Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
##common.pageHeaderLogo.altText##

Articles

Volume 17, Number 2 (1992)

Recovering the Fictions of Emily Carr

  • Susan Huntley Elderkin
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1992-06-06

Abstract

In her prose fiction, Emily Carr rejects the modernist notion of a unified self and opts for a polyphonic self-portraiture. In Klee Wyck, The Book of Small, The House of all Sorts, and Growing Pains, the reader discovers a mature woman creating and re-creating earlier versions of herslef and subsequently interacting with them. Instead of isolating formative circumstances and interpolating a subject from causal sequences, Carr constructs a series of voices/personae whose historic specificity is uncertain. Carr's anecdotes present the unstable collage of self in autobiographies that resist (mis)interpretations; her voices can be likened to containers that protect their contents.