repressive, some of its strongest Squamish supporters came to reject its authority, moving west to Xwmélch’sten, also known as the Capilano Reserve.87 Those who stayed were subject to a regime of domestic inspection by priests and clandestine observation by the village watchmen who were tasked with reporting anyone heard singing Squamish songs or speaking of traditional ways.88

FIg. 6.13 Contemporaries of Frank at Sen:ákw, the False Creek Reserve. Yam Schloot (Mary) poses with a basket she is making. Frank would have been eighteen when this photo was taken in 1891. Also shown are Chin-nal-set (Jericho Charlie), William Green, Peelass George, Jimmy Jimmy, and Towhu-quam-kee (Jack). 

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FIg. 6.14

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The village of Eslhá7an, also known as Mission Reserve No. 1, North Vancouver, as photographed by Philip Timms in 1902.

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Infractions were punished by fines, public denunciation, and, with the establishment of a residential school in 1889, the corporal punishment of children.89 While the reserve was moderately prosperous in the 1870s and ’80s, living conditions declined during the early decades of the twentieth century, and though population levels slowly began to recover from the previous century’s devastating epidemics, mortality rates remained significantly higher than the Canadian national average.90 In this context, basketry assumed new social functions for the Squamish women of North Vancouver, and by 1906, when Sophie Frank knocked on Emily Carr’s door in search of another customer, it had become their primary means of participation in a commodity-driven settler economy. Basketry’s place in the rhythms of Frank’s life now came to be determined by the daily canoe trips that she made to Vancouver with her children to sell or trade the coiled cedar-root wares that were her family’s sole economic support during her husband’s increasingly frequent periods of unemployment.91 It was difficult work, and a letter to Carr conveys weariness. “I am very tired of selling baskets,” she wrote in 1915. “I have lots though but no one cares much for them. All say that they have no money.”92

Far from bringing her into the kind of rapturous communion with soil and plants sought by Carr, the altered exigencies of Frank’s art exerted pressure in the opposite direction. “I buy all our food. I love the warm weather that is coming. I have not been working in my garden for I am in Vancouver every day trying to sell baskets.”93 As the new circumstances of Squamish existence drew Frank further and further from the land, the land itself was less and less able to provide her with what she needed to make the goods she sold. Intensive logging on the north shore of Burrard Inlet had decreased the availability of cedar roots, and basketmakers in North Vancouver began to trade for their supplies with women from Sechelt and Sliammon to the north, and from Mount Curry in the interior.94 These challenges notwithstanding, Frank’s baskets offer evidence of her skill, creativity, and imagination. Sesemiya (Tracy Williams), a contemporary Squamish weaver who has created new patterns based on Frank’s

FIg. 6.15 This basket, purchased from Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) by Muriel Colls Reid, is one of only two baskets securely attributable to her.

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FIg. 6.16 Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) in Eslhá7an, North Vancouver, c. 1919. The baskets and trays show a mixture of tradition and stylistic innovation, as well as complex illusionism.

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designs, is the most attentive observer of Frank’s work. With the eye of an experienced practitioner, Williams scans the photograph of Frank with her baskets and notes the even placement and regularity of tension in the coils, qualities that are the mark of a dexterous maker. Like so many women of her generation, Frank combined Salish traditions with technical innovations intended to appeal to a Euro-Canadian clientele. Thus, in the photograph, well-established Salish patterns such as the Chain of Lakes exist together with entirely novel ones, such as the depiction of two trees flanking a settler-style building – possibly the old Sacred Heart church building (now St Paul’s) in North Vancouver. For Williams, what particularly distinguishes Frank’s achievement is her sense of movement, visible in the unusual pinwheel motifs. In still other baskets – those above and to the right of the one with the building, for example – Frank has mobilized pattern to convey not only movement but depth as well. Her deployment of light and shadow to create the illusion of three-dimensional space produces an uncommon and complex effect. Clearly, Frank was both technically adept and individually creative in her work. In this she was not alone. Basketry is a communally practised art form, and the community of skilled Squamish weavers working in early decades of the twentieth century was a sizable one, including women such as Chucháwlut (Mary Anne August, c. 1881–c. 1971), P’elawk’wia (Margaret

FIgs. 6.17–6.22 Squamish basketmakers active in the early decades of the twentieth century. Clockwise from top left: an unknown maker from Eslhá7an, 1902; Annie Jack with her first husband, Christie Lewis, c. 1911–12; Kw’exiliya (Madeline Deighton), 1956; Molly John, c. 1930–33; Swenámiya (Mary Anne Khatsahlano) with a baby, c. 1930; Sut’elut (Monica Williams) with her son, David.

Baker, c. 1885–1972), Kw’exiliya (Madeline Deighton, c. 1858–1948), Skwétsiya or Hakstn (Harriet Johnny, c. 1843–1940), Sut’elut (Monica Williams, c. 1875–1972), Swenámiya (Mary Anne Khatsahlano, c. 1881–1970), Sxwelhcháliya (Mary Anne John, c. 1845/50–c.1942), Annie Jack (c. 1886–1973), Molly John (c. 1880–1955), Agatha Moody (c. 1887–1967), and Mary Natrall 273

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FIgs. 6.23–6.24 A lidded cedar storage basket by Annie Jack. The detail shows the even regularity and tight coiling that is the mark of an expert hand. 

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(d. 1959).95 These women, whose names are largely unknown to Canadian art historians, creatively planned and painstakingly manufactured objects of use and beauty, such as the magnificent berry-picking basket worked by P’elawk’wia (fig. 6.10). Many are remembered by family members. Lila Johnston of North Vancouver, for example, recalls her grandmother, Annie Jack, as a gentle woman who sold some of her baskets to wealthier Vancouverites but more often used them in more traditional ways and frequently gave them to others.96 This was also the custom of Sxwelhcháliya, a spirit dancer and well-known healer whose descendants remember that she made baskets for trade and domestic use and also for traditional ceremonies.97 Like basketry patterns themselves, with their mixture of tradition and innovation, basketmakers were crucial participants in the preservation of their people’s traditional practices, knowledge, and beliefs in the midst of social change. Teachings about the land and the plants and animals that inhabited it figured prominently in this knowledge. In his memoirs, Chief Simon Baker remembers his grandmother Líxwelut (Mary Agnes Capilano) as being “very strong in her traditions, how to survive with nature,”98 while his nephew Bob remembers Líxwelut’s daughter Susan, his own grandmother, in much the same way.99 Knowledge of plants was passed down through Sophie Frank’s family as well. Frank’s sister Sut’elut, who is spoken of by her grandsons as a quiet and authoritative woman, conveyed extensive botanical knowledge to her grandchildren, insisting that they learn both the practical uses of plants and how to treat them with respect.100 At the heart of such respect is a principle of reciprocity. Lil’wat scholar Lorna Williams explains:

FIg. 6.25 A cedar root basket by Sxwelhcháliya (Mary Anne John). Grass and cherry bark, both blackened and burnished, are used for the white, red, and black imbrication. The markings at the bottom of the basket identify the maker. FIg. 6.26 A basket attributed to Chucháwlut (Mary Anne August) by Squamish elders on a visit to the North Vancouver Museum and Archives.

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

When you think about our relationship with the cedar tree, it’s reciprocal. We needed the cedar. We lived where it was abundant. It provided everything to us: our clothes, our transportation, even the planks for our houses, and we could take a plank without ever damaging the tree. This speaks to our sense of self-restraint – that we approached the tree with respect and made sure we looked after

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the creeks. Not to dominate the world, but to make sure that things would support one another. In the area we used to go to gather roots, people used to fix things so it wouldn’t flood too much. So there’s this sense that we’re in this together. That we’re a part of each other.101

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Ethnobotanist Nancy Turner describes the careful cutting, pruning, and burning techniques the peoples of the western coast developed in order to increase plant propagation.102 Sustainable harvesting techniques that do not impede a plant’s capacity to regenerate are central to basketry, and basketmakers today are still careful to take only a narrow strip of bark, in order to ensure the cedar tree’s long-term viability.103 Traditional ecological knowledge and attitudes about the land had a crucial role to play in the context of the residential school system, for their transmission was less likely to incur the brutal punishment that so often attended the passing down of language or ceremonial ritual. Yet such knowledge was no less firmly tied to the spiritual principles of Squamish cosmology. Salish oral histories ground the ethical injunction to respect the land in an understanding of that land’s past identity with human beings. Thus, in the Squamish account of creation, three brothers known as the Transformers walked the earth, setting it to rights by changing people into plants, animals, rivers, and geological formations.104 It is from this shared history that a sense of spirit-based continuity across species emerges, binding people to non-human entities – whether plants or animals, rocks or places – and creating ethical obligations of care towards them. Subjectivity, in this reckoning, is one aspect of a concept of personhood that extends well beyond human beings.105 Traditionally, success at basketry and other skilled practices such as canoe-building or hunting was intimately bound up with a practitioner’s ability to establish a connection with the other-than-human-persons who inhabit the world, thereby gaining access to ancestral powers situated within the land.106 For Sesemiya (Tracy Williams), those connections remain a central aspect of experience: “The knowledge of the materials aligns you with the landscape, and the ancestors know what the plants and animals and language of the place are about. It’s important to pray: to ask the creator to ask the ancestors to ask the cedar tree to share its wisdom. You have to go to the plant, to watch and learn from the plant over the course of the seasons. The plants are our teachers.”107 Thus, from a Salish perspective, land, spirit, and skilled creative practice work together.108 There is, indeed, a fluid conduit of passage between them, as Lorna Williams observes: “The belief is that if you have any anger towards anybody, if you have resentments – all of that will be communicated to the tree and the roots will hide from you. Similarly, makers who approach their work with a good feeling will communicate that balance, evenness, strength, and beauty to

FIg. 6.27 A cedar tree with a strip of bark harvested for weaving. When a sufficiently narrow strip is taken, the bark regenerates. Squamish basketmakers of the early twentieth century typically worked with the roots of the tree.

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

the basket they make.”109 And just as makers are believed to impart their spirit to the baskets that they make, so too does the land inhabit those who gather its resources and use them well, sharing its strength and its beauty. Talk of the spirit of the cedar tree is not intended to be metaphorical. Rather, weavers and basketmakers emphasize the agency, will, and interiority inherent in baskets. These qualities may be felt, for example, in the

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deviation of a basket from its maker’s original plans. The square basket that insists on being round, the basket intended for one purpose or owner that ends up with another: these are registered as markers of the subjectivity and force within the objects and the plants from which they stem. Skilled weavers speak of the importance of attunement to such forces. Tracy Williams observes, “When I’m weaving, I don’t always plan it. I let the force of it flow through me rather than me trying to control it, because if I do, it won’t turn out right.”110 Jessica Casey (Sechelt) speaks in similar terms, as do Debra Sparrow and Lorna Williams. As Williams explains, the crucial thing is to be attentive enough to perceive the forces that emanate from the material: “When I teach, one of the things I do in my class is to ask students to attain a sense of quietness – of diving deep and reaching a sense of stillness. It’s quieting your mind, your heart rate, the energy flowing around you. And it’s in that sense of stillness that you can hear things that you wouldn’t hear otherwise. You can hear your wool, the cedar root or bark or whatever you’re working on. You can hear it.”111 The perceptual connections established through the stilled and mindful pursuit of weaving extend not only outwards to the world but also back through time. Contemporary Salish weavers and basketmakers, including Debra Sparrow and Tracy Williams, speak passionately of the ancestors who are a palpable presence to them while they work. “When you find the depth of your work, you know it’s connected to something,” Sparrow observes. “That it’s not about you, it’s not your weaving, it’s somebody else’s. We are the hands in which our ancestors work.”112 Similar convictions are expressed by Coast Salish curator Rose M. Spahan, who observes that a sense of temporal connection is strengthened by the corporeal effects of the weaving process, whose meditative aspects can be transcendent. Highlighting the “countless hours, days, and months” that weavers spend collecting, preparing, and working with their materials, Spahan characterizes woven objects as “sites where time is pulled together.”113 Suzi Williams describes something similar amongst northern Chilkat weavers: “Chilkat weavers live in a different time-warp from mainstream reality. The entire process, from gathering and preparing the bark of the cedar tree to the laborious task of removing the soft under-down of the mountain goat wool and then spinning the two together inch by inch, takes time. Time, when we travel back to the past and our fingers become the fingers of all the spinners that preceded us.”114 For contemporary practitioners working in the wake of a governmental policy that attempted to sever First Nations peoples from their lands, their families, and their histories, such experiences of cultural connectedness are enormously important. But how important would such values and beliefs have been to Salish basketmakers historically? Could they have mattered to Sophie Frank, trudging reluctantly through the streets of Vancouver and compelled to abandon traditional ways? If it is impossible now

FIg. 6.28 Sophie and Jimmy Frank, c. 1930s. The other sitters are Polly Harry, Loretta Williams, Rose Williams, and Marjorie Williams Paul.

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

to have direct knowledge of Frank’s own perspective on these matters, we can come surprisingly close to it through the recorded words of her husband, Jimmy, who served as an informant for the anthropologist Homer Barnett in the mid-1930s. Barnett’s notes from their interviews provide a vivid, albeit filtered, Squamish perspective on subjectivity, craft, and the natural world in the early decades of the twentieth century. A canoe-builder by training, Jimmy Frank was, like his wife, a craftsperson whose production depended upon intimate knowledge of cedar trees: when to harvest from them, how to process and work with their materials, and above all, how to value their gifts and treat them with respect. To this end, Frank maintained the traditions and protocols his father had taught him for interacting with cedar: singing to the tree while he chiselled, working in solitude to maintain the privacy of that communication.115 While both Sophie and Jimmy Frank were practising Catholics – as, indeed, everyone at the Mission Reserve was required to be – it is clear from his comments to Barnett that Jimmy’s Christian observances had not supplanted his traditional beliefs. Barnett was interested in Squamish religious customs and ceremonial practices, and Jimmy Frank provided numerous details about them, sometimes attempting to explain their rationale. On such occasions, Frank turned most frequently to the idea of a kinship

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that existed between the Squamish people and the plants, animals, and places around them, observing that a “tree has sense” and could offer its help to human beings.116 Thus, he explained, in certain circumstances individuals must refrain from cutting wood, “because it would be like cutting your own self and children.”117 He articulated this conviction repeatedly: “The tree is like a person, and you have to treat it right to have luck.”118 At other points in the field notes, as in Frank’s account of the First Salmon ceremony, the ethical obligations that flowed from such ontological connectedness are even more to the fore. Practised widely throughout the Northwest Coast, the First Salmon ceremony is an act of thanksgiving to the Salmon People who, in Squamish oral narratives, once lived in human form and possessed the power to transform into fish in the water. Upon establishing friendly relations with the Squamish people, the Salmon People sacrificed four of their children, in the form of fish, to feed their human guests. Requesting simply that their guests preserve every bone with care, the Salmon People subsequently restored their children to life by returning their bones to the water.119 As a child, Frank told Barnett, it had been his family’s task to perform the annual ceremonial recapitulation of key aspects of this account. Each spring, Frank’s father caught the first salmon of the year, his mother prepared it to be shared amongst the villagers, and it was Frank’s job to throw its head back into the river and tell the Salmon People of its return to the water.120 Three aspects of the ceremony are particularly relevant to discussions of basketry: the emphasis on the personhood of non-human entities, the attendant understanding of the interconnectedness of humans and their environment, and the sense of reciprocal obligation that ensued from it. Much like a basketmaker’s words to the tree prior to harvesting its roots or inner bark, the First Salmon ceremony was an acknowledgment of gratitude to the Salmon People, and it was also an acknowledgment of the importance of human behaviour to the maintenance of fish stocks. Expressed here in ritual form, this kind of acknowledgment shaped more strictly pragmatic aspects of Salish resource-management as well, such as the use of nets that would permit immature fish to pass, thus ensuring their continued abundance for future years and generations. For Frank, communication between animal and human people was a given. Thus he explained to Barnett that the right to perform the First Salmon ceremony belonged to his father because he knew the siwin, or sacred words, that would convince the salmon to swim into the nets.121 Frank also told Barnett of the spirit power that could pass between entities and the responsibilities this created between them. His father, for example, had received spirit power from the eagle and so, Frank explained, “his family never killed eagle and never ate it – it was ‘just like our flesh.’”122 Animal spirit-helpers might come to individuals in a variety of ways: in dreams, in dances, or in particularly intense visionary encounters with the environment.123 Such a dream had come to

Frank’s father when he received the spirit song that he used to help him in his canoe building. But while Frank had inherited his father’s song, he had never received one of his own; nor had he been able to learn the siwin that would let him communicate with the Salmon People. He speculated that his Catholic observances may have gotten in the way of such a gift.124 Frank’s testimony offers insight into an early twentieth-century Squamish reality marked both by rupture and continuity with past and present. In Frank’s understanding, the impact of colonization had affected his ability to experience spiritual connectedness with his world, but his belief in the reality of that connection continued to be central to the way he spoke of his culture. There is a parallel to be drawn here with basketmaking. Just as Salish women continued to make and use traditionally designed baskets outside of colonial circuits of commodity exchange, so too did traditional spiritual values continue to shape Salish understandings of being in the world. From parents and grandparents to children and grandchildren, the awareness of the cedar tree as being “like a person” remains a common point of reference that links Salish experiences at the beginning of the twentieth century with those of basketmakers and weavers working today.

Animism and Alterity

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

The elements that link the late paintings of Emily Carr with the cultural traditions of Salish basketry will by now be apparent. They include a sense of shared participation in a larger reality, a prioritizing of perceptual attentiveness, a conviction in the ontological similarity of beings, and a relational intersubjectivity that crosses conventional western boundaries between human “subjects” and other-than-human “objects.” What, then, are the implications of these positions for understandings of the self and world? What effects flow from the apparently simple act of saying “brother” or “sister” to a tree? For Carr and Indigenous thinkers alike, the answer to this question must contend with the issue (for some, the charge) of anthropomorphism: the projection of human traits and concerns onto the other-than-human realm. Carr, after all, is the woman who dressed her pet monkey in a little girl’s pink frock. And although that dress might also be read in other ways – as a savvy crack at the Victorian codes of feminine comportment that Carr herself had so decisively rejected, for example, or simply as a straightforward response to a displaced tropical animal’s need for additional warmth – there is no question that Carr saw human traits in non-human entities. Round stones looked to her like the tops of heads; arum lilies curtseyed; young pine trees were playful and stuck out their petticoats.125 Indigenous thought too, when it stems from animistic spiritual traditions, has often been considered as inherently anthropomorphizing. This, for example, is the conclusion of anthropologist Philippe Descola, a key participant in

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recent anthropological and philosophical reconsiderations of animism. For Descola, animism “endows natural beings with human dispositions and social attributes”; it is thus anthropomorphic in its very definition.126 Already in 1979, Doris Shadbolt had made the link between the two positions explicit: Carr’s “frequent anthropomorphizing,” she wrote, “relates to her instinctive animism.”127 For those attuned to the importance of respecting difference, anthropomorphism’s apparent failure to recognize alterity and its implied inability to accept the other as other raises significant ethical and aesthetic questions. In their accounts of nature, aesthetic philosophers have frequently argued that it is important for human beings not to limit their aesthetic encounter with the world to those capacities and qualities that are natural to themselves. Thus, for Yuriko Saito, “the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature … must embody a moral capacity for recognizing and respecting nature as having its own reality apart from our presence.”128 Such concerns, to be sure, are not much in evidence in Carr’s journals. In full pursuit of a spiritual experience of oneness, ethical questions about how to best to behave towards beings who were different from her seem not to have greatly preoccupied Carr. But it is otherwise with Indigenous basketry, where questions of care and obligation are central. For Salishan peoples working within the traditions of their cultures, to make a basket is not so much to enter into communion with other beings – cedar trees, bear grass, cherry – as it is to enter into a respectful dialogue with them. Because these entities are understood as being akin to humans in fundamental ways, they too are seen as deserving of care and consideration. It is such consideration that Dionne Paul references when she explains why it is important not to weave in a state of inner turmoil or negativity: “Not only will whatever you’re working on come out wrong, but it’s disrespectful to the tree, because if you’re feeling like that you can’t appreciate the value of its gift.”129 Paul’s invocation of the gift raises a critical question: Can a tree choose to give freely of itself? For Tracy Williams, the tree’s status as an independent actor within a reciprocal network of exchange is clear: “The trees can say no, you know. If you don’t ask properly, they can trip you up. The land can change. But mostly they want to be used. They want to be part of the cycle of life. We’re too segregated now, and it’s important to try and change that. Too many people don’t know: the land will not only talk to you, it will heal you.”130 Such talk of trees “wanting to be used” will not sit comfortably with all readers, and for some it may sound reminiscent of Carr’s own strategy, a projection back on to nature of what it has suited the artist to find there. But is it? At the heart of the matter is whether or not only humans have the will, agency, and consciousness associated with personhood. For Carr the panentheist, such qualities were ultimately aspects of the divine, and since God was immanent in all facets of his creation, so too were his attributes

inherent within them. Traditional Salish beliefs may also be characterized as panentheistic, and thus when Williams speaks of the tree’s wanting to be used, her statement is best understood in the context of her belief in a creator whose generosity of spirit is present also in the beings of creation. In both instances, an ostensible anthropomorphism is reconfigured through belief in something that far exceeds the projection of merely human characteristics. Holistic faith is thus the primary context in which Williams’s and Carr’s comments about trees must be situated. For those who share that faith, further inquiry is unlikely to yield any better or more persuasive account of the principle of connection at stake in their art. For those not inclined to faith, however, such inquiry may foster greater appreciation of another world view. Contemporary anthropological philosophizing on the nature of life and consciousness presents an avenue for such inquiry. If I turn to such philosophizing here, however, it is not in order to invoke it as a superior or more valid account than that provided by the artists themselves but rather to attempt a translation that might render their statements more accessible to a predominantly secular, academic, and settler readership. Like all translations, something essential will be lost in the process, but perhaps something else will be gained.

A World without Things

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

When speaking of trees’ desire, Tracy Williams evokes a participatory understanding of life as a process in which different beings are linked to each other in a never-ending fashion. Like the Carr of the later 1930s – who, as we have seen, was increasingly prone to speculation on the topic of life – Williams ties the sentience of other-than-human beings to the nature of life as a field within which all existence is enmeshed. In this the views of both women bear similarities to anthropologist Tim Ingold’s philosophical exploration of animism. Taking up the question of whether words such as “subjectivity,” “personhood,” and “animacy” are appropriate only to human beings, Ingold observes that much depends on whether these terms are understood as pre-existing properties (i.e., attributes with which an entity may or may not be endowed) or whether they are understood as existential conditions that emerge through the interaction of beings with their environment. Following the classic analysis of Ojibwe animism by Irving Hallowell, Ingold suggests that animistic traditions share an understanding of consciousness as a state of being alive that is reciprocally engendered between entities and so mutually shared by them. In this, Ojibwe thought proceeds quite differently from dominant strains within the western philosophical tradition, which typically conceive of consciousness as something that people bring to the world in order to understand it. By contrast, from a traditional Ojibwe perspective, mind “subsists in the very involvement of

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the person in the world.” As a result, personhood and consciousness are not qualities or attributes so much as they are ongoing outcomes of being alive, where life itself is conceived of as a state of being connected to the lived-in environment.131 Relationally determined, personhood is therefore not limited to humans but rather extends to those who enter into meaningful lived relations with humans – including fish, trees, and even rocks. Something very similar holds true within Coast Salish cultures.132 Settler observers have persistently noted the apparent distinction that Coast Salish peoples traditionally make between humans and the natural world, yet as we have seen, Salish cultures also evince numerous ways in which the boundaries between humans, plants, animals, and all the other inhabitants of the world are simultaneously blurred. For anthropologist Mark Ebert, these views are not fundamentally incompatible so much as deeply nuanced. Thus, if human beings are not the same as other entities in the Salish world view, neither are they separate from them. Rather, what unites all beings is a nexus of relations in which the underlying notion of personhood is grounded.133 It is just such a relational nexus that Tracy Williams calls into awareness when discussing the complex web of entities and interdependencies that weaving instantiates. To produce a Coast Salish woollen blanket, Williams explains, dog and mountain goat must provide the wool, whose production is dependent in turn on the plants that fed the animals, the winter that stimulated the growth of their coats, and the summer that caused them to shed. Cedar and stinging nettles, bulrush heads, and fireweed fluff all provide fibres that grow only with the aid of the sun, the soil, and the rain. Whalebone gives oil to treat the wool. The river brings water for dyes made of copper or Old Man’s Beard, and a child’s urine fixes the colour. Ducks or eagles give feathers or down. A human adult spins, and a tree gives a piece of wood for the spindle.134 All are brought together by the hands of the weaver. Through such networks, weaving and related practices like cedar coiling offer insight into the reality that, as Ingold would have it, “persons and things do not exist as bounded entities, set aside from their surroundings, but rather arise, each as a nexus of creative growth and development within an unbounded and continually unfolding field of relations.”135 From this perspective, to come into personhood is to be a participant in a field of interactions with the environment, both human and non-human, and subjectivity is a matter of the affordances and possibilities the world provides. Lorna Williams says as much from her Lil’wat context: “How you learn selfhood is in relation to everything. You can’t grow it on your own. You have to be really grounded.”136 In this vein, it makes sense that when Tracy Williams speaks of the importance of overcoming the segregation between entities that characterizes modern life, she frames her comments in terms of the land’s ability to heal its human interlocutors. Fullness of personhood

belongs to those who enter fully into relation with their world: those who take the time to listen to the trees, to be along with them, and thus come to a greater understanding of their specific place within the meshwork that is life. Williams’s Squamish perspective is not dissimilar to Ingold’s description of Ojibwe thought: The world of this “animic” understanding is home to innumerable beings whose presence is manifested in this form or that, each engaged in the project of forging a life in the way peculiar to its kind. But in order to live, every such being must constantly draw upon the vitality of others. A complex network of reciprocal interdependence, based on the give and take of substance, care and vital force – the latter often envisaged as one or several kinds of spirit or soul – extends throughout the cosmos, linking human, animal, and all other forms of life. Within this network, the generation of animate form in any one region necessarily entails dissolution in another. Vitality must be surrendered here so that it may be reconstituted there. For this reason, no form is ever permanent; indeed the transience or ephemerality of form is necessary if the current of life is to keep on flowing. All of existence is suspended in this flow. Borne along in the current, beings meet, merge and split apart again, each taking with them something of the other. Thus life, in the animic ontology, is not an emanation but a generation of being, in a world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual.137

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It is extremely tempting to slot Carr smoothly into this perspective, for terms such as “flow of life,” “transience,” and “ephemerality of form” are precisely suited to her late, gestural production, with its dialogic shimmer and flux. The suitability of Ingold’s language, so readily applicable to these paintings, is further reinforced by corresponding passages in Carr’s journal: “It seems as if those shimmering seas can scarcely bear a hand’s touch. That which moves across the water is but scarcely a happening, hardly even as solid a thing as a thought, for you can follow a thought. It’s more like a breath, involuntary and alive, coming, going, always there but impossible to hang on to. Oh gee whiz! I want to get that thing.”138 Thing. It is the one word that jars with Ingold’s (and Williams’s) account, and ultimately it is this word that will reinsert the rupture of cultural difference into the transcultural comparison I have been at pains to construct. It is a word that cannot be ignored, however, for it crops up over and over again in Carr’s efforts to articulate to herself the very core of her project. 28 January 1931: “How bad I want that nameless thing! … always the thing must be top in your thoughts.”139 17 June 1932: “What is that vital thing the woods contains, possess, that you want … Why do you go back and back to

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Emily Carr, Strait of Juan de Fuca, c. 1936.

