Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic: Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 4 9781474465878

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 · 2012

Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic Edited by

Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber, Susan Reid and Gina Wisker

Edinburgh University Press

Fig. 1. Terry Stringer, ‘Katherine Mansfield: study for sculpture’, c. 1979. Pencil on paper, 297 mm × 209 mm. Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa 1979-0044-2

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Contents

Introduction Gina Wisker Articles The Little Red Governess: Mansfield and the Demythologisation of the Motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in ‘The Little Governess’ María Casado Villanueva

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5

Katherine Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic Gina Wisker

20

Mansfield’s Charm: The Enchantment of Domestic ‘Bliss’ Rishona Zimring

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Ambivalence, Language and the Uncanny in Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension Andrew Harrison Lustful Fathers and False Princes: ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Donkeyskin’ Motifs in Edith Wharton’s Summer and Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories Christine Butterworth-McDermott

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63

Creative Writing Poetry W. H. Auden: ‘Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand ...’ Kay McKenzie Cooke: ‘Katherine Mansfield’s House’

79 83

Diary Chris Price: From ‘Isola Bella: A Writing Journal’

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Short Story Jessica Whyte: ‘Sunday’

92

Parody A. K. Grant: ‘Bliss! A New Mansfield’ Reports From Wellington to Fontainebleau: Three Unpublished Letters by Katherine Mansfield Gerri Kimber

99

106

A Note on Larkin on Mansfield C. K. Stead

118

A Note on Auden’s ‘Kathy’ Susan Reid

122

The Parrot Wallpaper in ‘Prelude’ Angela Smith

126

‘Wasp’-ishness in Mansfield’s ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ W. Todd Martin

128

Reviews Vara Neverow: Gerardo Rodriguez-Salas and Isabel Maria Andrés-Cuevas, The Aesthetic Construction of the Female Grotesque in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Interplay of Life and Literature Claire Davison-Pégon: Anne Mounic, Monde terrible où naître: La voix singulière face à l’Histoire Jenny McDonnell: Jeanne Dubino, ed., Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace Angela Smith: Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf Gill Lowe: Anna Jackson, Diary Poetics, Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 Ailsa Cox: Sue Orr, From Under the Overcoat

138 140

Notes on Contributors

142

Acknowledgements

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132 133 135

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Introduction Gina Wisker This fourth volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies is devoted to the theme of the fantastic, a relatively untrodden path in Mansfield studies, yet one which the contributors to this volume invite you to consider more closely. Nothing in Katherine Mansfield’s story world is quite as it seems; complacency and investment in familiar life-narratives are positively dangerous. Fantastic and Gothic readings of Mansfield’s fiction present us with a covert, darker world alongside seemingly familiar events and behaviours, a world conveyed in undercurrents and hidden threats, in the lies and false promises of the relationships we encounter and in the narratives we create for ourselves. Rosemary Jackson’s definition of the fantastic as ‘a literature of estrangement that resists closure and works to dismantle the real’,1 captures that defamiliarisation and troubled nature of the seemingly everyday actions and worldviews of Mansfield’s characters. In these short stories, ostensibly ‘safe’ young women travelling on trains through Europe are unable to see the wolfish threat of predatory older men (‘The Little Governess’); symbols of identity reveal insecurities and a tenuously maintained calm among gatherings of friends and family (‘The Garden Party’, ‘Bliss’, ‘Her First Ball’); ‘innocent’ characters may in fact be dominating, duplicitous, engulfing, cannibalistic (as in the stories from In a German Pension, or the nightmarish scenario of the baby boy as a huge bird in ‘Prelude’). In many stories some of the nagging familiarity of characters, settings or events derives from the narrative structures and intent of fairy tales, those fantasy fictions which traditionally seek to explain behaviours and encourage conformity. These troubled, Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 1–4 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0023 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies rewritten fairy tales are warnings: the ‘Cinderella’ story underlies ‘Her First Ball’ and Beryl’s character in ‘At the Bay’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ lurks beneath ‘The Little Governess’, and the notion of the changeling child emerges in ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’. These intrusive fairy tales either offer a parallel world of insights or reveal themselves to be ill-founded, unstable narratives upon which to build versions of self and world. Jackson helped to recuperate fantasy and the Gothic for readers of modernism, in recognising the importance of Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973),2 ‘in encouraging serious critical engagement with a form of literature which had been described as being rather frivolous or foolish’.3 More recently, Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith have recuperated the Gothic strains in the writing of many female modernists – though not Mansfield4 – a strain as insidious as creeping ivy, exploring, undermining, and enabling writers to create moments of estrangement and defamiliarisation, to reveal the parallel imaginary worlds alongside the seemingly real. And once we allow ourselves to break away from more familiar readings of Mansfield and see the fantastic and the Gothic in her work, it is clear that it is an essential lens, a vehicle for her marvellous irony, those subtle or sudden revelations of the damage we do ourselves and others, of the threats beneath the cosy outward show of personal and public relationships. To this volume, then. Maria Casado Villanueva in her prizewinning essay explores Mansfield’s reworking of versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in ‘The Little Governess’, recognising how modernism’s dissatisfaction with the realist mode, turning to alternative subjectivities, can also be seen – certainly in Mansfield’s case – to reinvigorate the use of the fairy tale as ‘hypotext’, revealing class-infused social discourses and false knowledge. Villanueva’s close reading of Mansfield’s story exposes her revelation and critique of the acculturating powers of fairy tales to instil and perpetuate gender roles. In ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic’, my own essay concentrates on Mansfield’s use of the literary Gothic in tales of childbirth and childrearing, exploring in ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ a story of child neglect and suburban complacency, based upon the cultural myths and fairy tales of the changeling. Christine ButterworthMcDermott also focuses on fairy tales and finds similar motifs in Edith Wharton and Mansfield which reveal how both authors ‘shared a concern over the danger of fairy tale fantasies of rescue for their female readership’ in what she defines as their ‘bittersweet’ narratives, exposing the dangerously camouflaged teachings of the fairy tale.

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Introduction Each author subverts the fairy tale of ‘Cinderella’ by ‘exposing how lustful fathers and false princes are detrimental to self-actualisation’, highlighting the need for female agency. Valuable explorations of fantasy terms are fundamental to Rishona Zimring’s essay in which she tackles a key term – that of ‘charm’ – in a discussion of how enchantment emanates from the domestic (‘Feuille d’Album’ and ‘Bliss’). The term ‘charm’ is unpicked and exposed, spanning the two extremes of the fantastic and the ordinary, which combine in Mansfield’s use of the enchantment of domestic interiors. Zimring argues that ‘Bliss’ ‘links the domestic interior, artfully arranged, to magical illusions and transformative possibilities’, foregrounding female creativity and celebrating the domestic sphere. Andrew Harrison begins with an observation on Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’ (the uncanny) and the unsettling effects of language in Mansfield’s In A German Pension stories, noting ‘the disconcerting slippage of meaning between languages and the uncanny potential of mixed languages, erratic voices and ambiguous expressions’. He thereby exposes the ambivalence of language as a locus for the uncanny, pointing out deliberately unsettling discontinuities in the collection, both in statements made in the stories, and also in perspectives and voices within stories. There is a particularly rich creative section in this volume. In ‘Bliss! A New Mansfield’, we republish a long-forgotten little masterpiece of parody by the late A. K. Grant. Chris Price, the 2010 Menton Fellow, captures the month of May in Menton through ten short poems and two prose extracts – part of a much longer work encompassing a creative response to her time in Menton. In the short story ‘Sunday’, Jessica White takes us inside the mind of Hilda, a Cornish housemaid trying to help manage the challenging domestic arrangements of Mansfield, Murry and the Lawrences in Cornwall in 1916. Kay McKenzie Cooke’s poem ‘In Mansfield’s House’ imaginatively explores this space without Mansfield’s presence. Angela Smith’s report, a companion piece to the beautifully imagined painting by Leanne Davies – Wallpaper – featured on the front cover of this volume, explores the origins and effects of the parrot wallpaper in ‘Prelude’. Gerri Kimber has tracked down three unpublished letters by Mansfield and her accompanying fascinating report opens up a door onto Mansfield’s state of mind at two key points in her life. Susan Reid introduces an Auden poem – rediscovered by Gerri Kimber and republished in full in this volume – and discusses its reference to Mansfield, the rich insights this mention gives us into the world of Auden’s thought, and his interaction with Mansfield’s

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Katherine Mansfield Studies work. We are also fortunate to have a piece on Larkin’s response to Mansfield by C. K. Stead, exploring how Larkin’s letters to Monica, his lover for many years, reveal a curmudgeonly person who was occasionally nudged into response by Monica’s sharing of Mansfield’s writing with him. Todd Martin’s report on a little-known attributed story ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ constructs a new reading of her portrayal of this family, and continues the fascinating discussion of whether this story can positively be attributed to Mansfield. Overall then, this volume offers a tantalising glimpse into another aspect of Mansfield’s fiction, opening up yet another dense seam for Mansfield research as we have come to expect from this fine journal. Notes 1. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 175. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). 3. Jackson, p. 3. 4. Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith, eds, The Female Gothic: New Directions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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The Little Red Governess: Mansfield and the Demythologisation of the Motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in ‘The Little Governess’ María Casado Villanueva

Abstract Katherine Mansfield’s interest in the literary rendering of subjective perspectives manifests a more general modernist questioning of a realist mode of representation, and her deployment of fantasy and fairy tale elements in her stories often testifies to a desire to account for a more complex portrayal of experience. However, fantasy can also be, for Mansfield’s characters, ‘a deceiving friend’.1 This article seeks to analyse the ways in which Mansfield deploys the fairy tale motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in her story ‘The Little Governess’ (1915). The notions provided by Jack Zipes’s socio-historical approach to the fairy tale foreground the transformations that ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ underwent in the process of being recorded, and the relevance of the ideological bias imposed on the most popular literary versions. In ‘The Little Governess’, Mansfield’s refashioning of the tale already shows an acute awareness of the role of fairy tales as socialising agents, more specifically as perpetuators of gender notions. Through a characteristically modernist manipulation of narrative perspective which privileges the protagonist’s point of view, Mansfield articulates a criticism of a model of education which not only relegates women to a state of undesirable naïveté but also punishes them for their own gullibility.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 5–19 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0024 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Key words: Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Little Governess’, fairy tale, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Jack Zipes, intertextuality

‘The fairy tale is the vessel of false knowledge, or more bluntly, interested propaganda.’2

Modernism’s dissatisfaction with a realist mode of representation has often been articulated through the presentation of alternative subjectivities which evidence the impossibility of an objective knowledge of external reality. One way of undermining the realist position is a new interest in what Robert Scholes has defined as the practice of ‘fabulation’ – experimental fusions of everyday scenes, dreams and fantastic elements.3 However, modernist literature also performed the deconstructive and metafictional task of laying bare the conventions of non-realist or idealising literary traditions, such as sentimental and fairy tale narratives. The latter have become common sites for allusion and rewriting in twentieth-century literature and their importance as ‘hypotexts’ lies in their quality as social discourses loaded with cultural codes related to class, gender and social behaviour.4 They are narrative constructs whose meaning has changed with the times and as conditioned by their instructive function. Mansfield’s conscious allusions to fairy tales in her short stories have been perceived to illustrate a narrative style which synthesises the aesthetics of Oscar Wilde’s decadent symbolism and the Russian parodic tradition.5 Her narratives operate two ways: on the one hand they question the possibilities of narrative representation of reality and, on the other, they disclose the values encoded in some forms of fantasy fiction such as the fairy tale. In ‘The Little Governess’, published for the first time in Signature on 18 October 1915 and later in the collection Bliss and Other Stories (1920), Mansfield’s deployment of references to the well-known motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ reveals her understanding of the ways in which fairy tales contribute to notions of social identity. Through a close reading of the story this article attempts to shed some light on the ways Mansfield foregrounds the acculturating power of fairy tales and denounces their capacity to perpetuate gender roles, anticipating, to a certain extent, the deconstructive readings of fairy tales characteristic of postmodernist writing. By appropriating fairy-tale material, Mansfield shakes the ground upon which fairy tales are set, since, as Christina Bacchilega has observed, ‘Rewriting need not be simply a stylistic or ideological updating to make the

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The Little Red Governess tale more appealing [. . . ] it involves substantive thought, diverse questioning of both narrative construction and assumptions about gender.’6 Indeed, the tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has been analysed by folklorists and fairy tale critics from various perspectives which have brought to the fore different dimensions of this story. Some studies have focused on its possible mythic or ritual origins and others have interpreted it from a psychoanalytic point of view as dramatising different stages in child development. However, certain critics, including Christina Bacchilega, Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes, have demonstrated how the oral and written versions of the tale convey the mentalities of different socio-historical moments and respond to the drive to instil particular ideologies in the readers or listeners of their time, performing an acculturating function of which Mansfield seems to be aware.7 It is my contention that Mansfield consciously refashions the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ plot with a critical intention to denounce the situation of women and the harmful consequences of some of the values on which their education rests. Although there is no evidence (in diaries or letters) that Mansfield’s allusions to the fairy tale are deliberate, several details of the story foreground a connection between Mansfield’s narrative and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, an intertextual dimension of the story to which criticism has not paid sufficient attention.8 Jack Zipes’s socio-historical approach provides an interesting starting point to analyse the ways in which Mansfield’s story appropriates certain elements of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Zipes has shown how this fairy tale is illustrative of the deep transformations that traditional oral narratives underwent through the process of literary recording. According to his research, the tale in its oral version used to be an account of a ‘socio-ethnic initiation ritual’.9 Most presentday readers are familiar with the story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ through re-elaborations based on the two most widespread versions of the tale – one recorded by Perrault in 1697 and the other by the Grimm brothers in 1812 – which differ mainly in their respective endings. In Perrault’s version, both grandmother and child are mercilessly devoured and the wolf is triumphant. The Grimm brothers sought to make the tale more palatable to a bourgeois audience, and changed Perrault’s denouement by adding the rescuing figure of the hunter, who saves both the child and the grandmother by cutting open the wolf’s belly, and punishes the predator by filling its stomach with stones. Zipes, however, has observed that the tragic ending is

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Katherine Mansfield Studies a peculiarity of Perrault’s story, since in most oral versions the girl manages to escape using her wit to deceive the wolf.10 Similarly, Christina Bacchilega insists upon the fact that ‘[a]s an initiatory tale in the oral tradition, “Red Riding Hood’’ did more than symbolize the child’s ability to defeat danger and evil by resorting to cunning: it also demonstrated the importance of women’s knowledge to survival’.11 Moreover, Perrault appended to his version a moral in verse which renders explicit the message of the tale: Young children, as this tale will show, And mainly pretty girls with charm, Do wrong and often come to harm In letting those they do not know Stay talking to them when they meet. And if they don’t do as they ought, It’s no surprise that some are caught By wolves who take them off to eat. I call them wolves, but you will find That some are not the savage kind, Now howling, ravening or raging; Their manners seem, instead engaging, They’re softly-spoken and discreet. Young ladies whom they talk to on the street They follow to their homes and through the hall, And upstairs to their rooms; when they’re there They’re not as friendly as they might appear: These are the most dangerous wolves of all.12

