Canadian girls in London: negotiating home and away in the British World at the turn of the twentieth century

This dissertation examines the ways in which Canadian women artists who lived as expatriates in Britain managed multiple and often competing ideas about home in their writing and artwork in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on a small group of professional, white, English-Canadian painters, including Emily Carr, Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes, Mary Alexandra Bell Eastlake, Helen McNicoll, and Frances Jones, I reveal links between Canada and the greater British Empire that have tended to be lost in nationalist art history narratives. Though well-known and respected during their lifetimes as successful professional artists who pursued international careers, Canadian women of the pre-WWI period have since been almost exclusively studied through the narrow lens of the ideology of separate spheres. Without dismissing the very real restrictions that women did face because of their gender, I maintain that this distinction between public and private neglects the colonial context in which white Canadian women lived and worked. Indeed, the nineteenth-century cult of middle-class domesticity and the era of high imperialism went hand in hand: "home," the personal space of the family, and "home," the social space of a nation, were twinned in the discourse of empire, both signifying a bounded, secure, and racialized space of belonging, safely separate from the outside world. Indeed, the maintenance of this strict division between "home" and "away" was one of the structuring fictions of imperialism. By insisting on the importance of a consideration of the specificity of the experience of artists like Carr, Forbes, Eastlake, McNicoll and Jones as not just women, but as white women, and even more specifically, as white women working within the context of British imperialism, my work pushes at the boundaries of the now well-established framework of white feminist art history, which has overwhelmingly tended to shy away from questions of race and empire. Through an examination of primary sources such as letters, travel diaries, autobiographies, and sketchbooks, and a close analysis of visual representations of motherhood, domestic interiors, and literary and historical subjects, I argue that both senses of home were met with a deep ambivalence, that the boundaries between home and away were permeable, and that the global public and domestic private were, in fact, intertwined and mutually constitutive. By dismantling these boundaries and examining the networks that stretched across the Atlantic and throughout the English-speaking world, I situate Carr, Forbes, Eastlake, McNicoll, and Jones within the context of what has come to be called the "British World."

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