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the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to just find it?”140 1 December 1936: “Oh, I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up … and sing – Harmony of Life.”141 Carr’s emphasis on the thingly property of life is a legacy of the broad currents of vitalism that pervaded the creative and intellectual world of the early twentieth century. As Frances Slaney has delineated, some of the most important figures in Carr’s aesthetic development were steeped in traditions of European vitalism. J.D. Fergusson, Carr’s teacher in France, was an enthusiastic proponent of Henri Bergson, and Marius Barbeau, her early champion in eastern Canada, had been educated in a domesticated variety of Bergsonian thought at Oxford. While it is unlikely that Carr ever read Bergson’s comments about an élan vital or knew of his views about art’s purpose of regaining “the intention of life,” it is clear from her journal that she did partake in a popular vitalist understanding of a life-force that was infused into all organisms.142 The basic tenor of this belief is in keeping with Indigenous basketry traditions on the Northwest Coast. “Baskets were used to sustain life,” comments Haida weaver Isabel Rorick. “It makes sense that they have the power of life.”143 But there is a key difference. In Carr’s rhetoric, the power of life is thingly – sometimes an “essence,” occasionally even a “substance.”144 Rorick’s words, by contrast, suggest that at least part of a basket’s power of life stems from the circumstances of its use. Thus while in Carr’s

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discourse animacy (like consciousness and personhood) is a property, in Rorick’s context it is linked to the positioning of entities in a field of relations. Debra Sparrow’s diagnosis of the root of Carr’s chronic dissatisfaction is apposite: “She can’t see the forest for the trees; she can’t see what’s between them.”145 And dissatisfaction there was: “Seems to me a large part of painting is longing,” Carr concluded towards the end of her life.146 For Carr, intent on looking for “the thing” that could satisfy desire, desire was bound, in truly Lacanian fashion, never to find satiety. As much as her sense of a life force, it is, I believe, this insatiable desire that energizes her late canvases; the restless energy of their movement registers her constant striving. It is a quality that Lorna Williams perceives in Carr’s writing. “There’s a tone in her of separation. That’s something we wouldn’t feel. You don’t see that in our baskets.”147 Indeed, you do not. In Salish basketry, Carr’s gestural idiosyncrasy gives way to regularity, and constant movement is supplanted by balance. The energy of the two forms of cultural production is entirely different. In place of Carr’s longing for an ecstasy of union with an unknown thing, baskets exude the calmness of their makers’ acts of being in relation with the world. The comparative presence and absence of relational processes of all sorts is, indeed, a significant axis of difference between Carr’s art and Salish basketry. Whereas basketmakers typically harvest their materials themselves and process them with care, Carr purchased her paint and turpentine from the hardware store. Basketmakers, likewise, come to their knowledge of the natural world relationally and in community – both with the family members who are often their teachers, and through long personal experience of botanical life cycles and the material properties of roots, bark, or grass. The sustainable ecological practices that First Nations basketmakers employ to maintain and enhance the land and its resources are, Nancy Turner observes, “derived from generations of experimentation and observation, leading to an understanding of complex ecological and physical principles.”148 Such knowledge is deeply situated. Throughout the 1930s, by contrast, Carr’s encounters with trees, ocean, and forest were hard-won hiatuses from her urban existence in Victoria. She took to her caravan for a few weeks a year, plopped herself down in a place she didn’t know, and subsisted on tinned food from the grocery store while she looked and made objects to be looked at. But vision is the most distancing of our senses.149 Basketmakers, on the other hand, made beautiful objects that were meant to be used as well as looked at. There is an everyday quality to the interaction here that is thus quite different from what Carr experienced. Indeed, many Salish people lived and continue to live with and through plants to a greater extent than the majority of their Euro-Canadian counterparts – Sophie Frank’s dependence on the grocery store notwithstanding. To this day, subsistence gathering, fishing, and hunting continue

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to form a significant part of Salish economic and social systems. Like that of her sister Monica, Frank’s knowledge of the land would have been as much through its uses as through its appearance. The sisters knew how the plantain leaf would calm a bee sting, and how the salmonberry would relieve nausea.150 Such knowledge is deeply relational. The ramifications of Carr’s propensity to think in terms of things, substances, and essences rather than processes and relations are extensive. Her longing for unity notwithstanding, she was – as her critics have sensed – dogged by a particularly acute case of the subject-object split, and it manifested itself in her sense of isolation. Selfhood, as Carr experienced it, was “an awfully lonesome affair”:

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You can live close against other people yet your lives never touch. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone, yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming. Your mother loves you like the deuce while you are coming. Wrapped up there under her heart is perhaps the coziest time in existence. Then she and you are one – companions. At death again hearts loosen and realities peep out, but [through] all the intervening years of living something shuts you up in a “yourself shell.” You can’t break through and get out; nobody can break through and get in. If there was an instrument strong enough to break the “self shells” and let out the spirit it would be grand.151

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For Carr, subjectivity was intrinsically isolating and oppositional; over and over again she bolstered her sense of self by cultivating her difference from others: from society ladies, intellectuals, critics, the English, and (most odious of all) her lodgers. When this strategy put her at a disadvantage in her search for oneness with the world, the only thing she could think to do was to attempt to put herself aside. “The forgetting of oneself is the only way,”152 she wrote in 1934. “To paint one must make the supreme effort. I mean the effort of emptying oneself, the effort of abandonment.”153 Personality, for Carr, was what needed to be moved past so that one might hear the world. By contrast, Lorna Williams emphasizes that amongst Lil’wat weavers, attunement to the world comes in conjunction with a real sense of self: “In our world, before a child is born there’s a real care around identity and sense of self. This lasts all the way through life. For example, we take great care around naming ceremonies. Your name is really important to the development of your unique self through your attachment to your ancestors and the world.”154 Again, the message is clear: personhood is attained relationally. Likewise, to Tracy Williams, Carr’s efforts to put the ego aside in order to better experience the world are distinctly foreign: “I just don’t think like that,” Williams says. “I don’t see myself as separate from the earth. I am part of it. I look at the grass and I see dye. If you look at yourself

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as part of the world, then putting yourself ‘aside’ doesn’t make any sense. You have to be present to the world to get the benefit of it.”155 To heal the breach that she felt between herself and the world, Carr placed her faith in “Mother Nature.” In this she was not alone. In fact, her sense of the ontological potential of Nature (with a capital N) is exemplary of perceptions of the environment in post-Romantic western culture. As literary scholar Timothy Morton has observed, “The ‘thing’ we call nature becomes, in the Romantic period and afterward, a way of healing what modern society has damaged.”156 Like aesthetics itself, Nature in the post-Romantic period is thought of as a source of renewed connection between subject and object, self and world. And yet within mainstream western traditions, this idea of Nature is itself an artifact of the divide produced by the separation of self from world. Ingold sums up the conventional wisdom nicely: “There exists on the one hand a real world ‘out there’, customarily called nature, whose forms and composition are given quite independently of human presence, and on the other hand a world of ideas or mental representations, which bears a relation of only partial correspondence to this external reality.”157 Thus it transpires that we have set nature up “as a reified thing in the distance, under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild.”158 The tragic bind that besets artists and poets of Nature – and we should number Carr among these – is that in their attempt to recapture wholeness, they resort to a concept of Nature that is part and parcel of that which they are attempting to overcome. Sophie Frank, by contrast, spoke a Salishan mother tongue that had no word for “nature.”159 Weaver Susan Pavel, who learned her craft from Twana elder Bruce Subiyay Miller, articulates its impact in these terms: “You know, there’s something not quite right in the language of being connected with ‘nature.’ It’s not that I am unconnected from nature, it is that I am part of nature, so that I don’t see nature and me as separate and needing connection. We are together already.”160 Pavel is clear on a further point as well: to be “together already” is in no way to imply that everything merges together in some kind of a blur, where homogeneity reigns. Rather, “I am this unique entity over here. Nobody is just like me, or like you, or like him, or this table, or this cup. So there’s the all that is, and then there’s our unique position inside of that. The teachings from the tree people, for example, would be that that cedar tree is honouring itself as an entity and living its fullness and being its own creation. It is our example of how to be in the world. How do I conduct myself like that? I honour my gifts. I honour what I am.”161 The notion of positioning is crucially important here, for it sustains difference within the meshwork that unites entities. The notion is ultimately a powerful response to the critique that perception of the immersion of all life within a unifying field obstructs an ethical recognition of difference.162

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Still, it is not the difference to be found within relationality that basketry best exemplifies. Neither is it a holistic oneness. Rather, what is so extraordinary about basketry as a means of approach to these kinds of ontological concerns is the way that it concretizes discussion of relationality. As a process where maker and material come together in an intimate familiarity and sensuous engagement, basketry offers insight about what is entailed in being in relation. The genesis of a basket is the gradual unfolding of a field of forces that is, as Ingold notes, “neither internal to the material nor internal to the practitioner (hence external to the material); rather, it cuts across the emergent interface between them.”163 Cedar rises to the maker in a way, meeting her coilings and tensions with its own exertions of force. The complex interface that a coiled basket creates is, moreover, formally contiguous with this processual imbrication of maker and material, in that even basic modes of separation, such as inside/outside, are frustrated by the basket’s structure, for the surface of the roots that basketmakers wrap around the inner coil of roots or slats perpetually traverse the interior and exterior surfaces of the basket, alternating between them. Indeed, for Ingold, “it is in the nature of weaving, as a technique, that it produces a peculiar kind of surface that does not, strictly speaking, have an inside and an outside at all.”164 If we place his observations within the broader analysis of life itself as a relational mode rather than a property, this discussion offers another, secular way of thinking about the traditional Salish attitudes towards life. The growth of a basket, Ingold argues, is much like the generation of life, an autopoietic “transformation over time of the system of relations within which an organism or artefact comes into being”; through this self-creating transformation, “the temporal rhythms of life are gradually built into the structural properties of things.”165 Carr, one suspects, knew all about this kind of connection. The gestural markings of her canvases, their movements and changes, suggest that she had such a connection with her paint. She pressed and caressed; it responded. And with it she succeeded in forging relations where she failed with words and concepts. Thus, in a profound and interesting way, paint was Carr’s own natural environment. Locked in an understanding of “Nature” that segregated things produced by human beings from those spontaneously occurring in the world, however, it is unlikely that she would have consciously recognized this. For Carr, it seems fairly clear, paint was of the hardware store, not of the natural world she so loved. To her it was only the vehicle through which she conducted her most intimate intercourse with her environment. In view of this, her late paintings, with their balance of gesture and liquidity, of painterly action and material reaction, thrustings and stillnesses, are even more remarkable, as fully achieved realizations of her project of being with her environment, parallel in their own way to the twistings and twinings of the basketmaker’s art.

FIgs. 6.30–6.31 A coiled cedar basket by an unidentified woman (with detail). 

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“Landscape Has Never Been an Innocent Word”

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What then emerges from the project of assessing the intersections between the relation to the land embodied in Sophie Frank’s basketry, and the work of one of Canada’s most famous landscape artists? Most criticism of Carr’s representation of nature has focused on its expressionism and found fault with her projection of herself onto a natural world that she nevertheless pretended to know in its truth. Such an analysis, however, works best if we assume the existence of a gap between people and their environment. Perhaps the lesson of basketry is to show us otherwise. Carr’s late landscapes are unabashedly subjective expressions; their gestural rhythms mark the presence of the artist in every fluid brushstroke. Baskets, likewise, encode their makers, who weave themselves into the objects they create, often developing a signature style that distinguishes their own baskets from another’s.166 But this personal involvement is not a failure of objectivity, as Carr’s critics have implicitly had it. It is not a kind of blindness to some reality “out there” waiting for someone to be true to it. To the extent that Carr’s relation to nature was unsatisfactory (and Carr, to be sure, was never quite satisfied in it), the problem lay in the entirely opposite direction: in her culturally and historically located inability to sustain the insight that sometimes came to her, that world and self are always already together. That insight is currently captivating humanities scholarship in Europe and North America, where efforts to blur the sharp divide between people and things have latterly assumed a variety of guises, from Donna Haraway’s cyborg to Bruno Latour’s actants and Deleuze and Guattari’s becominganimal.167 And if, in the wake of such analysis, human subjects are no longer sovereign beings, neither are objects the dumb and inert entities that once they were. Rather, western scholarly attention is increasingly being drawn towards a shifting interplay of dynamic forces that exceed their concretion in either subject or object form. And as it arrives at these conclusions, it is being met by the information that Indigenous people have always already been there – or at least somewhere very nearby.168 Once again, with the vibrant entry of Indigenous scholarship to the Academy and Indigenous curators to the galleries, western thinkers are presented with an opportunity to better understand Indigenous cultures and, through this, to critically rethink their own. The utility of this kind of cross-cultural analysis to Indigenous people and priorities is a matter for Indigenous scholars to decide. From a settler perspective, however, its implications extend to one of Canadian art history’s founding frames of reference: the wilderness construct. From Lawren Harris’s time onwards, this interpretative frame has mediated Carr’s landscape production, and latterly it has been subjected to considerable critique, revealed as an industrial-era fantasy born of the colonizing project and divested of intellectual credibility. In their edited collection Beyond

Nature and Personhood for Emily Carr and Sewinchelwet

Wilderness, John O’Brian and Peter White have assembled a portrait of Canadian art writing as it has struggled against the conceptual inheritance of wilderness bequeathed to it by Harris and the Group of Seven. One of the things to emerge most clearly from their book is the extent to which efforts to dismantle the wilderness legacy have been almost uniformly grounded in an exploration of human agency. “Landscape has never been an innocent word,” O’Brian reminds us, and the critical reassessment of its effects “has proceeded as an investigation of social relationships within it.”169 In response to the hypostatization of nature, then, Canadian cultural analysis has opted for a hefty dose of human intervention. Where once stood only the windswept peaks of the Rocky Mountains, now run the rails of the CPR and reminders of the Chinese workers who laid them. The recalibration has been imperative. But perhaps it is no longer enough to halt our analysis there, for it begins to seem that the task of identifying “the wilderness” as a cultural creation has only provided another opportunity to reassert the importance of human concerns and pitfalls. When an earlier generation of Canadian art historians looked at images of forests or riverbanks, they were often inclined to see facture or stylistic development. The current generation, by contrast, is likely to see the history of colonial conquest and the impact of Algoma Steel. In both instances, however, it might be argued that we have risked losing sight of the very rivers, trees, and lakes around us. Now, as those rivers, trees, and lakes are irrevocably altered by climate change, species extinction, and the destruction of ecosystems, the need to reconceptualize our relation to the world around us is pressing. While the notion of “wilderness” is no longer likely to be of any assistance in the endeavour, the attempt to kill it off by overprivileging our cultural presence hardly seems preferable. Considered from the perspective of environmental degradation, the anthropocentrism of a wilderness critique that foregrounds human activity is apparent, and anthropocentrism is a luxury that we can increasingly ill afford. In the continually shifting equilibrium of our awareness, nature commands our attention once again. How shall Canadian art history respond? In different ways, and to differing extents, the paintings of Emily Carr and the baskets of Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) suggest answers to this question, providing us with opportunities to be attentive to the bonds between the human and non-human aspects of existence in a way that neither privileges the human sphere nor repudiates it. In this manner, the art of both women facilitates an extension of the wilderness critique beyond a reinscription of the social, right through to the very dichotomy between nature and culture that subtends it, and in so doing it also helps us think again about the meaning of the self.

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CODA Coda In their 2015 exhibition catalogue The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artists, curators Alicia Boutilier and Tobi Bruce offer a striking visual pairing. On the left is Marion Long’s Self-Portrait of the Artist in Her Studio. Unsigned and perhaps unfinished, it is thought to date from the 1930s. On the right is an untitled photograph by Margaret Watkins (1884–1969), informally known as Self-Portrait and Shadows, taken in the middle of the same decade (figs. 7.1–7.2). Both images are troublesome self-representations, each in its own way echoing the words with which this book began: “I’m not myself at all.” The dynamic of subjective noncorrespondence that has been my theme across these six chapters thus finds a final articulation here, in a visual comparison that mirrors the twopart structure of this book – the first, a reflection on the impediments that have hindered women’s attainment of fully integrated subjectivities, the second, a meditation on the strictures of identity and an exploration of forces that might unsettle and realign the self. Marion Long’s visual tone poem in turquoise and grey makes visible the first set of considerations. Adopting the classic pose of the artist at her easel, Long uses her self-portrait as an opportunity to insert herself into a pictorial tradition that has had particular appeal for women. From Sofonisba Anguissola to Gabrielle Münter, Judith Leyster to Laura Knight and Emily Carr, female artists have used this trope to affirm their creative identities in the face of a representational tradition that would more readily

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position them as models. In modernist fashion, Long pushes at the intrinsic self-referentiality of the device by emphasizing her portrait’s doubled existence, once as the picture plane and again as the easel painting within its illusionistic space; a splash of turquoise informs us that the self-portrait we are looking at is the very one she has shown herself to be painting. Yet when it comes to the manifest depiction of self, Long has deferred the moment of reckoning, or perhaps demurred from it, blocking in her facial features but then obscuring them under a wash of ochre and grey. Possibly she was not satisfied with her initial attempt. Although a capable portraitist, Long would not have been the first painter to run into difficulties with the prospect of giving material form to her sense of self. A pencil inscription (one not made by the artist) on the back of the panel notes that the work is unsigned and concludes that it is unfinished. The question of when an artwork is finished remains an openended one, however, and during the modern period artists increasingly recognized and embraced the power of unresolved and unfinalized works as a means of making their creative thought processes visible.1 The mute eloquence of the obscured face was one that Long had puzzled through before (see fig. 5.8), and in view of this practice, it seems possible that the blankness of her portrait may also have been a deliberate choice – if not one intended from the outset, then perhaps one preserved in recognition of something that it captured. As Janice Anderson has pointed out, Long effaced her professional identity in numerous ways over the course of her career, listing no occupation when the census-takers came around and depicting her studio as a domestic environment rather than a space of creative labour.2 When, in the 1930s, she finally sat down to claim her artistic agency on canvas, it seems that she could not do it, even though her professional attainments were by then beyond all doubt.3 Whether Long’s self-effacement was a preservation of privacy or a sign of the wracking selfdoubt so common amongst high-achieving women, the result is the same: the self-portrait she gives us fails to register her presence fully. This failure, moreover, is felt as such. Self-identity here is something unachieved – a hoped-for outcome either abandoned in process or recognized as unattainable from the outset. In this, the portrait’s subjective non-correspondence speaks to the larger phenomenon of human identity as beset by absences, gaps, and displacements. Whether it is experienced as a dissonant imposition from outside, or as an internalized dream of unfractured self-attainment, identity on this reckoning is a failed project. And yet Long’s painting is beautiful, and she never over-painted it, despite an ongoing professional practice in which the need for stretched canvases was ever-present. In part, its beauty is that of the existential struggle itself. The work of the first part of this book has been to pull out the factors that particularized that struggle, both as it was experienced and registered by female artists living in Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as it remains relevant

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FIg. 7.1 Marion Long, Self Portrait of the Artist in Her Studio, c. 1930–40.

FIg. 7.2 (opposite) Margaret Watkins, Self-Portrait and Shadows, c. 1935.

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today. Inasmuch as it registers a lack of fit between the self and the narratives of identity available to it, the blankness of Long’s self-portrait is a symptom, akin to the absences that haunt the portrait of Demasduit, the displacements that characterize the scenes of Frances Anne Hopkins, or the gaps that nuance the idylls of Helen McNicoll. It is very much otherwise in Margaret Watkins’s Self-Portrait and Shadows.4 For while the question of intrasubjective “fit” remains significant here, its absence no longer registers as lack but becomes the creative wellspring of the image. At issue is the seeming disjunction between Watkins’s vantage point as photographer, stationed above the stairs, and that of her shadow, which appears to mount them from below. The illusion recedes if one imagines the artist taking her photograph from an upper landing with

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a light source much higher still behind her, but while it lasts, the effect of perspectival disorientation is engrossing. Like a still from a film noir tale of mistaken identity, the photograph embraces strangeness to self as a creative force, a source of ingenuity and invention. Beckoning viewers to imagine the ways in which its effect of subjective non-correspondence might have been achieved, Watkins’s self-portrait is also an invitation to revel in

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the possibility of a subject that is both interior and exterior to itself. It is, above all, this broadening of the self beyond the strictures of identity that the essays in the second half of this book have sought to elicit and engage. Whether through an emphasis on diversity, on the intersubjective inclinations of maternal reverie, or on the reconfiguration of personhood itself as the product of a field of relations, my concern in these latter chapters has been to see women’s art as an agent for the expansion, dissolution, and reconfiguration of identity in its gestures of self-becoming. The project of a feminist history of art in Canada is, I consider, well served by both undertakings. If the task of feminist scholarship does indeed lie in a realignment of the forces that have constrained women, it is important to identify these factors, learning to recognize their effects on creative production, but also to look beyond them to other forces and the ways of understanding that they produce. To balance the rigours of critique with more expansive and generous interpretive acts has thus been a structuring consideration of this volume. At times I have strayed quite far from the gender-based analysis that is feminism’s hallmark, but this too is ultimately one of feminism’s objectives: to enable women to live lives in which gender does not constrain and limit the understandings of subjects that are possible. The art made by women in Canada is a rich resource for the cultivation of such understandings, as the products of women’s creative labour then continue to act as a spark to our creative thinking now. It is just such creativity that is required if we are to think beyond our current limitations. In looking closely at art made by women in Canada, we gain access to a record of sensing subjects entering into relations with their world, and we open ourselves to the possibility that we might do likewise with fresh eyes.

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0.1 Unidentified photographer, portrait of Mary Anne Scrimes-Graham [?], c. 1852–53. Daguerreotype, 9.5 × 8.0 × 0.5 cm (with casing). Collection of Jennifer McKendry, Kingston. Photo courtesy of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre 2 1.1 Henrietta Martha Hamilton, portrait of Demasduit (Mary March), 1819. Watercolour on ivory, 7.5 × 6.5 cm. Library and Archives Canada (LAC ), Ottawa, acc. no 1977-14-1, C-087698. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 28 1.2 Henrietta Martha Hamilton, portrait of Demasduit (Mary March) (detail), 1819. Watercolour on ivory. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1977-14-1, C -087698. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 32 1.3 Henrietta Martha Hamilton, portrait of Demasduit (Mary March) (detail), 1819. Watercolour on ivory. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1977-14-1, C -087698. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 33 1.4 Henrietta Martha Hamilton, portrait of Demasduit (Mary March) (detail), 1819. Watercolour on ivory. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1977-14-1, C -087698. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 33 1.5 William Gosse, A Female Red Indian from Newfoundland, 1841. Watercolour on paper, 13.0 × 10.3 cm. The Rooms Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Provincial Museum Division Collections, St John’s,

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acc. no. 2003.715. Photo courtesy of The Rooms 35 Bernard Lens III, Oh Nee Yeath Ton No Rion, 1710. Watercolour and bodycolour with graphite on vellum, 9.0 × 7.0 cm (oval). British Museum, London, 1840, acc. no. 1212.35. Photo copyright The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 37 Unidentified artist, Mary March, Red Indian or Boeothick from Newfoundland, 1895, from P. Tocque, Kaleidoscope Echoes (1895). Photo: Digital Image and Slide Collection, Concordia University, Montreal 38 Shanawdithit, Sketch II , The Taking of Mary March on the North Side of the Lake, 1829. Lead pencil on paper, 28.0 × 43.0 cm. The Rooms Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Provincial Museum Division Collections, St John’s, acc. no. VIIIA -556. Photo courtesy of The Rooms 40 Shanawdithit, attr., Sketch XII , drawing of a room in perspective, n.d. Ink on paper, 20 × 16 cm. Howley Family papers, Coll 262, 6.01.015, Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University. Photo courtesy of Memorial University 42 Henrietta Martha Hamilton, Newfoundland sketch on birchbark, n.d. Watercolour on birch bark, 15.9 × 22.2 cm. Unlocated. Photo: Sotheby’s, Important Canadian Art, 6 November 1991 45

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1.11 Mary Ann Knight, Captain Norton, Teyoninhokar’awen, a Chief of the Mohawks, One of the Five Nations of Upper Canada, 1805. Watercolour and gouache with touches of varnish on ivory, 9.2 × 7.3 cm (oval). LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1984-119-1, e010933319. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 46 1.12 Shanawdithit, miniature canoe, 1826. Root sinew, spruce, birch bark, 14.0 × 54.0 × 16.7 cm. National Maritime Museum, acc. no. AAe 0190. Photo © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 47 1.13 The backing paper for Henrietta Martha Hamilton’s miniature of Demasduit (1819), from an 1815 newspaper advertisement. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1977-14-1. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 49 1.14 Shanawdithit, Sketch III , Captain Buchan Carries the Body of Mary March, in January 1820, 1829. As reproduced by J.P. Howley in The Beothucks or Red Indians (1915). Photo courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library 51 2.1 Frances Anne Hopkins, Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior, 1869. Oil on canvas, 68.6 × 121.9 cm. Glenbow, Calgary, acc. no. 55.8.1. Photo courtesy of the Glenbow 64 2.2 Frances Anne Hopkins, Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall, 1869. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 152.4 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989-401-1, C -002771. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 64 2.3 Frances Anne Hopkins, The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls, 1877. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 152.4 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989-400-1, C -002775. In Memory of Viscount Wolsely. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 68 2.4 Frances Anne Hopkins, The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls (detail), 1877. Oil on canvas. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989-400-1, C-002775. In Memory of Viscount Wolsely. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 68 2.5 Frances Anne Hopkins, The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls (detail), 1877. Oil on canvas. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989-400-1, C-002775. In Memory of Viscount Wolsely.

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Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 68 Frances Anne Hopkins, Shooting the Rapids, 1879. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 152.4 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989-401-2, C -002774. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 69 Unidentified engraver, Edward William Watkin, Esq., M.P. for Stockport, from the Illustrated London News, 23 July 1864. Photo courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library 70 Frances Anne Hopkins, Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall (detail), 1869. Oil on canvas. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989401-1, C -002771. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 71 William Notman, Mrs. Edward (Frances Anne) Hopkins, artist, Montreal, QC 1863, 1863. Silver salts on paper mounted on paper – albumen process, 8.0 × 5.0 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal, acc. no. I-8274.1. Photo courtesy of the McCord Museum 71 Anna Jameson, Voyage down Lake Huron, in a Canoe, Augt. 1837, 1837. Proof etching, grey wash, heightened with gouache, and pen and ink ruled border, on gray wove paper, 13.3 × 20.9 cm. Royal Ontario Museum, acc. no. 960.176.10. Photo with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © RoM 76 Frances Anne Hopkins, Timber Raft, Quebec, c. 1868. Watercolour and gouache over graphite, 39.0 × 56.2 cm. Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. R 9266-278, C -150716. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 77 Frances Anne Hopkins, Parliament Buildings, Ottawa, 1867. Transparent watercolour, opaque oil and graphite, 36.2 × 55.3 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift from the Canadian Club Classic Fund, purchased with the assistance of the Government of Canada through the Cultural Property Export and Import Act, 1989, acc. no. 89/86. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 77 Frances Anne Hopkins, Sketching on Île Dorval, from The Lachine Sketchbook (1859– 60), 1860. Graphite on wove paper, 17.9 ×

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3.3 Helen McNicoll, The Chintz Sofa, c. 1913. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 99.1 cm. Reproduced by permission of the owner. Private collection, Toronto. Photo: Art Canada Institute 110 3.4 Helen McNicoll, Under the Shadow of the Tent, 1914. Oil on canvas, 83.5 × 101.2 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, acc. no. 1915.122. Gift of Mr and Mrs David McNicoll. Photo: Brian Merrett, courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 112 3.5 Helen McNicoll, Fishing, c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 87.6 × 101.0 cm. Private collection, Acton. Photo: Carlo Catenazzi, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 113 3.6 Helen McNicoll, A Welcome Breeze, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 61.0 cm. Private collection. Photo courtesy of Heffel Fine Art Auction House 114 3.7 Laura Knight, The Beach, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 127.6 × 153.2 cm. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-on-Tyne, acc. no. twCMS : C 651. Photo copyright Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums/Bridgeman Images 116 3.8 Open page of Helen McNicoll’s scrapbook, c. 1900. Private collection, Acton. Photo: the author 119 3.9 Harold Knight, Chintz, c. 1909–12, from The Studio, vol. 57, 1912. Photo courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal 121 3.10 Helen McNicoll, The Open Door, c. 1913. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm. Private collection, Toronto. Photo: Carlo Catenazzi, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 122 3.11 Harold Knight, Mending Stockings, c. 1909– 12, from The Studio, vol. 57, 1912. Photo courtesy of University of Toronto Libraries 123 3.12 Helen McNicoll, Beneath the Trees, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 60.0 × 49.5 cm. McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, acc. no. 1995.30.1. Photo courtesy of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection 124 3.13 Helen McNicoll, Minding Baby, c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 51.0 × 61.0 cm. Private collection, Toronto. Photo: Carlo Catenazzi, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 125 3.14 Open page of Helen McNicoll’s scrapbook, c. 1900. Private collection, Acton. Photo: Carlo Catenazzi, Art Gallery of Ontario 126

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26.4 cm. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, acc. no. 961.219.1.36. Photo with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © RoM 78 Frances Anne Hopkins, Woman in a Field, 1904. Watercolour and gouache on card, 21.6 × 33.0 cm. Private collection. Photo courtesy of Heffel Fine Art Auction House 82 Frances Anne Hopkins, Voyageurs at Dawn, 1871. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 161.1 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989-401-3, C -002773. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 83 Frances Anne Hopkins, Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall (detail), 1869. Oil on canvas. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1989401-1, C -002771. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 87 Frances Anne Hopkins, Stern Paddler, n.d. Oil on canvas, 29.0 × 44.2 cm. Collection of Mr D. Stewart, Vancouver. Photo courtesy of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery 93 Frances Anne Hopkins, Minnehaha Feeding the Birds, c. 1880. Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 99.4 cm. Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul, acc. no. AV 1990.32.3. Photo courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society 96 Frances Anne Hopkins, Relics of the Primaeval Forest, Canada, 1885. Oil on canvas, 107.0 × 152.5 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, purchased with the assistance of the Government of Canada through the Cultural Property Export and Import Act, 1989, acc. no. 89/90. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 97 Frances Anne Hopkins, Left to Die, 1872. Oil on canvas, 86.1 × 151.7 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1986-28-1, C -126820. This acquisition was made possible by a contribution from the Government of Canada under the terms of the Cultural Property and Import Act. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 97 Mary Hiester Reid, Flowers, 1897. Oil on canvas, 20.3 × 30.5 cm. Photo courtesy of Heffel Fine Art Auction House 105 Helen McNicoll, The Blue Sea (On the Beach at St. Malo), c. 1914. Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 61.0 cm. Private collection. Photo courtesy of Heffel Fine Art Auction House 108

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3.15 Helen McNicoll, In the Shadow of the Tree, c. 1914. Oil on canvas, 100.4 × 82.6 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase, acc. no. 1951.140. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac, MNBAQ 128 3.16 Helen McNicoll, In the Shadow of the Tree (detail), c. 1914. Oil on canvas. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, acc. no. 1951.140. Photo: Jean-Guy Kérouac, MNBAQ 129 3.17 Helen McNicoll, Tea Time, c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 63.0 × 52.0 cm. Private collection, Toronto. Photo: Carlo Catenazzi, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 130 3.18 Helen McNicoll, Interior, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 45.9 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, purchased 1976, acc. no. 75/100. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 132 3.19 Helen McNicoll, The Victorian Dress, c. 1914. Oil on canvas, 107.1 × 92.0 cm. Art Gallery of Hamilton, gift of A. Sidney Dawes, M.C., 1958, acc. no. 58.87.Q . Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Hamilton 133 3.20 Henry Herbert La Thangue, A Provençal Stream, c. 1903. Oil on canvas, 76.0 × 85.0 cm. Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, West Yorkshire, uk , acc. no. BRA 1128508. Photo copyright Bradford Art Galleries and Museums/Bridgeman Images 136 4.1 Sophie Pemberton, untitled drawing of a lily, 1958. Pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 16.0 × 11.5 cm. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, acc. no. SC 1226.1-60. Gift of George and Lola Kidd. Photo courtesy of Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 148 4.2 Sophie Pemberton, Lilium parviflorum, 1895. Watercolour on paper, 34.6 × 24.8 cm. British Columbia Archives, Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, acc. no. PDP 00981. Photo courtesy of the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives 150 4.3 Unidentified artist, Eureka – Buttercupus!, n.d. Ink on paper, 16.5 × 12.7 cm. Collection of Catherine Munn Smith, Calgary. Photo courtesy of Glenbow Archives 153 4.4 Convallaria bifola, herbarium specimen collected by Harriet Sheppard at her home near

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Sillery, QC , in June 1825. Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris. Photo: Jacques Cayouette, Vascular Plant Herbarium (DAo ), Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa 154 Marion Moodie, orchid [Galearis rotundifolia], n.d. Watercolour on paper, 14.2 × 10.3 cm. Collection of Catherine Munn Smith, Calgary. Photo courtesy of Glenbow Archives 155 Faith Fyles, Principal Poisonous Plants of Canada: Bloodroot (Plate 18), 1920. Coloured lithograph, 16.5 × 24.8 cm. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada National Collection of Vascular Plants (DAo ), Ottawa, acc. no. FF0027. Photo courtesy of DAo 158 Sarah Lindley Crease, untitled botanical illustration, n.d. Woodblock print, 21.0 × 16.0 cm. Crease Family Fonds, British Columbia Archives, Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, acc. no. 199104-002, ref. no. PDP 08010. Photo courtesy of the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives 159 Maria Morris Miller, Wild Flowers of Nova Scotia: Asclepias Amcena vel Asclepias Syriaca. Indian Hemp – Milk Weed (Plate 6), 1840. Lithograph with watercolour on wove paper, 30.7 × 24.1 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, acc. no. 30717.6. Purchased 1990. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada 162 Agnes Marion Miller Ayre, Rhodora, n.d. Watercolour and ink on paper. Agnes Marion Ayre Herbarium Artwork, Centre for Newfoundland Studies, St John’s, 0519 FM, 21243. Photo courtesy of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University Libraries 164 Cover of Wild Flowers of Canada. Montreal Star, c. 1894. Photo courtesy of Jacques Cayouette, Agriculture and AgriFood Canada 165 Jane McCord, attr., untitled flower drawing with butterfly, c. 1869. Chromatic ink and gouache on rice paper mounted on paper, 21.1 × 32.0 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal, gift of the estate of Family McCord, acc. no. M 994X .5.272.1. Photo courtesy of the McCord Museum 166

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Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 175 Anne Ross McCord, Sarracenia purpurea, Hemmingford, Canada, 1851. Watercolour with bodycolour on paper, 37.5 × 27.0 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal, acc. no. M 1227. Photo courtesy of the McCord Museum 176 Maria Morris Miller, Wildflowers of Nova Scotia: Sarracenia purpurea, Indian Cup (Plate IV ), 1840. Coloured lithograph with watercolour on wove paper, 30.6 × 24.5 cm. Photo courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library 177 Agnes Fitzgibbon, Nymphaea odorata; Nuphar advena, c. 1867–68. Watercolour on paper, 32.5 × 23.5 cm. Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, Chamberlin Collection, MS Coll. 00112, box 5, folder 8, chamberlin_k_0232. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto 178 Agnes Fitzgibbon, Nymphaea odorata; Nuphar advena (detail), c. 1867–68. Watercolour on paper. Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, Chamberlin Collection, MS Coll. 00112, box 5, folder 8, chamberlin_k_0232. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto 178 Agnes Fitzgibbon, Canadian Wild Flowers: Nymphaea odorata; Nuphar advena (Plate 8), 1869. Hand-coloured lithograph, 36.5 × 27.0 cm. Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, Chamberlin Collection, MS Coll. 00112, chamberlin_a_0004. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto 179 Agnes Fitzgibbon, Canadian Wild Flowers: Nymphaea odorata; Nuphar advena (Plate 8, detail), 1869. Hand-coloured lithograph. Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, Chamberlin Collection, MS Coll. 00112, chamberlin_a_0004. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto 179 Lucy J. Goslee, Prunus Americana (Wild Red Plum), Amelanchier Canadensis (Shad Berry), Trientalis Americana (Star Flower), 1890–97. Oil on stiffened linen, 46.0 × 24.0 cm. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University

Illustrations

4.12 Cover of Mary Frary’s album, c. 1813. Leather, cardboard, paper, gold leaf, 24.7 × 20.0 × 1.7 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal, gift of Miss M. Gould., acc. no. M 925.1.1.1. Photo courtesy of the McCord Museum 167 4.13 Mary Frary, Guernsey Lily, c. 1813. Watercolour and graphite on paper, 24.1 × 18.4 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal, gift of Miss M. Gould, acc. no. M 925.1.1.14. Photo courtesy of the McCord Museum 167 4.14 Lucy Maud Montgomery, scrapbook page with lithographed and pressed flowers, 1894. Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, scrapbook CM 67.5.15, p. 3. Photo courtesy of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery 168 4.15 Emily Henrietta Woods, Cornus nuttallis, n.d. Watercolour on paper, 28.0 × 22.3 cm. British Columbia Archives, Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, acc. no. PDP 03949. Photo courtesy of British Columbia Archives 170 4.16 Mary Rebecca Wilkinson, Arrow Head, Sagittaria variabilis var. latifolis, c. 1868. Watercolour on paper, 23.1 × 36.9 cm. University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections, Fredericton, Mary Rebecca Wilkinson Fonds, MG H 197, Item 11. Photo courtesy of University of New Brunswick Archives 172 4.17 Unidentified lithographer, sheet music cover from Les Ressemblances, 1904. LAC , Ottawa, AMICuS no. 23147515, e011195428. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 173 4.18 Sophie Pemberton, Daffodils, 1897. Oil on canvas, 162.6 × 103.2 cm. British Columbia Archives, Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, acc. no. PDP 03664. Photo courtesy of the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives 173 4.19 Fanny Bayfield, Cypripedium spectabile or Lady’s Slipper, c. 1840–42. Watercolour on paper, 29.5 × 37.9 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1963-103-11, C -133309. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 175 4.20 Millicent Mary Chaplin, Cypripedium spectabile, Gay Lady’s Slipper, c. 1840–42. Watercolour on paper, 26.3 × 37.4 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1997-365-16, e010692313.