Alan Dundes has emphasised the highly ironical character of a moral which seems ‘almost a parody of a moral’; however, it is indicative of Perrault’s attempt to transform the oral story into an educative ‘fable’.13 Significantly, most literary versions after 1697 based on Perrault’s are infused with very specific notions of socially determined gender roles. Zipes states that ‘Perrault fixed the ground rules and sexual regulations for the debate, and these were extended by the Brothers Grimm and largely accepted by most writers and story tellers in the Western World.’ This fact is significant because Perrault’s rendering of the tale represented the transformation of ‘a hopeful and oral tale about the initiation of a young girl into a tragic one of violence in which the girl is blamed for her own violation’. In these versions, the girl loses her status of female hero to become a victim.14

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The Little Red Governess Departing from mythical interpretations of the text, which read the devouring scene in terms of a cyclic natural symbolism of death and regeneration, Zipes interprets this episode as a clear reference to the ‘sexual act’. Perrault’s pattern was readily assimilated within the Western cultural tradition, setting the grounds for a ‘bourgeois Red Riding Hood syndrome’, the recurrent motif of ‘virtue seduced’. According to these readings, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ would then emerge as a ‘a projection of male fantasy in a literary discourse considered to be civilized and aimed at curbing the natural inclinations of children’ and would become symptomatic of the deep alterations suffered by the civilising process in Western societies.15 The intertextual connection which ‘The Little Governess’ establishes with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ discloses the sexual notions implicit in the original fairy tale, and questions the validity of a discourse which holds women responsible for men’s misbehaviour. The story ‘The Little Governess’ narrates the eventful trip of a young girl who travels alone from England to Munich to work as a governess for a German family. After being well advised by the woman at the governess agency not to trust any stranger she encounters on her way, she takes a night train where she meets an old man and, since he seems harmless, she befriends him. He offers to guide her round Munich and, after what the governess thinks has been a pleasant day, the man takes the girl to his apartment and forces her to kiss him. Although she manages to escape him, she loses the chance to work for the family and, with a damaged reputation, she must face an uncertain future. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ resonates between the lines of ‘The Little Governess’. The links between the two stories are delicately woven and rest primarily on plot development. Mansfield’s story follows the same pattern as the well-known fairy tale in terms of Propp’s structural analysis of tale functions.16 The initial situation (
) for Little Riding Hood is that she is told to visit her grandmother, while in Mansfield’s story, it is decided that the governess should leave for Germany. Then follows  (departure), when Little Red Riding Hood sets out and the governess goes to the station and initiates her journey. Next is  (prohibition) and the first recognisable hint for a reader familiar with any written version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is the memory of the warning which the governess receives before setting off. In the Grimm brothers’ version, Little Red Riding Hood’s mother instructs the girl not to ‘leave the path’, whereas the lady at the Governess Bureau states: “‘Don’t go out of the carriage, don’t walk about the corridors and be sure to lock the lavatory door if you go there.’’’17 Transgression () ensues when both characters contravene the warning; Little Red

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Katherine Mansfield Studies

Fig. 1. Drawing of Katherine Mansfield. Pencil, 1985. © Murray Webb.

Riding Hood leaves the path to find the wolf and the governess starts a conversation with the old man. Then there is the trickery () of the wolf deceiving Little Red Riding Hood, by taking advantage of her curiosity and inexperience; in Mansfield’s story, the old man manages to convince the little governess to accompany him on a tour in Munich.

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The Little Red Governess Both Little Red Riding Hood and the governess enact compliance (), by accepting the villain’s proposals and ignoring the advice given. This results in villainy (A); the wolf eats both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, and the governess is sexually harassed by the old man, who tries to kiss her. As in the Grimm brothers’ story, Mansfield also presents a transitional moment (B): both Little Red Riding Hood and the governess manage to escape the villain. However, whereas the Grimm brothers’ version includes the punishment of villain, or the wolf’s killing, a function denominated as V, Mansfield leaves her villain unpunished and finishes the story with an open ending, with further implications of an unhappy future for the protagonist. Despite the similarities between Mansfield’s story and the traditional fairy tale, Mansfield departs from the simple tone of the fairy tale; she sets the scene in a realist and concrete location and time, and eliminates all fantastic elements. She deploys characteristically modernist narrative techniques; she chooses to begin the story in medias res and makes use of restricted omniscience and alterations in temporality. This method of narrative organisation contrasts with the linear development of the traditional fairy tale and privileges a subjective standpoint which also contravenes the dictates of realist literature. When discussing postmodern elaborations of fairy tales, Christina Bacchilega notices that ‘this kind of rereading does more than interpret anew or shake the genre’s ground rules. It listens for the many “voices’’ of fairy tales as well, as part of a historicizing and performance-oriented project.’ Although she has qualified ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as a ‘confining narrative’ aimed at training middle-class women in their role of ‘angels of the home’, thus divorcing them from any feature of ‘demonic sexual beings’, Bacchilega also acknowledges that ‘the tale has other wonders to perform’ and underlines how the work of postmodern writers such as Angela Carter ‘are acts of fairy-tale archaeology that release this story’s many other voices’. Mansfield’s modernist re-reading both listens to and reproduces some of the ‘voices’ presented in the tale, thus showing an awareness of the ‘institutional’ character of fairy tales, charged with ideological connotations which define women’s role in society.18 In her story Mansfield does not give the protagonist the chance to counteract the power of such discourse, but privileges the governess’s perspective and, by doing so, reveals the faults of a patriarchal order perpetuated by (among other institutions) the fairy tale she seeks to parody. Whereas postmodern rewritings of fairy tales – what Jack Zipes calls ‘liberating fairy tales’ – normally seek the systematic destruction of the

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Katherine Mansfield Studies source text by openly parodying it, Mansfield’s inscription of fairytale references is subtle, but also shows an awareness of the social values instilled within the tales and attempts to undermine them tangentially.19 Apart from the parallel development of the plot, Mansfield seems to hint at the classic fairy tale through other elements of her story. The concomitances begin with the title, which, like the fairy tale, contains the adjective ‘little’, a relevant feature in the portrayal of both anonymous protagonists. The unnamed protagonist in Mansfield’s story recalls the unidentified characters typical of tales and fables, but it also underlines the social perception of governesses as ‘nameless souls’, occupying a disregarded position in society as unmarried women forced to earn their living through work.20 Mansfield’s parody of a fairy-tale-like title could be understood as a critique addressing this anonymous condition of the working woman. The diminishing adjective of the title underlines the governess’s helplessness and serves to infantilise a character who is not a little girl as in the fairy tale, but a woman whose job should be, paradoxically, taking care of children. This particular way of portraying female characters as children recurs in Mansfield’s narratives, and often these women’s naiveté and lack of experience entails a criticism of the ways women are raised and educated. At a time when romantic images of childhood are being celebrated to counteract the utilitarian and unimaginative development of modern society, Mansfield condemns such idealism by highlighting the powerlessness and invisibility of these women when they are, in virtue of their alleged innocence, equated to children. The status of Mansfield’s governess lies between childhood and womanhood, but her tendency to perceive herself as a child prevents her from understanding that men could look at her otherwise. This troubled condition is also shared by Little Red Riding Hood, emphasised by the red colour of the girl’s cloak which has often been interpreted as a symbol of her sexual maturation.21 Most psychoanalytic interpretations of this fairy tale signal Little Red Riding Hood’s process of coming to terms with her own sexuality. As Bettelheim explains: ‘Little Red Cap is very much a child already struggling with pubertal problems for which she is not ready emotionally because she has not mastered her oedipal conflicts [. . . ] Little Red Cap wishes to find out things, as her mother’s cautioning her not to peek indicates.’22 For Zipes, however, the use of the red chaperon departs from such connotations since that piece of clothing used to be characteristic of middle-class women, red being one of the preferred

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The Little Red Governess colours. He argues that the fact that a village girl would wear it could emphasise her individuality and non-conformism.23 Unlike Little Red Riding Hood, however, the impersonality of Mansfield’s character extends to her dull clothes, which lack any sign of distinctiveness. Nonetheless, the red colour remains recurrent in the story. While the governess waits at the train station, her glance focuses on ‘a little boy in red’ (141), which in the context of the story could be read as a further reference to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Furthermore, the scene seems to reflect a memory of one of Mansfield’s trips through England, as described to Garnet Trowell in 1909: ‘In the train to Harwich. [. . . ] I loathe England – it is a dark night full of rain. There is a little child opposite me in a red cloak sleeping.’24 This colour reappears in the basket of strawberries which the old man buys for the governess. The basket fosters the governess’s sympathy towards him in a metafictional scene which recalls Snow White’s evil stepmother tempting the girl with the poisoned red apple: “‘Eat them and see’’ said the old man, looking pleased and friendly’ (146). The strawberry is a recurrent symbol with contradictory meanings, ‘culturally coded as both innocent and sexual’.25 In the face of the obvious sinful connotations of the apple, the strawberry (first fruit of the year) tends to be considered a more humble and innocent fruit, but its juiciness and freshness has also a voluptuous element. Mansfield renders both these aspects in the scene where the governess is eating the berries: ‘Timidly and charmingly her hand hovered. They were so big and juicy she had to take two bites to them – the juice ran all down her fingers – and it was while she munched at the berries that she first thought of the old man as a grandfather’ (146). The governess unintentionally displays sensual behaviour, and her own timidity ironically enhances the voluptuousness of the scene. However, she perceives the old man’s kindness as devoid of any sexual connotation; he appears to her to be a grandfatherly and protective figure. The strawberries, like the red chaperon in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, evoke the condition of this child-woman, unconsciously alluring, unaware of the attraction she might exert over the other sex. The strawberry scene illustrates a lack of correspondence between the governess’s point of view, clouded by her inexperience, and the harshness of the real world. This disjunction between reality and the perception of reality is a determining aspect of the story (as well as a characteristically modernist concern), explored through the use of free indirect discourse, which allows the reader access to the character’s state of mind. Thus, narrative technique becomes the way of formally rendering the contrast, which this story puts forward, between the

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Katherine Mansfield Studies way the governess sees things and the way things really are. The abrupt beginning of ‘The Little Governess’ introduces the reader into the story through the governess’s perspective: ‘Oh, dear, how she wished that it wasn’t night-time. She’d have much rather travelled by day, much much rather’ (139). The dangerous forest that Little Red Riding Hood has to cross to reach her granny’s hut is substituted in Mansfield story by a no-less-perilous train station where everything is a potential threat, and this setting is coloured by the governess’s fears. The deployment of free indirect discourse allows the presentation of the governess’s particular idiolect, which foregrounds her limitations and naïveté. Mansfield portrayal of the governess, waiting on the deck, holding her basket (an object which also serves to identify Little Red Riding Hood) and lost between tides of travellers, further emphasises her helplessness: But when the boat stopped and she went up on deck, her dress-basket in one hand, her rug and umbrella in the other, a cold, strange wind flew under her hat. She looked up at the masts and spars of the ship, black against a green glittering sky, and down to the dark landing-stage where strange muffled figures lounged, waiting; she moved forward with the sleepy flock, all knowing where to go to and what to do except her, and she felt afraid. Just a little – just enough to wish – oh, to wish that it was daytime and that one of those women who had smiled at her in the glass, when they both did their hair in the Ladies’ Cabin, was somewhere near now. (139–40)

The little governess’s lack of experience leads her to misinterpret all signs around her: at the train station she is certain that the porter tries to steal her luggage, and her refusal to pay him for a service she did not demand eventually turns against her when he takes revenge by removing the sign ‘Ladies Only’ from her compartment. The narrator’s voice continuously alternates with the governess’s thoughts shifting between direct and free indirect discourse and always privileging the character’s perception: ‘But I don’t want a porter’. What a horrible man! ‘I don’t want a porter. I want to carry it myself.’ She had to run to keep up with him, and her anger, far stronger than she, ran before her and snatched the bag out of the wretch’s hand. He paid no attention at all, but swung on down the long dark platform [. . . ] ‘He is a robber’. She was sure he was a robber as she stepped between the silvery rails [. . . ]. (140)

The governess’s point of view reveals the hostility of the surrounding world and emphasises the anguished condition of the lone woman. The shifting perspectives seem to accompany the accelerated and

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The Little Red Governess uneven pace of the character while she rushes behind the porter, and thus foreground her anxiety. Moreover, the governess’s selfreassuring discourse is systematically contradicted by the reality of her vulnerability, just as her reflected image gainsays her perceptions when she looks at herself once she is safely on the train: “‘But it’s all over now’’, she said to the mirror face, feeling in some way that it was more frightened than she’ (141). On the one hand, the voice of the narrator verbalises the intimate thoughts of the governess; on the other, the underlying narrative of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ orientates the reader’s expectations and reveals the inconsistencies of the governess’s perspective. The lady responsible for the governesses’ bureau materialises, through her warning, the essence of the fairy tale’s message, and her words put the reader on guard, helping to anticipate what is to come and allowing him/her to detect the ironies in the story. This happens, for instance, when the words of the narrator verbalise the governess’s thoughts regarding her travelling companion, observing ‘How kindly the old man in the corner watched her bare little hand turning over the big white pages’ (143). Those readers able to recognise the hypotext of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in the story would probably discover fewer kind intentions in the old man’s glance and his voyeuristic enjoyment of the exposed flesh of the governess’s ungloved hand. A naïve reader, however, like the governess herself, would fail to read in the old man’s attitude a clue of his sexual interest in the young girl. Significantly, the governess identifies the man with a grandfather from ‘out of a book’ (146). Her reflections are, in view of the following events, instances of dramatic irony, for she, like the girl in the fairy tale, also takes a wolf for a grandparent. The governess’s mistake is indicative of her desperate need for protection, a need fostered by a social order which denies her any possibility of independence. Throughout her trip, she must remain at the mercy of the male characters she encounters: first the porter, then the old man, and finally the hotel waiter who, like the former, takes revenge on the governess for denying him a tip and betrays her to the family she should work for. The governess’s attempts to protect herself against possible deceits turn against her, a victim of men’s lust and revengeful plots. In an ironic way, the governess’s mishaps, like Little Red Riding Hood’s, are ultimately her own fault, since she angered both the porter and the waiter and showed too much sympathy towards the old man. W. H. New interprets the linguistic barrier which prevents a fluent communication between the man and the governess as a metaphor of the inability of society to provide women with valuable tools to develop

