This Woman in Particular: Context for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr by Stephanie Kirkwood Walker (review)

HUMANITIES 293 Bobrow's book is a tribute to Odoevtseva's craft, perseverance, and her compassion to those whose images appear on the pages of her memoirs. Today, when Odoevtseva's novels find, albeit with difficulty, their way back into Russia, this study may serve as a useful introduction to Odoevtseva 's creative life and work. It can also provide the interested student of literary history with an inside view of life in the narrow circle of the Russian literati, both in Russia and in the West. (N.N. SHNEIDMAN) Stephanie Kirkwood Walker. This Woman in Particular: Context for the Biographical Image ofEmily Carr Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xvi, 212. $34.95 To begin, a few of my own contexts. First is Carlene Dingwall, an English Honours student, concluding a term paper she wrote in 1994: 'Carr's quest, seemingly modelled after a Native quest, is merely a non-Native idea of a vision quest.' A Second is Nancy Pagh's article on Carr's autobiography in Mosaic (Fall 1992): 'Because Carr's published autobiographical works have been heavily edited, we cannot rely on them to discover precisely to what degree her real voices may have been plural, nonsensical, full of ruptures ofjouissance.' The third is a conversation overheard while reading Walker's book on board the ferry Spirit ofBrit~sh Columbia sailing from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay. The conversation went something like this: TOURIST FROM UNITED STATES We're going to Vancouver Island to see some art YOUNG WOMAN FROM VANCOUVER Oh, you mean Emily Carr? TOURIST Well, I'm not sure. It is some place begins with C .... YOUNG WOMAN [after long pause} Chemainus? TOURIST Yes, that's it. We heard about it at home. Isuppose these notes, from my own files and memories, confirm that the 'energy field surrounding Carr's biographical image' is infinitely expanding . And certainly Walker's book is very good at establishing both the extent and intensities of that field: that is, it helps us understand Carr artist , woman, and person - by elaborating the literary, critical, and intellectual contexts, but also the historical and social situations which illuminate, and deflect, her reputation. In their accumulation and texture, these contexts show what actions and thoughts were possible and not possible for Carr, and continue to be for those who write about her - show what persona and ideology might be made visible, or necessarily obscured in each context. In the very best sense, Walker's book helps us great~y to read between the lines. 294 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Within the considerable range of her inquiry, Walker establishes some crucial emphases. The book has much to say about genre definition, but its key focus and accomplishment are its sustained feminist accent, and its deep interestinbiography's 'intrinsic religious dimension.' Walker presents the theory of gender and genre adeptly and succinctly, although the final chapter, perhaps in its urgency to get all the rest in, especially extra history, becomes a little cluttered, the argumentsometimes toppledby a precariously stacked syntax. The notes sounded in my own opening contextspoint up the most neglected topics - or topics onlybriefly mentioned, which deserve development. First the whole area of the absent First Nations voice/aesthetic. Walker touches on this matter, in reference to Robert Fulford's polemical article in Canadian Artand GertaMoray's recentre-visioning ofthe subject. But given the enormity of issues of div~rsity and appropriation in current cultural life, it is surprising this context can pass quite so quickly. Is Walker's book, and this review, a monologic discourse, as my student would claim? Nancy Pagh's article (not cited byWalker) points to a second dimension I longed to know more of. Despite Walker's introduction of a promising concept she calls 'the sayability of a life,' she gives very little attention to the context of writing itself. How did Carr, and her biographers and critics, come to write the way they did? I mean, in detail: their choices of form, of phrases, of pronouns, and verb moods? I wanted to know more about nonsense and jouissance. And, come to think of it, why, given Walker's constant reference to postmodernism's freedom of undecideability, is her...