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of Toronto, MSS 09254, 36. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto 181 Mary Schäffer, Lonicera involucrata (Bracted Honeysuckle/Twinberry), c. 1890–1910. Watercolour and ink on paper, 25.0 × 17.5 cm. Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, acc. no. Scm.05.30, whyte.org. Photo courtesy of the Whyte Museum 183 Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen, Fragaria vesca, Strawberry Flower, Berry, June 1873. Watercolour on paper, 35.6 × 23.8 cm. University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections, Fredericton, Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen Fonds, MG H 13a, Item 44. Photo courtesy of University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections 186 Unidentified photographer, photograph of Sophie Pemberton at home, Pemberton family photograph album, n.d. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 188 Unidentified photographer, snapshot of a woman in a tree, Pemberton family photograph album, c. 1903–10. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 188 Annie Prat, stinkhorn, 26 August 1916. Watercolour on paper, 35.4 × 25.5 cm. Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, Prat, Starr Family Fonds, 1979-147, vol. 594, no. 25. Photo courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives 191 Annie Prat, beefsteak mushroom, n.d. Watercolour on paper, 35.3 × 25.3 cm. Nova Scotia Archives, Prat, Starr Family Fonds, 1979-147, vol. 594, no. 62. Photo courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives 191 Annie Prat, unidentified mushroom, 1 July 1915. Watercolour on paper, 33.0 × 25.0 cm. Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, Prat, Starr Family Fonds, 1979-147, vol. 594, no. 16. Photo courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives 191 Annie Prat, cup fungi, 5 July 1915. Watercolour on paper, 35.0 × 25.0 cm. Nova Scotia Archives, Prat, Starr Family Fonds, 1979-147, vol. 594, no. 17. Photo courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives 191

4.36 Annie Prat, Trailing Arbutus – ‘Mayflower’ – Nova Scotia’s Emblem / Snow-Berry Vine, 18 May 1926/May 1932. Watercolour on paper, 35.5 × 25.2 cm. Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, Prat, Starr Family Fonds, 1979-147, vol. 595, no. 37. Photo courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives 192 4.37 Mary Schäffer, Rubus parviflorus (Mountain Raspberry [Thimbleberry]), 15 September 1903. Watercolour and ink on paper, 25.5 × 17.0 cm. Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, acc. no. Sch.05.06 (19030315), whyte.org. Photo courtesy of the Whyte Museum 194 4.38 Geraldine Moodie, White Yellow Centres. Like Daird Woosters Dryas but the Leaves Are Not Serrated so Markedly – Nor Are They Quite as Large, c. 1906–09. Glass negative, 8.5 × 8.5 cm. Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, Chamberlin Collection, MS Coll. 00112, box 16. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto 196 4.39 Anne Ross McCord, Convalaria trifolia; Orchis fimbriata. Copied from Nature 18th June 1837 Temple Grove, 1837. Coloured ink and graphite on paper, 27.7 × 22.7 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal, gift of the estate of Miss Anne McCord, acc. no. M 10005. Photo courtesy of the McCord Museum 197 4.40 Mollie Adams, attr., Mary Schäffer crossing a makeshift bridge, c. 1907–11. Hand-coloured lantern slide, 10.0 × 8.0 cm. Mary Schäffer Fonds, V 527/PS 1-152, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, whyte.org. Photo courtesy of the Whyte Museum 200 5.1 Paul Peel, Mother Love, 1888. Oil on canvas, 148.5 × 119.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, acc. no. 87. Purchased 1905. Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Canada 208 5.2 Marion Long, Maternal Love, n.d. Oil on canvas, 28.7 × 21.6 cm. Rain family collection. Photo: Kayla Rocca 210 5.3 Florence Carlyle, Mother and Child, 1910. Oil on canvas, 86.4 × 71.1 cm. Private collection, Toronto. Photo courtesy of the owner 212 5.4 Florence Carlyle, The Moth, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 61.9 × 74.6 cm. McIntosh Gallery, Western University, London, oN . Bequest of

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5.15 Mary Bell, Twilight Reverie, 1890. Oil on canvas, 85.8 × 109.8 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1892, acc. no. 133. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada 232 5.16 Clara Hagarty, In the Window, 1909. Oil on canvas, 91.5 cm × 61.0 cm. City of Toronto Fine Art Collection, acc. no. A 75-69. Photo: The Market Gallery 233 5.17 Mary Bell, Happiness, c. 1892. Pastel and graphite on illustration board, 75.9 × 62.9 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1914, acc. no. 947. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada 236 5.18 Clara Hagarty, Asleep, c. 1914. Oil on canvas. Unlocated. Photo: Ontario Society of Artists, Catalogue of the Forty-Second Annual Open Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, 1914 240 6.1 Harold Mortimer-Lamb, Emily Carr in Her Studio (cropped), 1939. Gelatin silver print, 24.1 × 19 cm. Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives, Victoria, acc. no. 193501-001. Photo courtesy of Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives 246 6.2 Harold Mortimer-Lamb, Emily Carr in Her Studio, 1939. Negative, 6.8 × 6.0 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft. Photo courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery 247 6.3 Emily Carr, Salish Woman Weaving, c. 1909. Watercolour on paper, 29.0 × 23.7 cm. British Columbia Archives, Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, acc. no. 196104-001. Photo courtesy of the British Columbia Archives 248 6.4 Emily Carr, Sophie Frank, 1914. Watercolour on paper, 23.7 × 18.7 cm. Collection of Mrs Jane Williams. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 249 6.5 Emily Carr, Stumps and Sky, c. 1934. Oil on wove paper, 58.4 × 90.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, gift from the Douglas M. Duncan Collection, 1970, acc. no. 70/31. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario 252 6.6 Unidentified Squamish woman from North Vancouver, coiled basket, n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass, 44.0 × 21.0 × 15.0 cm. Royal British

Illustrations

Wilhelmina Morris McIntosh, 1940. Photo courtesy of the McIntosh Gallery 213 Florence Carlyle, The Studio, 1903. Oil on canvas, 88.9 × 53.3 cm. Private collection, Toronto. Photo courtesy of Frank Tancredi 214 Marion Long, The Fan, 1914. Oil on canvas, 41.6 × 32.1 cm. Art Gallery of Hamilton, gift of Dr J.S. Lawson, 1961, acc. no. 61.77.Q . Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Hamilton 217 Laura Muntz, Mother and Child, c. 1885. Watercolour on paper, 26.0 × 34.5 cm (image). Private collection, Toronto. Photo courtesy of Heffel Fine Art Auction House 218 Frederick Simpson Coburn, Mother Nursing Child, 1903. Oil on canvas, 65.0 × 81.0 cm. Newlands Coburn Collection, Sherbrooke Museum of Fine Arts, acc. no. 2001.2.48. Photo courtesy of the Sherbrooke Museum of Fine Arts 219 Laura Muntz, Protection, c. 1906, pastel on paper. Reproduced in the Canadian Magazine 37, no. 5 (September 1911). Photo courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto 221 Mary Riter Hamilton, Maternity, 1906. Oil on canvas, 71.1 × 96.5 cm. City of Thunder Bay Public Art Collection. Photo courtesy of the City of Thunder Bay 222 Laura Muntz, Mother and Child, c. 1895. Oil on wood panel, 21.1 × 27.0 cm. Art Gallery of Alberta collection, Edmonton, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 1975, acc. no. 68.6.56. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Alberta 225 Laura Muntz, Mother Reading to Her Baby, 1912. Oil on panel, 31.9 × 21.9 cm. Private collection. Photo: Joyner Fine Art Inc., Canadian Art, 7 December 1999 227 William Blair Bruce, Mother and Child (Giverny), 1887. Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 92.4 cm. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Bruce Memorial, 1914, acc. no, 14.19. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Hamilton 229 Mary Bell, Mother and Child, n.d. Coloured chalk drawing, 46.3 cm × 37.5 cm. Unlocated. Photo: Joyner Fine Art Inc., Canadian Art, 23 November 1993 230

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Columbia Museum, Victoria, cat. no. 11594. Photo courtesy of the Royal British Columbia Museum 253 Emily Carr, Grey, 1929–30. Oil on canvas, 106.7 × 68.9 cm. Private collection. Photo courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery 257 Emily Carr, Sunshine and Tumult, 1939. Oil on paper, 87.0 × 57.1 cm. Art Gallery of Hamilton, bequest of H.S. Southam, CMG, LL.D, 1966, acc. no. 66.56.192. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Hamilton 259 Emily Carr, A Chill Day in June, 1938–39. Oil on paper, 85.0 × 55.0 cm. Bequest of John and Katharine Maltwood, University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, acc. no. M964.1.111-1. Photo: Holly Cecil, courtesy of the UVic Legacy Art Galleries 263 P’elawk’wia (Margaret Baker), berry-picking basket, Squamish/Skxwú7mesh, c. 1910. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass. Private collection. All images courtesy of Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity 264 Map of Squamish territory. Photo: Khelsilem Rivers, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, modified by Katharine Stein and McGillQueen’s University Press 267 Sut’elut (Monica Williams), coiled basket, n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass. Private collection, Squamish. Photo: Jessica Casey 268 Unidentified photographer, group near Jericho Charlie’s home on Kitsilano Indian Reserve (Snauq), 1891. Silver gelatin copy print, 11.0 × 15.0 cm. City of Vancouver Archives, ref. no. In P 1.1. Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives 269 Philip Timms, Mission Reserve, 1902. Black and white glass negative, 12.0 × 17.0 cm. Vancouver Public Library, acc. no. 5642. Photo courtesy of the Vancouver Public Library 270 Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank), coiled storage basket, n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, 25.0 cm × 26.0 cm. Private collection, Sechelt. Photo: Kyla Bailey 271 Unidentified photographer, Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank) with a child who is possibly Mrs Tina Cole, c. 1919. University of Victoria Archives, Maria Tippett Fonds, AR 426.

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Photo courtesy of the University of Victoria Archives 272 T.W. Fripp, Woman with Baskets, 1903. Black and white photograph, 21.0 × 26.0 cm. Vancouver Public Library, acc. no. 9414. Photo courtesy of Vancouver Public Library 273 Unidentified photographer, Annie Jack with her first husband, Christie Lewis, c. 1911–12. Black and white silver gelatin copy print, 25.0 × 16.0 cm. North Vancouver Museum and Archives, inventory no. 4783. Photo courtesy of the North Vancouver Museum and Archives 273 Unidentified photographer, Kw’exiliya (Madeline Deighton), 1945. Silver gelatin print, 11.0 × 8.0 cm. City of Vancouver Archives, ref. no. Port P 786.2. Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives 273 Unidentified photographer, Molly John, c. 1930–33. Photo courtesy of British Columbia Archives 273 Unidentified photographer, Swenámiya (Mrs August [Mary Anne] Jack Khahtsahlano) holding a baby, c. 1930. Silver gelatin print, 17.0 × 11.0 cm. City of Vancouver Archives, ref. no. Port P 469. Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives 273 Unidentified photographer, Sut’elut (Monica Williams), with her son David, n.d. Private collection. Photo: Chief Bill Williams 273 Annie Jack, coiled storage basket with hide handles, n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass, leather, 19.68 × 27.94 cm. Museum of Vancouver, acc. no. AA 458 a-b. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Vancouver 274 Annie Jack, coiled storage basket with hide handles (detail), n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass, leather. Museum of Vancouver, acc. no. AA 458 a-b. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Vancouver 274 Sxwelhcháliya (Mary Anne John), coiled cedar root basket, n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass, 23.5 × 25.4 × 27.94 cm. Museum of Vancouver, acc. no. AA 1947. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Vancouver 275

6.26 Chucháwlut (Mary Anne August), attr., coiled basket, n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass, 22.0 × 30.0 × 50.0 cm. North Vancouver Museum and Archives, acc. no. 1986.19.61. Photo courtesy of the North Vancouver Museum and Archives 275 6.27 Cedar tree with a strip of bark harvested for basketry. Photo: Charles Nils Burnett 277 6.28 Unidentified photographer, Sophie and Jimmy Frank and family, c. 1930s. Black and white silver gelatin copy print, 12.0 × 17.0 cm. North Vancouver Museum and Archives, inventory no. 7120. Photo courtesy of the North Vancouver Museum and Archives 279 6.29 Emily Carr, Strait of Juan de Fuca, c. 1936. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 56.2 × 87.0 cm. Art Gallery of Alberta collection, Edmonton, gift of Mrs Max Stern, Dominion Gallery, Montreal, 1973, acc. no. 73.3. Photo courtesy of the Art Gallery of Alberta 286

6.30 Unidentified woman, coiled basket, n.d. Cedar root and sapling wood, wild cherry bark, grass, 37.0 × 22.0 cm. University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, obj. no. A 7258. Photo: Jessica Bushey, courtesy uBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada 291 6.31 Unidentified woman, coiled basket (detail), n.d. University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, obj. no. A 7258. Photo: Jessica Bushey, courtesy uBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada 291 7.1 Marion Long, Self Portrait of the Artist in Her Studio, c. 1930–40. Oil on wood panel, 25.4 × 30.5 cm. LAC , Ottawa, acc. no. 1988-313-1, e011093478. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 296 7.2 Margaret Watkins, Self-Portrait and Shadows, c. 1935. Silver gelatin print, 11.1 × 8.1 cm. Collection of Joseph Mulholland 297

Illustrations 307

Notes

IntrOductIOn 1 Provenance indicates that the daguerreotype was likely made in Kingston, Ontario, and the pattern on the metal preserver that clamps plate, mat, and glass together strongly suggests a date of 1852–53. Jennifer McKendry records that during these years one of Kingston’s early daguerreotypists was a woman, Mrs Coombes, who ran a studio in Bagot street from 1851 to 1856. See McKendry, Early Photography in Kingston, 16. For the dating of the preserver, see Sean Nolan, Fixed in Time, 46. 2 McKendry, Early Photography in Kingston, 58. I have typically endeavoured to refer to women by the names that they themselves used in the context of their art. In this case, I have preserved the hyphenated form of Scrimes-Graham’s name, as used by her son Richard in reference to her. 3 Thomas’s arrangement was published by Frith, Pond & Co. in 1848. The sheet music is available through the digital collection of the Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music, Baylor University. See http://contentdm.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/ collection/fa-spnc/id/10195. Thanks to Alicia Boutilier for first alerting me to Lover’s tune. 4 Mary Anne Scrimes and William Graham married on 14 February 1839 at St George’s Church in Kingston. My thanks to Jennifer McKendry for this information.

5 It seems fairly certain that the slip of paper was not originally framed with the image, for the metal preserver that binds the image plate, mat, and glass together is bent in a way that supports the likelihood that it has been pried up at a point after its initial assembly. 6 See Wolff, The Social Production of Art; Battersby, Gender and Genius; Pollock, “Agency and the Avant Garde”; Salomon, “The Art-Historical Canon: Sins of Omission.” 7 See, for example, Frederickson, Singular Women. 8 There are, of course, exceptions. In addition to the voluminous biographical literature on Carr, see Laura Brandon’s Pegi by Herself, a biography of Pegi Nicol McLeod, Esther Trépanier’s Marian Dale Scott: Pioneer of Modern Art, or Elspeth Cameron’s And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Volumes on Laura Muntz Lyall by Joan Scott, and on Florence Carlyle by Susan Butlin, also follow a biographical arc. 9 Bell, Hilda Stewart, R.M.S., is a lovely, though brief, Canadian example, that presents the methodological questions at play. 10 Some prominent examples include Dawn, National Vision, National Blindness; Jessup, Antimodernism and Artistic Experience; Jessup, Robertson, and Morton, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot; O’Brian and White, Beyond Wilderness; McKay, The Quest of the Folk; Payne and Kunard, The Cultural Work of Photography; Phillips, Trading Identities;

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22

Notes to pages 7–20

23

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24

25

Stanworth, Visibly Canadian; TownsendGault, Kramer, and Pyle, Native Art of the Northwest Coast. Notably, Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently. Ibid., 17–62; Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity; Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 3. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 172–6, 210–17. See also Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 369. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 25. Handsman, “Stop Making Sense,” 153. Seigel, Idea of the Self, 20. This is a dominant theme of Carr’s journal, posthumously published as Hundreds and Thousands. Seigel, Idea of the Self, 18. Crease journal, 29 September 1880, reproduced in Bridge, Henry and Self, 163. Bridge, Henry and Self, 11. While Crease did adopt the “I” in letters to her husband and children, she did so much less frequently in her diary. Entries in Sophie Pemberton’s diary, in the BC Archives, also employ “self” in this way, suggesting a trend in women’s writing about selfhood at the time. Jameson, Winter Studies, vol. 1, 264. Ibid., 143 and again, in different form, on 205. The original quotation is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “‘Most women have no character at all,’ said Pope and meant it for satire. Shakespeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that, in fact, it was the perfection of woman to be characterless.” Table Talk, vol. 1, 212–13. Given her feminism, it is noteworthy to find Jameson praising Coleridge as the modern author “who has best understood the essential nature of woman.” Winter Studies, vol. 1, 142. LAC, Emily Carr Fonds, MG 30 D 215 (MF C13525, C13526), Carr journal, 27 January 1933 (Hundreds and Thousands, 60). I have consulted and cited the original journals, silently correcting spelling and adding some punctuation. Page references to the corresponding entries in Hundreds and Thousands are provided for ease of consultation. LAC, Carr, Carr journal, undated entry just before 5 June 1934 (Hundreds and Thousands, 184). Riley, “Am I That Name?” 114.

26 Jacobus, First Things, 271 and Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 115. 27 Boutilier and Bruce, The Artist Herself, 17. 28 The exhibition, held at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2 May–19 August 2015, was on display alongside Boutilier and Bruce’s historical show. 29 See Smith, “Bringing Queer Theory into Queer Practice,” and Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 32. 30 BCA , Bullock Webster, MS 1965. Julia Bullock Webster diary, 27 August 1894. A transcription of the journal has been made by Cuyler Page and the Heritage Interpretation Services, Keremeos, BC . 31 See Thompson, “A Stronger and More Independent Self”; Gerson, “Wild Colonial Girls”; Fowler, The Embroidered Tent; Jackel, A Flannel Shirt and Liberty; and Light and Prentice, Pioneer and Gentlewomen in British North America. 32 A similar dynamic is noted in Dean, Practising Femininity, 12: “Femininity in a colonial society is a particularly contested discursive formation, drawing on a conservative belief in universal and continuous values which is contradicted by the liberal rhetoric of freedom characteristic of the New World.” 33 Cook and Mitchinson, Proper Sphere, 167. 34 Journal of Anne Langton, 15 January 1839, in Williams, ed., A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, 209. 35 Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 13. 36 Ibid., 12. 37 Burton, “Canadian Girls in London,” 30. 38 See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 143–61. 39 Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined,” 137. 40 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. 41 Grosz, Time Travels, 186, 193. 42 Jameson, Winter Studies, vol. 1, 205. 43 Grosz, Time Travels, 193. 44 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll: A Canadian Impressionist. 45 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 26 November 1930 (Hundreds and Thousands, 46). 46 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 53. My thanks to Kim Rondeau for drawing my attention to this book. 47 Coulthard, Politics of Recognition.

48 Basketry and wool weaving, though they utilize different materials, share common techniques and, sometimes, patterns and practitioners. The weavers and basketmakers I spoke with also discussed the spiritual and philosophical aspects of their practice in very similar terms. On the close connections between Salish weaving and basketry, see Fortney, “Identifying Sto:lo Basketry,” 26. 49 In North Vancouver and in Squamish, Bob Baker, Vanessa Baker, Lila Johnston, Joanne Nahanee, Shirley Toman, and Bill and Henry Williams have all shared their knowledge of their families and traditions with me. 50 Addressing herself to archival documents, rather than works of art, Scott clearly elucidates one response to the question: “The challenge, of course, for all but the most naive empiricists, is that the texts don’t speak for themselves; the whispers are heard only through a process of translation, and the very words – spoken or written – carry different meanings in each of their iterations. The dead don’t come back to life as they were, but as we represent them” (Fantasy of Feminist History, 145). And yet the particularities that the art historian faces are rather different, for of course works of art – even very old ones – are not themselves dead, and so do not require resuscitation in the same fashion as the intentions of those who made them. What they require, rather, is attentiveness and openness to stimulus. That this openness will combine with the viewer’s own pre-existent perspectives is the core of Gadamer’s hermeneutic insight. See, for example, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics” in Philosophical Hermeneutics. 51 Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider; Michael Ann Holly, “Reciprocity and Reception Theory.” 52 Grosz, Time Travels, 193.

chaPter One

Notes to pages 21–9

1 Polack, “Art in the Bush,” 343–4. 2 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 67. This seminal collection of historical sources on the Beothuk is available at https://archive.org/details/ beothucksorredin00howl.

3 A detailed accounting of the scheme is given in Marshall’s magisterial text History and Ethnography, 132–3, and further developed by Polack, “Art in the Bush,” 341–7. 4 Lieutenant John Cartwright, “Remarks on the Situation of the Red Indians, Natives of Newfoundland,” in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 34, quoted in Marshall, History and Ethnography, 91. 5 The successive proclamations are reprinted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, including the initial proclamation by John Byron (45). 6 Details of the painting’s appearance are recorded in Anspach, History, 250. 7 William Faukener to Governor Holloway, 2 December 1808, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 68. 8 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 123–32, 160–7, 185–6. 9 Ibid., especially 126. 10 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. 11 Governor Holloway to Lord Castlereagh, 20 May 1808, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 66–7. 12 Polack, “Art in the Bush,” 348n14. 13 Population figures for the Beothuk are difficult to assess, but an annotation by William Eppes Cormack, made in conversation with a later Beothuk captive, Shanawdithit, estimates the number at twenty-seven in 1820. See Sketch III , fig. 1.9. 14 Marshall explains in History and Ethnography, 161–2, that “in the 1820s, W.E. Cormack claimed that Hamilton had offered a reward of one hundred pounds sterling to any person who could bring a ‘Red Indian’ to St. John’s. However there is no record of such an offer. The last public proclamation to mention a reward was the one made by Governor Richard Keats, some five years earlier.” 15 For examples of this more usual practice, see the named portraits of Mi’kmaq sitters by Lady Falkland, Ellen Nutting, and Mary McKie, assembled at mid-century in Lady Falkland’s album, now in Library and Archives Canada (R 14203-0-1-e ). 16 One of the earliest sources to proclaim Beothuk extinction was published in an 1836 issue of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country. See McGregor, “Shaa-naan-dithit.”

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Notes to pages 29–38 312

17 Key examples are Tocque, Mary March; Wandering Thoughts; Kaleidoscope Echoes; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, The Mission Field; Patterson, “The Beothiks”; Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians; Winter, Shananditti; Rowe, Extinction; Fardy, Demasduit; and Marshall, History and Ethnography. 18 The official proclamations that repeatedly ordered the safeguarding of Beothuk life and made violence against them a criminal offence must weigh heavily against the charge of genocide. Without it, however, responsibility for the enormity of the ensuing loss has been displaced, with Beothuk extinction cast in the guise of tragic misfortune rather than as the structural result of systemic violence. 19 Bartels and Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives,” 259. 20 For example, the Mi’kmaq perspectives recounted in Bartels and Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives,” as well that of Rita Joe in her poem “I’m a Beothuk,” quoted in Berlo and Phillips, Native North American Art, 171. 21 Dalton, “Shadow Indians,” 144. 22 These sources are collected in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 91–108. 23 Existing accounts of Demasduit’s kidnapping do not entirely accord with each other. Participants’ statements are influenced by different personal perspectives, by the passage of time, and, doubtless, by the pressures of a criminal investigation. Some narratives appear to sanitize the violence, others to sensationalize it, but the basic outline I give here is shared in common, except where I have otherwise indicated. 24 E.S., “Tribe of Red Indians: to the Editor of the Liverpool Mercury,” Liverpool Mercury, 1829, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 99–100. 25 This information was given by Shanawdithit to William Eppes Cormack. She also made a drawing of her own recollection of the event. 26 Robinson, “Private Journal,” 216. 27 Ibid. See also Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 120–1. 28 Robinson, “Private Journal,” 216–17. Robinson’s mention of a lengthened chain refers to Demasduit’s sadness rather than to any literal confinement. The implicit reference to slavery may or may not have

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been intentional, as philanthropic sentiment toward the Beothuk sometimes drew on parallels with the Abolitionist movement, as in the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 27 May 1819. See Marshall, “Miniature Portrait,” 5–7; Marshall and Hardy, “New Portrait,” 25–8; and Marshall, History and Ethnography, 506n48. Anonymous inscriptions on the back of the miniatures indicate them to be the work of W. Gosse, and I have preserved this attribution. Signed miniatures by William Gosse from the 1840s, however, indicate a substantially more accomplished hand, and there has been some speculation that the Gosse miniatures are by his brother, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse. Both Gosse brothers had learned miniature painting from their father, Thomas, who was an itinerant miniaturist. Marshall, History and Ethnography, 205. Gosse’s portrait is illustrated as an image of Shanawdithit in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography; see Pastore and Story, “Shanawdithit.” Marshall notes that Gosse was already in St John’s in 1828, when William Eppes Cormack proposed that a portrait of Shanawdithit be made. It is not known whether such a portrait was ever executed, but if it was, Gosse would have been a likely candidate to undertake it. By 1830 he is known to have been working as a professional artist in St John’s. Marshall, email correspondence with author, 7 May 2004. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 124. See also van Alphen, Art in Mind, and “The Portrait’s Dispersal.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 131. Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants,’” 67. See Bond, Queen Anne’s American Kings. Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 17 October 1822. Henrietta Hamilton’s great-grandfather Andrew Drummond (1688–1769), a goldsmith and banker, was the founder of Drummonds Bank and purchased the family estate, Stanmore House in Middlesex, in 1729. See Winterbottom, “Drummond, Andrew.”

60 See Huneault, “Miniature Paintings as Transcultural Objects?” 61 Phillips, “Representation in the Miniature,” in Trading Identities, 72–102. 62 MM , McCord, P 001-M 12/88-5027, J.P. Howley to David Ross McCord, 21 February 1914. See also Tocque, Kaleidoscope Echoes, 242; and the entry by Bert Riggs on Henrietta Hamilton in the Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, which notes that “Duncombe’s daughter, Eliza Cammann, came into possession of the portrait and it remained with the Cammann family, who resided in New York, until 1976 when it was sold at an auction in New York City.” This is the portrait now in the collection of Library and Archives Canada. Nevertheless, in 1914, Edward Archibald Hamilton informed McCord that “the picture of Mary March is heirloomed in my family” (MM , McCord, P 001-M12/88-5027.4, Archibald Edward Hamilton to David Ross McCord, 15 February 1914). If Lady Hamilton painted more than one version of her miniature, nothing is now known of the other painting. 63 Stewart, On Longing, esp. 11–31 and 38–69. 64 Day, Art of Miniature Painting, 24–5. 65 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 4 and 37. After the arrival of the French in North America, the Beothuk also faced sometimes violent competition for resources from displaced Mi’kmaq peoples. 66 It is impossible to say with certainty when or by whom the clipping was affixed and the miniature framed, but both are considered original to the artwork by Library and Archives Canada. The clipping dates from 1815 and advertises the animal paintings of “Mr Sartorius,” one of a family of itinerant artists – including John Nost Sartorius (1759– 1829) and his son, John Francis Sartorius (1779–1831) – who portrayed the animals of the aristocracy. There are no verifiable links between the Hamiltons and the Sartorius family. 67 Chief Justice John Reeves, testimony to the Parliamentary Committee on Trade to Newfoundland, 1793, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 55.