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Katherine Mansfield Studies themselves in the social world: [Mansfield’s story] explores the limits of fluency [. . . ] implicitly criticising the system of education that deprives people of (verbal, hence social) fluency [. . . ]. Young women are the chief victims in their regard, protected from the very dimensions of Language that would best serve their interests.26

Significantly, New adds, the governess ‘has been trained to interpret life according to story-book paradigms but in practice they do not prove as absolute/ perfect as convention declares them to be’.27 The ineffectiveness of those ‘story-book [or fairy-tale] paradigms’ is brought to the fore through the motif of the broken spell, deployed to further articulate the contrast between reality and the governess’s world of preconceptions instilled by a faulty education. The role of fantasy, in this story, is that of a ‘deceiving friend’. Pamela Dunbar has aptly remarked how ‘the Little Governess’s fantasies are structured according to the motifs of fairy tale, subverted in order to expose the gap between fantasy and reality’.28 In the descriptions of the governess’s tour around Munich, Mansfield evokes a spellbound atmosphere full of sunshine, ice-cream and nice walks: ‘The chocolate ice-cream melted – melted in little sips a long way down. The shadows of the trees danced on the tablecloths, and she sat with her back safely turned to the ornamental clock that pointed to twenty-five minutes to seven’ (148). The governess is unaware of the time (she has forgotten to wind her watch) and, like Cinderella, is shocked when the spell comes to a sudden end, and when the figure of the ‘fairy godfather’ transforms itself at the ‘critical hour’.29 Her obliviousness of time and her romantic view of the world around her are revealing of a sentimental personality which is characteristic of other female characters in Mansfield’s stories, whose idealising imaginations lead them to misinterpret reality. The story of the governess, however, represents possibly the most brutal awakening to reality. Mansfield’s deconstructive task consists of making explicit the terms that Perrault inscribes in his apparently harmless story by disclosing the cultural association of sexuality and violence, as shown in the episode of assault by the old man. The porter and the waiter also attempt to take advantage of the governess in economic terms. In this story, as in the tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, sexual intercourse is demonised, and sexuality becomes part of a system of exploitation, which is both physical and economic.30 The traumatic scene of the kiss, equated to the devouring scene in the fairy tale, destroys the

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The Little Red Governess governess’s preconceived ideas of how the world should work. As Dunbar explains, ‘the kiss of the story is not the transforming romantic gesture of the redeemer-lover of fairytale but a lewd sexual overture’.31 The governess reacts to the old man’s lechery by refusing to believe the actuality of what is happening: ‘It was a dream! It wasn’t true! It wasn’t the same old man at all. Ah, how horrible! The little governess stared at him in terror. “No, no, no!’’ she stammered, struggling out of his hands’ (149). Not until later will she understand that the idea of the perfect day was the dream, and that, like an evil witch, the man had been feeding her with the intention of making of her his prey afterwards. Mansfield’s particular version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, therefore, subverts the meaning of the original tale by turning it from a warning into a criticism of the conditions which make such warning necessary. Behind the satirisation of its naïve protagonist, the story questions a social model unwilling to provide women with the means to survive alone. The exaggerated mistrust of the lady at the bureau shows how hard the conditions are for ‘ladies alone’. She tells the young governess: “‘Well, I always tell my girls that it’s better to mistrust people at first rather than trust them, and it’s safer to suspect people of evil intentions rather than good ones. . . . It sounds rather hard but we’ve got to be women of the world, haven’t we?’’’ (139). In particular, through these warning words, Mansfield mocks the cultural discourse of ‘endangered virtue’ which Perrault and the Grimms inscribed in their versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. This warning is the verbalisation of a social mechanism which defines the way women see themselves and are seen by others. As Ann Martin aptly observes, ‘if there is irony in Mansfield’s story, it arises from the recognition that the Grimms’ patronizing moral still applies: girls who stray from the path of acceptable behaviour will not survive’.32 Mansfield’s story, like Perrault’s version of the tale, does not have a happy ending which suggests that alternatives to that path are far from being available. Furthermore, society seems to take for granted and perpetuate the helpless situation of women by providing places secluded from the harshness of male attacks, such as the Ladies’ Cabin on the ship, or the ‘Femmes Seules’ train compartment, which are both expressions of the compartmentalised gendered spaces of the modern world. ‘The Little Governess’ illustrates a modernist use of intertextuality at the service of deconstruction. It is a technically innovative story which can be read on its own, but whose meanings might also be enriched by drawing on a subliminal fairy tale plot which brings to light a critical

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Katherine Mansfield Studies account of social dysfunction. Mansfield’s story, unlike later radical rewritings of the tale, does not draw on elements of the oral versions in order to subversively restore the power of which the female protagonist was deprived when the tale was recorded in writing. Nevertheless, the author shows an acute awareness of the social codes inherent in the better-known versions of the tale, and more specifically of the gender ideology which serves a particular model of society in which women are educated to believe in romance and simultaneously punished for doing so, notions which the socio-historical approaches to the fairy tale have only in recent decades brought to the fore. Notes 1. Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 62. 2. Patricia Dunker, ‘Re-Imagining the Fairy Tale: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History, Vol. 10 (April 1984), pp. 3–12. 3. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana, IL,: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 4. Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 51–2. 5. Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Katherine Mansfield. El Postmodernismo Incipiente de una Modernista Renegada (Madrid: Verba, 2009), p. 143. 6. Christina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 50. 7. Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003);Jack David Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (London: Routledge, 1993). 8. The tale of ‘The Little Red Riding Hood’ is also evoked in a story of a similar title, ‘The Little Girl’ (1912). The protagonist, a sleepless little child lying in bed with her father, addresses him saying, ‘What a big heart you have, father dear’, recalling the litany of exclamatory sentences that Little Red Riding Hood directs to the wolf: ‘Oh grandmama, what big ears you have!’ Pamela Dunbar has aptly analysed it as an indirect way to refer to both the generosity and aggressiveness of the father. Moreover, she states that ‘the father’s effective usurpation of Grandmother’s place in bed with the girl underlines the relevance of the fairytale’ (Dunbar, p. 133). 9. Zipes, pp. 2–4. 10. Zipes, pp. 3–4. 11. Bacchilega, p. 56. 12. Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales, trans. and intro. by Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 103. 13. Alan Dundes, Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 3. 14. Zipes, p. 7. 15. Zipes, pp. 78, 31. 16. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 25–66.

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The Little Red Governess 17. Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006), p. 139. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 18. Bacchilega, pp. 50, 59. 19. Jack David Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 182. 20. Jasper Fred Kobler, Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990), p. 82. 21. Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (London: Gollancz, 1952). 22. Bruno Betteleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 171–2. 23. Zipes, p. 72. 24. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, pp. 90–1. 25. Pat Kirkhan, The Gendered Object (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 92. 26. William H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1999), p. 91. 27. New, p. 91. 28. Dunbar, pp. 62–3. 29. Dunbar, p. 63. 30. Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (Tavistock: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2004), p. 54. 31. Dunbar, p. 63. 32. Ann Martin, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 39.

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Katherine Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic Gina Wisker

Abstract Explorations of ways in which literary modernists use the Gothic only rarely consider the work of Katherine Mansfield among other women writers of the period. However, Mansfield’s stories often use defamiliarisation, a popular feature of the Gothic which moves readers through estrangement to see situations and people anew. Mansfield’s use of the Gothic can be seen to expose and explore social relationships and states of being, and do so using a rich mixture of narrative formulae and techniques, influenced by fairy tales and myth. This essay considers such techniques in a range of Mansfield’s short stories and poems, before focusing on the story ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, which builds on the traditional tale of the changeling to expose selfishness, hypocrisy, suburban complacencies, self-deception and culpable child neglect. Key words: Gothic, fairy tale, changeling, child neglect, Katherine Mansfield, ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ Katherine Mansfield is rarely thought of as a writer who uses Gothic strategies in her work, but in many ways it is the fresh, ironic scrutiny that the literary Gothic offers which so suits a colonial modernist, whose clarity of vision was sharpened by her own relatively marginalised position. Mansfield’s insight into relationships was Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 20–32 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0025 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic fuelled by the familiarity yet strangeness of perception offered by her own origins and the otherness of Europe. Her expression draws on a wealth of available literary movements, including European and international mythologies and fairy tales, together with versions of the Gothic. At the time Mansfield was writing, Europe offered a certain amount of sexual and intellectual freedom, but neither New Zealand nor Europe provided her with ontological security. Yet that very insecurity resembles that of other modernist women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Charlotte Mew and May Sarton, who aligned Gothic strategies with psychoanalytical, cultural and political engagement, in order to explore questions of identity, gender and social norms, and hierarchies of power and politics. Gothic readings of modernist women’s writing remain something of a challenge to received interpretations of their work, perhaps because of the mass-market history of Gothic novels, and critical perceptions of their ostensibly frivolous, fantastic elements. Recent re-readings of modernist writers’ use of the Gothic – such as those in volumes by Jeff Wallace and Andrew Smith; Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid; and Claire Drewery – rebuild the links between modernism and the Gothic.1 For example, Drewery’s study of Mansfield, Woolf, Sinclair and Richardson emphasises the liminal, which unites modernism with the Gothic since ‘both draw on transitions, themes, times and spaces in order to challenge such limits and powers’.2 Mansfield, who left the restrictions of New Zealand society at eighteen, subsequently discovered a way of exploring and imagining her homeland within a cosmopolitan European setting. She uses techniques of literary modernism to engage with representations of relationships and issues of women’s roles, and focuses in several of her stories on different demands and opportunities as they impact upon the lives of women, constraining and forcing them to make moral and personal choices. In so doing, she utilises the literary Gothic as well as realism, imagism, irony, and psychoanalysis to explore and critique the ways in which women, in particular, experience constraints on identity, self-image and rights. Mansfield’s use of the literary Gothic is often apparent in tales of childbirth and childrearing. These stories utilise striking images of birds and eggs – suggesting capture and incarceration, ingestion, eating, birth, flight, the domestic and the strangely Other – and they focus on contradictory impulses and developments related to children and mothering. Indeed, a socially dysfunctional, often selfpreservational lack of these maternal instincts is familiar Mansfield territory. She writes in many early stories about childbirth traumas,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies no doubt initiated by her own (at least) two lost pregnancies, and the time in the German Pension to which she escaped when her mother deposited her in a home, of sorts, for unmarried mothers. Mansfield’s rebellious individualism led her to move from the Hotel Kreuzer to the cheaper Pension Muller. However, her time there gave her a wealth of experiences to inform her writing about children, childbirth and eating habits. She is a marvellous investigator of dysfunctional relationships, exposing the stuff of horror and crime fiction beneath the semblance of normality in her short stories and in poetry. However, her work is rarely read through a popular fiction lens of crime and horror. In Mansfield’s writing, babies are often terrifying, engulfing creatures. Parasitic, they take over the mother’s body, and the actual birth causes terrible, incomprehensible pain. The horrors of marriage and weddings, childbirth, and disgust at the bodily demands which lead to and from childbirth, predominate in her first volume of published stories, In a German Pension (1911). For Sabina, the waitress listening to her manager’s wife giving birth in ‘At Lehmann’s’, babies are exhausting, channelling the mother’s life into an existence where individuality is erased in the service of the developing child. Children are equated with consumption and over-eating in ‘Germans at Meat’. In some tales dangers are produced by children or parents who project their own problems onto the Other. The murderous, childminding child in ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ is such an example of one onto whom excessive domestic responsibilities are offloaded and who turns and destroys those whose care she is charged with. In this early tale, the overworking of a young girl, whose moral and intellectual capabilities are limited, leads to infanticide. The child, standing in for the exhausted mother in a dysfunctional family, is marginalised and made to carry out hard domestic chores without any of the bonding or emotional responses that at least some mothers and wives receive in return for their labours. Overburdened with excessive domestic responsibilities, she suffers a blow upon hearing there is yet another child on the way, meaning more work for her. Her terror at the impossibility of managing so many demands drives her to smother the baby in her care, thinking ‘You’ll not cry any more, or wake up in the night.’3 In ‘Prelude’ (1917), Linda Burnell’s abject feelings towards pregnancy echo throughout the text. Here, Mansfield emphasises the ontological insecurity of self of several members of the Burnell family, but particularly the mother Linda and her sister Beryl, using Gothic strategies of dreams, animals becoming human, objects seeming

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Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic more alive than people, split selves and mirroring. Linda’s own displacement, and her fear of mothering another child, emerge in the Freudian dream of a bird-baby monster: ‘How loud the birds are,’ said Linda in her dream. She was walking with her father through a green paddock sprinkled with daisies. Suddenly he bent down and parted the grasses and showed her a tiny ball of fluff just at her feet. ‘Oh, Papa, the darling.’ She made a cup of her hands and caught the tiny bird and stroked its head with her finger. It was quite tame. But a funny thing happened. As she stroked it began to swell, it ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger and its round eyes seemed to smile knowingly at her. Now her arms were hardly wide enough to hold it and she dropped it into her apron. It had become a baby with a big naked head and a gaping bird-mouth, opening and shutting. Her father broke into a loud chattering laugh and she woke to see Burnell standing by the windows rattling the Venetian blind up to the very top. (15)

Her own sense of self and individuality are tied up with the boy, and we experience her resistance to being both engulfed and displaced by the needs of others: the precise, dominant, insensitive, childlike husband Stanley, her children, and the possible boy child. In this state, kitchen and house objects are more alive than she is: ‘Things had a habit of coming alive like that. [. . . ] How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top-hats on; and the washstand jug had a way of sitting in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest’ (17). Birds and eggs are significant images in Mansfield’s writing, where they suggest birth, engulfment, change or flight. Eggs devoured at family breakfast tables might appear domestic and ‘safe’, but remind us of human embryos. The endless demands of baby birds for their frantic parents translate into a terrifying, entrapped role for women, one that overwhelms the reluctant Linda: ‘I dreamed about birds last night,’ thought Linda. What was it? She had forgotten. But the strangest part of this coming alive of things was what they did. They listened, they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they were members of a secret society and they smiled among themselves. Sometimes, when she had fallen asleep in the daytime, she woke and could not lift a finger, could not even turn her eyes to left or right because THEY were there; [. . . ] What Linda always felt was that THEY wanted something of her, and she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would really happen. (18)

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Domestic pressures on Linda are externalised as a continually demanding ‘THEY’. Things come alive and threaten to destabilise her. She is in a liminal space, in a new house, on the brink of having another child, circumstances which recall Mansfield’s own mixed fears of unfulfilment, a sense of absence and longing, and a loss of identity in living vicariously through children. Mansfield constructs domestic Gothic horror with the nightmare of the engulfing child, but also the bullying husband, as in ‘Frau Brechenmacher attends a wedding’, and predatory potential suitor such as Harry Kember in both ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’. In ‘The Little Governess’ (1915) and ‘Her First Ball’ (1921), the Other is a predatory, self-assertive older man, representative of versions of social danger and delivering a warning about over-investment in the seemingly glorious safety of youth and beauty. Mansfield does not use the more extreme elements of the literary Gothic, such as vampires, werewolves and alien invasions, but rather invests in processes of twinning and mirroring, changelings, mer-children, and shapeshifters who metamorphose. In so doing, Mansfield’s use of the Gothic causes readers to consider identity and ontological security. She thus exposes ‘normality’ as pretence and performance by emphasising the pedestrian, the dull and the pretentious, and beneath these, the effects of silencing, marginalisation, neglect and abuse. Mansfield’s use of the literary Gothic, then, often focuses on families, women’s roles, displacement, childbirth and childrearing, and the Other. Gender-influenced constructions of the Gothic fundamentally question and undermine taken-for-granted versions of cultural, gendered and social hierarchies and versions of the normal or real, including domestic security and family identities and relationships, thus creating opportunities for alternative viewpoints and oppositional readings. Mansfield’s oscillation between journeying and the stasis of socially isolated locations, beginning with her Bavarian experience, helped her to explore further her sense of being outside everyday life, and towards seeing through the imbalances and ways in which acceptable relationships or social behaviour covered up domestic inequalities, tyrannies and neglect. Gothic images, narratives and fairy tales combined with psychology to express, expose and dramatise these disturbing revelations. Her tales are an unsettling domestic Gothic, like many traditional fairy tales that also expose, for example, the cruelty of stepmothers, the insistence on childbearing, together with clear inheritance lines and the vulnerability and the time-limited social worth of young women. However, Mansfield does not always deploy familiar fairy tale formulae in order to teach conformity.

