In this essay I would like to explore a volume of writings and sketches by Emily Carr: Pause. A Sketchbook (1953). The aim of this critical analysis is therefore that of giving voice to a little studied document of one of the most famous and eccentric Canadian painters, later to become the only woman – as member associate – in the Group of Seven, an innovative art movement of Canadian landscape painters. Her volume of short pieces of prose and sketches can be considered an autobiography of the eighteen months of her life spent in a British Sanatorium. Here, at East Anglia Sanatorium, where she was diagnosed with hysteria, she was forbidden to paint and had to renounce her art altogether. However, she could not restrain herself from drawing and recording, with irony and humour, what happened around her, and how patients with T.B. as well as with other pathologies were treated. Her writings become even more relevant as a historical chronicle, because they portray a typical late-Victorian institution that works like one of those hospitals and asylums described years later by the philosopher Michel Foucault in his well-known essay Discipline and Punish (1975).
Emily Carr's Sketches of Life in a Sanatorium
CONCILIO, Carmelina
2016-01-01
Abstract
In this essay I would like to explore a volume of writings and sketches by Emily Carr: Pause. A Sketchbook (1953). The aim of this critical analysis is therefore that of giving voice to a little studied document of one of the most famous and eccentric Canadian painters, later to become the only woman – as member associate – in the Group of Seven, an innovative art movement of Canadian landscape painters. Her volume of short pieces of prose and sketches can be considered an autobiography of the eighteen months of her life spent in a British Sanatorium. Here, at East Anglia Sanatorium, where she was diagnosed with hysteria, she was forbidden to paint and had to renounce her art altogether. However, she could not restrain herself from drawing and recording, with irony and humour, what happened around her, and how patients with T.B. as well as with other pathologies were treated. Her writings become even more relevant as a historical chronicle, because they portray a typical late-Victorian institution that works like one of those hospitals and asylums described years later by the philosopher Michel Foucault in his well-known essay Discipline and Punish (1975).
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