Notes to pages 39–48

39 Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website Project, “Voluntary Settlement.” 40 Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 17 October 1822. 41 Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, 223. 42 See Polack, “Reading Shanawdithit’s Drawings,” n.p. 43 Ten of these drawings are held in The Rooms Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Provincial Museum Division. 44 The portrait is in the National Archives collection, uk , and the paper cuttings are held privately. Other work, now lost, is known from descriptions in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 181 and 230. 45 Sparke, “Demythologizing and Deconstructing.” 46 Polack, “Reading Shanawdithit’s Drawings,” n.p. 47 William Epps Cormack to John Stark, 26 October 1827, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 198. 48 Robinson, “Private Journal,” 216. 49 E.S., “Tribe of Red Indians,” quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 99–100. 50 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 94. See also Captain D. Buchan to Governor Hamilton, 10 March 1820, quoted in ibid., 121. Such capture-bonding is sometimes known as the Stockholm Syndrome. 51 Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 17 October 1822. 52 Ibid., 24 January 1822. See also 26 February and 17 October 1822. 53 Governor Hamilton to Lord Bathurst, 27 September 1819, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 120. 54 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 131. 55 Pointon, “‘Surrounded by Brilliants,’” 63. 56 See Frank, Love and Loss. 57 wSRo , Hamilton, Add. MSS 28237, Will of Henrietta Martha Hamilton, 6 July 1855. 58 Another drawing, of St John’s Harbour, is in the collection of The Rooms Provincial Museum (988.4), and a watercolour, Woodlands Cottage, St John’s, is reproduced in Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 406. 59 The miniatures are in the collection of Victoria College, University of Toronto.

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Notes to pages 49–60 314

68 See Charles Hamilton to Francis Forbes, 5 June 1819, quoted in ibid., 113; and Charles Hamilton to William Nugent Glascock, Orders No. 1 and 2, 3 June 1819, quoted in ibid., 110–11. In his communications with the Colonial Office, Hamilton used the more neutral term “Indian woman.” 69 The Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, for example, ran a six-part series of articles on contemporary racial theories, beginning on 22 February 1821. 70 Charles Hamilton, “Instructions to Capt. David Buchan in His 2nd Expedition during the Winter of 1819–20,” quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 117. See also Marshall, History and Ethnography, 162. 71 John Peyton Jr, as retold by Howley in Beothucks or Red Indians, 93, quoted in Marshall, History and Ethnography, 161. 72 Although Peyton had told the governor that Demasduit was mother to “an infant,” Hamilton’s letter to the Colonial Office describes “a child 3 or 4 years old,” and conveys the erroneous impression that settlers had no knowledge of its existence at the moment of Demasduit’s capture. See John Peyton Jr to Charles Hamilton, 27 May 1819, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 108; and Charles Hamilton to Lord Bathurst, 27 September 1819, quoted in ibid., 120. 73 See, for example, Milloy, National Crime, and Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision. 74 Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, 223. 75 See also Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 96, for Shanawdithit’s account of a watchful John Peyton’s ignorance of Beothuk surveillance on the night when his canoe was stolen, prompting the retaliatory expedition that resulted in Demasduit’s capture. 76 Bernardin et al., Trading Gazes. 77 Parry, Journal of a Voyage, 277, reprinted in the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 27 December 1821. 78 Robinson, “Private Journal,” 216. 79 Caillois, “Mimicry,” 30. 80 Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 27 May 1819. 81 The Beothuk were the original “Red Indians,” so-called after the red ochre that

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88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

they applied to their bodies and clothing. The full inscription on the back of the miniature reads: “Mary March / a Female Native / Indian of the / Red Indians who / inhabit Newfound / land painted by / Lady Hamilton / 18.” Bhabha, Location of Culture, 88. For instance, on the Festival of St Patrick, 1820, an enthusiastic toast was made to Lady Hamilton. According to the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 23 March 1820, “His Excellency in returning thanks seemed to feel its flattering effect too deeply to say much on the occasion.” See also ibid., 27 April 1820. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 86. Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991), 165, quoted in Polack, “Reading Shanawdithit’s Drawings,” n49. Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 27 May 1819. “Proclamation of Governor John Duckworth,” August 1810, quoted in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 71. See also Governor Keats’s proclamation of 1813, quoted in ibid., 91. “Proclamation of Governor John Duckworth,” quoted in ibid., 70. Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, 27 May 1819. Stewart, On Longing, 66. Ibid., 60. Stewart’s phrase is on page 65; the point about colonial history is my own. Althusser, Reproduction of Capitalism, 181–3. Stewart, On Longing, 44. Althusser, Reproduction of Capitalism, 181–3, 188. Peckford’s position is discussed by Bartels in “Newfoundland Micmac Claims,” 43–5. On 23 June 2008, the minister of Indian affairs and northern development and federal interlocutor for Métis and non-status Indians and the president of the Federation of Newfoundland Indians signed an agreement to create the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, the country’s only landless First Nation, but the legal status of many who have come forward to claim membership in the band is

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still uncertain. See “Surge in Newfoundland Native Band has Ottawa Stunned, Skeptical,” Globe and Mail, 14 April 2014. On the Mi’kmaq Mercenary Myth, see Bartels, “Time Immemorial?” and Upton, “Extermination.” On the contemporary Mi’kmaq resurgence, see Baehre, “Indigenizing the Academy.” On contemporary Mi’kmaq claims to Beothuk ancestry, see Bartels and Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives,” 258–9. Polack, “Memory against History,” 64. Other examples, from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous pens, include Assiniwi, The Beothuk Saga; Beckel, All Gone Widdun; Major, Blood Red Ochre; Such, Riverrun; and Dion and Dion, “Braiding Histories Stories.” Michael Crummy’s novel River Thieves deals with Beothuk history but is notable for its refusal to adopt a Beothuk voice or imagine a Beothuk perspective. Wolochatiuk, Stealing Mary. Belmore, interviewed in Martin, “Out in the Cold,” 80. For example, Dalton, “Shadow Indians”; Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls.” Goldie, Fear and Temptation. See Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia; Goldman and Saul, “Talking with Ghosts”; Gordon, Ghostly Matters; Sugars and Turcotte, “Postcolonial Gothic.” Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls,” 419. Skinner, “Settler-Colonial Art History,” 164–5.

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Notes to pages 60–9

1 Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869. The work now known as Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall was almost certainly the one exhibited in 1870 under the title Canoe Travelling in the Backwoods of Canada. Her contribution of 1871, Running a Rapid on the Mattawa River, Canada, is now unlocated. 2 This would change by the end of the century. In 1897, when Hopkins exhibited work at the Burlington Gallery, she was sharing

3

wall space with Frederick Verner and Allan Edson. Morning Post, 17 May 1897. Art Journal, 1871, 178. Later notices of Hopkins’s work, while brief, were more unambiguously positive. See The Times, 18 May 1879; Art Journal, 1886, 222; St James’s Gazette, 28 May 1886, 6; London Evening Standard, 28 May 1886; London Morning Post, 17 May 1897; Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1901; Bristol Western Daily Press, 24 April 1901. Art Journal, 1871, 178. In the event, the Art Journal was prescient; Hopkins’s 1871 canvas is now lost, but is known through its engraving in George Grant’s Ocean to Ocean. Nute, “Voyageur’s Artist,” 32. Clark, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 19. “Canada in the Days of the Bark Canoe” and “Peasant Landscapes in France”: Water-Colour Drawings by Mrs. F.A. Hopkins, Walker’s Galleries, Bond Street, 16–28 March 1914. Other one-woman shows included “Woods and Waterways,” at the Graves Galleries, c.1901; “Untrodden Ways in French Fields and Forests,” at the Doré Gallery, 1906; “In Pleasant Places,” at the Doré Gallery, 1907; and “Canada, Normandy, and South Africa,” at the Modern Gallery, 1912. See for instance, Chalmers, “The Lady Who Painted Canoes.” Ibid., 21; Harper, Painting in Canada, 416; Luckyj and Farr, From Women’s Eyes, 20. Wilfrid Beechey Hopkins was born on 4 October 1870 (Weller Smith, unpublished typescript). The artist spent the summer before the birth at a cottage in Kent. Although she is known to have been in Montreal in April 1870, Edward’s correspondence indicates that he was back in London with his family by 21 June 1870 (Johnson, “Edward and Frances Hopkins,” 16). The portage around the Kakabeka Falls was begun after 8 June and not successfully completed until 24 June (Huysche, Expedition, 69–70). The Atlantic Ocean crossing took nine days, and rail and steam travel from Montreal to Lake Superior would have added considerably to the travel time, making it almost impossible for Hopkins

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to have witnessed any part of the operation. Nevertheless, belief that the artist was present on the expedition has been bolstered by two circumstances, both put on record by Alice Johnson: first, the fact that Lady Wolseley visited her husband at the site of the portage that June and later owned the painting led to speculation that Hopkins must have been among her companions (“Edward and Frances Hopkins,” 15); second, Edward Hopkins had initially planned to return from England to Canada to escort the governor general and other officials on a visit to the expedition between 20 July and 20 September (ibid., 14–15). This scheme, however, fell through following objections from the Colonial Office, and Johnson records that while Edward Hopkins did return to Canada for two months, he left his family behind in England (ibid., 15). Clark, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 31; Hudson, “Red River Expedition,” 101. The conclusion is supported by an anonymous inscription to this effect on the back of the canvas, which also notes that the fabric attached to Wolseley’s cap is a puggaree, first adopted by British soldiers in India to ward off the elements. Hudson, “Red River Expedition,” 105. Johnson, “Edward and Frances Hopkins,” 14. Ibid., 11. Watkin, Canada and the States, 154: “The eleven stalwart Indians, almost all six feet high, who manned the boat, made the trip interesting, as it was to me in the nature of a new experience. These men had been with Governor Dallas nearly 4,000 miles by river, lake, and portage; and he told me he never knew them to be late, however early the start had to be made; never unready; always cheerful and obliging; and that a cross word had never, in his hearing, been uttered by any one of them. These men made Caughna Wauga, opposite Lachine, their home, and there were their families.” Alexander Grant Dallas, the company’s governor and Hopkins’s immediate superior, was the other party in the canoe. Weller Smith, “Self-Portraits?,” n.p.

17 Ibid. 18 Hopkins’s correspondence with the Canadian collector David Ross McCord indicates her familiarity with copyright law, her willingness to reproduce earlier paintings at patrons’ request, and a clear sense of the market value of her work. By 1910, she was charging 25 guineas for a 22 × 14-inch watercolour (roughly $3,500 in today’s dollars). See MM , McCord Family Papers, 88-5031.1-3. The artist’s sales records have not survived, but known patrons included Edward VII, Arthur Boyer, a Canadian Liberal senator under Prime Minister Laurier, Major Henry Richard Legge Newdigate of the Prince Consort’s Own Rifle Brigade, which was stationed in Canada in the 1860s, Colonel and/or Lady Wolseley, and Lady Mount Stephen. 19 Clark, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 13–15. 20 Weller Smith has identified these children as St Lawrence Beechey Hopkins (1859–1869), Julian Beechey Hopkins (1861–1864), Olive Beechey Hopkins (1863–1917), and Basil Beechey Hopkins (April–July 1865). There is a gravesite for the stillborn or miscarried child at St Stephen’s in Lachine. Two more sons, Wilfrid (1870–1910) and Raymond (1879–1923), were born after the artist’s return to England. Weller Smith, unpublished typescript. 21 My thanks to MaryEllen Weller Smith for this observation. 22 HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Books, B.134/b/21, p. 836 (mf 1M 198), Edward Hopkins to Peter Bell, 24 February 1864; cited by Weller Smith in her unpublished typescript. 23 HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Books, B/134/b/21, p. 418–19 (mf 1M 198), Edward Hopkins to John McIntyre, 5 August 1864, quoted in Clark, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 39. 24 Weller Smith, unpublished typescript. 25 HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Books, B.134/b/24, p. 675 (mf 1M 202), Edward Hopkins to John Black, 6 August 1865. 26 HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Books, B134/b/24, p. 370 (mf 1M 202), Edward Hopkins to James G. Stewart, 20 March

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36 HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Inward, B.134/c/115, p. 281 (mf 1M 372), N.M. Simpson to Donald Smith, 9 September 1869: “Mr. Hopkins … told me he was to leave for England soon after he got to Montreal.” 37 See Clark, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 24–5, for a reproduction of the 1870 exhibition catalogue. 38 See Pomeroy, Intrepid Women; Cherry and Helland, Local/Global; Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits; Kirker, New Zealand Women Artists. 39 Elizabeth Simcoe was married to John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. The couple were in Canada from 1791 to 1796 (see Longchamps, “Elizabeth Simcoe”). Amelia Falkland accompanied her husband, Lucius Cary Falkland, during his posting as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia from 1840 to 1846 (see Reinhart, “Lady Falkland’s Travel Album”). Anna Maria Yorke Head was married to Edmund Walker Head. In 1848 she accompanied him to New Brunswick, where he served as lieutenant governor, and remained with him upon his 1854 promotion to governor general of the Province of Canada. They returned to England in 1861. In 1863 he became governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. (See Head, Governor General Looks at Canada). 40 Anna Jameson was married to Robert Sympson Jameson, who was stationed in Canada from 1833, when he was appointed attorney general of Upper Canada, until his death in 1854. Anna joined him in 1836 (see Johnston, Anna Jameson). Millicent Mary Chaplin was married to Thomas Chaplin of the Coldstream Guards, who was stationed in Lower Canada from 1838 to 1842 (see Burant, Drawing on the Land). Katherine Ellice was married to Edward Ellice, who served as private secretary to Lord Durham when he was appointed governor general of the Province of Canada. They were in Canada from April to November 1848, leaving shortly after Katherine was abducted by French-Canadian rebels near Montreal (see Béland, “Katherine Jane Ellice”). Amelia Frederica Dyneley accompanied her father, Lieutenant-General Thomas Dyneley, C.B., to Montreal where he

Notes to pages 74–6

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1866: “My family are all well. I purpose sending them home early in June, before the Cholera breaks out, as I think they will be safer in England than here.” Sketches from the journey, dated 7 and 9 September 1866, are in the Hopkins sketchbook, LAC , 1936-67; C 13581. HBCA, Montreal Correspondence Books, B.134/b/24, p. 24 (mf 1M 202), Edward Hopkins to Captain [Maguedu?], 15 November 1866: “I am alone out here. Mrs Hopkins and the children went home at the end of September and are now living in London.” Also Edward Hopkins to James Stewart, 23 January 1867: “Mrs. Hopkins and my family are settled in London and I doubt if the former will now return to Canada.” HBCA, Montreal Correspondence Books, B.134/b/27, p. 420 (mf 1M 207), Edward Hopkins to Robert Campbell, 1 April 1868. HBCA, Montreal Correspondence Books, B.134/b/27, p. 889 (mf 1M 206), Edward Hopkins to William Hardisty, 30 January 1867. Thanks to Donna McDonald for this reference. Hopkins’s letter to D.R. McCord, 20 July 1907, MM , McCord Family Papers, P 001M12/88-5031.2, names W. Scott and Sons as her dealer. It is unknown how long-standing this business arrangement was. Hopkins exhibited Indian Canoe Guide – Ottawa River, Woodland Scene – Midsummer Canada, and Camp Scene on the Ottawa at the Society of British Artists in 1867. Edward took an extended furlough from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1867–68, followed by a leave of absence in 1869–70. He officially resigned from service on 1 June 1870, age forty-nine (Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Biographical Sheets, Edward Martin Hopkins, https://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/ archives/hbca/biographical/h/hopkins_ edward-martin.pdf ). HBCA, Montreal Correspondence Inward, B.134/c/114, p. 270 (mf 1M 370), John McIntyre (clerk at Fort William) to Edward Hopkins, 4 June 1869: “The three North canoes you ordered are ready.” Weller Smith, “Self-Portraits?,” n.p.

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commanded the Royal Artillery in Canada from 1847 to 1852. Theakstone, Victorian and Edwardian Women Travellers. The earliest one-woman exhibitions of colonial subject matter were by Emily Eden (1843) and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1859–61). Travel scenes by women became popular in the 1890s. See Yeldham, Women Artists, 152–79. Frawley, Wider Range, 25. See also Pomeroy, Intrepid Women, especially Casteras’s essay “Palettes, Pencils, and Parasols,” 35. Jameson’s drawings are discussed in Mills, “Fluid Play.” Lachine Sketch Book, Royal Ontario Museum. The drawing, dated 1866, is in the Hopkins Sketchbook, LAC . On women’s travel and self-actualization, see Smyth, “‘Lords of the World.’” Feltes, “Gender and Gaze,” 9. Podruchny, “Unfair Masters,” 56. Feltes, “Gender and Gaze,” 17. Ibid. Mills, Discourses of Difference, 98. Foster, Across New Worlds, 19. Ibid., 76. The Times, 11 June 1869. For the accuracy of Hopkins’s depiction of canoeing techniques, see Franks, Canoe and White Water, 49, 63. Ottawa Citizen, 28 November 1997. The anomaly of the water lilies is noted in Perrin, “Éléments de Romantisme,” 71. Clark, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 31. Compare, for example, the fully embodied, first-person vantage point adopted by Daniel Wilson in his canoe at West Cliff, Nipigon, Canada West of 1866, reproduced in Stacey, “Canoe-Eye-View,” 49. Janet Wolff, “On the Road Again,” 123–4. For example: Art Journal, 1874, 163; and the London Evening Standard, 28 May 1886. George Curzon, “Ladies and the Royal Geographic Society,” The Times, 31 May 1893, 11, quoted in Frawley, Wider Range, 111. Hopkins’s father had been president of the society from 1855 until his death the following year. Frawley, Wider Range, 27 and 38.

64 The public responded by praising her work as “ladylike and loveable to look at” (Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette, 27 November 1867) and highlighting its “charm” (Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 20 February 1906) and “delicacy of treatment” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1901). Only the Western Mail (31 May 1869) found Canoes in a Fog – Lake Superior to be a “right good bold picture.” 65 As Meaghan Morris points out, home has not been reliably experienced by women as a place of security against which travel’s disruptive adventures might be played out. Hopkins, voyaging in the wake of her children’s deaths, had cause to know this well. “At Henry Parkes Motel,” 11–12. 66 Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xix. 67 Frawley, Wider Range, 31. 68 Spraakman, Management Accounting, 107. 69 Williams, “Hudson’s Bay Company,” 82. 70 Johnson, “Edward and Frances Hopkins,” 13. 71 HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Books, B.134/b/29, p. 221 (mf 1M 209), D. Smith to Charles Perry, 12 July 1869: “Hopkins intends on proceeding with some friends on a pleasure trip as far as Fort William.” Weller Smith notes the financial aspects of the transaction in her unpublished typescript. 72 A small sampling of William Beechey’s portraits includes those of Admiral Sir John Jervis, who fought with Wolfe at the siege of Quebec; Sir George Yonge, British secretary of war and, concurrently, a member of Upper Canada’s Parliament; and Edward, Duke of Kent, the commander in chief of British forces in North America from 1799 to 1800. On Frederick Beechey’s drawings, see Bershad, “Drawings and Watercolours.” Beechey’s drawings were published as illustrations to four different narratives of exploration, including Parry’s Journal of a Voyage, discussed in chapter 1, and Beechey’s own book A Voyage of Discovery. 73 Additions to the Ensign (for example, the white letters HBC ) were placed in the lower right quadrant, which Hopkins hides from view. 74 Hopkins is meticulous in the inclusion of this design, both here and in an oil sketch

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82 Mackay’s Montreal Directory for 1865–66, 437; and Weller Smith, unpublished typescript. See also Lake Huron Copper Bay Mining Company, Charter, By-Laws and Report. 83 See, for example, Edward’s plans with John McIntyre to gain title to Crown lands in the Nipigon region, laid immediately after the couple’s return from his 1864 tour of inspection. HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Books, B .134/b/24, p. 419 (1M 198), Edward Hopkins to John McIntyre, 5 August 1864. 84 MM , McCord, P 001-M 12/88-5031.3, Hopkins to D.R. McCord, 12 July 1910. 85 Simpson, Journey round the World, 23. 86 HBCA , Montreal Correspondence Inward, B.134/c/94, p. 471 (mf 1M 350), Fr Nicolas Victor Burtin to Edward Hopkins, 13 June 1864. 87 Though Hopkins’s travels began from Fort William, HBC “summermen” regularly travelled back and forth between Lachine and Lake Superior. It would have been a relatively straightforward matter to have a select crew waiting for the Hopkinses on their arrival by steamboat at Fort William. 88 Benn, Mohawks on the Nile, 30–1. 89 Nicole St-Onge, personal communication. 90 Grabowski and St-Onge, “Montreal Iroquois Engagés,” 32. 91 Ibid., 26–8. See also Frisch, “Ethnological and Ethnohistoric Notes”; Karamanski, “Iroquois and the Fur Trade.” 92 Podruchny, “Unfair Masters,” 47. 93 Ibid., 57. 94 Ibid., 53, citing E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press 1993), 43, 45–6. 95 Alexander Ross, Fur Hunters of the Far West: A Narrative of Adventures in Oregon and the Rocky Mountains (London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1855), vol. 1, 301–2, quoted in Podruchny, “Unfair Masters,” 54. 96 Philip Turnor, “A Journal of the Most Remarkable Transactions and Occurences from York Fort to Cumberland House, and from Said House to York Fort from 9th Septr 1778 to 15th Septr 1779 by Mr. Philip Turnor,” in Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, ed. J.B. Tyrrell (Toronto: Champlain Society 1934), 252, quoted in ibid.

Notes to pages 86–91

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(fig. 2.17). Though no exact parallel for Hopkins’s motif is known, extant fur-trade canoes and historical photos also include red flags, with staves, painted on the stern of the canoe, sometimes in pennant shape. See Kent, Birchbark Canoes, vol. 1, 162–3. As part of the implementation of the Manitoulin Treaty, Governor Francis Bond Head had presented a Red Ensign to the Anishnaabe chiefs in 1837. Modified by the addition of a beaver and a lion to symbolize the two peoples’ alliance, the flag was honoured by the chiefs who received it (Corbiere, “Symbols of Alliance,” 6). In view of this history, one possibility is that the flag painted on the stern of the canoe is a loosely rendered Red Ensign. The seven blue markings underneath the blue saltire also call to mind the diplomatic practices of the Chiefs of the Seven Fires (or Seven Nations), a confederacy of nations along the St Lawrence River, centred in Kahnawá:ke. Historical documents from around the time of Hopkins’s paintings describe the Seven Nations as identifying themselves to each other through the use of flags, though the one remaining description (of a red cross on a white background) does not conform to the image depicted here. See History of the Indian Wampum, an undated nineteenth-century broadsheet. Morrison, “Robinson Treaties,” 11. See also Surtees, “Treaty Research Report.” Morrison, “Robinson Treaties,” 4. The Royal Proclamation, issued by King George III to claim British North America after the Seven Years’ War, explicitly forbade settlement on any British North American land that had not been ceded by treaty with the Crown. Knight and Chute, “Visionary on the Edge,” 95–8. Morrison, “Robinson Treaties,” 8. Morrison’s detailed account of the treaty is the source for all factual information in this paragraph, unless otherwise indicated. “First Nations Take Federal, Ontario Governments to Court over $4/Year Benefit,” Globe and Mail, 9 September 2014. Currently, there are approximately thirty thousand beneficiaries of the treaty. Morrison, “Robinson Treaties,” 115, 159–60.

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Notes to pages 91–6 320

97 Jameson, Winter Studies, 320–1. 98 HBCA , D .6/4, Frances Simpson Journal, 1830. 99 Ibid. 100 Driscoll, “‘Chain of Connection,’” 97. 101 HBCA , e .12/5, Isobel Finlayson Notebook, 1840. 102 Hudson, “Red River Expedition,” 103. Given Hopkins’s residence in Lachine, Hudson concludes that the canoe is of Haudenosaunee manufacture, but our knowledge that the artist travelled in canoes manufactured at Fort William in 1869, taken together with the particular appearance of the floral iconography, suggests the greater likelihood of Ojibwe manufacture. Both floral vines and the rayed circular ornament that Hopkins shows on the bow of the canoe may be found in extant fur-trade canoes and in watercolours by other nineteenth-century painters, including Millicent Mary Chaplin and Paul Kane. Canoe historian Timothy Kent cites Tappan Adney on their significance: “All the rayed and disc pictures are sun and moon symbols, whether [the interior] lines be curved or straight” (Kent, Birchbark Canoes, vol. 1, 164–5). Hopkins painted different versions of the circular motif, which she adopted as something of a trademark. MM , McCord, P 001-M 12/88-5031.3, Hopkins to D.R. McCord, 12 July 1910. 103 Hudson, “Red River Expedition,” 103. The relevant discussion in Phillips can be found in Trading Identities, 155–96. 104 Governor Simpson’s manuscript journal of his journey around the world mentions that each voyageur “is supplied with a feather to adorn his cap, an indispensible in the equipment of a voyageur.” HBCA , D .3/2, Governor George Simpson – Journal, 1841, p. 11 (mf 3M 2). 105 I have compiled Asennaienton’s biography from Kahnawá:ke parish registers as well as from employment records in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, notably the Abstracts of Servants Accounts for the Columbia District and the Northern Department, contained in the post records for York Factory and Montreal (BANQ , Registre d’Etat civil, Saint-François-Xavier-de-Caughnawaga,

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Ce601,S25; HBCA B.239/g/10-42, Northern Department Abstract of Accounts, Columbia Servants and Free Trapping (mf 1M 801); B.134/g/25-39, Montreal Department Abstracts of Servants Accounts, Lachine Depot (mf 1M 790); and B .134/z/1 (mf 1M 1663) fol. 85 (Settlement of Accounts in the Fur Trade of Northern Department), fol. 104 (Northern Department Goers and Comers), fol. 105 (Advances en route to Northern Department: Winterers and Goers and Comers) and fol. 158 (Credit Balances). It is my great good fortune to know Roy Wright, peripatetic linguist and friend of Martin Loft at the Kahnawá:ke Cultural Centre. I greatly appreciate their insights into Mohawk language and history. Bell, Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities, 25–47. Skinner, “Settler-Colonial Art History,” 140, 158; Thomas, Possessions, 134–7, 144, 168–71. Jackson, “Longfellow’s Tradition,” 478. Also see Carr, Inventing the American Primitive. Edward Hopkins’s collection of nearly two hundred objects subsequently went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The collection contained two deerskin dresses – one Cree (now lost) and one of Ql̓ispé origin, which bears some similarities to the dress Hopkins has painted, though it is not identical. She would also base the clothing in Left to Die on Edward’s collection. See Peers, “‘Many Tender Ties,’” 288, 296–7; Major-Marothy, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 47–9. The caption was as follows: “The Indians of the prairies when passing through an enemy’s country on the ‘war path’ are obliged to desert and leave to his fate any one of the party who, disabled by wounds or sickness, cannot travel on horseback at the pace necessary for safety.” The unspecified nature of the “war path” left viewers ample room in which to conjure up accounts of bloodthirsty rivalries between warring Indian tribes (Major-Marothy, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 48). For those viewers conscious of then-current events in North America, the painting could not have failed to signify in terms of the Indian-American Wars that

112

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114 115

116 117 118

120 Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xxiv. 121 Ibid. 122 On Indigenous survivance, see Vizenor, Manifest Manners, vii.

chaPter three 1 Greenshields, Subjective View of Landscape Painting, 9–10. 2 Ibid., 25. Greenshields is here citing from Philadelphia artist and author Henry Rankin Poore’s book Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures (New York: Baker & Taylor 1903). 3 Jefferys, “Art of Mary Hiester Reid,” 19. 4 Ibid., 21, 23. 5 Émile Zola, in his review of the 1866 salon, famously defined the work of art as “un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament.” “Mon salon,” L’Événement, 11 May 1866. 6 Moore, “Sex in Art,” 229. 7 Jefferys, “Art of Mary Hiester Reid,” 21. 8 Théodore de Wyzewa, “Berthe Morisot,” in Peintres de jadis et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin 1892), 12–13, quoted in Garb, “Morisot and the Feminizing of Impressionism,” 192. See also Broude, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading; and Callen, “Technique and Gender.” 9 Of the thirty artists included in Joan Murray’s pathbreaking 1974 exhibition Impressionism in Canada, only two were women (McNicoll and Laura Muntz Lyall), and of these only McNicoll was included by Dennis Reid in his overview of Canadian Impressionism for Norma Broude’s World Impressionism. In her 1995 exhibition Visions of Light and Air, Carol Lowrey expanded the list to include Frances Jones Bannerman, Mabel May, and Emily Carr, but May and Carr do not appear in Ash Prakash’s Impressionism in Canada. In Choosing Their Own Path, Mora Diane O’Neill makes a much wider selection of artists, demonstrating the breadth of Canadian women who adopted Impressionism’s plein air practice, looser handling, and choice of themes from everyday life. Of these, however, only a few would embrace a fully broken brushwork and high-keyed palette.

Notes to pages 97–105

119

ravaged the West throughout the 1870s. Here, again, however, Britons could maintain a comfortable detachment, contrasting the comparative peace of Aboriginal relations under the paternalism of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the violence of America’s genocidal policies. Yet the practice of leaving the injured or infirm behind was not the sole province of the battlefield. In a widely read account of his travels in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, fur-trader Samuel Hearne described the difference between Native communities who traded with the company and those who did not. While the former were forced at all costs to follow the lead of the fur-bearing animals they sought, the latter could subsist in relative security by corralling deer to live on throughout the winter months. Freed from the necessity of following the furs, these communities were able to care for those who could not travel (Greenfield, Narrating Discovery, 29). Hopkins’s contemporary, the AfricanAmerican sculptor Edmonia Lewis, also took Minnehaha as a veiled symbol for herself. See Holland, “Lewis’s Minnehaha,” esp. 32–4. The photographs, all dating from 1863, are in the Notman Photographic Collection of the McCord Museum. They show Hopkins as a shepherdess (I -7335) and as Portia (I -7336). A third photograph (I -8276), of the artist in deep mourning, also shows her with grey hair, suggesting a costume. Hopkins would not have been in mourning for any of her children in 1863. Clark, “Frances Anne Hopkins,” 41. In her unpublished typescript, Weller Smith points out that even after twenty-five years in Canada, Edward still referred to London as “home” in his correspondence. Gagnon and Lacasse, “Antoine Plamondon.” Montreal Gazette, 30 May 1863, 2; Rozmovits, “New Woman Meets Shakespeare Woman.” Rozmovits, “New Woman Meets Shakespeare Woman,” 456. Admiral Beechey’s will stipulated that his daughters were to control their legacies “independent of any husband they may marry.” Weller Smith, “Self-Portraits?,” n.p.