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Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic Here, Lucie Armitt’s differentiation between the Gothic and fairy tale is helpful, in highlighting Mansfield’s deliberate challenge to the constraints of conventional relationships, families, romance, childrearing, domesticity and paternalism: Unlike traditional fairytale gothic narratives are always struggling to come to terms with a problematic paradox between licence and control that consistently undermines straightforward textual categorization. The very relationship that exists between readers of gothic texts and the texts themselves helps to unveil this playful, if problematic dialectic. The gothic deliberately reveals that which is meant to be hidden.4

Mansfield combines wide-ranging fairy tale formulae from European origins, and the ironies, paradoxes and revelations enabled by the Gothic, where final messages, if any, are unlikely to convey a moral insistence on conformist behaviour. In her poems, she explores child neglect and rejection, using figures of mer-children in ‘The Sea Child’ (1912), attempts at relationships, the embodiment of dream, loss, alienation and disillusionment in ‘The Opal Dream Cave’ (1912) and ‘Sea’ (1912), and the erotic, slightly dangerous ‘The Earth Child in the Grass’ (1912), while a more positive fairy tale sends the princesses home at the day’s end in ‘Fairy Tale’ (1919). ‘The Sea Child’ is a poem of child neglect which borders on ‘pimping’. The mer-mother sends her daughter from the sea to sell her wares in land towns, as she has herself. She is lovely, but all she has to peddle is her beauty – ‘into the world you sent her mother/Fashioned the body of coal and foam’.5 The girl resembles a debutante launched into the season, decked out, performative, ready to be bought and sold, but she ends up like the homeless, peddling her beauty, her wave in her hair like her mother’s, but merely a sea child out of her depth: ‘And under a doorway she laid her down/The little bird child in the foamfringed gown’.6 There is no family, no community to help her and hear her cry. Alone and undernourished, vulnerable, uncared for, to survive she loses all she has, selling the corals and foam. Then she is denied her return home and so is Otherised, rejected, made to feel she does not belong, is strange, even in the sea. This mother cannot sustain the child; she neglects and rejects her, sending her back to ‘the darkling land’: ‘There is nothing here but sad sea water/And a handful of sifting sand’.7 **** Mansfield’s ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ is a marvellous example of the Gothic spliced with fairy tale, bearing a cautionary tale at its heart,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies concerning the dangers and duplicities of a perfectly normal-seeming home after the devastation of World War I. This is an example of domestic Gothic in which disturbance and dis-ease exist in the midst of the everyday comforts of an ordinary house, family, and family meal. A questioning of identity, values and relationships troubles the normality and safety of the relations between the family and the child, and in so doing reveals a total neglect of the child’s quality of life, and that of others/outsiders, through a selfish focus on food and everyday mundanities. Mansfield adopts and fundamentally alters the tale of the changeling left by fairy people, in order to critique ways in which children can be marginalised, mistreated, or ignored if they cannot be made ornamental to the lives of their parents. D. L. Ashliman, an expert on changelings in folktale, legend and fairy tale indicates that in such tales they are recognisable by certain characteristics.8 For example, they tend to have ravenous appetites and large heads. They don’t fit in, they are silent or cry a great deal, and they can be rejected by stewing beer in eggshells. All of this is used as evidence that a changeling child has been switched at birth. Ashliman explores a number of changeling tales from a variety of different locations in Europe and makes links between the fairy nature of the tale and the ways in which it is used to explain child neglect in families whose offspring are affected by physical or mental handicap. Otherising and rejecting such a handicapped child can then be explained away as a natural response to recognising the child is not your own offspring but a changeling deposited on you by evil fairy folk, who stole your real child away from you. The standard changeling tale suggests that fairy people – or sometimes earth people – switch human children for their own, the ‘Other’, so the cuckoo-like creature is nurtured by the human family. By rejecting the changeling, the argument goes, the human parents prompt the fairy/elf parents to take it back and, hopefully, to return their own child. This fairy tale is an explanation of ways in which families deal with a handicap or disability in a child who represents a disappointment to its parents. The misfit can be understood as a fairy or changeling child, who is not your responsibility, not your problem. This also provides an explanation or excuse for child neglect, rejection, and infanticide. The narrative underpinning a changeling tale is that the healthy, normal, human child has been stolen away from the parents by earth people, the devil or fairies, who have substituted for it their own misfit offspring, an ill-fitting, monstrous Other. Changelings tend not to be children but older, unpleasant fairies in disguise, one of their chief qualities being a huge appetite for food. Ashliman notes that autistic or handicapped children were

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Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic often labelled as changelings in European societies, as their parents sought social approval before ejecting them. He says that Luther believed they were Satan’s children and traces a range of changeling tales: The parents of seriously handicapped children obviously wanted others to share the moral responsibility for whatever decisions were reached. [. . . ] Folklore suggests that parents sought and received advice and approval from all segments of society before taking any drastic measures with their suspected changelings. The Grimms’ accounts offer excellent examples of this broadly based community support. In three of their tales, the advice comes from ordinary people: a neighbour, a stranger on the street, and an unidentified person. In two other instances, the mothers – peasant women – are advised by their feudal landlords, and in one tale, ‘The Changeling in the Thuringian Forest’, the mother receives information from her pastor that enables her to discover her changeling’s true identity and to drive him away.9

Mansfield is not the only writer to engage with this fairy tale representation of ways in which society and family units eject those who do not fit into their particular behaviours, values, or looks. Fellow modernists, Charlotte Mew and W. B. Yeats, also wrote changeling poems. Mew writes from the point of view of the changeling, and, as in Mansfield’s tale, birds call the child back to the wild wet wood. In his changeling poem, Yeats uses elements of the Gothic which resemble those used by both Mew and Mansfield. The changeling knows s/he cannot fit in. The characteristics in Yeats’s poem of being an outcast, playing in the garden, wildness and the call of the birds all reappear in Mansfield’s ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’: But I, so wild, Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never, Never, I know, but half your child! In the garden at play, all day, last summer, Far and away I heard The sweet ‘tweet-tweet’ of a strange new-comer, The dearest, clearest call of a bird.10

Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), and Fairy Folk Tales of Ireland (1892), reveal evidence of his interest in pagan tales and mythology.11 ‘The Stolen Child’ (1889) is based on Irish legend and concerns fairies persuading and beguiling a child to come away with them:

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Away with us he’s going, The solemn-eyed – ...... For he comes the human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy, hand in hand For this world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.12

In Yeats’s tale the stolen human child is the focus, though the escape to fairy life is more than a romantic escape: it removes the child from human suffering. Mew’s poem ‘The Changeling’ (1916) is an explanation of how the strange one feels when they realise they do not fit in. In Mansfield’s story the changeling is the victim of selfish behaviour and child neglect. **** Mansfield makes use of the fairy tale trope of the changeling as one which offers an excuse to ignore then eject from society those who do not fit in. Instead of siding with the dismayed family, she portrays family members as complacent, selfish, lacking in values other than the middle class, suburban, consumerist prizing comfort, good food and dull conversation. The changeling child in ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ is the silenced, marginalised Other who manages to recognise his bird brothers and escape to another existence where, one hopes, he will fit in better. According to Ashliman, an underlying belief in folklore is that the mistreatment of changelings leads to a happy outcome for the human parents and their own child.13 The otherworldly parents rescue the changeling and return the stolen mortal child in order to stop the abuse. In an era plagued with birth defects and debilitating, deadly infant diseases, these tales offered some hope of a way out of the stigma and problems of children with mental or physical disabilities, since the abuse and rejection of the changeling was defined as only a logical reaction, aimed at restoring order and reclaiming the true offspring. However, not surprisingly, many recorded changeling tales are less positive. Although children thought to be changelings are driven away or even killed, there is little indication in either folklore or historical accounts that healthy children are returned. Mansfield’s ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ is a changeling tale where the child, Little B., recognises and sympathises with his bird brothers,

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Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic outside the home, on the lawn; this marks him out as more sensitive and sympathetic than his complacent, food-oriented, small-minded suburban parents. The tale critiques blinkered, selfish complacency, and an incapacity to care or empathise with others. Mr. and Mrs. B. form a dysfunctional couple, unable to confront their own shortcomings. Their child is not a miniature version of themselves and they find this disappointing, reacting by undermining his existence and not responding to his needs. Mansfield cuts into social and family pretences and cruelties, but she also celebrates the boy’s agency and escape. The family breakfasts on eggs while the birds are outside in the cold, on the lawn, their needs ignored by the self-absorbed Mrs. and Mr. B. who also ignore their own child. Eggs and birds are versions of traditional elements of the changeling tale, of eggs cooked in beer, cuckoos and flight. The story starts with a stereotypical suburban couple at breakfast. All is comfortable and the tone describing their breakfasting emphasises their bourgeois self-satisfaction: ‘Mr. and Mrs. B. sat at breakfast in the cosy red dining room of their “snug little crib just under half an hour’s run from the city’’ ’ (548). ‘Crib’ would suggest the nurturing of a baby, but their child lacks such care and attention, and the language indicates the kind of artifice and pretence to which the parents have thoroughly subscribed. The good food they eat emphasises their wellto-do self-satisfaction, as does the rest of the brief description. Smells of eggs, toast and coffee fill the air and Mr. B. then takes over the tone of the narrative, as we slip into his self-centred worldview. His is a small world, circumvented and self-congratulatory, a long way from the war, which he has managed to avoid, he claims, because of office work. While Mr. B. has a ‘thoroughly good tuck in’ before he faces what is ironically described as the ‘very real evils of the day’ (548), others, represented by the bird-boys on the lawn, are starving. Selfishness enabled him to escape enlistment, although he pretends to be sorry to have been retained by his mundane job, arguing that he ‘hadn’t been able – worse luck – to chuck his job and join the Army; he’d tried for four years to get another chap to take his place, but it was no go’ (548). Mr. B. has evaded action, and his platitudinous public-schoolboy language betrays his double standards in his successful attempt to achieve security and safety. Like his wife, he revels in their little piece of marketing heaven in the suburbs. The victim, the marginalised and neglected one in all this, is Little B., their son. Little B. is ignored at the breakfast table, due to the sense of error, injustice, and irrational despair his parents feel because he is not what they wanted or feel that they deserved. In Mr. B’s view: ‘Alas! Little B.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies was not at all the child that such parents had every right to expect’ (549). Little B. is no fledgling to emerge from a homely breakfast egg, instead he is seen as inappropriate, like distasteful news, a displaced hatchling. While Mrs. B. is imaged as a fat preening pigeon, Little B. perches uncomfortably on a high stool, unable to eat a huge egg, hoping that small eggs might be produced for smaller people. Though he is named after his parents, he has no real place at the table, and his parents ignore his comment about the hunger, poverty and discomfort of the birds on the lawn. Little B., then, is more morally and socially aware than his parents, and so wins the support of the reader, who cannot side with their wilful neglect which ignores both the famine on their doorsteps as well as their only child, because he does not quite fit in. Little B. is a rejected child, but not a child of the devil or the fairies; rather, ironically, his parents are seen as social misfits in their complacency and lack of any sense of moral responsibility. Little B. is undersized, unlike other changelings, who might eat their adoptive parents out of house and home, and then find themselves forced to eat an egg cooked in beer.14 Little B. has to eat a breakfast egg too big for him, his attempts at conversation are ignored, and he has none of the excessive characteristics of the traditional changeling. Rather, these extreme traits of devouring and thoughtlessness are instead exhibited by the parents. To them he is a misfit, ‘no fat little trot; no dumpling’, ‘no firm little pudding’ (549). He is described as a consumable, misplaced in their commodified existence. The parents barely see the child, instead imagining, the perfect meal poised and hovering before them. They see a jugged hare, maybe a sirloin, and then a pudding: ‘there floated between them a dark round pudding covered with creamy sauce’ (550). This pudding hovers between them in their imaginations, and neither their child nor the issues of the day engage them in quite the same way. Meanwhile, Little B. is watching the birds which have landed in the garden. He is described like food (legs like macaroni), or a small creature (hair like a mouse), and he resembles the little hungry sparrows on the lawn, frozen, cheeping and ignored. Unlike his parents, Little B. has sympathy for the starving birds, who “‘don’t keep still not for a minute. Do you think they’re hungry, father?’’’ (550). Little B., marginalised and furry like the hare in the soup of which his parents dream, also resembles the sparrows, who, like him, can’t keep still. Outside, the sparrows are on ‘the grey frozen grass’ chirping and flapping their ‘ungainly wings’. He wants to offer them crumbs

