This Woman in Particular: Contexts for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Biography and autobiography are siblings in the feminist theory explored
by Stephanie Walker. As William James notes in a fine foreword, This
Woman in Particular is neither another biography of Emily Carr nor
simply an analysis of existing biographies; instead, it is an ecology of
the genre via the contexts of biographical writings. It explores the
reality behind the often-conflicting images.

Walker’s pursuit of the biographical image moves beyond the extremes
of Carr as iconoclast or eccentric outsider. She has chosen to pursue a
complex “image.” As James puts it, Carr “was orphaned as a
teenager, possibly an incest survivor, unmarried, perhaps a lesbian. She
has been enthroned as a kind of proto-ecofeminist heroine who understood
in advance of her time the place and importance of nature.” Walker,
attracted to Carr because of the numinous quality in her landscapes,
believes that the conception of self is at root a spiritual act. She
also maintains that biographical studies of Carr matured with the growth
of feminist perspectives. She calls biography “a deceptive genre,
positioned between fact and fiction and elusive in its purposes.” The
biographer is influenced by cultural conventions, but usually fails to
acknowledge them.

In a well-documented and relatively brief text, Walker examines the
limits of autobiography, the “enigma” of biography, the shaping
mirror of culture, feminist reconstructions, and the relationships
between art, religion, and culture. A feminist view is important to her
argument. She writes: “In both the hagiographies of the medieval
period and biographies in the modern West, women’s lives have been
narrated as marginal, liminal, tangential to the norm.” In short, as a
counterpoint to the main model, the narrative of male experience.

This Woman in Particular is a fresh and striking study of the
biographical genre and of the centrality of culture in the seeing eye.
The text—not one to read in a hurry—is sometimes freighted with
academic jargon. Walker, however, has taken an innovative approach to a
complex subject and has brought an abundance of original insights to it.