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Notes to pages 106–18 322

10 Jefferys, “Art of Mary Hiester Reid,” 19. See also Brian Foss’s essay “Sympathetic Self Expression.” 11 By comparison, press coverage of McNicoll’s rough contemporary Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles (1866–1928) was overflowing with personal observations, describing the artist as frank, humorous, and a brilliant entertainer. See, for instance, Canadienne (pseud.), “Afternoon in ‘The Studio,’” Saturday Night 29, no. 17 (5 February 1916), 21; and “Representative Women,” The Globe, 25 June 1910, 5. 12 “A Loss to Canadian Art,” Saturday Night 29, no. 38 (10 July 1915), 3. 13 Murray, Helen McNicoll, n.p.; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canadians in Paris, 40. Murray’s various discussions of McNicoll (see also Impressionism in Canada and “A Century of Canadian Women Artists”) consistently emphasized these aspects of the artist’s work, and the influence of her writing is apparent in subsequent discussions by Lowrey, Visions of Light and Air, and Tippett, By a Lady. 14 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 70. 15 Ibid. 16 The classic analysis is Nanette Salomon, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission.” 17 Federickson and Webb, Singular Women, 1–20. 18 Marchese, “Return of Sunlight,” 22. 19 Teitelbaum, preface to Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 13. 20 Burton, “Re-Mapping Modernity.” 21 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 63. See also Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 96. In her contribution to Visions of Light and Air, Lowrey speculates that Sharp might also be the model for the painting (35), though photographs of Sharp show little facial resemblance. 22 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 70. 23 Murray, “A Century of Canadian Women Artists,” 8. 24 Natalie Luckyj, curator’s talk, 11 October 2000, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery. 25 Murray, Helen McNicoll, n.p. 26 MacDonald, “Helen McNicoll,” 1077. 27 Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 94; Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 19.

28 Mackay Institution for Protestant DeafMutes, Annual Reports. 29 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 19. 30 Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 94. 31 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 19; Rée, I See a Voice, 97. 32 Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 94. Duval’s speculation about McNicoll’s visuality resonates with the 1910 assertion of George Veditz, president of the National Association of the Deaf, that deaf people are “first, last, and all the time the people of the eye.” Proceedings of the Ninth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf and the Third World’s Congress of the Deaf, 1910 (Philadelphia: Philocophus Press 1912), 30, quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 10. 33 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 44. 34 On silence in art, see Rubin, Manet’s Silence, and Ward, American Silences. 35 For instance: “When hearing people think of the world of the deaf as silent, they are comparing and reducing an identity, a way of life, an infinitely complex set of social and cultural relationships to a simple and concrete phenomenon: a temporary absence of sound.” Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 23–5. 36 Winzer, “Talking Deaf Mutes,” 23–33. 37 For a full account of this transformation, see Branson and Miller, Damned for Their Difference, 121–77. See also Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, and particularly Baynton, Forbidden Signs, whose excellent account I am indebted to throughout this paragraph. 38 Branson and Miller, Damned for Their Difference, 150; Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, 178–95. 39 Convention of Articulation Teachers of the Deaf – 1884: Official Report (Albany: E.S. Werner 1884), 11, quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 136. 40 Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 147. 41 Rée, in I See a Voice, 231, cites memoirs by David Wright and Moll Sifton to this effect. 42 Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 5. 43 Proceedings of the National Association of the Deaf and the World’s Congress of the Deaf, Colorado Springs, 1910 (Los Angeles 1910), quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 76. 44 Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 34.

52 See Tickner’s discussion of “the womanly woman” in The Spectacle of Women, 213–26. 53 Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” 9–65. 54 Taylor, “Some Women Art Students,” 243. Two-thirds of the Slade’s students were female. On the role of gender at the school, see Foster, “Gwen John’s Self-Portrait.” 55 A prominent example is Tippett, By a Lady, 35. 56 Luckyj, “McNicoll, Helen Galloway,” 730–1. In his unpublished catalogue to the Canadian Art Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA , dossier 4998, p. 295), J. Russell Harper described McNicoll as an artist who “principally worked in Montreal painting mother and child groups and figure studies in oil.” Paul Duval similarly refers to the artist’s “affection … for the theme of mother and child” (Canadian Impressionism, 94), while an Exhibition Fact Sheet prepared for the AGo ’s 1999 exhibition described the artist as “primarily a painter of children, working women and maternal themes” (Helen McNicoll Artist File, Canadian Women Artists History Initiative). 57 Art Association of Montreal, Memorial Exhibition, 5. 58 The classic account is Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” 59 “Current Art Notes,” Connoisseur 40 (1914): 229, 231. 60 On deafness and hysteria, see Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, 201–4. 61 Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Scribner 1909), 70, quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 177. 62 Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, 195. Ironically, as Mirzoeff details (101), advocates of sign language had previously argued that signs achieved the highest degree of natural correspondence between word and idea. 63 Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 92. 64 See McConkey, British Impressionism, and especially Impressionism in Britain. 65 Greutzner-Robins, “British Impressionism.” 66 Talmage also taught Emily Carr, who recorded his advice in her autobiography, Growing Pains, 314.

Notes to pages 118–36

45 Branson and Miller, Damned for Their Difference, 145–55. 46 Sharp emerges quite clearly as a constant companion in McNicoll’s letters home. In 1913 they shared a studio and living space at 91 Ashworth Mansions, Maida Vale. In 1914 the catalogue for the Royal Society of British Artists lists both artists as residing at 3b Fulthorpe Studios, Warwick Avenue, which had been McNicoll’s London address from 1913 onwards. After McNicoll’s death, Sharp lived and worked until the end of her life in close companionship with another artist, Marcella Smith. 47 For assessments of the extensive literature addressing women’s same-sex relationships at the turn of the century, see Stanley, “Romantic Friendship?” and Diggs, “Romantic Friends.” 48 Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Murray Files, Helen McNicoll to David McNicoll, 19 March 1913. 49 Vigorous discussion of this question during a memorial symposium for Luckyj at Ottawa’s Carleton University in 2001 suggests the discomfort that this apparently “easy” painting engenders. 50 Colette, Earthly Paradise: An Autobiography (London: Secker & Warburg 1966), 216, quoted in Parker, Subversive Stitch, 10. 51 The painter and sculptor Estelle Kerr commented on the welcome freedom from concern over questions of attire and housekeeping while working abroad (Kerr, “The Artist,” 27), but concerns about propriety of appearance were acutely felt by Sophia Pemberton and Emily Carr (Burton, “Canadian Girls in London,” 103–23). Similarly, Florence Carlyle’s rousing evocation of “the thrill of those silent hours standing shoulder to shoulder in the army of ardent, splendid, hard working women” was offset by her account of the instructor’s weekly visit, with each student “as he stands by her side, humbly realizing the master’s greatness.” See Florence Carlyle, “Student Life in Paris,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, 10 February 1936, quoted in McKellar, “Out of Order,” 67, and Tippet, By a Lady, 46.

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Notes to pages 136–41 324

67 Greutzner-Robins, “British Impressionism,” 86. 68 George Thomson, “Henry Herbert La Thangue and His Work,” The Studio 9 (1896): 177, quoted in McConkey, Impressionism in Britain, 52. In this, La Thangue was true to the Academic edicts of his teacher, Jean-Leon Gérôme. 69 Philip Wilson Steer, “Mr P. Wilson Steer on Impressionism in Art,” in D.S. MacColl, The Life, Work and Setting of Philip Wilson Steer (London: Faber & Faber 1945), 177, quoted in Greutzner-Robins, “British Impressionism,” 78. 70 Brymner, “Impressionism,” 33. Brymner’s lecture was initially delivered at the Art Association of Montreal (AAM ) on 13 April 1897. The original typescript, now preserved in the Queen’s University Archives, has been reproduced in facsimile by Boutilier and Marechal in William Brymner: Artist, Teacher, Colleague. My subsequent citations of this source preserve Brymner’s original pagination. 71 Brymner, “Impressionism,” 7. 72 Ibid., 30. 73 Ibid., 33. Italics mine. 74 Ibid., 23. 75 Ibid., 3. 76 Barasch, Modern Theories of Art 2, 48–50. 77 The major turning point in this assessment was Shiff’s 1978 article “The End of Impressionism.” 78 Littré, “De quelques points de physiologie psychique,” 312–15. 79 Shiff, Cezanne and the End of Impressionism, 19. 80 Jules Laforgue, “L’Impressionisme” (1883), Melanges posthumes, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Mercure de France 1919), 140–1, quoted in Broude, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading, 136. 81 Ibid. 82 Brymner, “Impressionism,” 25, citing George Moore’s “Confessions of a Young Man” (London: S. Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co. 1888). 83 Luckyj, Helen McNicoll, 70. 84 The other is Laura Muntz Lyall, who worked in an Impressionist vein throughout her decade-long residence in Paris. The main

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88 89 90 91

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sources on Canadian Impressionism are Murray’s Impressionism in Canada, 1895–1935; Duval’s Canadian Impressionism; Reid’s “Impressionism in Canada”; Lowrey’s Visions of Light and Air; and Prakash’s Canadian Impressionism. Reid, “Impressionism in Canada,” 93. Broude, “A World in Light: France and the International Impressionist Movement,” in World Impressionism, 10. Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 13. On the phenomenon of “cultural cringe” in Britain’s former colonies, see Katie Pickles, “Transnational History and Cultural Cringe.” Broude, World Impressionism, 11. Stacey, “(Their Own) Landscape,” 56. Ibid., 71. Duval, Canadian Impressionism, 98. Prakash highlights the French side of McNicoll’s production in Canadian Impressionism: A Journey of Rediscovery, which emphasizes her early access to French paintings in the collection of her father’s close colleague, William Van Horne, notes her three-month stint at an unknown Parisian atelier, and points to her possible attendance at the Impressionist exhibition organized by Durand-Ruel at London’s Grafton Galleries in 1905. “Pictures and Sketches by Helen G. McNicoll at the Art Association,” Montreal Daily Star, 11 November 1925, 4. In April 1913, the Montreal press was divided on the question of McNicoll’s principal country of residence. The Daily Star reproduced a photo of her London studio and reported that she had “lived in London for many years” (“Miss McNicoll now a member of Royal Art Society,” Montreal Daily Star, 2 April 1913, 2). By contrast, the Gazette noted that she had returned to Montreal and opened a studio there, while “spending a portion of each year in Europe” (“Honor Montreal Artist,” Montreal Gazette, 2 April 1913, 2). In London, McNicoll was known as “a Montreal artist.” See The Studio, August 1915. Burton, “Canadian Girls in London.” Canadian citizenship was first created in the Immigration Act of 1910 as a way to

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99 100 101

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106 On the British world, see Buckner, Rediscovering the British World, and Buckner and Francis, Canada and the British World. 107 De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 12. 108 Ibid., 26. 109 Hennessy, Materialist Feminism, 93–4. 110 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 33. 111 Ibid. 112 Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books 1970), 27, quoted in Hennessy, Materialist Feminism, 93. 113 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 110.

chaPter FOur 1 AGGV , Sophie Pemberton Archives, SC1226.19. 2 One album is in the collection of the British Columbia Archives; the other, which pairs images with poetry, is at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. 3 For a well-illustrated overview of this tradition, see Kramer, Women of Flowers. For a more scholarly one, see Seaton, “The Sentimental Flower Book and Its Audience,” in Language of Flowers, 16–35. 4 Pemberton gave her trays away as gifts or sold them as wartime fundraisers for the Red Cross. See Tuele, Sophia Theresa Pemberton, 26–7. 5 “89th Birthday of a Great Local Artist,” Oak Bay and District Leader, 13 February 1958. 6 BCA , Pemberton Family Fonds, MS 1295.1, Sophie Pemberton, diary and daily scripture readings. 7 See, for example, Bermingham, Learning to Draw; Bennett, Lilies of the Hearth. 8 Nickelsen, Draughtsmen, Botanists and Nature. 9 For discussions of women, botany, and science, see Gates, “Ordering Nature” and “Retelling the Story of Science”; Shteir, “Elegant Recreations”; “Let Us Examine the Flower”; “Botany in the Breakfast Room”; “Linnaeus’s Daughters”; and Cultivating Women; and Gates and Shteir, Natural Eloquence. See also Secord, “Botany on a Plate.” For an expressly art-historical take on the conjunction, see Bermingham, Learning to Draw.

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designate those British subjects who were born or domiciled in Canada. Burton, “Canadian Girls in London,” 103–23. So significant was McNicoll’s father as vice-president and general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railroad that both an Ontario town (Port McNicoll) and a Rocky Mountain (the Vice President) were named after him. Upon his death, obituaries for him appeared in papers across the country. Burton, “A Canadian Artist in King Arthur’s Court.” Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Murray Files, Helen McNicoll to David McNicoll, 28 March 1913. On the RBA , see Koval, “Society of British Artists.” Greutzner-Robins, “British Impressionism,” 91. Canadian press coverage of McNicoll’s work approved McNicoll’s moderate modernism. The Montreal Gazette emphasized the extent to which her art was never “freakish” (23 June 1915) and did not strain “after extreme effects and extravagant technique” (2 April 1913). In 1914, McNicoll’s In the Shadow of the Tent was awarded the Women’s Art Society prize for best painting by a woman at that year’s AAM exhibition. SuzorCoté won the prize for the best painting in oil. Both painters were supported by the National Gallery of Canada, which purchased a supremely French haystack painting (Stubble Fields) from McNicoll in 1912. The gallery had purchased Suzor-Coté’s Return from the Harvest Fields in 1904. Ford, “Royal Canadian Academy of Arts,” 45. Ford exhibited regularly in the Royal Canadian Academy and was an occasional contributor to the Royal Hibernian Academy. “Philistia” is a term of Whistlerian opprobrium that signals Ford’s familiarity with his Ten O’Clock lectures. Boyanoski, “Selective Memory.” Montreal Daily Star, 2 April 1913, 2; Toronto Weekly Star, 12 April 1913. Other unidentified clippings are on file at the Art Gallery of Ontario. McNicoll’s election to the RBA came in 1913. She was elected an associate of the RCA the following year.

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10 There is currently no panoramic overview of women and botany in Canada, but a sense of the breadth of these activities is evident in Jacques Cayouette’s account of women’s botanical activities in northern Quebec and Labrador alone. Marie Auguste Hlawatschek collected specimens around Labrador from 1872 to 1896. Doris M. Peacock (née Davis) was highly regarded for her collecting activities in Nain, Labrador, between 1945 and 1947, and along with her husband, the Reverend F.W. Peacock, helped botanist Gérard Gardner explore plant life around Happy Valley–Goose Bay in the 1960s. Upon meeting Peacock, Brigitte Schloss began collecting in Labrador in the early ’50s. Margaret Oldenburg quit her job as a teacher and librarian to collect plant specimens in Churchill, Manitoba, in 1939, and travelled around the Canadian Arctic collecting specimens until 1954. Doris Löve helped several botanists identify plants in the mid to late 1950s, including Kenneth Hare, whose wife, Jocelyn, put together a herbarium of plants collected from the Kaumajet mountains based on Löve’s identification work. See Cayouette, À la découverte du Nord, 70, 75–6, 118, and 193–4. Further information about and context for women’s activities in southern Quebec prior to Confederation is available in Asselin, Cayouette and Mathieu, Curieuses histoires de plantes du Canada. 11 Dalhousie, “Catalogue of Canadian Plants,” published in Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. Harriet Sheppard also published work on natural history in the society’s Transactions. 12 Pursh lost his research in a fire, and the book was never published. See Cayouette, “Pursh dans l’est” and “Enquête sur la Flora perdue.” Hooker’s two-volume Flora BorealiAmericana was published in London from 1829 to 1840. Torrey and Gray published their two-volume Flora of North America in New York, 1838–43. On Canadian women’s correspondence with William Jackson Hooker and their contributions to the Kew herbarium, see Ann B. Shteir and Jacques Cayouette, “Collecting with ‘Botanical Friends,’” forthcoming 2018, as well as a

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series of articles by Cayouette: “Anne Mary Perceval,” “Pursh dans l’est,” and “Enquête sur la Flora perdue.” See also Pringle, “Canadian Botanical Specimens” and “Anne Mary Perceval”; Hardy, “Les ladies de Sillery.” Ainley, “Science in Canada’s Backwoods,” 88. Agnes Dunbar Moodie Fitzgibbon Chamberlin also illustrated her aunt’s Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885). Fitzgibbon’s watercolours for the book were photographed by her daughter, Geraldine Moodie, who also created botanical drawings and photographs (see fig. 4.38). Jack, Canadian Garden. Jack also contributed regular articles to the Reports of the Montreal Horticultural Society from 1877 to 1890, to the Canadian Horticultural Magazine from 1897 to 1899, and to the Canadian Horticulturalist from 1901 to 1911. Saunders gathered her collection of rare specimens from 1878 to 1884 while living in London, Ontario, with her husband, William Edwin Saunders, a pioneering Canadian pharmacist, entomologist, and plant breeder who eventually became director of the experimental farms system at the Department of Agriculture. See Dore, “The Saunders Collection.” The collection is one of the oldest in the country. Amber Lloydlangston discusses Dominion botanist James Fletcher’s later correspondence with female botanical collectors in her article “Women in Botany.” In operation from 1905 to 1923, the George museum was the only natural history museum in the Northwest Territories apart from the government-run museum in Banff. The plants collected by Barbara George are now in the collection of the Royal Alberta Museum, along with watercolours by her. “Large Collection of Wild Flowers by Calgary Girl,” News Telegraph, 9 July 1913, Glenbow Library Clipping File. See also Smith, “Marion Moodie”; Hallworth, “Miss Marion Moodie.” Letters to Moodie from these institutions detail their transactions and are privately preserved in family papers. A letter from the curator in the Department of Botany of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago enumerates several suggestions for the

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22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

31 Gill Saunders, Picturing Plants. The author divides her book into chapters on each of these different kinds of illustrations, along with two older ones – herbals and florilegia. For definitions of the different modes, see especially 15, 101–7, and 132–3. 32 The BC Archives contains numerous examples of Lindley’s botanical illustrations, including pencil sketches, watercolours, engraved copperplates, artist’s proofs, and signed engravings. See Bridge, Henry and Self, 23 and 116. There are also some botanical drawings attributed to her daughter, Josephine. 33 See, for example, her work in Davis et al., The Raspberry and Its Cultivation in Canada, available online through the Internet Archive, as well as the original watercolours for it, preserved in the Canadian Agricultural Museum. Fyles’s extensive horticultural drawings of fruits, vegetables, and plants may be consulted online through the museum’s collection database. Fyles also contributed an article, “Ferns and Flowers,” to the C.S.E.T. Manual for Tuxis Boys, which details and illustrates numerous specimens, poisonous and non-, from multiple plant families. 34 Though Fyles had moved to the Horticulture Division in 1919, a letter from her new supervisor indicates that her work on poisonous plants had been undertaken in her previous posting. See “Letter from E.S. Archibald, Director, Experimental Farms, to J.H. Grisdale, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, 1 October 1920,” 100, quoted in Lloydlangston, “Women in Botany,” 129. 35 Maroske, “Establishing Botany in Colonial Australia.” 36 A number of colonial floras were completed, and in the early 1860s William Hooker proposed his son, Joseph Dalton Hooker, as the author of a new British North American flora. By this time, however, the British government had shifted the financial burden of publication onto the colonies, and the British North American project ultimately fell through from lack of funding. See “Flora of British North America,” 73; “Botanical

Notes to pages 156–61

30

proper collection and labelling of regional plant specimens (8 April 1915). Among the women discussed in this chapter, Sarah Agnes Saunders, Barbara George, Agnes Hill, Mary Schäffer, Harriet Sheppard, and Anne Ross McCord shared their interests in botany with their husbands, while Elizabeth Hazen passed hers on to her son, John Douglas Hazen. Some, including Countess Dalhousie, Fanny Bayfield, Faith Fyles, and Mary Schäffer, had close male relatives who were active in other branches of natural history, notably entomology and geology. Agnes Hill’s father wrote books on medicinal plants. See Boivin, “Botany History.” See also Penhallow, “Review of Canadian Botany.” “Botany for Schools,” American Journal of Education 4 (1829): 168–75, quoted in Rudolph, “How It Developed,” 92. Seaton, Language of Flowers, 24. Ibid. Berger, Science, God and Nature, 13. Developments here paralleled those in the United States. See Keeney, The Botanizers. Shteir, Cultivating Women. See Gillett, “Carrie Derick (1862–1941)”; Birker, “Carrie Derick.” Gussow, “Report of the Dominion Botanist,” 31 March 1912, 191–2, 215. See also Lloydlangston, “Women in Botany,” 128. Lloydlangston, “Women in Botany,” 129. The book and its illustrations have been digitized. See https://www.scribd.com/ document/61177175/Fyles-PrincipalPoisonous-Plants-of-Canada. Fyles’s expertise in poisonous weeds had been developing since 1914 when she had toured Western Canada, collecting eight hundred flowering specimens for the national herbarium. Fyles authored a pamphlet, “Do You Know Your Weeds?” and developed an educational display that was circulated to farmers through the Central Experimental Farm’s Western Exhibition circles. See Gussow, “Report of the Dominion Botanist,” 1916, 964–5. The book and its illustrations have been digitized. See https://archive.org/details/ principalpoisono00fyleuoft.

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Notes,” 348; and Zeller, Inventing Canada, 235–7. Cayouette, “Anne Mary Perceval,” 8. See, for example, this passage in his Exotic Flora, vol. 2, 145: “For the introduction of this highly interesting plant to Europe [Habenaria orbiculata = Plathanthera orbiculata], we are indebted to the Right Honourable the Countess of DALHouSIe , who, with a liberality and kindness that I am proud to acknowledge, immediately upon receiving an application which had been made to her Ladyship for Canadian plants, sent to our Botanic Garden [Edinburgh] some boxes well stored with botanical rarities, especially Orchideae, from the vicinity of Montreal.” As editor of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, Hooker would also dedicate a volume of the publication to Lady Dalhousie (vol. 60, or series 2, vol. 7, 1833). See also Browne, “Countess of Dalhousie.” Cayouette, À la découverte du Nord, 87. In 1840, six of Morris’s botanical paintings were published as hand-coloured lithographs in parts one and two of the first series of Wild Flowers of Nova Scotia; another set of six lithographs was published in 1853 under the same title, and a third series appeared in 1866 as Wild Flowers of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In 1867 new lithographs were made of the first two sets of images and published as Wild Flowers of British North America. Traill’s Canadian Wildflowers was first published in Montreal in 1868 by John Lovell. Five hundred copies of the first edition were sold by subscription. Second and third editions were printed the following year, plus a separate issue of the third edition, called North American Wildflowers, was printed for the American market. A fourth edition of Canadian Wildflowers was published in 1895. The scientific text for the 1840 edition of Maria Morris’s prints was provided by Titus H. Smith, the secretary of agriculture for Nova Scotia. Alexander Forrester, who lectured on botany at the Mechanics’ Institute, provided the text for the 1853 illustrations, and George Lawson, founder of the Botanical Society of Canada, did the same for the 1863

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edition. In the prefaces to the various editions of Canadian Wild Flowers, Traill singles out Lawson and William Hinks among the “several scientific and literary gentlemen” who had approved her work; in her more extensive botanical work Studies of Plant Life in Canada, Traill thanks John Macoun for his encouragement and James Fletcher for revising the proofs. A transcript of the lecture, which mentions the illustrations but does not reproduce them, was published in the Transactions of the Ottawa Field Naturalists Club in 1884. See Macoun, “Edible and Poisonous Fungi.” Fitzgibbon’s original drawings are now held in the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Collection of the University of Toronto Library, Agnes Dunbar (Moodie) Chamberlin Papers, MS Coll. 112. Skidmore, Searching for Mary Schäffer, 70. For other literature on Schäffer and her extraordinary life, see Beck, No Ordinary Woman; MacFarlane, “Mary Schäffer’s ‘Comprehending Equal Eyes’”; and Hart, Hunter of Peace. See also Schäffer’s own Old Indian Trails. This was Stewardson Brown at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, under whose name the book eventually appeared, published by Putnam’s in New York. Ayre, Wild Flowers of Newfoundland, vol. 3, preface, n.p. Due to financial considerations, illness, and misadventure, only volume 3 was ever published. Many of Ayre’s original artworks are now preserved in the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, and a selection may be consulted at http://collections.mun.ca/ cdm/search/collection/cns_ayre. For more on and by Ayre, see also Ayre, “Newfoundland Flowers”; Peter Scott, “Agnes Marion Ayre.” Another such album, thought to be commissioned by an officer in the British military, is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. See O’Neill, Maria Morris. Curator and editor Kathryn Bridge paired Woods’s drawings with writings by Emily Carr in Wild Flowers. For more on Woods, see Finlay, A Woman’s Place.

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active collectors. In Quebec, Emily McTavish collected specimens around the postings of her husband, George Simpson McTavish, at Great Whale and Little Whale Rivers between 1865 and 1871, and Elisabeth “Lizzie” Crawford spent part of the summer of 1876 collecting specimens at her husband Robert Crawford’s posting at Fort Chimo (Kuujjuaq). Cayouette, À la découverte du Nord, 87–8. To this end, Fitzgibbon went so far as to teach herself lithography. The colouring for the first edition was done entirely by hand in Fitzgibbon’s home, with the assistance of her children. The book was the first coloured illustrated book to be printed in Canada and set the standard for luxury publications at the time. The text’s introductory essay was by George Iles. Text and artworks were “by special artists and botanists” including Maud Humphrey (1868–1940), a prominent American illustrator. The Viger Album in the Bibliotheque et archives nationales du Québec gives a sense of the range of women’s floral imagery, including both flower drawings and botanical drawings by Marianne Malone. The album may be consulted online at http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/viger/. A beautiful découpaged flower drawing is preserved in the album of Lady Belleau at Library and Archives Canada. Examples in the McCord Collection include the albums by Sophie Amelie Bruneau (M 988.109.3) and Mary Frary (M 925.2.2), as well as one by Louise Badelard Panet (M 24629). There are also numerous botanical drawings by Anne Ross McCord and by her daughter Jane McCord (1838–1914) (M 994X .5.272.1-5). At the Royal Ontario Museum, see two 1878 drawings by Jennie Carson Hele (989.309.13 and 989.309.12) and album pages by A.E.A. Mathison (979.301.2.27 and 979.301.2.18). For more on Montgomery’s albums, see Epperly, Imagining Anne. On albums as expressions of personal identity, see Sheppard, “Lady Caroline Bucknall-Estcourt.” John Samuel McCord to Anne Ross, c. 1831, MM, McCord, P 001-M16691. Though the letter does not specify the author of the book,

Notes to pages 163–9

48 Elizabeth Beckwith was married by arrangement to James King Hazen in 1858 but separated from him in 1860 or ’61, returning with her two children to her family’s home in Fredericton. She exhibited her artwork at the provincial exhibitions in the 1870s. Her wildflower drawings are preserved in uNBA, Elizabeth Beckwith Hazen Fonds, MG H 13a, http://gencat.eloquent-systems.com/ unb_permalink.html?key=25749. 49 Ayre, preface to Wild Flowers of Newfoundland. 50 From her home in Colborne, Ontario, the American-born Goslee painted more than 400 different wildflowers on 170 sheets of stiffened folded fabric and housed them in a custom-made leather case. The collection, executed between 1891 and 1897, was eventually gifted to the Royal Ontario Museum, which later gave the album to the biology department at the University of Toronto, where it resided until being transferred to its current home in the university’s Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, MSS 09254. 51 On botany and the colonial project, see Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany; Tobin, Colonizing Nature; Miller and Reill, Visions of Empire; Fara, Sex, Botany, and Empire. 52 The quote, from the then Prince of Wales, appeared originally in the Hindoo Patriot, 10 May 1886, and appears in Mathur, India by Design, 57. See also Tupper, Colonial and Indian Exhibition. For Countess Dalhousie, who was made an honorary member of the male-only Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1837, see Browne, “Countess of Dalhousie,” and Reid, “Unsung Heroines.” 53 Born in St John, New Brunswick, in the 1840s, Agnes Hill moved to British Columbia with her husband, Albert J. Hill, in 1882. She was president of the New Westminster Local Council of Women in 1901–02 and was elected to the New Westminster School Board from 1900 to 1903. See House, Plantae Occidentalis, 23, 26–7, and Hale, “British Columbia Woman Suffrage Movement.” 54 See Fast, “Cripps, Eleanor Eliza.” Kennedy’s album is in the Manitoba Museum Archives, H9-29-695. Other wives of HBC traders were

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the date of the gift and its place of publication (which are also specified in the museum files) point directly to Elizabeth Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary, which was first published in Baltimore by F. Lucas in 1829 and immediately ran to several printings and editions. On the “language of flowers” in general, and on Wirt’s book in particular, see Seaton, Language of Flowers. Wirt, Flora’s Dictionary, 7. I have consulted the 1837 edition, but the same preface is included in the earlier edition owned by Ross. Novascotian, 24 December 1834, 412. Halifax Monthly Magazine, 1 June 1831, 29. Women “of moderate means,” it stated, would be much improved “by putting a wreath or two less of artificial flowers in their heads,” and hope was expressed that Morris’s drawings might serve as inducements to “a successful cultivation of a delightful branch of the Art of Painting, that … may come to make the ready imitation of nature’s handiwork, an accomplishment by which the females of Nova-Scotia shall hereafter be honorably distinguished.” Novascotian, 14 September 1836, 291. “The Man about Town,” Novascotian, 19 January 1837, 1. Henry Bayfield to Amelia Harris, 17 April 1838, University of Western Ontario Archives, Harris Family Fonds, quoted in McKenzie’s introduction to Survey Journals, vol. 1, xlviii, and McKenzie, “Wright, Fanny Amelia.” “Death of Mrs. Bayfield,” Charlottetown Daily Patriot, 11 September 1891. Berger, Science, God and Nature, 33–4. Mary Rebecca Curry was descended from United Empire Loyalists and married John Wilkinson, an architect, engineer, and draughtsman for the provincial Board of Works. Margaret Medley (1821–1905) was an experienced nurse and early advocate of anaesthesia in Fredericton. She was also an avid gardener and botanist. The Wildflowers of New Brunswick album was given to Margaret Medley at Christmas 1868 and is now preserved in the Mary Rebecca Wilkinson Fonds, University

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of New Brunswick Archives, MG H 197. http://gencat.eloquent-systems.com/ unb_permalink.html?key=27743. Kate Waghorne lived with her two brothers in New Harbour, NL . She taught school in neighbouring Dildo, NL , from 1879 to 1889, and married the Rev. Samuel J. Andrewes in 1890. She died shortly after giving birth to her first child. Waghorne’s botanical drawings are thought to parallel her brother’s interest in plants, which began in 1886–87. According to Ayre (“Newfoundland Flowers,” 101), Waghorne also sold botanical drawings at Mrs Rouse’s, the St John’s bookstore of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Examples of her work, and that of Mary Southcott, are preserved in the provincial archives of Newfoundland and Labrador (MG 24.10) and the Centre for Newfoundland Studies. By then Knox United Church. Berger, Science, God and Nature, 32. Shteir, Cultivating Women, 16. George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 59. Annie Ryder, Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! (Boston: Lothrop 1886), 44, quoted in Seaton, Language of Flowers, 22. Such art-historical discussions include Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form; Bryson, Vision and Painting; Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”; Crary, “Modernizing Vision”; Damisch, Origin of Perspective. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 10, 38. See Foucault, Use of Pleasure; Care of the Self; “Technologies of the Self.” Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 58. See Burant, Drawing on the Land, 81–91. See Saunders, Picturing Plants; Blunt and Stearn, Art of Botanical Illustration. Fitzgibbon’s original drawings are preserved in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Images of the published illustrations may be consulted online at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/moodietraill/027013-5005.5-e.html. For details of the work’s publication history, see Globe, “Story of Canadian Wildflowers.” Shteir, Cultivating Women, 16–17.