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Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic but his parents refuse. Culpable in their blindness, they ignore want, both international and local. Mr. B. insists that “‘All this talk about famine [is] all a Fake, all a Blind’’’ (551). They can appreciate neither the physical hunger of their child and the sparrows, nor their child’s emotional hunger. Instead they see a huge cheese floating in front of them. But at this point, Little B. witnesses the sparrows shape-shifting into bird-boys, calling: “‘Want something to eat, want something to eat’’’ (551). Suddenly he is gone; not hiding, but gone with the sparrows, the boys on the lawn: ‘There on the grey frozen grass, with a white, white face, the little boy’s thin arms flapping like wings, in front of them all, the smallest, tiniest was Little B.’ (551). He accepts his bird-brothers’ invitation and flies off. The last line, ‘away they flew – out of sight – out of call’ (552), reminds us that the needs of their child and the needs of the sick and those suffering famine in Europe have been put ‘out of sight, out of mind’. In response, this changeling, Little B., their son, has found a community that he can identify with. Mansfield takes the perspective of the changeling child. Although the parents believe they love him – expressed in the comment that his mother kept ‘an eye of warning love on little B.’ – they did not know how to value him, and ignored him as being different from them, with his alien needs. Little B., however, escapes marginalisation by joining his fairy bird family. ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ is thus a Gothic-influenced, reversed changeling tale that questions adult justifications for ignoring the child, rather than a traditional tale of infanticide. **** Mansfield uses the literary Gothic strategies of dreams, dehumanisation, defamiliarisation, as well as fairy tales and folktales, to expose domestic tensions, contradictions and the dangers of family relationships. Her stories depict childbirth as terrifying and dangerous, young women as caught in or between destructive roles, and children ignored, neglected and better off in the non-human world. The tales of child neglect and shapeshifting, of changelings and mer-children, are particularly poignant, since here the Gothic and fairy tale combine. Mansfield’s use of the literary Gothic exposes the manipulations, performances and meannesses of the family as a microcosm of a world which rejects and ignores those who question it or are unsure of how they might fit in.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Notes 1. Jeff Wallace and Andrew Smith, eds, Gothic Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011); and Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011). 2. Drewery, p. 68. 3. Angela Smith, ed., Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford world’s Classic series, 2006), p. 664. All further references to Mansfield’s stories are to this edition, with page numbers cited in the text directly after the quotation. 4. Lucie Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (London: Hodder Arnold, 1996), p. 58. 5. Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., Poems of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 32. Hereafter referred to as Poems. 6. Poems, p. 32. 7. Poems, p. 32. 8. D. L. Ashliman, 1997, accessed on 20 December 2011 at: http://www.pitt.edu/ ∼dash/changeling.html#infanticide 9. Ashliman (online). 10. Charlotte Mew, ‘The Changeling’, in The Englishwoman, 17 February 1913, pp. 134–6. 11. W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London: Walter Scott, 1888); Fairy Folk Tales of Ireland (London: Simon and Shuster, 1892). 12. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Stolen Child’, in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1889), p. 36. 13. Ashliman (online). 14. Ashliman (online).

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Mansfield’s Charm: The Enchantment of Domestic ‘Bliss’ Rishona Zimring

Abstract Mansfield’s fiction both illustrates and fulfills the modern longing for enchantment, and it acquires fantastic qualities in its insistence upon what Janet Lyon calls ‘creative practices of re-enchantment’. Mansfield’s charm comes into sharp focus in two stories about the domestic interior’s potential for strangeness and transformation: ‘Feuille d’Album’ and ‘Bliss’. These stories encourage newfound appreciation for the talismanic power of ordinary objects and the enchantment harbored in arrangements of domestic space. In these explorations of charmingly uncanny interiors, Mansfield’s fiction guides readers to accept that what Max Weber called the ‘great art’ of modernity can be found in creative practices of everyday life. In writing the domestic art of the pianissimo, Mansfield fosters a sense of art and fantasy not as escapes from reality, but as transformations of it in flickers and glowing embers. Mansfield is therefore a modernist celebrant of the possibilities of domesticity, the transformative creativity of the small, intimate, and unassuming. To label her work ‘charming’ is not to diminish its stature, but to acknowledge the presence of the fantastic—the magical, the marvelous, the metamorphic, the uncanny, the ghostly—in the shimmering surfaces and forms of the mundane.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 33–50 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0026 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Key words: Mansfield, enchantment, charm, uncanny, domestic space, objects

I musn’t forget to mention the carpet with a design of small beetles which covers the whole floor. The dining room is equally charming in its way [. . . ]. The kitchen gleams with copper. Its a charming room [. . . ] Katherine Mansfield, letter to John Middleton Murry, 14 September 19201

Enchantment Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ epitomises the metamorphic, marvellous potential of domestic settings. The feverish suspense conveyed by the proliferation of dashes, ellipses, and exclamation points in its opening paragraphs only begins to suggest its power to flirt with its readers by inviting them to join its protagonist’s breathless anticipation that something ‘divine’ is about to ‘happen’.2 Perhaps no story in Mansfield’s oeuvre is more saturated with the sense of the domestic sphere’s uncanny power. Thus it resonates with and indeed amplifies a fantastic strain in Mansfield’s writing, the tendency to revel in the enchantment (often disconcerting) of domestic settings and things, from the talking cat, bush, and birds of ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’, to Laura’s exclamation, at the end of ‘The Garden Party’: “‘It was simply marvellous’’’.3 When a pot improbably does not break when it falls at the end of ‘Prelude’, we are in the orbit of something Mansfield wrote about with untiring devotion in her many letters from Italy and France to Murry: the ‘ravishing’ delight of household ‘treasures’, from furniture to trays. Mansfield was captivated by the enchanting qualities of ordinary objects with dual capacities of utility and ornamentation; she wrote to Murry ardently about teacups, vases, pots, bowls, and even saucepans, often transforming them in the very act of the epistolary description. Hence in response to Murry sending her a drawing of a jug he has acquired for them: ‘The cream jug is a pearl’,4 or, writing from Menton in the letter cited in my epigraph, ‘two very handsome crimson vases [. . . ] remind me of fountains filled with blood’. Echoing Mansfield herself when she wanted to convey the ‘bliss’ she felt being reminded of ‘home’ at Menton, one might say that Mansfield’s domesticity, in life and art, was both fantastical and ‘charming’.

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Mansfield’s Charm To refer to ‘charm’ is to underscore the fantastic in Mansfield, and to domesticate, without taming it. Charm strikes me as a particularly capacious term, pointing at one extreme to the supernatural, and at the other, to the utterly ordinary. The original meaning of ‘charm’ is ‘the chanting or recitation of a verse supposed to possess magic power or occult influence; incantation, enchantment; hence, any action, process, verse, sentence, word, or material thing, credited with such properties; a magic spell; a talisman, etc’, but charm also denotes a mere trinket, while ‘charming’ connotes a milder effect than enchantment.5 In claiming that Mansfield’s fiction possesses charm, I mean to redeem a debased term in Kantian aesthetics from its association in the Critique of Judgement with mere ornamentation, emotion, impurity, and even barbarism. Rather, I link it positively to both the genre of the fantastic and to the aestheticism of Mansfield’s work and her intellectual and artistic context, to what Sydney Janet Kaplan, tracing affinities with Wilde and Pater, calls Mansfield’s ‘longing for artificiality’.6 Mansfield’s charm is inseparable from the aestheticism which determines, in turn, the modernism of her fiction’s stylistic originality, impressionism, parodic quality, defamiliarising strategies, and its attention to the enchanting capacities of the mundane. To call these characteristics of her fiction charming is to situate them as symptoms of modernity and to evoke charm’s meaning as magical power, underscoring charm’s affinities with those qualities we associate with the fantastic, such as the marvellous, the supernatural, and the metamorphic.7 Marina Warner locates the origins of the fantastic in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as in the fairy tales and myths in which metamorphoses occur with irrepressible frequency and the irruption of the marvellous is expected. Far from repressing metamorphic writing, modernity involves the proliferation of uncanny fictions, with Gothic effects and haunting doppelgangers, alongside the Enlightenment.8 Fantastic elements in the literature of modernity persist in the twentieth century; for example, twentieth-century women’s writing, in its recurrent aesthetic and political interrogation of domesticity, evinces a Gothic preoccupation with houses and hauntings as well as boundaries, borders, and thresholds.9 From the talking animals of ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’ to the withered, cackling, ominous creatures of ‘The Young Girl’ and ‘Je ne parle pas français’, marvellous figures are abundant in Mansfield’s fiction. They suggest, among other things, that her work can be understood both as innovative (as a modernist break with the realist conventions of much nineteenthcentury fiction), and as continuous with a tradition of Gothic effects

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Katherine Mansfield Studies symptomatic of and in reaction against an Enlightenment insistence on reason and progress. The powerful charm of Mansfield’s work allies it with the fantastic as defined by Rosemary Jackson: a literature of estrangement that resists closure and works to dismantle the real.10 The language of charm emphasises affinities with the fantastic, and also situates Mansfield’s aesthetics within a growing body of scholarship on the enchanting qualities of modernist art and literature.11 Recent articulations of modern aesthetic categories have employed a lexicon of glamour, sophistication, performance, fascination, celebrity, and what Joseph Roach has called the ‘It-Effect’, deriving his terminology from British expatriate and Hollywood tastemaker Elinor Glyn’s 1927 description of the quality, shared by celebrities and felines, of being at once fascinating, mysterious, and unbiddable.12 When it applies to texts and artifacts of the early twentieth-century, such criticism articulates a reception of modernism that pays appreciative attention to the pleasures as well as dangers of enchantment. Take two recent examples. Glamour, writes Judith Brown, is ‘a metaphor for transformation’, as well as ‘a commodity that banked on the illusion it sold alongside its substance’.13 Modernism’s enchanting qualities are revealed in its proximity with forms of mass cultural consumption and commodification, including, of course, that most powerful medium of mass attraction and fantasy, cinema. In Anne Anlin Cheng’s analysis of the 1929 film Piccadilly, we should be fascinated and charmed by the shining costume and shimmering cinematic effects of a filmed dancer whose body is ‘clad in resistant and mobile gleam’, in order to understand both the objectification of that vulnerable body and its temporary but empowering escape from the ‘burdens of personhood’.14 In their close attention to the way texts, images, and bodies enthrall audiences, such critical interventions all aim to historicise and appreciate the power and pleasure of enchantment, a category that includes fantasy, the fantastic, and what I am calling Mansfield’s charm. Enchantment becomes an urgent matter in the twentieth century, when its fiercest critics see in mass culture the threat of crowd delusions. The redemption of low, middlebrow, popular or mass culture from the most excoriating denunciations, and the interrogation of the autonomy and oppositionality of modernism, has been an abiding critical project for some time now. New vocabularies of enchantment elaborate the ways in which both modernism and mass culture offer consolation (benevolent and malign) for the shocks and losses comprising the experience of modernity.

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Mansfield’s Charm Accounts of Western, industrialised society of the early twentieth century contain a persistent theme: the longing (sometimes dangerous) for enchantment in an age of disenchantment. T. J. Clark, for example, alludes to Weber’s ‘Science as Vocation’ to argue that: Modernity [. . . ] points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future – of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, of infinities of information. This process goes along with a great sanitising of the imagination. [. . . ] The phrase Max Weber borrowed from Schiller, ‘the disenchantment of the world,’ still seems to me to sum up this side of modernity best.15

If ‘disenchantment’ occurs along with a ‘great sanitising of the imagination’, a tremendous loss takes place even when newfound pleasures and freedoms are secured. As modern subjects, we are all in some sense modernity’s victims, robbed of meaning as well as traditions even as we are liberated from mythologies and mystifications. However, the problem of modernity is not only disenchantment, but competing forms of re-enchantment, some formidably pernicious, that emerge alongside the ‘pursuit of a projected future’. It becomes the modern subject’s task to navigate the malign and benevolent forms of re-enchantment. In a recent essay on sociability, Janet Lyon leads with Weber’s language of disenchantment in order to set the stage for an inquiry into twentieth-century practices of social gathering, such as Bohemian salons, that attempted to foster the intimacy of personal relations in which the forces banished by intellectualisation and rationalisation found refuge. Lyon characterises Weber as ‘negative and nostalgic’ in his view of sublimity’s shift from ‘the great communities’ to ‘the smallest and intimate circles’; Weber thus cannot celebrate in such circles the ‘creative practices of re-enchantment’ where ameliorative sociability thrived.16 Certainly, Weber was concerned less with ameliorative re-enchantment than with its more malign forms. ‘Science as Vocation’ reads as a warning against the most dangerous forms of anti-intellectual re-enchantment of the early twentieth century, such as the ‘crowd phenomena’ of youth cults which make ‘idols’ of personality and personal experience.17 Weber rejects re-enchantment in the form of a return to religion: Redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of living in unison with the divine. This, or something similar in meaning, is one of the fundamental watchwords one hears among German youth, whose feelings are attuned to religion

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Katherine Mansfield Studies or who crave religious experiences. They crave not only religious experience but experience itself. [. . . ] This method of emancipation from intellectualism may well bring about the very opposite of what those who take to it conceive as its goal.18

Weber emphatically argues against the seductions to which disenchanted youth are particularly vulnerable, and regrets that alongside science and rationalisation have sprung up dangerous hungers for religious experiences, indeed for experience itself. Precisely against such dangers of disenchantment and reenchantment, Weber proposes an alternative form of enchantment, one aligned with, if not loudly celebratory of, the social gatherings Lyon regards as ‘creative practices of re-enchantment’. In the most famous passage from Weber’s essay, which begins ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world’’’, Weber seems to regret that ‘the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations’. He goes on to say, however, that It is not accidental that our great art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together. If we attempt to force and to ‘invent’ a monumental style in art, such miserable monstrosities are produced as the many monuments of the last twenty years.19

Here we find a suggestive endorsement of the ‘great art’ of ‘our’ age, i.e. of modernity and especially the first decades of the twentieth century. The ‘great art’ of modernity is the art of ‘something pulsating’ in the ‘smallest and intimate circles’, the art of the ‘pianissimo’ that opposes and resists the ‘monumental’. Anti-monumental art offers the possibility of genuine and perhaps improved communities, ones that are not welded together by firebrand, but instead gently held in more delicate balance. The art of the ‘pianissimo’ finds habitation in the modernist celebration of the everyday as a realm of ‘something pulsating’: the relocation of the ‘prophetic pneuma’ to the mundane, small, and intimate, and the emergence of an art dedicated to finding the obscure to be fascinating, the overlooked or trivial, luminous, the ordinary, extraordinary. In this sense, Mansfield’s fiction both illustrates and fulfills the modern longing for enchantment, and it acquires fantastic

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Mansfield’s Charm qualities in its insistence upon what Lyon calls ‘creative practices of re-enchantment’. Mansfield’s charm comes into sharp focus in two stories about the domestic interior’s potential for strangeness and transformation: ‘Feuille d’Album’ and – especially – ‘Bliss’. These stories encourage newfound appreciation for the talismanic power of ordinary objects and the enchantment harboured in arrangements of domestic space. In these explorations of charmingly uncanny interiors, Mansfield’s fiction guides readers to accept that what Weber called the ‘great art’ of modernity can be found in creative practices of everyday life. In writing the domestic art of the pianissimo, Mansfield fosters a sense of art and fantasy not as escapes from reality, but as transformations of it in flickers and glowing embers that are indeed a modern improvement on the ‘firebrand’ that previously swept through and welded communities together. Mansfield is therefore a modernist celebrant of the possibilities of domesticity, the transformative creativity of the small, intimate, and unassuming. To label her work ‘charming’ is not to diminish its stature, but to acknowledge the presence of the fantastic – the magical, the marvellous, the metamorphic, the uncanny, the ghostly – in the shimmering surfaces and forms of the mundane.