104 Sophia Pemberton, “Wildflowers of BC ,” drawing from 13 May 1895, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1995.24.1 105 In a sympathy card from Pemberton to her friend Flora Burns in 1940, Pemberton compares her friend’s mother to a lily: “I always thought your dear Mother looked like a lily in her grace, stately beauty” (BCA , Burns, MS-2786.3.23) 106 Tuele, Pemberton, 27. 107 Geraldine Moodie to R.B. Thomson, 4 March 1937, ut , Chamberlin, MS Coll. 112; Barbara George’s memoir is in the Glenbow Archives, M 407; Schäffer’s attempt, published in Old Indian Trails, 24, reiterates centuries-old rhetoric employed by Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin. Though generally a fluent writer, Schäffer had difficulty finding a language in which to convey her interest in flowers. In her article “Flora of the Saskatchewan and Athabasca River Tributaries,” she credited the botanist Stewardson Brown with the article’s contents, (“I herewith give a few notes, the result of his work”), yet the text does not record Brown’s scientific conclusions about the plants so much as it situates these flowers along the geographic route that Schäffer had travelled during an expedition in which Brown played no part. The article depends for its impact on the fact of this travel and the first-person encounters with plants that it afforded, but the scientific naming (which she elsewhere called the “real work” of botany) was what she acknowledged as important. Schäffer wrote about flowers on two other main occasions, in “Haunts of the Wildflowers” and “My Garden,” the latter an unpublished 1910 lecture (typescript preserved in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Mary Schäffer Fonds, M79/2). 108 An online exhibition of Prat’s work and that of her sisters, Minnie and May, is available at http://novascotia.ca/archives/prat/ default.asp. 109 See watercolours in the Samuel Prat Family Fonds at Acadia University, especially 1990.007 PRA /7.gg. 110 NSA , Prat, Starr Family Fonds, 1979-147.595.22.

Notes to pages 180–90

83 Gates and Shteir, Natural Eloquence. 84 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv and 247–8. The second quote continues: “For example, one asks which among several differences is the one which truly forms a ‘characteristic’ – in other words, the one which allows to be grouped under a reflected identity those beings which resemble one another on a maximum number of points … [The characteristic] ensures the greatest subordination of differences to the order of increasing and decreasing resemblances.” 85 Foucault, Order of Things, xxvi. 86 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv. 87 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 74. See also Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference, in which she examines canonical texts in the history of western thought and argues that they preclude the recognition of sexual difference. 88 wMCR , Toms, M 429, Mary Schäffer to Humphrey Toms, 11 September 1933. The exact wording is “my master was a very determined one.” 89 Ibid. 90 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 96. 91 wMCR , Toms, M 429, Schäffer to Toms, 26 November 1937. 92 Ibid., 11 September 1933. 93 Ibid., 26 November 1937. 94 Ibid. 95 Traill, Studies of Plant Life in Canada, 3. 96 Ayre, preface to Wild Flowers of Newfoundland. Ayre also collaborated with Fernald when he was revising the eighth edition of Asa Gray’s classic text Gray’s Manual of Botany. 97 Foucault, Order of Things, 61. 98 Fitch, “Botanical Drawing,” Gardener’s Chronicle (1869), quoted in Blunt and Stearn, Art of Botanical Illustration, 256. 99 Nickelsen, Draughtsmen, Botanists and Nature, passim, but especially 2–8. 100 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 86. 101 Gates, “Ordering Nature,” 180. 102 Sophia Pemberton, “Wildflowers of BC ,” drawing from 27 May 1895, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1995.24.1. 103 Sophia Pemberton, book of wildflowers, BC Archives, PDP 00975.

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111 Ibid., 1979-147.594.71. 112 Ibid., 1979-147.594.26; 1979-147.595.110; 1979-147.594.71. Her inscription on the Indian pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) references both Thoreau and Asa Gray. Prat also owned a copy of John Ingram’s Flora Symbolica. 113 Ibid., 1979-147.594.22. In her notes on her botanical glass plates, Geraldine Moodie similarly emphasized the uniqueness of some of her finds, as well as her difficulty in procuring them. For example, her photograph of a night-blooming plant: “As far as I know, I was the first to bring this beautiful specimen to notice. I sent a drawing and description to the late Prof. Macoun Sen[ior]. He was greatly interested and I understand sent a member of his Dept. to Medecine Hat to find it but he was not successful in producing it. It is very difficult to find as it grows on the face of an almost perpendicular bank and finds shelter in crevices. Only on a bright moonlit night its snowy bloom stands out clearly.” ut , Chamberlin, MS Coll. 112. 114 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1. 115 Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, 46. 116 Dickenson, First Impressions, 22, notes that “Linnaeus was convinced that a complete description was anti-taxonomic and, even more, misleading … The main aim [of taxonomy] is to state the timeless essentials; the rest is irrelevant because it is supposed to follow from the essence as a logical consequence.” 117 Walcott, foreword to North American Wildflowers. 118 The examples are in the Mary Rebecca Wilkinson Fonds, uNBA , MG H 197, items 21, 23, and 8. 119 “I gathered and photographed all the wildflowers I could find in the latitudes from Churchill north to Fullerton and along the Ungava coast and at the same time pressed … most of them.” G. Moodie to R.B. Thomson, 28 November 1934, ut , Chamberlin, MS Coll. 112. Moodie’s diary from her Churchill years, along with a record of her photographs, has been digitized by the Glenbow and is available at http://www.glenbow.org/ collections/search/findingAids/archhtm/ moodieg.cfm. For more on Moodie, see

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Donny White, In Search of Geraldine Moodie. A selection of Moodie’s glass plates is available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/ thomasfisherlibrary/sets/ .72157628085300542/. Nickelsen, Draughtsmen, Botanists and Nature, 8–11, and especially chapter 7. Agnes Fitzgibbon’s “introductory note to fourth edition” was published in Traill, Canadian Wild Flowers (4th ed.), 7. Further study would be required to ascertain whether or not Hazen copied from other illustrations, particularly in drawings not so labelled. Traill, Studies of Plant Life in Canada, iii. Traill’s impertinence in the practice of bestowing botanical names in place of scientific ones predates Ruskin’s more resolutely defiant championing of the same practice in Proserpina of 1875: “Now you observe … that you have in the first place, nine names given you for one flower; and that among these nine names, you are not even at liberty to make your choice, because the united authority of Haller and Miller may be considered as an accurate balance to the single authority of Linnæus; and you ought therefore for the present to remain, yourself, balanced between the sides” (2). See also Jonathan Smith, “A Science against Sciences.” Julia Bullock Webster, Keremeos Diary, 7 April 1895. I am grateful to Cuyler Page and the staff of Heritage Interpretation Services, Keremeos, for sharing their 1995 transcript of the diaries that are held in the British Columbia Archives. Original botanical watercolours by Bullock Webster are housed in the collection of the Penticton Art Gallery. NSA , Prat, Starr Family Fonds, 1979-147.594.61. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 85. Berger, Science, God and Nature, 15. Ainley, “Science in Canada’s Backwoods,” 93. The Novascotian, 24 December 1834, 412; 22 August 1833, 267. Other advertisements appear regularly. Guildford, “Maria Morris Miller”; “‘Whate’er the Duty.’” Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 202, 224.

133 A letter to Humphrey Toms, dated 11 September 1933, offering to paint a skunk cabbage, shows that she did not abandon botanical illustration entirely. She had earlier refused a sketch to Toms because she wanted to keep them in her possession with an eye to eventual publication: “I still cling to the idea that someone will want to re-produce my work.” wMCR , Toms, M 429. 134 Schäffer, Old Indian Trails, 2–3. 135 On Southcott’s fascinating story, see Linda White, “Who’s in Charge Here?” 136 Scott, “Agnes Marion Ayre,” 6. Ayre was active in the Saint John’s Women’s Franchise League in the 1920s. 137 Elaine Miller, The Vegetative Soul, 8. 138 Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 184. 139 Grosz, Time Travels, 8. 140 Cousins, “Joy of Botanical Drawing,” 8. 141 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 82. 142 Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Travel, 1892–1913, quoted in Hart, Hunter of Peace, 2. Kipling was travelling with his wife, who later wrote to Schäffer in appreciation of Old Indian Trails.

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Notes to pages 200–15

1 Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity, 1. 2 The range of new scholarship on maternal experience is best represented by the journal Studies in the Maternal, founded in 2009. Other significant examples not cited elsewhere in this chapter are Ruddick, Maternal Thinking; O’Reilly, Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics and Practice; and Baraitser, Maternal Encounters. For art-historical perspectives on motherhood, see Buller, Reconciling Art and Mothering; Chernick and Klein, The M Word; and Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal. 3 For example: Ettinger, “The Feminine/Prenatal Weaving”; Hollway, “From Motherhood to Maternal Subjectivity.” 4 On Modersohn-Becker and Kollwitz, see Higonnet, “Making Babies,” and Betterton, “Mother Figures,” respectively. 5 The classic text is Duncan, “Happy Mothers.”

6 Tippett, By a Lady, 35. 7 Catalogues were consulted for the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Art Association of Montreal. Because most works were not illustrated and titles are not always transparently indicative of subject matter, such assessment is necessarily provisional, but it remains broadly suggestive. 8 See, for example, Mary Bell Eastlake’s Mobilization Day, 1914 (National Gallery of Canada); George Reid’s Mortgaging the Homestead, 1890 (National Gallery of Canada); Reid, The Foreclosure of the Mortgage, 1893 (Government of Ontario Art Collection). 9 Noteworthy examples are Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and Alice Neel’s Well Baby Clinic (1928–29). For discussion of these works in the context of contemporary art, see Baillie, “Ideas of Melancholy and Maternity,” 6. 10 Torn in Two is in fact the British title of Rozsika Parker’s important book on the experience of motherhood, published in North America under the more sensational title Mother Love, Mother Hate. On the experience of maternal ambivalence, see also Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood.” 11 Gualtieri, “Woman as Artist,” 140. 12 Mother and Child was on display at the 1910 spring exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists, which opened on 5 March at the gallery in Toronto’s Public Library building on College Street. The Moth was shown in April 1910 at the exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal and sold to J. Gordon and Wilhelmina McIntosh. 13 Possibly, this also worked the other way round, with maternity intervening to offset female reverie. 14 Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity, 1. 15 Two representative examples are Marion Long’s Memories on a Garden Swing (Waddington’s, 22 April 2013, lot 31), which can be seen at http://finewine.waddingtons.ca/ pastauction/336/lot-31, and Estelle Kerr’s Reflections, which was reproduced in the Annual Exhibition Catalogue of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1916). Gualtieri gives

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examples of works by both male and female artists. Among the women are Florence Carlyle (Thoughts, 1902; Reminiscences, 1906; Meditation, 1913); Mary Dignam (Daydreams, 1890); Sidney Strickland Tully (Meditation, 1898); and Clara Hagarty (Reflections, 1908). Women were only legally recognized as “persons” in Canada in 1928, after an appeal to the Judicial Committee of the English Privy Council overturned a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada that had denied women this status and, along with it, the right to membership in the Canadian senate under the terms established by the British North America Act, Canada’s de facto constitution at the time. Gualtieri, “Woman as Artist,” 101–3. Anderson, “Negotiating Gendered Spaces,” 35; Anderson, “Marion Long: The Fan,” 104. Marcus, “Reverie,” 145. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 3. (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974) 83, quoted in Marcus, “Reverie,” 138. The full quote from Freud and Breuer reads: “There are no doubt a whole number of activities, from mechanical ones such as knitting or playing scales, to some requiring at least a small degree of mental functioning, all of which are performed by many people with only half their mind on them. This is specially true of people who are of a very lively disposition, to whom monotonous, simple and uninteresting occupation is a torture, and who actually begin by deliberately amusing themselves with thinking of something different.” While the passage is not overtly gendered, the examples (knitting and playing scales) were prominent amongst the experiences of young middle-class women. Hysteria itself was firmly feminized. Ellis, “Auto-Eroticism,” 226–7; AndreasSalomé, “Dual Orientation of Narcissism.” On Andreas-Salomé and the self-sufficiency of “woman,” see Martin, Woman and Modernity, 4–5. Hall, Adolescence, vol. 2, 578. Ibid., 572. Laura Marholm’s observation was made of George Egerton, one of the leading

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New Woman writers, in Modern Women (London: John Lane 1896), quoted in Marcus, “Reverie,” 146. The long-standing opinion that children were the appropriate objects for female subjects was given its classic expression by Sarah Stickney Ellis in Mothers of England, 3: “And why should the mother not rejoice? Has she not become the possessor of a new nature, to whose support she can devote all the vast resources of her self-love, without its selfishness? She has now an object peculiarly her own, for which to think and to feel; and, not less – for which to suffer.” Andreas-Salomé, “Dual Orientation of Narcissism,” 7. Chavasse, Advice to a Wife, 270. On advice to mothers, see Hardyment, Dream Babies; Hulbert, Raising America; Arnup, Education for Motherhood; Arnup, Levesque, and Pierson, Delivering Motherhood. Chavasse, Advice to a Wife, 270. Chavasse is quoting the October 1861 issue. See also Burrell, The Mothers’ Book, 264. Key, Sofia, and Fries, Renaissance of Motherhood, 106. Ibid., 105. Poulsson, Love and Law, 73–4: “The child’s first environment is the mother herself. Before birth the child was environed in her body, and for some months after his birth she should as protectingly hedge him about and be the medium through which everything comes to him … She in her own being is now spiritually, as she was bodily, the first and closest environment of the child.” See also Key, Sofia, and Fries, Renaissance of Motherhood, 105. Poulsson, Love and Law, 30. The work is now known only from its blackand-white reproduction in the catalogue of that year’s joint exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy and the Ontario Society of Artists. Mulley, “Madonna/Mother/Death and Child,” 92. As one mothering manual put it, mother and baby are “as homogenous as trunk and twig,” and breast milk is “the sap” that flows between them (Harland, Eve’s Daughters, 24).

62 Ibid., 15. 63 “A Theory of Thinking,” was originally published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and then reproduced in Second Thoughts. In it Bion asserts that the “mother’s capacity for reverie is the receptor organ for the infant’s harvest of self-sensation gained by its conscious” (116). See also Bion, Learning from Experience, 36–7; Van Buren, “Bion’s Odyssey toward Transcendence.” 64 Parker, Torn in Two, 116. See also Hollway, “From Motherhood to Maternal Subjectivity.” 65 The major contributors are beta-endorphins and oxytocin. The former, which acts in a similar fashion to opiates, produces a sense of well-being accompanied by a characteristic mental relaxation. Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” fosters interpersonal connection. See Lothian, “Birth of a Breastfeeding Baby and Mother.” 66 Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant, 71 and passim. 67 Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty”; Gallagher and Meltzoff, “Earliest Sense of Self.” 68 Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty,” 129–30. 69 On the importance of maternal support for the simple task of “going-on being,” see Winnicott, “Primary Maternal Preoccupation,” 300–5. 70 Hollway, “Rereading Winnicott.” 71 Ibid. 72 Other instances, not reproduced in this chapter, might easily be found, including Sydney Strickland Tully’s Mother and Child, n.d., exhibited in the memorial exhibition of Paintings and Drawings at Art Metropole, December 1911, as well as Mary Bell’s undated oil Mother and Child, and numerous examples by Laura Muntz. 73 Cavarero, “Inclining the Subject,” 198, quoting Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Shocken Books 2003), 83. 74 There is no place for such interdependence in Cavarero’s account, which emphasizes the “full and unilateral power” of mothers to bestow or withhold their care. Yet this characterization of motherhood is unlikely

Notes to pages 222–41

35 “Nobody Wants Maternity,” Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, 21 October 1975. Early in her marriage, while living in Port Arthur, Hamilton lost first her infant child and then her husband. She turned to painting after their deaths. 36 Gordon, Modern Mother, 121–2. 37 Ibid., 138. 38 These particular terms belong to Eliza Lynn Linton, the British writer and anti-feminist, in her essay “Modern Mothers,” 13, 17. For two exceptions to the trend, see Higginson, Common Sense about Women; Fisher, Mothers and Children. 39 Burrell, Mothers’ Book, 12. 40 Gordon, Modern Mother, 204. 41 Davis, Mother and Child, 92. For a similar tone, see Allbutt, Every Mother’s Handbook; Harland, Eve’s Daughters, 15. 42 Burrell, Mothers’ Book, 117. 43 Ibid., 13. In Read’s Mothercraft Manual, 86, cuddling and fondling were to be strictly limited to one hour a day. Quiet was preferred “because the brain and nervous system are yet incomplete in their development, and are very sensitive.” 44 Parker, Torn in Two, 45. 45 Mulley, “Madonna/Mother/Death and Child,” 92. 46 Undated letter from Laura Muntz to Elizabeth Muntz, quoted in ibid., 84. 47 Murray, Laura Muntz Lyall, 44–5. 48 See Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood.” 49 See Betterton, “Mother Figures”; Higonnet, “Making Babies.” 50 Parker, Torn in Two, 29. 51 Ibid., 54. 52 See Stern, First Relationship; Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant. 53 Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 70. See also Melberg, “Rousseau’s ‘Rêverie.’” 54 Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 13 and 158. 55 Ibid., 167. 56 The term is Jean-Luc Nancy’s in Inoperative Community, 29 and 58. 57 See Mathews, “Mary Cassat.” 58 Saleeby, Woman and Womanhood, 179. 59 Panton, The Way They Should Go, 39. 60 Ibid., 41. 61 Ibid., 16.

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to ring true to the parent of a colicky baby whom no amount of rocking will soothe. Whatever the fragility of the newborn, its head still has the power to tear the mother’s flesh, its lips to crack her nipples. Cusk, A Life’s Work; Baraitser, Maternal Encounters; Fischer, “Becoming Bovine”; Stern and Bruschweiler-Stern, Birth of a Mother. See also Elliott et al., “Becoming a Mother.” See Nancy, Inoperative Community. Ibid., 4. Ettinger, “Matrixial Trans-Subjectivity,” 218–19. See also Pollock, “Mother Trouble.” The phrase “weaving of mental and affective strings” is Ettinger’s in “Matrixial TransSubjectivity,” 219. Saleeby, Woman and Womanhood, 185 and 184. Saleeby, an Englishman, took a special interest in the “superb” health of Canadians and their children, whom he judged to be “the finest people … anywhere in the world” and the “hope of the British Empire.” Saleeby, Sunlight and Health, 100, quoted in Devereux, Growing a Race, 80. In Canada, Saleeby’s ideas circulated in the pages of Maclean’s magazine and elsewhere. To this end, for example, Ellen Key praised the “wonderful mysteries of motherlove” captured in old-master paintings of the Madonna and child as well as the works of Giovanni Segantini, whose painted analogies between human and animal mothers would much later provoke Linda Nochlin’s ire in “Morisot’s Wet Nurse.” See also Key, Sofia, and Fries, Renaissance of Motherhood, 11. For a refreshing counter-perspective see Mason, School Education, 34, where the author counsels mothers to take time away from their children by visiting an art gallery to look well at even one picture. De Beauvoir, Second Sex, 491. Chessman, “Mary Cassatt and the Maternal Body,” 240. For further discussion of representations of motherhood by women artists, see also Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation; Sieglohr, Focus on the Maternal; Pollock, “Mary Cassatt”; Pollock, Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women. See, for example, Winnicott, “Hate in the Countertransference.”

chaPter sIx 1 BCA , Newcombe, Add. Mss 1077, vol. 42, file 22, William A. Newcombe, “W.A.N’s notebook of Miss Emily Carr’s collection of baskets, etc.” Carr’s comment on basketry is included in her lecture “On Totems,” reproduced in Crean, Opposite Contraries, 177–203. 2 I have given both the Skwxkwú7mesh and English names for individuals when these have been known to me. When feasible, I have requested permission to include ancestral names from the current bearers of those names. To those I have not known how to contact, I hope that concerns around cultural ownership will not outweigh the spirit of recognition in which I have included this information. In correspondence with Carr, Sewinchelwet signed herself Sophie Frank, and, as a settler scholar, I have typically retained her usage of her English name when speaking of herself to settlers. 3 While barter was often preferred by Squamish basketmakers, letters from Frank to Carr refer explicitly to her practice of selling baskets for money. See notes 6 and 91. 4 Carr’s last will and testament is reproduced in Morra, Corresponding Influence, 301–2. 5 For a summary of the arguments coupled with a defence of Carr, see Cole, “The Invented Indian/The Imagined Emily.” The major assessment of Carr’s treatment of Indigenous themes is Moray, Unsettling Encounters. 6 The three extant letters from Frank to Carr are from “your friend,” “your dear friend,” and “your ever loving friend.” My conclusion that this was no mere epistolery convention is supported by the fact that Frank named one of her children Emily. The letters, dated 19 March 1915, 6 August 1915, and 7 March 1929, are preserved in the Emily Carr Fonds (MS 2763.273) and the Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher Fonds (MS 2792.2.2) of the British Columbia Archives. They have been reproduced in Crean, Opposite Contraries, 220–2, along with a letter to Carr from Jimmy Frank, dated 8 December 1939 (BCA , Carr, MS 2763.C ). Carr writes of her love for Sophie Frank in her diary entry for

7

8

9

10 11

12 13 14

15 LAC , Emily Carr Fonds, MG 30 D 215 (mf C13525, C13526), Carr journal, 26 November 1930 (Hundreds and Thousands, 46). I cite the original journals with silent corrections to spelling and punctuation. Page references to the corresponding entries in Hundreds and Thousands (hereafter HT ) are provided for ease of consultation. 16 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 3 November 1932 (HT , 55). 17 Bill and Fran James, personal communication, 6 April 2012. For a fuller articulation of this principle from a Northwest Coast perspective, see Atleo, Tsawalk. 18 The quote is Lawren Harris’s from “Emily Carr and Her Work,” 278, quoted in Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 14. The classic text here is Crosby’s “Construction of the Imaginary Indian.” 19 Chief Bill Williams, interview with the author, 3 October 2012. In Skidegate, a contemporary descendant of Clara Russ, Carr’s contact there, recounts Russ’s sense of betrayal upon the publication of Klee Wyck: “It angered Clara. It was full of lies and bullshit” (Crean, Laughing One, 351). As Crean discovered, however, Russ’s closest living relative, an adopted daughter who remembers Carr’s visits to her mother, has no recollection of this reaction. Crean concluded that “the true nature of Carr’s personal connection with Native women like Clara is not easily ascertained” (ibid., 354). My similar experiences in North Vancouver have led me to share that conclusion. 20 The paradigmatic instance is the 1927 exhibition Canadian West Coast Art – Native and Modern. See Brown and Barbeau, Exhibition; Dawn, National Visions; Hjartson, “Wedding ‘Native’ Culture”; and Jessup, “Hard Inclusion.” 21 On the incorporation of Indigenous art and expressive culture into displays of Canadian and Quebec art at the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, see Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art” and “A New Pavilion.” 22 From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario (2015), included works by Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw,

Notes to pages 250–2

5 December 1930 (Hundreds and Thousands, 47). Carr, “Sophie,” in Klee Wyck, 55–65. Carr wrote about Sophie Frank on different occasions. The story called “Sophie” in Klee Wyck is also supplemented by passages from her journal that were omitted from Hundreds and Thousands but have been subsequently published by Crean in Opposite Contraries (24–6, 71–3, 162–7). Carr also mentions Frank in her correspondence with Ira Dilworth. See Morra, Corresponding Influence. The Saint Peter’s registers, North Vancouver, provide baptismal or death records for twelve of Frank’s children: Isaac (1889–?), Daniel (1892–1900), Christina (1894–1900), Marie (1895–?), Lucie (b. and d. 1897), Casimir (1900–1911), Martine (1905–1914), Rosa (b. and d. 1907), Felix (b. and d. 1910), Amy (b. and d. 1912), Mary (b. and d. 1914), and Emily (b. and d. 1914). Carr also refers to two unbaptized babies being buried outside the cemetery fence. Carr, in an inscription on her portrait of Frank (see fig. 6.4), bequeathed to Ira Dilworth the “original Portrait of Sophie done probably in Vancouver around 1907 or 1908, at my death the property of Ira Dilworth of CBC from his love, Emily, because the life of Sophie meant so much to him. He understood her womanliness & my love for her. To him she was more than just an Indian, she was a symbol.” Quoted in Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 331. Hembroff-Schleicher, “Emily and the Indians,” in Emily Carr: The Untold Story, 93. Marchessault, Le voyage magnifique; Vreeland, The Forest Lover; Crean, Laughing One, 355– 69, 387–94; Bear and Crean, “Presentation of Self,” 62–71. Bear and Crean, “Presentation of Self,” 62–71. Ibid., 68. In this chapter I have followed Bear and Crean’s assumption that Frank made her own baskets, as was customary amongst Squamish women and as she had been taught to do in childhood. It is worth noting, however, that her letters contain no mention of basketmaking, only of the pressure to sell them.

337

Notes to pages 253–5 338

Nuu-chah-nulth, Salish, Tsimshian, and Tinglit makers. 23 The Museum of Vancouver also preserves three baskets (AA 368, AD 133, and AD 78) said by their donor to be by “Sophie of North Vancouver,” but the existence of a second North Vancouver basketmaker named Sophie, Sophie Moody, makes the attribution to Frank uncertain. Basketry scholar Sharon Fortney notes Interior Salish Nlaka’pamux traits in the MoV baskets, which decreases the likelihood of such attribution but does not make it impossible. The museum’s paintings of “Old Sophie” by Margaret Wake and Charles H. Scott are subject to similar uncertainty and do not clearly correspond with photographs of Frank. The photographic record too is the source of some confusion. Maria Tippett published the most securely identified photograph of Frank in her biography of Carr, having been given it in May 1974 by Mrs Tina Cole, who was a neighbour of Frank’s as a girl in North Vancouver (see fig. 6.16). A photograph in the Vancouver Public Library (VPL ) collection, reproduced here as fig. 6.17, has also been published as an image of Frank by Sharon Fortney in her essay “Symbols of Identity,” 191, and the same image has subsequently been reproduced by the Squamish Nation as a photograph of Sophie Frank. This image and the one obtained from Cole appear to be contradictory, however, for the sitter in the securely dated library photograph of 1903 looks considerably older than the subject of the Cole photograph, ostensibly taken sixteen years later. If the latter photograph is correctly dated to 1919, the two images are not likely of the same woman. Moreover, in 1903 Sophie Frank would have been only thirty-one years old, while the woman in the library photograph appears to be significantly older. That being said, the pinwheel motif that appears in baskets in both photographs is unusual, and its repeated presence tends to support a familial link between the two women. The older woman might possibly be a family member, such as Frank’s aunt, Sarah Denny, who also lived at the Mission Reserve. Sharon Fortney has also drawn my

24

25 26

27 28 29 30

31

attention to the elder woman seated next to Jimmy Frank in an undated photograph from the North Vancouver Museum and Archives collection, recently listed by the museum as a photograph of Sophie Frank (see fig. 6.28). The likely accuracy of this identification is increased by the presence of members of her extended family in the back row, as well as by a plausible physical resemblance to the woman in the Cole/Tippett photo. Bear and Crean (“Presentation of Self,” 68) have insisted on Frank’s literacy, but the fact that her letters are written in two distinct hands strongly suggests the intervention of a third party. The ability to write English was rare amongst Squamish women of Frank’s age. Debra Sparrow, interview with the author, 13 June 2013. Some examples include Honouring the Basket Makers, at the Museum of Vancouver (2002); S’abadeb – The Gifts: Pacific Coast Salish Art and Artists, at the Seattle Art Museum (2008); Entwined Histories, at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives (2011); and Baskets for Barter, at the Surrey Museum (2012). For published writings on Salish basketry and weaving see Fortney, “Symbols of Identity”; Gustafson, Salish Weaving; Johnson and Bernick, Hands of Our Ancestors; Nordquist and Nordquist, Twana Twined Basketry; Ross, “L’hen Awtxw”; Smith and Leadbeater, “Salish Coiled Baskets”; Wells, Salish Weaving. Other significant sources on Northwest Coast basketry include Haeberlin, Teit, and Roberts, “Coiled Basketry”; Laforet, “Northwest Coast Baskets in the Pitt Rivers Collection”; Lobb and Wolfe, Indian Baskets of the Northwest Coast; Porter, Art of Native American Basketry. LAC, Carr, Carr journal, 28 December 1933 (HT , 132). LAC, Carr, Carr journal, 3 November 1932 (HT , 55). LAC, Carr, Carr journal, 12 November 1932 (HT , 56). I have run together two journal passages here, one from 7 June 1933, the other from 17 January 1936 (HT , 64 and 293). Watson, “Disfigured Nature,” 109.

50 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 8 September 1936 (HT , 350). 51 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 16 September 1933 (HT , 95). 52 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 4 April 1935 (HT , 246). 53 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 28 November 1935 (HT , 283). 54 A journal entry from 18 February 1934 is typical. Carr begins the day by attending communion at Victoria’s cathedral but leaves dissatisfied with its air of grimness and duty, and turns instead for wisdom to the combination of mystical strains of Christianity and Hinduism offered in B.H. Streeter and A.J. Appasamy’s The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion (Macmillan 1921). Before the entry is out, she is musing about Indigenous spirituality and links between the human and animal world (HT , 142). 55 Panentheism, as distinct from pantheism, proposes a God coextensive with but also existing before and beyond the universe. 56 Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography, 29–31. 57 For the former view, see ibid., 78. 58 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 6 November 1933 (HT , 114). 59 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 16 September 1934 (HT , 210). 60 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 30 October 1933 (HT , 105). 61 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 25 June 1938 (HT , 401). 62 April Churchill interview in Bear and Jones, “Carrying on the Tradition.” 63 Bolton and Daly, Xwelíqwiya, 77–8. 64 Ibid., 77. 65 Harris, “Emily Carr and Her Work,” 278. 66 In British Columbia, the casting of Indigenes in the sphere of nature, as opposed to culture, was particularly damaging for its connection to the moral and legal rationale embraced by settlers as a justification for their appropriation of all lands “unimproved” by the imposition of cultural constructions such as houses, roads, fences, or the infrastructure of resource development. See Harkin and Lewis, Native Americans and the Environment; Hagan, “Justifying

Notes to pages 255–65

32 Linsley, “Painting and the Social History of British Columbia,” 230. 33 Hunter, “Emily Carr: Clear Cut.” 34 Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 70–179 passim. 35 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 10 November 1927 (HT , 21). 36 Ibid. (HT , 22). 37 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 17 April 1937 (HT , 383). 38 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 16 April 1934 (HT , 161). 39 For example, LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 19 August 1933 and 22 May 1934 (HT , 81 and 176). The entry for 19 September 1935 is notable in this regard: “We cannot elude matter. It has got to be faced, not run away from. We have got to contact it with our five senses, to grow our way through it. We are not boring down into dark but through into light” (HT , 270). 40 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 10 November 1927 (HT , 21). 41 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 15 September 1934 (HT , 208). 42 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 17 January 1936 (HT , 293). 43 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 17 November 1927 (HT , 26). 44 Compare Richard William Hill’s comments on the Group of Seven: “Never trust a group of urban intellectuals – modernist painters to boot – when they tell you they are getting back to nature and the spirit of their country. Urban intellectuals have been claiming to do this as long as cities have existed, and they have all been guilty of bad faith. All they ever find out in the woods are the ideas they brought with them.” Hill, “Graveyard and Giftshop,” 214. 45 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 24 April 1934 (HT , 164). 46 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 22 May 1934 (HT , 176). 47 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, Good Friday April 1936 (HT , 315). 48 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 27 January 1933 (HT , 60). 49 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 12 November 1932 (HT , 56).

339

67

68

69 70

71 72

73

74

75

Notes to pages 265–70

76

340

the Dispossession”; and Lewis, “Native Americans.” “She has an uncommon bond with the animal world. She has had at different times a monkey, a vulture, a chipmunk, white rats and all manner of birds as well as many dogs as companions … She housed and handled them with a kind of careless, off-hand understanding which made one feel she knew every twist of their varied natures. Her bond with the Indians of the coast is of a similar nature.” Harris, “Emily Carr and Her Work,” 277–8, quoted in Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 14. Dionne Paul, personal communication to the author, 22 June 2012, and interview with the author, 7 June 2012. Lil’wat Nation, official website, http://lilwat.ca. Accessed 5 June 2013. Naxaxalhts’i, “We Have to Take Care”; Thom, “Coast Salish Sense of Place.” For Squamish attitudes, see Squamish Nation, Xay Temíxw Sacred Land. Sparrow, interview. The court challenges to federal omnibus bills C -38 and C -45 have been mounted in an effort to restore federal environmental oversight of the waterways that flow through Indigenous lands. See Gloria Galloway, “First Nations Say Cuts to Environmental Oversight Violate Treaty Rights,” Globe and Mail, 8 January 2013. Assembly of First Nations, statement on environmental stewardship, http://www.afn.ca/ index.php/en/policy-areas/environmentalstewardship. For a discussion of this trend in the American context, see Ranco, “Ecological Indian.” The report, tabled in January 1994, may be consulted at https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/tasb/ slrp/lrmp/nanaimo/clayoquot_sound/ archive/reports/clay1.pdf. Turner, Ignace, and Ignace, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge”; Turner, Earth’s Blanket. My thanks go to Jamie Williams, Frank’s great-grandniece, for her permission to use her ancestral name. The record of Sewinchelwet’s baptism appears on page 51 of the St Peter’s Church Register, 1869–1879. The baptism took place at Burrard Inlet on

77

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79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86

87 88 89

29 December 1872 when she was “two or three weeks old.” My thanks also to Jessica Casey and Dorothy Kennedy for sharing this and other genealogical information in the chapter, which comes from Kennedy’s research for the Squamish Nation Genealogical Reconstruction, a database she compiled on behalf of the Nation between 1986 and 2010. Sophie Frank’s headstone is thus erroneous in giving her date of birth as 1879. The 1901 Canadian census record, where she is listed as being twenty-seven years old, is also inaccurate. Information about the ancestral villages of Frank’s family comes from Homer Barnett’s 1935–36 field notebook, “Sechelt and Squamish,” 101–2 (uBC , Barnett, RBSC ARC-1025.1.4) See also a second notebook (RBSC -ARC -1025.1.5) entitled “Squamish.” My thanks go to Jessica Casey and the Squamish elders for directing me to these fieldnotes. Sut’elut (Monica Williams) is vividly remembered by her grandsons Bill and Henry Williams. Bill Williams, interview. Hightower, “Reserve Land,” 36. uBC, Barnett, RBSC-ARC-1025.1.4, “Sechelt and Squamish,” 119. The Saint Mary’s register, Archdiocese of Vancouver, records the marriage as having taken place on 5 June 1893. While the parentage is clear, the register gives another ancestral name for Sophie: Siamshut. Barman, “Erasing Indigenous Identity.” Bill Williams, interview. A good visual history of the False Creek/Kitsilano reserve is available at http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/ home/land-rights/mapping-tool-kitsilanoreserve.html. Information about Jimmy Frank’s family comes from his interviews with Barnett. See, for example, Hightower, “Reserve Land,” 26; Hightower, “Paul Durieu”; Lascelles, Mission on the Inlet, 12–13. See, for example, Fisher, “Su -Á -Pu -LuCk (Joseph Capilano).” Lascelles, Mission on the Inlet, 25. In this context, Frank’s decision to seek permission from the village priest for her

90

91 92 93 94

95

96 97

98 99 100 101 102 103 104

107 Tracy Williams, interview with the author, 4 October 2012. 108 Bierwert, Brushed by Cedar. 109 Lorna Williams, interview. 110 Tracy Williams, interview. 111 Lorna Williams, interview. 112 Sparrow, interview. 113 Spahan and Wherry, Smash, 34. 114 Williams, “Chilkat Weaving,” 128. 115 uBC , Barnett, RBSC -ARC -1025.1.4, “Sechelt and Squamish,” 95. 116 Ibid., 131. 117 Ibid., 118. 118 Ibid., 95. 119 Amoss, “The Fish God Gave Us.” 120 uBC , Barnett, RBSC -ARC -1025.1.4, “Sechelt and Squamish,” 104. 121 Ibid., 125. 122 Ibid., 20. 123 A powerful account of one weaver’s spirit encounter is provided by Sarris in Mabel McKay. 124 uBC , Barnett, RBSC -ARC -1025.1.4, “Sechelt and Squamish,” 125. 125 For example, LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 16 April 1934 and 5 June 1934 (HT , 161, 185). 126 Descola, “Constructing Natures,” 88. 127 Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 142. 128 Saito, “Appreciating Nature,” 151. See also Godlovitch’s essay “Icebreakers” in the same collection. 129 Dionne Paul, interview. 130 Tracy Williams, interview. 131 Ingold, Perception, 101. 132 See Ebert, “Human Versus Person.” 133 Ibid., 46. 134 Tracy Williams, interview. 135 Ingold, Perception, xvi. 136 Lorna Williams, interview. 137 Ingold, Perception, 113. 138 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 24 April 1934 (HT , 165). 139 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 28 January 1931 (HT , 50). Emphasis in original. 140 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 17 June 1932 (HT , 54). 141 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 1 December 1936 (HT , 358). 142 See Slaney, “Vitalism.”

Notes to pages 270–86

105 106

friendship with the Protestant Carr assumes a different complexion from the naïve expression of piety that Carr perceived. One of the few published firsthand accounts of life on the Mission Reserve is Kirkness, Khot-la-cha, 12. On First Nations’ mortality rates, see the work of Canada’s first chief medical officer, Peter H. Bryce, Story of a National Crime. BCA, Carr, MS-2763.273, Sophie Frank to Emily Carr, 19 March 1915. Ibid. Ibid. Kirkness, Khot-la-cha, 2–3. For images showing the physical transformation of the north shore, see Bourdon, Boom Years. Baskets by these named makers, as well as by many makers whose names were not recorded, may be found in the collections of the Museum of Vancouver, the North Vancouver Museum and Archives, the Royal BC Museum, the Glenbow Museum, and the Squamish Nation, as well as in private collections. The birth and death dates for Indigenous people given in settler records are often inaccurate. The dates I have given here are frequently best approximations but may well be refined by further inquiry. Lila Johnston, interview with the author, 2 October 2012. Exhibition labels from Honouring the Basketmakers: Woven Lives of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Úxwumixw, Museum of Vancouver, 3 October 2002 to 6 September 2004. Kirkness, Khot-la-cha, 5. Bob Baker, interview with the author, 3 October 2012. Bill Williams, interview. Lorna Williams, interview with the author, 14 June 2012. Turner, Ignace, and Ignace, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” 1276. Turner, “L’importance de la vannerie.” See Khatsahlano and Charlie, Squamish Legends; Arnett, Two Houses Half Buried. Thom, “‘Place,’ Personhood and Claims.” See Sarris, Mabel McKay, for an account of these powers in relation to basketry.

341

Notes to pages 286–96

143 Isabel Rorick, interview. 144 Cf. note 24, as well as LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 26 January 1933 (HT , 59): “God – the divine in us calling to the divine in all else – the one essence and substance.” 145 Sparrow, interview. 146 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 19 April 1937 (HT , 384). 147 Lorna Williams, interview. 148 Turner, Ignace, and Ignace, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” 1276. 149 Jay (Downcast Eyes, 24–6) discusses the distancing function of sight with reference to Hans Jonas’s article “The Nobility of Sight” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14, no. 4 (June 1954): 507–19. Classen also refers to sight as a “distance sense,” for example in Color of Angels. 150 Henry Williams, interview with the author, 3 October 2012. 151 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 16 July 1933 (HT , 69). 152 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 18 February 1934 (HT , 142). 153 LAC , Carr, Carr journal, 7 March 1934 (HT , 146). 154 Lorna Williams, interview. 155 Tracy Williams, interview. 156 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 22. 157 Ingold, Perception, 98–9. 158 Morton, Ecological Thought, 3. 159 Squamish Nation, Squamish-English Dictionary. 160 Susan Pavel, interview with the author, 12 June 2012. 161 Pavel, interview. See also the film on Miller, Teachings of the Tree People (dir. Katie Jennings). 162 This, for example, is effectively the grounds for Luce Irigary’s criticism of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late ontological turn. See Irigaray, “Invisible of the Flesh.”

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163 164 165 166

Ingold, Perception, 342. Ibid., 341. Ibid., 345. See Laforet, “Regional and Personal Style.” Based on her intimate familiarity with the baskets of Squamish makers, Chief Janice George has attributed a number of baskets in Vancouver area museums to specific makers. 167 Haraway’s cyborg highlights the interface between humans and machine to challenge entrenched notions of identity; Bruno Latour’s actants reconfigure notions of agency in the context of the social networks that bind humans with nonhumans; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s description of becoming-animal theorizes the intersections of virtual and actual forces that radically reconfigure human subjectivity. See Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”; Latour, Reassembling the Social; and Deleuze and Guattari, “1730: BecomingIntense, Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible,” in A Thousand Plateaus, 232–65. 168 See, for instance, Phillips, “We Were Never Western?,” and Horton, “Ojibwa Tableaux Vivants.” 169 O’Brian and White, Beyond Wilderness, 3, 29.

cOda 1 Baum, Bayer, and Wagstaff, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. 2 Anderson, “Marion Long,” 83. 3 Such was Long’s standing amongst her peers that when in 1933 the Royal Canadian Academy finally decided to admit women to full membership, she was the first to be elected. 4 On Watkins, see O’Connor and Tweedie, Seduced by Modernity.

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Bibliography 367

Index

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations Aboriginal: relations, 320–1n111; status, 160 absence: archival, 5–6, 19; Beothuk, 25–63; and Demasduit, 15, 19; and Frances Anne Hopkins, 66, 72, 80–1, 84, 89, 101–2; and Helen McNicoll, 127–33; Indigenous, 58–63, 86; and meaning, 11; and realism, 80–1; and subjectivity, 4, 9, 16, 30, 103, 152, 204, 295–6 Adams, Mollie, 200, 205 Adney, E. Tappan, 320n102 Adorno, Theodor, 16 Aesthetic movement, 104–5, 135, 211 aesthetics: and ethics, 282; and subjectivity, 8–10, 15, 289 affect, 21–2, 47, 238–9, 242–3 agency: of artworks, 21, 298; female, 11, 54, 199, 202, 295; Indigenous, 52, 55, 90, 251; of individuals, 6, 238; non-human, 261–2, 276–8, 282–4; and perception, 9 Ainley, Marianne Gosztonyi, 199 albums, 28, 150, 152, 163, 165, 167–70, 172, 187, 189 alienation, 20, 216, 244; as estrangement, 11, 14, 118; maternal, 5, 210, 237; from nature, 138, 255; and normativity, 118, 134; from social formations, 98–9, 145–6, 244 alterity. See difference Althusser, Louis, 59 ambivalence: and colonial formation, 13–14, 55, 144; maternal, 224–5, 333n10; subjective, 5, 7, 19, 75; and travel, 84, 100, 102

Anderson, Janice, 215, 295 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 216 Anguissola, Sofonisba, 294 animism, 266, 281–7 Anishnaabe, 37, 86, 88; chiefs, 88, 319n75; craftspeople, 46; iconography, 66; land, 88; resistance, 88 anthropomorphism, 190, 281–3 aporia. See subjectivity appropriation: cultural, 99, 251; land, 339–40n66 Aristotelian logic, 182 art: as documentary artifact, 29, 31, 67; political use of, 25–7, 37; relation to lived experience 106–7, 114, 137–8, 145; as self-expression, 103–4, 106–7; women’s, 10, 27, 106–7, 145, 152, 298 Art Association of Montreal, 74, 93, 126, 127, 137, 142, 212 art history: Canadian, 6, 12, 20–1, 139–41, 143, 254, 292–3, 298; feminist, 6, 11, 22, 107, 118, 145, 243, 298; and identity, 6–7; Indigenous, 18–22, 253; and interpretation, 18–20, 145; and the past, 20, 63; settler, 20–1, 254, 283, 292 artists, 8–9; British, 136–7; Canadian, 13, 105, 120, 135, 142, 211, 220, 240; Canadian women, 9, 11–12, 14, 19, 125, 141–2, 159, 166, 211, 244; colonies, 109, 116, 120; European, 196; male, 12, 152, 183; professional, 38, 202; settler, 13, 95, 141; women, 6, 14, 76, 22, 104, 107, 109, 120, 125, 145, 159, 182–4, 196, 208–9, 228, 243, 294–5

Art Journal, 65–6, 101 Asennaienton, Jean-Baptiste, 94 attachment: to ancestors, 288; Carr and animals, 262; maternal, 218, 224; miniatures and, 43–4, 47, 58. See also connection August, Mary Ann (Chucháwlut), 272, 275 authenticity, 66, 81 authority: of Catholic church, 269–70, 340n89; epistemological, 163; female, 84, 111–12, 199; of Hudson’s Bay Company, 86, 88, 92; men’s botanical, 182–4, 200–1 autonomy: aesthetic, 143; maternal, 228, 237, 239; national, 140, 143; voyageurs’, 90; women’s, 99, 120, 211. See also subjectivity avant-garde, 109, 135, 140, 142 Ayre, Agnes Marion Miller, 163, 164, 184, 199, 201, 328n45, 330n96, 333n136

Index

babies: care of, 237–9, 241, 335n43; demands of, 239, 242, 244, 335–6n74; as helpless, 241, 335–6n74; mothers and, 209–12, 225–7, 230, 237; pictorial disregard of, 224; psychology of, 238–9 Bachelard, Gaston, 234–5, 238 Bailey, Loring W., 184 Baker, Margaret (P’elawk’wia), 264, 272–4 Baker, Simon, 274 Bal, Mieke, 21 Barbeau, Marius, 286 basketmakers, 21, 265, 272–4, 278, 341n95, 342n166. See also Frank, Sophie basketry, 246–9, 267, 292; and ancestors, 276–8, 341n106; economic factors, 270–1; exhibitions, 338n26; and ontology, 276–8, 280–2, 286–7, 290, 293 338n23; and survivance, 253, 274, 276; techniques, 264, 272, 274, 276, 278, 290, 311n48. See also under Carr, Emily Bayfield, Fanny, 170, 175, 327n19 Bayfield, Henry, 169–70 Baynton, Douglas, 117–18 Bear, Shirley, 250 Beau, Henri, 142 Beauvoir, Simone de, 6, 243 Becker, Paula Modersohn, 208, 228 Beckwith Hazen, Elizabeth, 163, 184–5, 186, 195–6, 201, 327n19, 329n48 becoming, 17, 239, 242–3, 292, 298 Beechey, Frederick William, 52–3, 86 Beechey, William, 52, 85–6

370

being, 6, 17, 36–7, 39, 234–5, 261–2, 283–4; being-with, 207, 211, 215, 230, 238–9, 241–2, 244. See also becoming; ontology Bell, Alexander Graham, 117 Bell (Eastlake), Mary Alexandra, 230, 230–2, 232, 234–5, 236, 237–8, 242 Belle, Charles de, 220 Belleau, Marie-Reine-Josephte, 167 Belmore, Rebecca, 61–2 Beothuk, 25–6, 48, 50, 52, 311n2, 311n15, 314n81; and absence, 25–63; Bœothik Institution, 41, 47, 313n65, 314n81; captives, 15, 27, 50, 53, 311n13; extinction and continued presence, 29–31, 60–3, 311n16, 311n20, 312n18; nineteenth-century attitudes to, 36, 41, 56, 311n18, 312n28 Berger, Carl, 198 Bergson, Henri, 286 Bermingham, Ann, 199, 202 Bhabha, Homi, 54 biography, 6, 75, 100, 107, 145 Bion, Wilfrid, 238 blankness: as pictorial affect, 15–16, 29, 31–9, 43–4, 50, 52–4, 57–9, 103, 133, 295–6 blindness. See colonialism: denial bodies: absent, 62, 72, 100, 131, 133, 144; Englishwomen’s, 75; female, 131, 133; human, 131; infant, 210–11, 237–9; maternal, 207, 212, 220–3, 237–9, 242, 334n30; and subjectivity, 15–16, 256, 258, 265 Bœothik Institution. See under Beothuk Bolton, Rena Point, 265 botanical art, 149–206; and authority, 182–4, 200–1; and difference, 177–8, 182, 189–93; and identity, 152, 180, 182, 184–6; illustration, 157–60; illustrators, 183, 185, 199, 201; and individuation, 193, 195, 202–4; and marriage, 169–70, 182, 199; and normative ideals, 182, 185–6; photography, 157, 163, 195–6, 332n113; pictorial logic of, 151, 173–8, 180–2, 204; and religious sentiment, 171; and sameness, 175–7, 179–83; and scientists, 161–2, 182–5, 197; serial nature, 193, 204, 206; as space of encounter, 191–2, 196, 201, 203, 331n107; and subjectivity, 149, 151, 168, 174, 202–6; types of, 157–63 botany: and Canadian identity, 161, 163, 165–7; and Canadian women, 152–7, 326n10; and civic education, 155–6; classification, 180, 182; and colonialism, 161, 163, 165, 327n36;

and gender, 156–7, 171, 179–80, 182, 187, 201; economic, 160; and freedom, 189, 198, 200; and identification, 161, 166, 180, 182, 187, 190, 193, 197–8, 201, 203–4, 206, 326n10; and life, 189, 203; and social class, 153–5. See also horticulture boundaries: and gender, 144, 171, 195; and miniatures, 48; ontological, 264, 281, 284; of the self, 18, 216, 218, 220, 225, 235, 238; territorial, 88; and travel, 101–2 Boutilier, Alicia, 11, 294 Boyanoski, Christine, 143 Braque, Georges, 109 breastfeeding, 219–23, 238, 335n65 Brenton, Mary E., 161 Breuer, Josef, 215, 334n20 Britain, 27, 98, 135, 141–3, 153, 160–1, 163, 197, 199. See also England British North America, 28, 52, 76, 86, 100, 153, 161–2 Broude, Norma, 139–40 Brown, Fred, 135 Brown, Stewardson, 163, 331n107 Browning, Robert, 187 Bruce, Tobi, 11, 294 Bruce, William Blair, 229, 231 Bruneau, Sophie Amelie, 167 Brymner, William, 137–8 Buchan, David, 50 Burtin, Nicolas Victor, 90, 94 Burton, Samantha, 14, 109, 141 Caillois, Roger, 53 Cammann, Eliza, 49 Canadian. See under art history; history; Impressionism; women; women artists Canadianness, 12–13, 139–41, 146 Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR ), 269, 293 Canadian Wild Flowers (Traill and Fitzgibbon), 154, 161, 165, 177–9, 196, 199 canoes, 46, 66, 68, 70–1, 74–6, 78–80, 84–6, 89, 91, 98–100, 102, 320n102; building, 81, 276, 279, 281; fur-trade, 81, 92, 318–19n74; scenes of, 65, 68, 75 Capilano, Mary Agnes (Lixwelut), 274 Carlyle, Florence, 120, 209, 211–14, 212, 213, 214, 219, 221, 226, 239, 323n51 Carr, Emily, 6, 170, 245–93, 294, 321n9, 323n51, 323n66; and animals, 262; anthropomorphism and animism, 281–3; art,

246–7, 248, 251–2, 252, 257, 259, 263, 265, 286, 286–7; and basketry, 246–50, 281, 287, 336n1; and colonialism, 252, 340n67; 336n5; critical reception, 250, 252, 255, 292, 336n5, 337n19; journals, 254, 258, 261–2, 282, 285–6, 339n39; and nature, 251, 254–8, 261, 287, 289–90; painting, 245, 256, 258, 262, 290; panentheism, 254, 258, 260–2, 282–3, 339nn54–5; selfhood, 9–10, 19, 245, 260, 262, 287–8; and Sophie Frank, 249, 249–54, 336–7nn6–9, 340–1n89; vitalism, 262, 283, 285–6 Casey, Jessica, 21, 278 Cassatt, Mary, 243 Cavarero, Adriana, 241 Cayouette, Jacques, 326n10 cedar, 275–9, 281–2, 284, 289–90; coiling, 284; roots, 246, 268, 271, 278. See also under Squamish Chamberlin, Agnes Fitzgibbon. See Fitzgibbon, Agnes Chaplin, Millicent Mary, 76, 175, 317n40, 320n102 Charlie, Elsie, 265 Chavasse, Henry Pye, 219 Chucháwlut. See August, Mary Ann Churchill, April, 264 civilizing mission, 41, 43, 50 Clapp, William H., 142 Clark, Janet, 69, 81, 97 class, 14, 141, 99, 231 classification. See under botany Claxton, Seliliye, 21 Coburn, Frederick Simpson, 219, 220 Cole, Tina, 272, 338n23 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 310n22 Colette (writer), 123 colonialism: and art, 16, 25–9, 40–2, 55, 85–8, 161, 163; and art history, 6, 52, 252; contradictions of, 55–8; and denial, 55–63; effects of, 268–9, 281, and identity, 13–14, 66, 141, 144; and mimicry, 50–4; past and present, 20, 30–1, 59–63; and race, 49–50; and romanticism, 26–7; violence, 16, 26, 29, 31–2, 43, 48–50, 152. See also decolonization; Indigenous; settler Colonial Office, 25–6, 49, 314n68, 316n10 compearance, 235 connection, 207, 211, 224, 231, 239, 258, 265–6; to ancestors, 288; cultural, 278; Index 371

human, 266; maternal, 218, 224; miniatures and, 43–4, 47, 58; ontological, 280; spiritual, 281; women’s, 244 consciousness, 234, 239, 282–4, 287; aesthetic, 8; doubled, 80, 100; maternal, 238; political, 266 conservatism: aesthetic, 142; social 13, 171, 187, 205 Copper Bay Mining Company, 89 Cormack, William Eppes, 41–2, 61, 311n13 correspondence: of art and interpretation, 21; of experience and representation, 107, 135, 139; of language and reality, 134, 144; of past to present, 20; of subject and world, 8. See also subjective non-correspondence Cousins, Valerie, 203 Crean, Susan, 250–1, 337n19, 338n24 Crease, Sarah Lindley, 9, 159, 159–60, 166, 310n20 Cripps, Eleanor, 165 critique, 16, 18, 22, 146, 298; wilderness, 293, 298 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 8 Crosby, Marcia, 252 curiosity, 27, 41, 47, 81, 203, 266 Curran, Amelia, 25–8 Curry, Mary Rebecca, 330n68 Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 185, 195, 328n38 Curzon, George, 83

Index

daguerreotype, 3–5, 11–12, 309n1 Dalhousie, Countess of. See Ramsay, Christian Broun Daston, Lorraine, 174, 185, 198 deafness, 107, 111–18, 134, 322n32; acculturation and normativity, 107, 116–18, 143, 228; and gender, 112, 134–5, 144–6; oralism, 116– 18, 134–5; silence, 111, 115–18, 134, 322n35 death, 27, 41, 44, 62, 74–5, 89, 94, 109, 151, 163, 171, 200, 221, 226, 245, 288 decolonization, 17, 52. See also colonialism; Indigenous; settler Deighton, Madeline (Kw’exiliya), 273 Deleuze, Gilles, 182, 193, 202, 206, 292, 331n84, 342n167 Demasduit, 25–63, 66, 314n72; and absence, 15, 19; appearance in portrait, 3–34, 62; death, 15, 34; descriptions of, 34; historical 43, 52, 55; kidnapping and captivity, 31, 43, 50, 52–3, 56, 61, 312n23, 312n28; as Mary

372

March, 32, 34, 40, 50, 54; as mimic, 50–4; other images of, 35–6, 38; selfhood, 59; subjectivity, 52, 55; traumatized, 42–3, 50, 52. See also under Hamilton, Henrietta Martha Department of Agriculture, 155–7, 160, 326n15 Derick, Carrie, 156 Descartes, René, 207, 215 Descola, Philippe, 281–2 destabilization, 5, 11, 15, 54, 66, 193, 204 detail. See realism diaries, 9, 13, 75, 151, 187, 189, 256, 310n20 difference: colonial, 142–3; cultural, 285, 287; and deafness, 117, 134; differentiation, 145, 193, 198, 202, 204–6, 225, 231; ethics of, 16, 282, 289; inscription of, 145; as otherness, 95, 97, 143, 145–6; 98, 100, 198, 281–2; and repetition, 179; sameness, 145, 175, 178–80, 182, 193, 198, 204–5; sexual, 22, 79; women’s, 107, 131, 144–6 Dilworth, Ira, 337n7 disjuncture (pictorial), 12, 16, 48, 79–80, 92, 107, 127, 131, 145–6, 296. See also affect; gap; subjective non-correspondence displacement, 12, 14, 79, 65–6, 72, 75, 79–80, 84, 95, 98, 100–3, 142, 295–6 diversity, 18, 198, 202, 205–6, 298 domesticity, 78, 84–5, 120; and familialism, 117; feminine, 83–5, 101, 110, 123, 129; settler, 13; and travel, 81 Drake, Sarah Ann, 159 dreams, 8, 16–17, 62, 115, 135, 138–9, 201, 234, 237, 280, 295 Dunscombe, Eliza, 47 Dunscombe, John, 47, 49 Duval, Paul, 110, 113, 115, 126, 140, 322n32, 323n56 Dyneley, Amelia Frederica, 76, 317–18n40 Eagleton, Terry, 8 Eastlake, Mary Alexandra Bell. See Bell (Eastlake), Mary Alexandra Ebert, Mark, 284 economy, 6, 26, 39, 78, 84–5, 87, 89–90, 95, 100, 116, 265 education, 113, 116–17, 167, 211, 243; aesthetic, 170; civic, 155; female, 169 Egerton, George, 334n24 Ellice, Katherine Jane, 76, 317n40 Ellis, Havelock, 216 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 334n24

empathy, 43–4, 47, 49–50, 92, 224 empire, 27, 49, 57, 67, 75, 85–6, 88, 100, 125, 141, 143, 161, 163, 336n80 empiricism, 201–2, 205 emptiness, 10, 16, 36, 53, 122, 127, 129, 131, 133, 144, 215. See also vacancy England, 39, 99–100; and botanical illustration, 199; and botany, 161, 180; Canadian artists in, 109, 125, 135, 141–2. See also Britain; London environment, 189, 234, 244, 292; degradation of, 254–5, 266, 293; as ecosystem, 20, 206, 266, 293; and policy, 266, 340n72; urban, 115. See also nature Eslhá7an (Mission Reserve No. 1), 269–70 estrangement. See alienation ethics, 241, 280, 282, 289 ethnicity, 89–90, 93, 141, 143, 244. See also race Ettinger, Bracha, 242 Europe, 12, 157, 160, 201, 292, 324n92, 328n38 Europeans, 39, 41, 47, 50, 55, 92, 189 existence, 231. See also life faith, 171, 251, 283, 289 Falkland, Amelia, 75, 317n39 Falkland, Lucius Cary, 317n39 fantasies, 16, 34, 58, 101, 109, 129, 131, 134, 138, 215, 237, 255, 292; identificatory, 99; interior, 216; linguistic, 134; social, 134 Feltes, Norman, 79 feminine: character, 169, 199; charm, 106; delicacy, 169, 171; domesticity, 84, 101, 123; duty, 187; fulfilment, 125, 127, 135, 208–9, 219–20, 222; grace, 106, 187; neatness, 123, 169; patience, 123; propriety, 187; purity, 98, 111, 125; self-expression, 105–6, 145, 205, 281 femininity: in Canada, 13, 310n32; as characterlessness, 10, 17, 310n22; and constraint, 10–11, 17, 22, 187, 298; and flowers, 171–3, 187, 189; intersection with class, 13; narratives of, 118–19, 124–5, 127; and pathology, 134, 215–6, 334n20; representations of, 120–1; self-expression, 105–6,145, 205, 281; and textile work, 121–3; as visible in art, 104–7, 131, 134–5; western, 54–5. See also gender; reverie feminism: on femininity, 17, 144–46, 182; on Helen McNicoll, 109–11; on identity, 10–11,

16, 17, 144, 202–3; on motherhood, 207, 209, 238; opposition to, 216, 219, 243; and queer theory, 11. See also art history: feminist; suffrage Fernald, Merritt, 184 Finlayson, Isobel, 92 First Nations, 15, 45, 66, 86, 89, 92, 98, 252, 265–6, 287; art, 251; culture, 251; traditional practices, 266. See also Indigenous Fitch, Walter, 185 Fitzgibbon Chamberlin, Agnes, 153, 161–2, 165–6, 177, 178, 179, 195–6, 199, 201, 326n14. See also Canadian Wild Flowers flora and field guides, 152, 156–7, 160–6, 190, 198, 327n36, 331n107. See also herbaria flowers, 81, 91, 105, 189–91, 192–3, 195, 200, 202–3, 232, 234; and femininity, 171–3, 187, 189; and intercultural relations, 91–2; language of, 169, 199; and marriage, 169–71; and philosophy, 202–3; and women’s visual culture, 166–8, 182, 199 Forbes, Francis, 49 Ford, Harriet, 120, 142, 209 Fortney, Sharon, 338n23 Foucault, Michel, 174, 182, 184 Foy Suzor-Coté, Marc-Aurèle de, 142 Frank, Jimmy, 267–9, 279–80, 338n23 Frank, Sophie (Sewinchelwet), 18, 21, 278, 336n2, 338n23; basketry, 251, 270–2, 271, 272, 336n3, 337n14, 338n23; biography, 267–71, 337n8, 340n76, 340n77, 340n82; and Catholicism, 279, 287–9, 293, 340–1n89; and Emily Carr, 248–54, 270, 336n6 337n7, 337n9; family, 20, 274, 279; literacy, 338n24 Frary, Mary, 167 Frawley, Maria, 84 Freud, Sigmund, 216, 334n20 friendship, 45, 60, 203, 249, 251, 340–1n89; romantic, 120 fullness, 122, 129, 131, 133, 146, 234, 244, 289; of personhood, 284–5; phenomenological, 30; subjective, 103 fungi, 163, 178, 190–3, 196, 206; poisonous, 162 fur trade, 89–93. See also Hudson’s Bay Company Fyles, Faith, 156–7, 158, 160, 166, 171, 201; Principal Poisonous Plants, 157–8 Index 373