Domestic Interiors Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ was first published in 1919, the same year as the original publication of ‘Science as Vocation’. ‘The Uncanny’ locates itself in a haunting postwar world in which ‘placards in our big cities advertise lectures that are meant to instruct us in how to make contact with the souls of the departed’,20 a society primed for enchantment. The essay’s enduring legacy is its insistence on the merging of the ‘heimlich’ with the ‘unheimlich’: that haunting by ghosts, secrecy, intellectual uncertainty, and the blurring of the boundary between fantasy and reality, all begin at home. Domestic space is a source of anxiety (at the very least), not reassurance. The central literary location for Freud’s exploration of uncanny domestic space is of course the childhood home of Nathanael, the protagonist of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’.21 Presided over by mother and nursemaid, invaded by a stranger, then by the ‘mysterious and terrifying death’ of the father,22 the childhood home is enigmatic and dangerous; it harbours the violent fantasies of Freud’s theories of childhood sexuality, above all the Oedipus complex and the threat of castration. This territory is certainly present in Mansfield’s fiction: the decapitation that takes place at the new domicile in ‘Prelude’ and the intrusion of untimely,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies violent death into the festive domestic space of ‘The Garden Party’ are only two obvious examples. But contrasting this tendency towards a violent, Gothic uncanniness in Mansfield’s depiction of domestic space is a more alluring, charming set of interiors. These modern domestic interiors retain elements of uncanniness and can also be understood as spaces of modern enchantment. The transformation of domestic space from Victorian to modern involves de-cluttering, but crucial to understanding Mansfield’s modernist interiors as spaces of modern enchantment is the intermediate stage of Edwardian decoration. We think of the paradigmatic Victorian interior as a symbol of imperial acquisitiveness, a crowded, museum-like storehouse of possessions, a sentimental collection of mementoes, and a flaunting of wealth, whether actual or aspirational. The paradigmatic modernist interior, by contrast, is streamlined and spare, embodying Le Corbusier’s dictum that the house was ‘a machine for living in’ and Adolf Loos’s pronouncement that ornament was a ‘crime’. But as historian Deborah Cohen has argued, the modernist British interior did not join the design revolution sweeping the continent. Rather, British interiors clung to the past, and remained, in Cohen’s apt description, ‘endowed with sentiment and personality’.23 The Edwardian interior, in particular, was characterised by ‘eccentricity’: home decoration became a form of individual self-expression. Decoration of the domestic interior allowed rooms to express a newly secular conception of the self which emphasised personality over character. The domestic interior became a stage for the display of a performative self, a self emerging into modernist or even postmodernist fluidity and malleability.24 The Edwardian freedom of self-expression, individuality, and eccentricity in creative practices of interior arrangement and decoration also set the stage for the emergence of the British avant-garde. In their murals, Italianate colors schemes, upholstery design, and ornamentation, Bloomsbury’s celebrated interiors both embodied and modernised the Edwardian predilection for using rooms as forms of self-expression, and thus innovated what art historian Christopher Reed has labelled Bloomsbury’s ‘domestic modernism’.25 The word ‘domestic’ connotes both intimacy and familiarity, but the domestic interior is also, of course, the Gothic source of Freud’s uncanny. Between the domestic interior’s associations with dread, on the one hand, and creative selfexpression, on the other, lies its potential to charm, enchant, and transform. Before turning to Mansfield, I want to pause briefly to consider a quintessential modernist story of the domestic interior as a space of

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Mansfield’s Charm creative self-expression: Virginia Woolf’s 1920 story ‘Solid Objects’. John decorates his mantelpiece with a lump of glass, and in doing so animates the inanimate object in the manner of a child who, in adopting a pebble from the path, promises it ‘a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers, and believing that the heart of the stone leaps with joy’.26 His domestic interior is a space of unlimited metamorphic potential. The lump of glass that served the function of a paperweight is freed from its utilitarian role to become an autonomous work of art, liberating its viewer from work into play: Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it (my italics).27

A fragment of broken china becomes otherworldly: a creature from another world – freakish and fantastic [. . . ]. It seemed to be pirouetting through space, winking light like a fitful star. The contrast between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contemplative, fascinated him, and wondering and amazed he asked himself how the two came to exist in the same world [my italics].28

John’s arrangements fascinate: that is, they have the power to charm. His home has become the modernist work of art itself: an autonomous realm of magic, metamorphosis, and enchantment. Woolf’s story offers a superb example of domestic modernism as a creative practice, pointing to both delusion and charm among its potential effects. One can regard the protagonist as either inspired or pathological in his fascinations, but the story neither demonises nor ridicules him.29 Summarising an earlier critical consensus on ‘Solid Objects’ which read it as a ‘cautionary tale about the dangers of aesthetic absorption’, Bill Brown seeks to redeem the story as a protosurrealist celebration of the ‘secret life of things’, and of ‘the fluidity of objects [. . . ] how they decompose and recompose themselves as the object of a new fascination’.30 In Brown’s account, Woolf’s story endorses John’s willingness to be fascinated by objects. The extent to which we create out of our domestic interiors a ‘display’ is not mitigated but actually enhanced by the privacy and inconspicuousness of that display: in retreating to domestic interiors where art flourishes in the act of perceiving the ordinary anew, we become, like John, the inhabitants of a space of meditative absorption that returns us to the world transformed by new knowledge and insights. In

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Katherine Mansfield Studies its powers of defamiliarisation, the ornamented domestic interior possesses redemptive charm. If ‘Solid Objects’ lays the groundwork for an interpretation of modernist domestic space as the scene of creative practices of enchantment and fascination, Mansfield’s ‘Feuille d’Album’ epitomises the transformative potential and charm of such spaces. Woolf’s story ends with a definitive separation between John’s domestic interior and the outside world: thus Brown’s affirmative reading of it as ‘intensely’ (and creatively) private against the more negative readings of John as dangerously solipsistic. ‘Feuille d’Album’ tells the story of how the aestheticised interior creates a perceptive vantage point that encourages contact, rather than prevents it. Mansfield’s Ian French is custodian of a magical realm similar to John’s in his carefully aestheticised Paris studio. ‘Everything was arranged to form a pattern, a little “still life’’ as it were – the saucepans with their lids on the wall behind the gas stove, the bowl of eggs, milk jug and teapot on the shelf, the books and the lamp with the crinkly paper shade on the table’ (174). That exquisite design endangers its artist just as John’s mantelpiece threatens to absorb him completely into an endless trance. In both cases, the domestic interior artistically arranged by a male aesthete threatens to cut him off from the outside world and from sociability entirely; the domestic interior runs the risk of becoming the solipsist’s paradise. Or so it seems to the many maternal women who find Ian French so frustrating at the beginning of the story, which begins, ‘He really was an impossible person. Too shy altogether’ (173). They are stymied in their attempts to get him to come out of his shell, and after repeated outings to clichéd, enervating spaces of leisure and consumption (‘cafes and cabarets, little dances, places where you drank something that tasted like tinned apricot’ [174]), they give up. Ian French remains in his attic studio with the great views, feeling that ‘[r]eally there was no need for him to go out. If he sat at the window until his white beard fell over the sill he still would have found something to draw’ (175). However, contra John’s solipsism, ‘Feuille d’Album’ suggests that the domestic interior, exquisitely arranged, not only fosters the individual imagination, but creates hospitable conditions for sociability. The cohabitation of fantasy and desire in Ian’s seclusion promotes interaction with the world. Ian bears a startling superficial resemblance to Nathanael of ‘The Sandman’, who, as a student, looks through a pocket spyglass into the house across the street, where ‘he catches sight of Olimpia, the professor’s beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter. He soon falls [. . . ] madly in love with her’.31

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Mansfield’s Charm ‘Feuille d’Album’ shows us Ian sitting at a window, staring at the house across the street, and spying ‘a strangely thin girl in a dark pinafore’ placing flowers on a balcony, then disappearing. Unlike Olimpia, she is neither motionless nor silent; Ian overhears her talking to herself about the flowers. In keeping with the fantastic’s fascination with thresholds and borders, interstitial spaces of window and balcony here stage marvels and metamorphoses. Mansfield’s carefully worded description of Ian’s response to seeing the girl on the balcony underscores the fantastic metamorphosis of his experience: ‘His heart fell out of the side window of his studio, and down to the balcony of the house opposite—buried itself in the pot of daffodils under the half-opened buds and spears of green’ (177). Ian and his abode are charmingly eviscerated by falling in love: Mansfield delights her reader by rendering the upheaval startlingly literal even as we understand the sentence to be playfully figurative. This begins Ian French’s metamorphosis from solitary artist to lover; he now imagines the daily life of the girl across the way, and then wonders ‘how could he get to know her?’ (178). His desire for knowledge prompts him to follow her as she shops at a draper’s, a fruit shop, and a dairy, where she purchases an egg. A symbol of transformation, the egg’s presence at the end of the story is crucial to its fantastic appeal.32 After he follows her into her stairwell and onto her landing (note, again, the liminal spaces), Ian blurts out that she has dropped something. The story’s final line is ‘And he handed her an egg’ (179), one of Mansfield’s most charming endings: it connotes transformation, newness, and the marvellous all at once. How could a dropped egg remain whole? Either it has remained magically intact (like the pot at the end of ‘Prelude’) or Ian has been carrying an egg all along – perhaps one of the eggs in a bowl that comprised part of the ‘still life’ of his exquisitely arranged studio. If so, the art of the studio – still life, windows, balconies, and stairwells – has now become part of Ian French’s art of living, an art not of solitariness, but of enchanting sociability. Both Woolf’s and Mansfield’s aestheticised domestic interiors contain small objects that fit in the palm of the hand: a lump of glass, an egg. Their diminutive size enhances their charm, for they are, in a way, trinkets; as decoration, they are charming in Kant’s sense of ‘mere’ ornamentation. They are also fantastic: they represent and catalyse metamorphoses with talismanic power, influencing John’s fascination and amazement as he becomes an artist, and the evisceration of both Ian and his studio as he changes from artist to lover. Both stories allow readers to observe voyeuristically intimate, private domestic interiors aesthetically arranged by imaginative inhabitants. Calling attention to

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Katherine Mansfield Studies the apparently inert objects within, these stories go on to animate them, catalysing their power to charm.

The Charm of ‘Bliss’ In her biography of Mansfield, Claire Tomalin emphasises the strangeness of ‘Bliss’: ‘there is something powerful at work in the harsh picture of the young heroine and her feeling for her possessions: house, garden, carefully arranged dinner, boyish husband, baby whom she fights the nurse over. The almost hallucinatory intensity of some of the passages strikes with great force, if not always pleasantly.’33 To read ‘Bliss’ as a ‘harsh’ satire categorises the story as an indictment of Bertha’s naiveté, casting it within a familiar framework of modernism as a literature of disillusionment. However, to read the domestic interior of ‘Bliss’ as charming recasts it as a tale of even greater subversive potential. The story then becomes a profoundly ironic exploration of the transformative possibilities of domestic space. Rosemary Jackson defines the fantastic as a literature of ‘desire for something excluded from the cultural order’.34 ‘Bliss’ foregrounds subversion from the start, describing Bertha’s lament at the inadequacy of language that labels her “‘drunk and disorderly’’’; she resists labels with: ‘How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to shut it up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?’ (95). Jackson is especially interested in how the fantastic dismantles a unified, coherent psychological subject, and offers instead a panoply of ‘graphic depictions of subjects in process’.35 ‘Bliss’ lends itself to Jackson’s poststructuralist celebration of the subversive functions of fantasy and desire. After all, ‘Bliss’ inspires interpretations that underscore its scepticism towards the foundations of the patriarchal cultural order: marriage and heterosexuality.36 Tomalin is right to emphasise the ‘hallucinatory intensity’ of ‘Bliss’; therein lies its charm. Like John of ‘Solid Objects’ and Ian of ‘Feuille d’Album’, Bertha Young puts enormous stake in the aesthetically pleasing arrangement of the domestic interior. Like these idiosyncratic aesthetes, Bertha derives intense pleasure from her role as expressive Edwardian decorator and modernist innovator of domestic space: the ornamentation of her home is a form of enchantment that compensates for a modernity that sanitises the imagination, and, in its small scale, resists the monumentality of the kind of art Weber finds monstrous. Like ‘Solid Objects’ and ‘Feuille d’Album’, ‘Bliss’ belongs to a category of modernist stories about the charming possibilities of interior decoration as an aesthetic practice of

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Mansfield’s Charm self-expression and sociability. It foregrounds domesticity as a creative practice by implicitly comparing the ambitions of the interior decorator with professional aspirations (Mrs. Norman Knight), with those, more creative and disorderly, of the amateur (Bertha). Mrs. Norman Knight is ‘awfully keen on interior decoration’ (98), and she enthuses about being hired to decorate a room professionally: “‘Oh, I am so tempted to do a fried-fish scheme, with the backs of chairs shaped like frying pans and lovely chip potatoes embroidered all over the curtains’’’ (107). Her garish, tawdry scheme resembles the soul-destroying ambitions of Isabel in ‘Marriage à la Mode’: both are targets for Mansfield’s aggressive satirical wit. By contrast, Mansfield treats Bertha’s decorative creativity more ambiguously. Her elaborate stagings, accompanied by feelings of feverish excitement, will suffer the blow of disillusionment. But ‘Bliss’ also endows Bertha’s aestheticism and its attendant emotions with the eerie aura of charm. The language of ‘Bliss’, which has much to do with describing Bertha’s attempts to design an enchanting domestic space for both privacy and sociability, is a language of uncanniness, fantastic metamorphoses, and magic spells. ‘Bliss’ is a story about excess and spilling-over, told in language emphasising the difficulty of containment. As a story about the strangeness of the domestic interior’s failures to contain, its narration of the simple event of a dinner party foregrounds the breakdown of private domesticity in the act of converting domestic into social space to display a ‘decorative group’ (104). In other words, ‘Bliss’ ironically foregrounds and plays with exactly that quality so conspicuous in the Edwardian idea of the home – its role as performative space for the display of personality. Bertha’s euphoria at creating a space of modern enchantment is figured as a ‘brimming cup of bliss’ (105), a metaphor that resonates with an insistent pattern of images having to do with fullness, emanation, and spillage. A swallowed sun burns in the bosom, ‘sending out a little shower of sparks [. . . ] into every finger and toe’ (95); Bertha cannot stand the tight clasp of her coat (95–6); she is inexorably drawn to the view out the window, beyond the balcony, of the garden (99–100); Pearl’s fingers are luminescent. Pearl Fulton’s name, of course, connotes both iridescence and fullness; together, Bertha and Pearl occupy an otherworldly ‘circle of light’ (106). In contrast to the sun, sparks, and overall luminosity of Bertha’s bliss, is the profound embarrassment she feels at the secrecy and withholding figured in Mrs. Norman Knight’s alienating ‘habit of tucking something down the front of her bodice – as if she kept a tiny, secret hoard of nuts there, too’ (105). ‘Bliss’ underscores the