Galison, Peter, 174, 185, 198 gap, 18, 204, 244; anticipation-fulfilment, 131; art-life, 104; difference, 144–6, 152, 244, 292, 295–6; experience-symbolization, 10–11, 57, 59, 107, 118, 224, 145, 135; and language, 134, 138; of metaphor, 13; narrativeimage, 31, 33; pictorial, 15–16, 48, 146, 152; subject-world, 9, 292. See also disjuncture; subjective non-correspondence Garb, Tamar, 103 gardens, 8, 78, 96, 129, 151, 155–6, 234, 271, 331n107. See also horticulture gaze, 3, 33, 52, 58, 71, 79–80, 115–16, 230–2, 234–5, 245, 256; mother’s, 119, 226; sitter’s, 237; viewer’s, 111 gender: in art history, 6; awareness of, 79–80, 118, 120, 125, 200; and deafness, 112, 134–5; difference, 171, 179–80; expectations, 11, 31, 76, 83, 110, 144, 157, 180, 187, 199–201, 205; as ideology, 118, 134–5, 180, 202, 243–4; intersection with colonialism, 98–9; intersection with place, 13; and power imbalance, 20, 183; in representation, 11, 104–6. See also femininity genocide, 29–30, 50, 62, 265, 312n18 George, Barbara Mary, 156, 178, 184, 190 George, Janice, 342n166 George, Sam, 171 God, 9, 171, 187, 203, 254, 256, 260, 262, 282, 339n55 Goldie, Terry, 13–14 Gordon, Laing, 223 Goslee, Lucy J., 163, 181, 329n50 Gosse, Philip Henry, 312n30 Gosse, William, 35, 35–8, 312n30 Great Britain. See Britain Grosz, Elizabeth, 17, 22, 203 Gualtieri, Julia, 215 Guattari, Félix, 292, 342n167 Güssow, Hans, 157

Index

Hagarty, Clara, 232, 233, 234, 240, 240–2 Hakstn. See Johnny, Harriet Hall, Stanley, 216, 218 Hallowell, Irving, 283 Hamilton, Charles, 39, 44, 49–50, 311n14 Hamilton, Henrietta Martha, 12, 27–8, 28, 32–3, 39, 45, 47, 54–5, 103, 244; personality and attitudes, 43–5, 47, 49–50, 54–5, 57; portrait of Demasduit, 29–59, 62–3; reputation,

374

38–9, 43–4, 57, 314n83; technique, 33–4, 45; training and ability, 38, 58; as a woman, 54–5. See also Demasduit Hamilton, Mary Riter, 221–2, 222, 227–8, 239 Haraway, Donna, 292, 342n167 Harper, J. Russell, 126, 323n56 Harries, John, 62 Harris, Lawren, 258, 265, 292–3 Hayes, Edith, 120 Hazen, Elizabeth Beckwith. See Beckwith Hazen, Elizabeth Head, Anna Maria Yorke, 75, 317n39 Head, Francis Bond, 319n75 Hembroff-Schleicher, Edythe, 250 Hennessy, Rosemary, 145 herbaria, 152, 156, 161, 163, 326n10, 326n12. See also flora and field guides Hiester Reid, Mary, 104–6, 105, 209, 215 Higonnet, Anne, 243 Hill, Agnes, 165, 201 Hill, Richard William, 339n44 Hinduism, 261, 339n54 history, 18–19. See also art history Hlawatschek, Marie Auguste, 326n10 Holloway, William, 25–6 Hollway, Wendy, 238–9 Holly, Michael Ann, 21 home, 66, 78–9, 84–5, 98–101. See also domesticity Hooker, William Jackson, 153–4, 161, 328n38 Hopkins, Edward, 67, 70, 73–5, 84–5, 88–9, 92, 94, 96 Hopkins, Frances Anne, 64, 65–102, 68, 69, 71, 77, 78, 82, 87, 93, 96, 97; and absence, 66, 72, 80–1, 84, 89, 101–2; and ambiguous self-representation, 66–72, 96, 99–102; attitude to Canada, 73–5; and colonial settlement, 85–9; critical reception of, 65–6, 83; and domesticity, 66, 78–85; and empire, 85–6, 101; and gender, 80–1, 83, 98; and indigenization, 95–8; and mobility, 100; pregnancy and deaths of children, 73–5; as professional, 67, 72, 74; and realism, 72–4, 80–2, 92, 100–1; relations with voyageurs, 89–95; return to London, 67, 74; voyages of, 67, 73–5, 78–9, 100–2 Hopkins, Wilfrid Beechey, 315n10 Hopper, Edward, 115 horticulture, 155, 157, 160–1. See also botany; gardens

Hudson, Anna, 69, 92, 320n102 Hudson’s Bay Company, 70, 72, 74, 84–86, 88, 92, 94, 319n87 humanity: as ontological status, 261–2, 266, 276, 280–5, 289, 342n167; as personal characteristic, 44, 49–50, 55–6 Hunter, Andrew, 255 idealization, 109, 137, 185, 195, 202, 206, 209, 250 identification, 201, 203–4, 206 identitarian thought, 6–7, 15–17, 18, 22, 146, 193, 296, 298; in botany, 180, 182, 184–7, 198, 201, 204, 331n84 identity, 4–7, 149, 294; Canadian, 13, 30, 140, 143, 166; coherent, 16–17, 152, 206–7, 239; colonial, 13–15, 54, 141, 144; deaf, 117; French-Canadian, 98; gendered, 10–11, 16, 106–7, 131, 151–2, 169, 171, 189, 199; imperial, 86; indeterminacy of, 3–5, 36, 54, 66, 70, 86, 93, 98 101, 127, 247; Indigenous, 14, 16, 17, 94–5, 98, 265, 288; loss of, 215, 244, 295–6; professional, 6, 95; well-regulated female, 171, 173, 184, 186–7, 200. See also subjective non-correspondence; subjectivity ideology, 6, 10, 16, 22, 57, 134–5, 186, 244, 266; patriarchal, 134, 243 illustrators, 157, 174, 183, 185, 202 Impressionism, 105–7, 109, 129, 142, 144; British, 135–7; Canadian, 20, 106, 139–41, 321n9; and femininity, 104–5; French, 104, 135–6, 139; and subjectivity, 82, 137–8 inclination, 240–4 Indian Act, 89, 268 Indians: Imaginary, 255; mystical, 265; as Natural Man, 265, 314n81, 316n15, 320– 1n111, 337n9; princess stereotype, 54, 96, 98–9; Vanishing Indian trope, 31, 58, 96 indigenization. See under settler Indigenous: absence, 58–63, 86; activism, 20, 52, 60; attitudes to land and nature, 14, 41, 88, 264–7, 274, 276, 279, 280, 283–90, 340n73; cultural production, 20–1, 60–1, 65–6, 251–4 (see also basketry); diplomacy, 86–9, 269; identity, 14, 16, 17, 95–8, 265, 288; knowledge, 41, 163, 253, 266, 276; scholarship, 20, 253, 292; settler relations, 13–14, 25–7, 60–3, 82, 91–2, 95–6, 98; spirituality, 281–3; stereotypes, 54, 265–6, 339n66; territories, 48, 85–8, 254, 265,

267–70; traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom of women, 13, 21, 28, 62, 92, 270–2. See also Anishnaabe; Beothuk; Kanien’kehá:ka; Métis; Mi’kmaq; Ojibwe; Salish; Squamish individuation and individuality, 193–5, 201–6, 216 Ingold, Tim, 283, 285, 289–90 interiority, 38, 58, 215, 235, 262, 277. See also subjectivity interpellation. See under subjectivity interpretation: of art, 18–21, 93, 109, 111, 188, 255; of treaties, 88 intersubjectivity, 18, 44–5, 50, 58, 262, 281, 298. See also subjectivity: relational; trans-subjectivity introspection, 215, 234–5, 264; acts of, 216, 231; morbid, 223 Irigaray, Luce, 182 Jack, Annie, 155, 273, 274 Jacobus, Mary, 10–11 James, Fran, 21, 251 Jameson, Anna, 9, 17, 67, 76, 91, 310n22, 317n40 Jameson, Robert Sympson, 317n40 Jefferys, C.W., 104–6 John, Mary Ann (Sxwelhcháliya), 273, 275 John, Molly, 273 Johnny, Harriet (Skwétsiya or Hakstn), 273 Johnson, Alice, 315–16n10 Johnston, Lila, 274 Jones, Eliza Field, 45 Kahnawá:ke, 89–90 Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk people), 66, 86, 89–91, 93–6 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 137–8, 202 Kent, Timothy, 320n102 Kerr, Estelle, 323n51, 333n15 Key, Ellen, 218–19, 336n81 Khatsahlano, Mary Anne (Swenámiya), 273 Kipling, Rudyard, 205, 333n142 Kitsilano, 268–69 Knight, Harold, 120–3 Knight, Laura, 115–116, 294 Knight, Mary Ann, 45, 46 Kollwitz, Käthe, 208, 228 Kristeva, Julia, 16 Kw’exiliya. See Deighton, Madeline Index 375

labour, 19, 57, 90, 117; creative, 246, 295, 298; reproductive, 13, 209, 219, 238 Lachine, 67, 70, 73, 78, 86, 94, 100, 316n15, 320n102 Laforgue, Jules, 138 Lamb, Harold Mortimer, 245, 246–7 landscape: in Canadian art and art history, 140, 254, 292–3; painting, 82, 103, 245, 251, 256 Langton, Anne, 13 La Thangue, Henry Herbert, 136 Latour, Bruno, 292, 342n167 Lawson, George, 161 Leduc, Ozias, 115 Leidy, Joseph, 184 Lens, Bernard, III, 36–9, 37 lesbianism, 120 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 46 Leyster, Judith, 294 life (as force), 189, 203, 254–5, 258, 261–2, 283–7, 290. See also existence Lindley, John, 159 Lindley, Sarah. See Crease, Sarah Lindley Linnaeus, Carl, 169, 171, 180, 184, 331n107, 332n116 Linsley, Robert, 255 Littré, Emile, 137–8 Lixwelut. See Capilano, Mary Agnes Lloydlangston, Amber, 157, 326n15 Logue, Deirdre, 11 London, 26–7, 65–7, 69–70, 73, 74, 91, 93, 98–9, 135–7, 139–43, 149, 161, 165–8, 170 Long, Marion, 209–10, 210, 215–16, 217, 239, 294–6, 296 Longfellow, Henry, 96–9; Song of Hiawatha, 96, 98 Loring, Frances, 120 Löve, Doris, 326n10 Lover, Samuel, 5 Lowrey, Carol, 139, 321n9 Luckyj, Natalie, 106, 109–15, 138 Lyall, Laura Muntz. See Muntz, Laura

Index

MacDonald, Colin, 112 Macoun, John, 162, 184 madonna, 127, 235, 336n81 Manet, Edouard, 114, 138 March, Mary. See Demasduit Marchessault, Jovette, 250 Marcus, Laura, 215 Marshall, Ingeborg, 34, 36, 50, 311n14

376

masculinity, 12, 79, 82–4, 91, 101, 179, 182, 200, 205 maternité, 18, 126, 235, 238 maternity, 4, 44, 104, 207–44; advice, 223–4, 237; ambivalent, 225–6, 228, 333n10; breastfeeding, 221–3; connection with child, 218, 220–1, 223, 228–31, 238–9, 241, 243, 334n30, 334n34, 335n65; genre, 209, 211, 224, 231; and happiness, 208, 220, 226, 235, 243; inclination, 241–2; and reverie, 211–15; rhetoric of, 125–6, 207–9, 219–20, 228, 235, 243; separation from child, 223–6, 243, 335n43; and subjectivity, 207–9, 211, 219–20, 242; and suffering, 210, 219; and women artists, 125–7, 144, 149, 170, 201, 208–9, 211, 226–7, 228. See also pregnancy Matthews, Winifred, 126 McCord, Anne Ross, 169, 176, 177, 195–6, 197, 327n19, 329n57 McCord, David Ross, 89, 316n18 McCord, Jane, 166 McCord, John Samuel, 169 McKendry, Jennifer, 309n1 McNicoll, Helen Galloway, 103–46, 108, 111–14, 112, 113, 114, 122, 124, 125, 128–9, 130, 132, 133; and absence, 127–33; affect of estrangement, 115, 118, 127–33, 144; and ambiguity, 121, 125; critical reception, 106–12, 142–3; and deafness, 111–14, 134; depiction of babies, 120, 124, 126–7; in England, 141, 324n91; and gender, 106, 109–12, 119–35, 144; and Impressionism 135, 139, 142; and modernism, 142; and modernity, 109 Medley, Margaret, 171–2, 330n68 Métis, 69, 89–91, 314–15n96 Mi’kmaq, 30, 46, 60, 313n65, 314n96 Miller, Bruce Subiyay, 289 Miller, Elaine, 202 Miller, Maria Morris. See Morris Miller, Maria mimesis, 27, 62, 66 mimicry, 50, 53–5 miniatures: affects of presence and absence, 36, 47, 58; historical significance, 57; and interpersonal connection, 29–30, 43–5, 47, 58; time and memory, 57–8; and transcendence, 48; as transcultural mediators, 45–7 Minnehaha, 96–8 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 134 Mitchell, Allyson, 11 mobility, 82, 99–100, 116, 269

Modersohn-Becker, Paula, 228 Mohawk people. See Kanien’kehá:ka Monet, Claude, 135–7, 141 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 168 Montreal, 67, 70, 73–4, 85, 97, 127, 141–3, 157, 177, 179, 315–16n10, 317n36, 317n40, 328n38 Moodie, Geraldine, 165, 184, 190, 195, 196, 332n113 Moodie, Marion, 153, 155, 156, 171, 196, 201 Moody, Sophie, 338n23 Moore, George, 104 Morgan, Bernice, 60 Morisot, Berthe, 11, 104–5 Morris, Meaghan, 318n65 Morris Miller, Maria, 161–3, 162, 169, 177, 177–8, 190, 196, 199, 201, 330n63 Mortimer-Lamb, Harold, 245–6, 248, 255, 258 Morton, Timothy, 289 Mulley, Elizabeth, 226 Münter, Gabrielle, 294 Muntz, Laura, 126, 209, 218, 220, 221, 225, 225–7, 227, 239, 324n84 Murray, Joan, 111, 114, 321n9 mushrooms. See fungi Nancy, Jean-Luc, 24 natural history, 198. See also botany naturalists, 53, 169, 174 nature: book of, 296; and culture, 293; encounters with, 196; fascination of, 92; inaccessibility of, 138; painterly fidelity to, 136–8; reification of, 289–90, 292; as social resource, 171, 186; spiritual valence of, 171, 201, 254, 256; and subjectivity, 173, 203–4, 251, 255, 258, 260, 264–6, 287, 289; variety of, 193, 198, 204. See also Carr, Emily: and nature; Indigenous: attitudes to land and nature negative dialectics, 16, 18 Newfoundland: colonial history, 25–7, 39–40, 48, 54, 60–1, 163, 171, 330n69; land claims, 60 New Woman, 215–16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 193, 204–5 Nochlin, Linda, 40, 42, 44, 50 non-correspondence to identity. See subjective non-correspondence Nonosabasut, 31–2, 34, 61–2 Norton, John (Teyoninhokarawen), 45–6 Notman, William, 70

Nova Scotia, 161–3, 169, 178, 190, 196, 317n39 Nute, Grace Lee, 67 objectivity, 72, 81, 101, 103, 174, 201, 292 O’Brian, John, 293 Oh Nee Yeath Ton No Rion (Haudenosaunee chief ), 36–7 Ojibwe (people), 283, 285, 320n102 O’Keefe, Georgia, 258 Oldenburg, Margaret, 326n10 O’Neill, Mora Dianne, 321n9 Ontario Society of Artists, 211, 333n7, 333n12, 333n32 ontology, 17–18, 36, 43, 185, 241, 262, 266, 280–90. See also being oralism. See under deafness Orpen, William, 125 otherness. See difference Owen, John, 45 painting: materiality of, 29, 45 Panton, Jane Ellen, 237 Paris, 135, 139–41, 150, 152, 225, 235 Parker, Rozsika, 123, 224, 228, 238 Parry, William, 52 paternalism, 41, 90, 250, 320–1n111 patriarchy, 15, 19, 22, 99–100, 111, 139, 146, 204, 209, 216; societies, 10, 16, 100, 135, 152; Victorian, 76. See also under ideology Paul, Dionne, 21, 265, 282 Pavel, Susan, 21, 278, 289 Peacock, Doris M., 326n10 Peckford, Brian, 60 Peel, Paul, 208 P’elawk’wia. See Baker, Margaret Pemberton, Sophie, 148, 149–51, 150, 172, 173, 176, 184, 186–9, 188, 195, 205, 323n51 Perceval, Anne Mary, 153, 161, 199 personhood, 14, 245, 248, 253; human and non-human, 276–7, 279–80, 282–5, 287–8, 298 Peyton, John, Jr, 50, 52, 314n72 Phillips, Ruth, 46, 92 photography: botanical, 157, 163, 195–6, 332n113; daguerreotype, 3–5; family, 188–9. See also Mortimer-Lamb, Harold; Watkins, Margaret Picasso, Pablo, 109 Pissarro, Camille, 135–6 Plamondon, Antoine, 98, 115 Index 377

plants: and life, 157, 161, 184, 189, 193, 326n10; and subjectivity, 202 Podruchny, Carolyn, 90 poetry, 62, 98, 150–1, 189, 220, 289 Pointon, Marcia, 36, 44 Polack, Fiona, 27, 41 Pollock, Griselda, 11, 145 Pope, Alexander, 262, 310n22 portraiture: animal, 48; daguerreotype, 3–4; encounter of sitter and artist, 40, 50, 52, 55, 58, 250, 337n9; miniature portrait objects, 29, 36, 44–8, 58; psychological function of, 36–8, 44, 58, 62; self-, 11, 70–1, 98, 100, 126, 207, 293–6 postcolonial uncanny, 62 posthumanism, 17 Prakash, Ash, 139, 324n91 Prat, Annie Louisa, 163, 178, 190–3, 191, 192, 197–8, 201 pregnancy, 69, 73, 131, 207, 209. See also maternity psychoanalysis, 10–11, 17, 144, 207, 216, 238, 242 Pursh, Frederick, 153, 184 Quebec, 76, 153, 161, 167, 170, 175, 326n10

Index

race, 6, 15; British, 143; in fur trade, 90, 92; scientific racism, 48–9, 55; superiority, 49–50, 92, 250; and white women, 7, 92, 102, 141, 205. See also ethnicity Ramsay, Christian Broun (Lady Dalhousie), 153, 161, 163, 199, 328n38 realism, 72, 80–2, 101, 127, 137 , 176, 204 reciprocity, 40, 222, 274; subjective, 40–2, 48, 50 Red River expedition, 68–70, 86 Rée, Jonathan, 113, 117 Reeves, John, 25, 48 Reid, Dennis, 139, 321n9 Reid, George Agnew, 104 Reid, Muriel Colls, 271 repetition, 179, 182, 193, 206 representation, 6, 11, 22, 54, 57, 59, 120, 134, 136, 138, 144–6, 174, 289 reverie: as attunement to the world, 231–5; female, 211–18; as inward introspection, 214–18, 234; maternal, 237–8, 244, 298, 335n63; as pathology, 215–16

378

Riel, Louis, 69 Riley, Denise, 10 Riter Hamilton, Mary. See Hamilton, Mary Riter Robinson, Hercules, 34 Robinson Treaties, 87–9 Romanticism, 8–9, 25, 27, 104, 207, 228, 289, 260 Rorick, Isabel 21, 286–7 Ross, Alexander, 91 Ross, Anne. See McCord, Anne Ross Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 234, 238 Rousseau, Theodore, 115 Royal Academy (RA ), 64, 67, 74–5, 142, 173, 315n1 Royal Canadian Academy (RCA ), 142–3, 211, 333n7, 334n32, 342n3 Royal Society of British Artists (RBA ), 142–3 rupture, 57, 93, 112, 216, 229, 239, 281, 285 Ruskin, John, 332n124 Saito, Yuriko, 282 Saleeby, C.W., 243, 336n80 Salish: ontology, 251, 281–4, 287; oral histories, 276; relation to land, 276, 287–8; resource management, 280; subjectivity, 264–5, 284, 287, 289; territories, 249; weaving, 284; women, 281. See also basketry; Squamish sameness, 145, 175, 178–80, 182, 193, 198, 204–5 Sartorius, John Francis, 313n66 Sartorius, John Nost, 313n66 Saunders, Gill, 157, 159–61 Saunders, Sarah Agnes, 155, 326n15 Saunders, William Edwin, 326n15 Schäffer, Mary, 162–3, 182–4, 183, 190, 194, 195, 199–201, 205–6, 331n197 Schloss, Brigitte, 326n10 science. See botany; women: and science Scott, Charles H., 338n23 Scott, Joan, 19, 311n50 Scrimes-Graham, Mary Anne, 2, 4–5, 11–12, 66 Segantini, Giovanni, 336n81 Seigel, Jerrold, 8–9 self: actualization, 75–6, 79, 100; awareness, 8–9, 15, 80, 231, 264; European, 98; exploration, 80; expression, 81, 98, 103–4, 106, 114, 168, 259, 292; and other, 44, 66, 102, 244; referentiality, 8, 13, 67, 78, 80, 83, 95, 98,

101, 295; representations, 69, 70–2, 79, 80, 97, 100, 169, 294; sufficiency, 13, 112, 215–16 selfhood. See subjectivity separation: familial, 43, 125, 127, 160, 199; and miniatures, 36, 44; from the mother country, 143; and representation, 145–6; as subject-formation, 216–17, 235, 238; from the world, 287, 289–90. See also under maternity Sesemiya. See Williams, Tracy settlement, 85, 87–9, 247, 268 settler: denial and responsibility, 43, 55–61, 63, 314n72; expansion, 26, 87–9, 160, 165, 269, 271, 339–40n66; femininity, 20; indigenization, 13–14, 31, 95–8, 101, 166; nationalism, 165; relation to the mother country, 143; settler-Indigenous relations, 25–7, 60–3, 82, 91–2, 95–6, 98, 166, 247, 252, 268; society, 30–1, 55, 60, 63, 85, 254, subjectivity, 30–1, 39–42, 57, 59–60, 62–3; violence, 26–7, 31, 62. See also art history: settler; colonialism settler colonialism, 13–14, 30, 39, 62–3, 143. See also colonialism Sewinchelwet. See Frank, Sophie sexuality, 15, 120, 216 Shadbolt, Doris, 255–6, 282 Shanawdithit (niece of Demasduit), 31, 36, 40, 40–2, 42, 46–7, 50, 51, 160–1, 311n13; and William Eppes Cormack, 41 Sharp, Dorothea, 110, 114–15 Sheppard, Harriet Campbell, 153, 154, 161, 199 Shiff, Richard, 138 Shteir, Ann, 179 silence, 112–15, 144–5 Simcoe, Elizabeth, 75, 317n39 Simcoe, John Graves, 317n39 Simpson, Frances, 91–2 Simpson, George, 89, 94 Sisley, Alfred, 135–6 Skinner, Damian, 63, 95, 99 Skwétsiya. See Johnny, Harriet Slade School of Art, 125, 149 Slaney, Frances, 286 Smith, MaryEllen Weller, 72 Southcott, Mary, 171, 201 spaces: domestic, 151, 211; interior, 41, 151; liminal, 255; semiotic, 127 Spahan, Rose M., 278 Sparrow, Debra, 21, 253, 265, 278, 287

Spence, Theresa, 62 spirituality, 61, 276, 281 Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh) people, 21, 249, 253, 264, 276; and cedar trees, 275–6, 279–81; and colonization, 268–71, 279–81; cosmology, 276, 280–1; territory, 267. See also basketmakers; basketry; Salish Stacey, Robert, 140 Steer, Philip Wilson, 135, 137 Stern, Daniel, 238 Stewart, Susan, 46, 48, 57–8 stillness, 111, 114, 232, 258, 278, 290; radical, 79, 114 St John, Kate, 69 subjective non-correspondence, 3–5, 9–15, 18–19, 22, 204, 244, 295, 297 subjectivity, 14–17, 27, 62, 81, 107, 202, 204–5, 207–9, 211, 79, 294; and aesthetics, 8; aporetic or fractured, 10–11, 15, 16, 39, 42, 57, 59, 84, 103, 105, 107, 118, 143–6, 204, 244, 256, 258, 295–6; autonomous, 8, 22, 44, 174, 215–16, 218, 231, 244; Cartesian, 215; coherent/unified, 15–17, 204, 215; and corporeality, 10, 15, 79; dissolution or forgetting of, 53, 235; distributed, 260, 261, 276, 278, 281; embodied, 15, 16, 256, 258, 265; formation of, 17, 107, 230, 238–9, 242, 284; and impressionism, 82, 137–8; Indigenous, 50, 62, 264–5, 284–5; individual, 189, 202–4; and interpellation, 7, 173–4, 187, 205; and introspection, 214–16, 231, 288; maternal, 207–9, 211, 219–20, 242, 244; and the natural world, 14, 173, 203–4, 251, 255, 258, 260, 264–6, 287; and objectivity, 80–2, 101, 136–8, 174, 201; oppositional, 216, 234, 244, 288; and perception, 8–9, 174, 238; and portraiture, 36, 39–40, 42–4, 52, 55, 58–9; relational, 14, 231, 235, 238–9, 241–2, 244, 281–5; and representation, 59; settler, 30–1, 39–42, 57, 59–60, 62–3; and travel, 84–5. See also interiority; intersubjectivity; trans-subjectivity suffrage, 98–99, 110–11, 125, 201 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 228 Sut’elut. See Williams, Monica Swenámiya. See Khatsahlano, Mary Anne Sxwelhcháliya. See John, Mary Ann symbiosis, 238; maternal, 207, 211 symbolic order, 10, 118, 135, 195, 239 Index 379

Talmage, Algernon, 135 taxonomy, 159–60, 169, 171, 180, 184–5 Teitelbaum, Matthew, 108–9, 111, 135, 139 Tennyson, Alfred, 186–7, 198 textile work, 121–3 Teyoninhokarawen. See Norton, John theoretical objects, 21 Thomas, John Rogers, 5 Timms, Philip, 270 Tippett, Maria, 208, 256, 338n23 Tobey, Mark, 258 Tocque, Philip, 38 Tonks, Henry, 135–6 Torrey, John, 153 trade: basket, 268, 270–1, 274; with Beothuk, 26, 47, 50; fur, 85, 89–93; tourist, 46, 48, 50 traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom, 266, 276, 280, 287. See also Indigenous: attitudes to land and nature Traill, Catharine Parr, 153, 156, 161, 178, 184, 196–8, 201, 203–4, 332n124. See also Canadian Wild Flowers transhistoricism, 20, 31, 59, 63 translation: across media, 177; as art historical method, 283, 311n50; of experience, 105, 146 trans-subjectivity, 238–9, 242. See also intersubjectivity; subjectivity: relational Trapnell, Ellen, 163 trauma, 12, 14, 31, 42, 47, 58, 61, 152 travel: narratives of, 76, 80–3. See also under women treaties, 87–9, 93 Tully, Sydney Strickland, 209, 335n72 Turner, Nancy, 276, 287 unity: of mother-child, 126, 220, 224, 228; with nature, 255, 260, 288; of subject, 8, 17; of subject and object, 131, 138–9, 244

Index

vacancy, 33, 36, 42, 54–5, 58–9, 133. See also emptiness Vancouver, 250, 267, 269–71, 278, 337n9, 338n23, 341n95, 342n166. See also Eslhá7an Vancouver Island, 85, 189 Van Den Abbeele, Georges, 65, 84, 101 Veditz, George, 322n32 Victoria, 149, 151, 163, 169–70, 255, 258, 287 Victorian: lady travellers, 67, 75, 80, 83; science, 198; society, 98–9; women, 9–11,

380

13, 76, 79–83, 85, 98–9, 134, 152, 187, 201, 219, 281 Vigée-Lebrun, Elizabeth, 126–7 Viger, Jacques, 167 voyageurs, 65, 79, 81, 83–4, 89–94; and agency, 90; gender, 91; ritual theatre, 90–2, 100 Vreeland, Susan, 250 Waghorne, Arthur, 171 Waghorne, Kate, 171, 330n69 Wake, Margaret, 338n23 Walcott, Mary Vaux, 184, 195 Watkins, Margaret, 294, 296–7, 297 Watson, Edith, 120 Watson, Scott, 255 weaving, 234, 266, 277–8, 284, 290 Webster, Julia Bullock, 13, 197 Whistler, J.A.M., 135, 142–3 White, Peter, 293 Whitman, Walt, 260 Wickenden, Robert, 157 Wild Flowers of Canada (book), 165–6 Wilkinson, John, 330n68 Wilkinson, Mary Rebecca, 171, 172, 195, 330n68 Williams, Bill, 337n19 Williams, Lorna, 21, 274, 276, 278, 284, 287–8 Williams, Monica (Sut’elut), 267, 268, 273, 274, 340n78 Williams, Suzi, 278 Williams, Tracy (Sesemiya), 21, 271–2, 276, 278, 282–5, 288 Wirt, Elizabeth, 169 Wolseley, Garnet, 69, 86, 90, 316n11 Wolseley, Louisa, 69, 315–16n10 women: and art history, 6, 19–20, 104–7; British, 12–13, 27–8, 75–6, 98–9, 110; careers, 120, 156–7; Canadian, 13–14, 18, 196; as characterless, 10, 17, 24 310n22; Indigenous, 13, 21, 28, 62, 92, 270–2; and men, 12, 54, 119–20, 156, 180; New, 215–16; peasant, 220; and representation, 27, 110, 143–6, 151–2, 243; and science, 151–4, 156–63, 167, 182–6, 197–9, 266, 328n41, 331n107, 332n104; selfhood and identity, 6–7, 9–11, 15–17, 66, 79, 151, 182, 203–4, 294, 298; and travel, 75, 80–5; white, 91–2. See also botany; femininity; gender;

maternity; subjective non-correspondence; women artists women artists: and biography, 6; Canadian, 12, 14, 19, 141–2, 180, 198–9, 208–9, 215, 321n9; Canadian in Britain, 14, 141–3; feminine difference as visible in their art, 104–7,

143–6; friendships, 116, 250–1; professional careers, 125–6, 190, 199, 202, 209, 228, 295; and travel, 65, 75–6, 79–80, 83–5. See also botany; maternity Woods, Emily Henrietta, 163, 169, 170, 201 Wyle, Florence, 120

Index 381