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Katherine Mansfield Studies tension between enclosure and excess, trained and untrained energies mapped onto the channelled, professionalised interior decorating practice of Mrs. Norman Knight, on the one hand, and the ‘drunk and disorderly’, disruptive, and abundantly transformative decorating practice of Bertha, on the other. The one is normalised and safe, the other potentially dangerous in its metamorphic powers. Mansfield satirises the one, while ironically claiming fantastic possibilities for the other. The story’s fascination with untrained energies, fullness, and overflow, its multifaceted challenge to containment, is expressed not only in the images of brimming and light, but in its linguistic excess, its predilection for a kind of verbal uncanniness involving repetition, doubling, and mirroring. Thus the ‘charming’ white socks and scarf of poet and party guest Eddie Warren (102), mirror Bertha’s white dress (100), which, in combination with ‘jade beads, green shoes and stockings’ (100), coordinates not only with Eddie’s costume, but with the dinner’s colour scheme, its “‘white flesh of the lobster’’’ and the “‘green of pistachio ices’’’ (104), as well as with the pear tree’s white blossoms and green leaves. The colour coordination charmingly composes the ‘decorative group’. Other instances of repetition include the two cats that creep across the lawn, one like the other’s shadow, which are then mirrored in the final image of Pearl and Eddie, ‘like the black cat following the grey cat’ (109). The sight of the first feline pair causes Bertha to stammer (a form of verbal repetition); the second pair is accompanied by Pearl’s parodic repetition: “‘Your lovely pear tree – pear tree – pear tree!’’’(109). Such verbal repetitions appear elsewhere, in Bertha’s “‘I’m absurd. Absurd!’’’ (100) and her feeling ‘ardently! ardently!’ (108) or the movement of Bertha, following Eddie, ‘noiselessly [. . . ] noiselessly’ (109). A literal mirror appears as well, showing Bertha’s reflection (96). The story’s uncanny effects are achieved in its own exquisite patterns and doublings, not only its coordinated colour scheme and its frequent repetitions, but also its repetition of the word ‘strange’ (99, 103, 107), and its vigorous engagement with linguistic possibilities in homonyms (‘pear’/ ‘pair’), puns (‘Pearl’ has a pear and a ‘pair’ in her name), and double meanings (Mrs. Norman Knight’s joke-like name; Pearl is not only precious, but ‘full’). The force of the homonym is perhaps the story’s most aggressive charm. The pear tree serves as an ornament linking the contained exterior (the garden) with the uncontained interior (the gaze of those inside, are drawn by it, outside). Compositionally, the pear tree, viewed from inside, draws attention to threshold spaces of window and balcony

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Mansfield’s Charm (99, 106). As a ‘pair’ tree, it represents doubles: Bertha and Pearl gaze at it together (106), forming one subversive pair that challenges the authority of the married couple; that authority is again called into question by the adulterous pair of Harry and Pearl (110). The pear/pair tree remains an implacable presence, as though to insist upon the power not of any one pair, but of the enchanting charm of pairing per se: of arranging and re-arranging, of creating patterns and repetitions, of decoration and ornamentation. The pear/pair is in ‘Pear(l)’: perhaps no character in Mansfield’s fiction possesses as much charm as Pearl Fulton, who practically embodies magic power and occult influence.37 Miss Fulton is ‘all in silver’ with ‘pale blonde hair’, a ‘strange half smile’, and ‘slender fingers that were so pale a light seemed to come from them’ (103–5). As a pale figure of luminescence, Pearl represents a quasi-supernatural power, figuring at the same time the fantastic’s role of shedding light on culture’s unseen. She represents the fantasy and desire of both husband and wife: she is an unconfessable longing, both adulterous and homoerotic. She makes visible ‘female energy’ and ‘excess’, transgressive desires expressed through the fantastic.38 Pearl’s otherworldly powers of female energy and excess, her charismatic charm, are at their height in the pivotal scene in which she and Bertha gaze at the pear tree. Pearl’s hypnotic influence on Bertha is such that ‘all Bertha could do was to obey’ and then both are enveloped in an explosion of figurative language: the pear tree becomes the flame of a candle, which becomes the silver moon. Pearl’s captivating charm dissolves and disintegrates boundaries and selves, transforming humans into ‘creatures of another world’ (106). I have been arguing all along that modernism meets the fantastic in the enchanting charm of mundane objects which, when they ornament domestic space, become imaginative catalysts of otherworldly effects. John arranges a lump of glass and a piece of broken china on his mantelpiece, Ian creates a ‘still life’ out of saucepans and a bowl of eggs. The aestheticised domestic interior liberates objects (and selves) from functional into playful roles: domestic space becomes a context for fantastic metamorphoses and modernist defamiliarisation. ‘Bliss’, too, contains charming, everyday objects: two arrangements of fruit. Bertha first takes fruit on a tray and with it a glass bowl, and a blue dish, very lovely, with a strange sheen on it as though it had been dipped in milk [. . . ]. There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Then she arranges them. When she had finished with them and had made two pyramids of these bright round shapes, she stood away from the table to get the effect— and it really was most curious. For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air. (96)

Bertha’s arrangement is an artistic expression, like John’s mantelpiece and Ian’s still life. Especially significant are not only the pears included in her composition, but Mansfield’s careful attention to pairing. Bertha creates not one, but two pyramids. Given the story’s preoccupations, in this arrangement we find a metaphor for the story itself, with its pears and pairs, set up in the open container of extravagant female energies flowing through a wavering domestic space inhabited by selves in process. The bowl’s roundness contributes to a pattern of repetition; it is mirrored by the ‘circle of unearthly light’ in which Bertha and Pearl become otherworldly ‘creatures’. The enchantment of domestic space is symptomatic of modernism’s attention to the everyday as a source of inspiration. Domestic interiors and private retreats become imaginative resources of ‘pianissimo’ creative practices in resistance to modernity and modernity’s excesses (Weber’s ‘monumental’ art). Mansfield celebrates the fantastic metamorphoses lying dormant, ready to be animated, in simple bowls of eggs and fruit. The charm of such ordinary domestic still lives may cast conventional spells of romance (boy meets girl in ‘Feuille d’Album’) or more subversive ones (‘Bliss’). ‘Bliss’ links the domestic interior, artfully arranged, to magical illusions and transformative possibilities; it also foregrounds female creativity. The fantastic charm of ‘Bliss’, then, expands the thematics of domesticity elaborated in feminist readings that interpret Mansfield’s fiction as a celebration of the domestic sphere.39 Female creativity and desire in ‘Bliss’ are epitomised by the pairing of Pearl’s otherworldly gleam with the strange sheen of Bertha’s blue bowl. To read ‘Bliss’ as fantastic is to join them in their circle of polymorphous light, and to join Mansfield in her pursuit of the ‘most lovely things [. . . ] cups, saucers, trays, boxes, exquisite oddments’ she found so enchanting when she wrote to Murry of her own aspirations to create a charming domestic arrangement for artistic experimentation and the emergence of the unknown.40 Notes 1. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 4, p. 36. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number.

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Mansfield’s Charm 2. Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 96. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text. 3. Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 51. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text. 4. Letters, 3, p. 101. 5. ‘charm, n. 1’. OED Online, September 2011, Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/30762 (accessed 6 December, 2011). ‘charming, adj.’. OED Online, September 2011, Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/30776 (accessed 6 December, 2011). 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 64–7. For a discussion of charm’s relation to form in Kantian aesthetics, see Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 4. Kaplan’s discussion of aestheticism in Mansfield is invaluable. See Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 7. The literature on the fantastic is abundant, but particularly enduring and crucial to my argument is Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981). More recent and especially thought-provoking works on the fantastic include Lucie Armitt’s Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000) and Marina Warner’s Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Jackson’s work informs recent interpretations of Mansfield’s work, notably Maurizio Ascari, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul’, in Katherine Mansfield Studies, 2 (2010), pp. 39–55. 8. Warner, p. 25. 9. Armitt, p. 1. 10. Jackson, p. 175. 11. In addition to Brown, Cheng, and Preston, see, for example, Faye Hammill, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). A number of these recent studies have been influenced by Roach. 12. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 13. Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 2. 14. Anne Anlin Cheng, ‘Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern’, in PMLA, 126:4 (October 2011), pp. 1031–2. Other recent examples of interest in early twentieth-century forms of fascination and performativity include Carrie J. Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 15. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 7. 16. Janet Lyon, ‘Sociability in the Metropole: Modernism’s Bohemian Salons’, ELH, (2009): pp. 687–711, (p. 687). 17. Max Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’, in Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 129–56 (p. 137). 18. Weber, p. 143. 19. Weber, p. 155. 20. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McClintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), pp. 148–9.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 21. Freud, p. 135. 22. Freud, p. 136. 23. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 172. See also Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, ‘Designs for Living: Female Designers, the Designing Female, Modernism and the Middlebrow’, in Modernist Cultures, 6:1 (2011), pp. 155–77. 24. Cohen, p. 125. 25. Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 26. Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’. In The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (New York: Harcourt, 1989), p. 104. 27. Woolf, p. 104. 28. Woolf, p. 105. 29. Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 40. 30. Bill Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things: (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism)’, in Modernism/Modernity 6:2 (1999): pp. 1–28 (p. 2). 31. Freud, p. 137. 32. Warner’s main categories for fantastic metamorphoses include ‘hatching’, to which category the egg of ‘Feuille’ belongs. 33. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 170. 34. Jackson, p. 176. 35. Jackson, p. 178. 36. On the story’s exploration of lesbian desire, see Gillian Hanscombe, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Pear Tree’, in What Lesbians Do in Books, edited by Elaine Hobby and Chris Wite (London: Women’s Press, 1991). 37. For a discussion of the pearl’s literary connotations, especially for modernist women writers, see Kathryn Simpson, ‘Pearl-Diving: Inscriptions of Desire and Creativity in H.D. and Woolf’, in Journal of Modern Literature 27:4 (Summer 2004), pp. 37–58. 38. Jackson, p. 177. 39. Exemplary feminist readings of Mansfield stressing celebrations of domesticity, maternity, female community, and female artistry are Susan Gubar, ‘The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Kunstlerroman, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield’, in The Representation of Women in Fiction, edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) and Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993). See also Christine Butterworth-McDermott, ‘Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 2 (2010), pp. 56–71, which reads ‘Bliss’ as an exploration of transformative possibilities. 40. Letter to Murry, 17 March 1920, in Letters, 4, p. 242.

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Ambivalence, Language and the Uncanny in Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension Andrew Harrison

Abstract This essay uses an observation on the strangeness of language in the opening section of Freud’s essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ to describe the unsettling effects created by the stories in Mansfield’s first collection, In A German Pension. It relates the formal ambivalence of the stories to their thematic concern with deception and self-deception, insinuation and suspicion, showing how the reader is troublingly implicated in the processes of speculation and intrusion foregrounded in the narratives. The essay concludes by concentrating on Mansfield’s technical concern with the disconcerting slippage of meaning between languages and the uncanny potential of mixed languages, erratic voices and ambiguous expressions. Key words: Ambivalence, uncanny, insinuation, transformation, interjection, Katherine Mansfield, Freud Freud opens his investigation into the uncanny in his now seminal essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919)1 by concentrating in some detail on the etymology of the German word unheimlich (uncanny). He tells us that this ‘examination of linguistic usage’ was originally undertaken to confirm the findings of ‘a number of individual cases’, so that the essay reverses the terms of his original research by starting with the word and moving out to instances of the uncanny in literature and Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 51–62 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0027 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies in various case studies.2 In the rhetorical structure of the essay, the appeal to etymology is intended to isolate its cultural significance as a compensation for the difficulty involved in defining its nature at the level of affect. The feeling Freud is trying to describe eludes such an approach, however, because its range of meanings exposes the ambivalence at its centre. Beginning with the sense of unheimlich as the opposite of heimlich (homely) and heimisch (native), Freud suggests that we might think of the uncanny as signifying that which is strange and unfamiliar, yet he acknowledges that ‘something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny’. He turns for clarification to ‘other languages’ (Latin, Greek, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and Hebrew), but notes that these ‘tell us nothing new, perhaps only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’.3 Freud seems to suggest here that language does not yield up the meaning of the uncanny because it is itself an uncanny medium.4 With its various historical and linguistic layers, our mother tongue is a familiar form which we have internalised, yet its meanings open out onto the strangeness of the historical and the foreign. Language is, then, a locus for uncanny feeling, and instances of linguistic ambiguity and ambivalence point toward the strangeness at the heart of the familiar. Freud is forced to concede that ‘heimlich’ is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.5 ‘Das unheimliche’ is a phrase, and a feeling, built on ambivalence: just as the word falls through the gap between language/s, so the feeling is encountered at the contested boundaries between id and ego, anxiety and fear, intellectual uncertainty and our sense of the irrational. It is a feeling which occurs in the instant when the familiar gives way to the strange, so that the two are suddenly experienced as indistinguishable. My purpose in this essay is to show how Katherine Mansfield’s first volume of short stories, In a German Pension (1911),6 may be said to cohere through its formal and thematic concern with ambivalence, and specifically through its fascination with the uncanny potential of mixed languages, erratic voices and ambiguous expressions. An unsettling encounter with foreignness is clearly central to these stories; I will suggest that the structural ambivalence of the stories is matched by a concern with the uncanny nature of written and spoken language. While recent work on Mansfield has addressed an earlier blindness to the importance of the uncanny in her fiction,7 the German Pension stories still tend to be overlooked as uncanny texts. For instance, in her recent essay on ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Uncanniness’, Clare Hanson

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Mansfield’s In a German Pension focuses on better-known stories such as ‘Prelude’, ‘Miss Brill’, ‘The Doll’s House’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and does not even allude to the earlier collection.8 Furthermore, attention to the uncanny in Mansfield’s fiction has tended to focus on the various common tropes or motifs explored by Freud in his essay, such as the automaton, the double, and the fear of being buried alive. By concentrating instead on formal ambivalence and the uncanniness of language in Mansfield’s first collection, I wish to stress not only the psychological insight but also the technical artistry of stories which are too often dismissed as immature work.9 Ambivalence is inscribed in both the form and content of the German Pension stories.10 Anybody reading the stories in the order in which they appear in volume form will be struck by the discontinuities in the collection. Seven of the thirteen stories are written in the first person (the first four, the sixth, the eighth, and the eleventh); the remaining six are in the third person, though ‘A Birthday’ is a New Zealand story overlaid with German names, and the final two stories (‘The Swing of the Pendulum’ and ‘A Blaze’) are clearly linked tales of female infidelity containing a Zolaesque analysis of the tawdriness of physical desire.11 The feeling of unevenness as we move between the stories in the volume is exacerbated by the sense of uncertainty they create in us around the nature and situation of the first-person narrator. The ‘I’ figure is emotionally withdrawn and responds to the strong personalities at the Pension Müller with a wry sense of irony and an occasionally acerbic retort. She refuses to reveal her nationality and the reason for her attendance at the spa in Dorschausen,12 thus complicating two of our most significant interpretive tools for understanding her position in relation to the other guests at the Pension. While the guests’ assumption that she is English goes unchallenged in ‘Germans at Meat’, ‘The Sister of the Baroness’, ‘Frau Fischer’ and ‘The Modern Soul’, in ‘The Luft Bad’ she denies that she is American and responds to a direct question about whether she is English with the ambiguous hanging phrase ‘Well, hardly –’ (45). In ‘Frau Fischer’, she responds with similar ambivalence to a question about her reasons for attending the spa, employing an enigmatic smile and a shrug of the shoulders (15). Her motives for doing this remain uncertain: we are left wondering whether this central consciousness in the stories is a vulnerable female outsider, retaining her privacy to protect against the aggressive nationalistic and sexual forces at play in the Pension, or whether she deliberately manipulates her acquaintances in order to exert and maintain power over them. Is the narrator to be compared to the abused Frau Brechenmacher

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Katherine Mansfield Studies in ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, subject to the predatory attentions of men in a society where they hold all the cards, or is she akin to the devious maid in ‘The Sister of the Baroness’, who passes herself off as an aristocrat in order to garner social distinction and secure the attentions of the student from Bonn? This sense of the narrator as an ambivalent presence shadowed by a series of potential doubles applies equally to us as readers, since our equivocal intimacy with the ‘I’ figure places us in the same prurient relationship to her as the other guests at the Pension Müller. In the version of the opening story, ‘Germans at Meat’, first published in the New Age in March 1910, the narrator-figure is named ‘Kathleen’ and the story contains a sentence (cut from the book version) which hints at her pregnancy.13 In the revised text, our desire to identify the author in the narrator of the stories is at once encouraged and undermined; once we succumb to the suspicion created by her dismissive comments on childbirth and domestic or matrimonial matters we immediately sense our troubling kinship with intrusive and gullible characters like Frau Fischer or the manager of the Pension in ‘The Sister of the Baroness’.14 By implicating us in the atmosphere of insinuation and suggestion, the stories ironise any desire we might have to identify with the narrator in setting ourselves apart from the various characters with whom she interacts. This would suggest that the text cultivates a feeling of familiarity and sympathy with the first-person narrator which consistently, but erratically, gives way to a sense of her strangeness and animosity: an uncanny dynamic, then, shapes our reading of the volume. The atmosphere of insinuation and suspicion is an effect created by the stories as well as a theme exploited within them. Mansfield sustains it on both narrative and thematic levels through her foregrounding of the psychology of deception and self-deception. The third-person stories often explore the nature of deception in a manner calculated to expose the processes of distortion involved in any reading of the first-person narrator. For example, in ‘A Blaze’, the tripartite structure of the story abruptly shifts our perception of the characters, as we struggle to understand the power games played in the eternal triangle between Victor, Max and Elsa. On the face of things, Victor seems to be the conventionally cuckolded husband, Max the earnest and wronged lover, and Elsa the breathtakingly detached woman who enjoys the affections of both men. Yet a certain feeling of excess in each part of the story may rightly disturb our interpretive complacency. Victor’s playful bonhomie with Max might suggest an awareness of his affair with Elsa, and a willingness to manage their meetings in order

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Mansfield’s In a German Pension to limit any disruption to his own life; Max’s dramatic declaration of his hopeless lust for Elsa could suggest a personality consciously committed to risk and to the dramatic trappings of a passionate affair; and Elsa’s apparent skill in manipulating the two men can surely be questioned, given her laconic statement to Max that she ‘just let[s] things occur’ (85). The perception of the power wielded by each of the three characters changes as we respond to the shifts in the story’s form. This feeling of continual transformation in our response to characters is central to the uncanny effect created by the stories in the collection. In ‘The Sister of the Baroness’ and ‘The Advanced Lady’, this is simply a question of the narrator exposing the truth that the sister is actually the daughter of a dressmaker, or employing an ironic tone to demonstrate how the ‘advanced’ female professor and novelist is really a traditionalist in her approach to issues of gender. In ‘The Modern Soul’, Sonia Godowska’s revelation to the narrator that she is ‘curiously sapphic’ (33) suddenly disrupts the affective context of the tale and complicates our understanding of her relationship to the narrator, her mother and the Herr Professor. However, in other stories the transformation generates a more implicit and unsettling feeling of ambivalence in our understanding of a character. The most striking single example would be the stark shift in response to the eponymous ‘Child-Who-Was-Tired’ occasioned in that story’s final paragraphs. Throughout the text we are alerted to the Child’s mistreatment as a ‘help’ in the home of the anonymous (pregnant) Frau and her husband. The Child is the illegitimate and ‘half silly’ (60) maid who tends to the couple’s unruly children: Hans, Lena, Anton, and their baby son. Our sympathy is naturally invested in the young girl in the face of the abuse she suffers, yet her decision to suffocate the baby with a bolster cushion in order to keep it quiet in the final paragraphs shocks us out of our stock moral response. The act is performed ‘gently, smiling, on tiptoe’ (61): a detail which simultaneously intensifies our disgust at the act and causes us to question whether it is a cold-blooded act of murder, an uncanny replication of her mother’s own attempt ‘to squeeze her head in the wash-hand jug’ (60), or the wrong-headed action of an idiot child responding to her employer’s injunction to ‘keep that baby quiet’ (61). The feeling of uncertainty created in us through the depiction of the Child’s thoughts and actions is encapsulated in the Frau’s description of her as ‘half silly’ (60). Our access to the Child’s thought processes in the story’s use of free-indirect discourse certainly confirms her commitment to fantasy,15 but, partly because the age of the girl is

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Katherine Mansfield Studies withheld from us, it is difficult to say whether this is a symptom of psychological instability or merely a child’s desperate response to a life of dull routine and drudgery. The ambivalence of ‘halves’ is repeated in other stories in the collection. In ‘The Baron’, when the narrator returns from her unplanned walk with the eponymous aristocrat, she tells us that she ‘ran half way up the stairs, and thanked [him] audibly from the landing’ (8); although she seems detached from the awe in which he is held by the other guests, she is happy to cultivate the reflected glory of their brief walk in the rain. In ‘The Sister of the Baroness’, the narrator’s ambivalent interest in the romance surrounding the ‘Sister’ and the student from Bonn causes her to read ‘a volume of Mörike’s lyrics’, ‘finding a sad significance in the delicate suggestion of half mourning’ (12). And again, at the beginning of ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, Viola reads a letter from Casimir in a spirit of angry resistance to its greeting, but we are told that ‘her rage was only half sincere’ (72): an insight whose importance the story will go on to explore and substantiate. The stories frequently cause us to question not only the lines between sympathy and irony, detachment and participation, sanity and madness, or the adult and the child, but also the distinction between the human and the animal. Animal images and analogies abound in the text.16 For example, the Baron in the story of that title eats his salad ‘rabbit-wise’ and ‘looks like a little yellow silkworm’ (5). The bride’s mother in ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’ wrinkles her forehead ‘like a monkey’, while a guest describes the father of the bride’s illegitimate child as ‘a pig of a fellow!’ (23). In ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, the strange man whom Viola invites into her room behaves ‘like a dog’ or a ‘creature’ and ‘beast’, while she goes from being a ‘pussy cat’ to a ‘vixen’ and a ‘bitch’ (78–9). In fact, the women in the stories are repeatedly compared to cats: Frau Fischer sees the narrator as ‘like a little Persian kitten’ (17), while Elsa, in ‘A Blaze’, compares herself to a cat, since both seek admiration and enjoy being stroked (84). The German names of two of the characters manage to gesture at their grotesque animality in the slippage of their meaning into English: the Herr Rat (the councillor) is an overbearing chauvinist who boasts that he has had all he wants from women without marriage, and reminisces about ‘living in a hotel in Leicester Square’ (1), while Frau Fischer is the wealthy businesswoman who attends the spa on an annual basis and enjoys prying into the private lives of her fellow guests, fishing for details of their relationships and their health, or else – to use her own image – ‘squeez[ing] them dry like a sponge’ (17).

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Mansfield’s In a German Pension The ambivalence of words, and the slippage of meaning when we move from one language to another, reinforces the feeling of interpretive jeopardy in the stories. The collection alerts us to the comical awkwardness occasioned by any attempt to directly translate concepts from German into English, and vice versa. Fräulein Stiegelauer’s reference to her morning spa routine in ‘Germans at Meat’ is a case in point (‘At half-past five I fell asleep, and woke at seven, when I made an “overbody’’ washing!’ [2]), yet the ironically accentuated ‘world outlook’ (66) in ‘The Advanced Lady’ registers the difficulty of translating the German philosophical term Weltanschauung into English. Two of the stories end with phrases whose awkward combination of two languages comically exposes the absurdity of social assumptions and class pretensions: ‘The Baron’ closes with a satirical English tweaking of a Latin phrase from Thomas à Kempis (‘Sic transit Gloria German mundi’),17 while ‘The Sister of the Baroness’ ends with a comical indication (in French and Italian) of the perturbation caused by the Baroness’ revelation of her maid’s duplicity: ‘Tableau grandissimo!’ (13). It is as if the superficial cultural and genetic purity lauded by certain guests at the Pension is undermined by a playful and subversive melding of languages and cultures which allows us access to a stranger reality beneath. The text’s formal concentration on the discomforting effects created when languages coalesce is underscored by its use of common phrases in German, which take on a surreal quality when translated into English. The archaic Bavarian euphemism for confinement before childbirth, ‘Sie ist nach Rom gereist’, is invoked twice in the sense of a literal translation (‘She is on a journey to Rome’) in ‘At “Lehmann’s’’’ and ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’. The effect of literalising the euphemism is to lift the romantic veil shrouding maternity in order to expose the hardships of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth (the first-person narrator of ‘Frau Fischer’ considers ‘child-bearing the most ignominious of all professions’ [18]). A similar effect is achieved in ‘The Sister of the Baroness’, where the German version of the child’s counting-out rhyme (‘eena-deena-dina-do’ [10]) is preferred to the familiar English equivalent (‘eena-meena-mina-mo’), with the effect that the air of social awkwardness created by the appearance of the ‘Sister’ at the head of the table in the Pension is mirrored in the response of an English reader of the story, who must attempt to understand what the other guests’ ‘eena-deena-dina-do’ expression actually signifies. Readers are often forced to confront and wrest meaning from the strangeness of spoken language in the German Pension stories.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies The erratic nature of the exchanges between the Pension guests is suggested by the use of unexpected words to describe the manner of their enunciation. In ‘Germans at Meat’, characters ‘cry’ and ‘boom’ (1, 3), while elsewhere they ‘shriek’ and ‘scream’ (41, 58); their behaviour often seems troublingly disproportionate to its genteel context. The focus on the manner in which words are spoken produces an interesting use of culturally-specific interjections. In ‘The ChildWho-Was-Tired’, little Hans expresses shock at having his head spat upon by his brother Anton with the phrase ‘Oh, weh! oh, weh!’ (58) (a strong cry of despair, literally meaning ‘Oh, woe! Oh, woe!’).18 Herr Erchardt in ‘The Advanced Lady’ cries ‘Nu’ (63), in response to hearing that the Frau Professor is studying English books: the phrase (which roughly translates as ‘Now!’), is intended to emphasise his pleasant surprise at hearing the news and realising her suitability as a partner for the English-speaking narrator.19 These examples may seem straightforward enough, but elsewhere in the collection Mansfield has recourse to the powerful ambiguity of German expressions in pinpointing the strangeness of a child’s burgeoning sexual self-awareness. Mansfield’s most significant and inventive engagement with the ambivalence of German interjection occurs in what is perhaps the most uncanny story in the collection: ‘At “Lehmann’s’’’. Like ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, this text hinges on our uncertain response to a young girl who seems curiously suspended between childish and adult identities. Sabina is a waitress in Lehmann’s café, whose sexual naivety is offset by a troubling fascination with a ‘Young Man’ who visits her place of work. The story employs in complex fashion the trope of the double which critics have identified as central to the uncanny effects created elsewhere in Mansfield’s writings. On the brink of her entry into womanhood, Sabina’s sexual identity is divided between an eager identification with the posed pornographic image of a naked girl shown to her by the Young Man, and a more troubling, less conscious identification with her heavily pregnant and ‘ugly’ employer, Frau Lehmann. In Pamela Dunbar’s formulation, Sabina is ‘torn’ between being ‘the shapely object of man’s desire, and the swollen receptacle of his seed’.20 The story explores the anxious manoeuvring of Sabina around these disparate images of female sexuality (its hypnotic visual power and its abject association with domestic confinement). Caught between these two possibilities, but limited by her position of servitude in relation to both Frau Lehmann and the Young Man, the ambivalence of Sabina’s sexual identity is suggested through her use of an expressive interjection which perfectly captures her frustration and uncertainty.

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Mansfield’s In a German Pension The German word ‘Ach’ has an expressive range not dissimilar to the English word ‘Ah’, though the two words are far from synonymous. Where ‘Ah’ is equally appropriate for use in expressing positive or negative surprise, ‘Ach’ is normally (though not exclusively) used in a negative context, to exclaim at some hurt or upset caused to the speaker, or else to wearily dismiss an unwanted objection. It is used seven times by characters in the German Pension stories, and unusually four of the seven uses are wholly neutral exclamations.21 Two of the negative instances come close together in ‘At “Lehmann’s’’’. Sabina repeats the expression to herself in her exasperation at being constantly reminded of Frau Lehmann’s pregnancy: ‘Ach’, said Sabina. ‘I think no more of it. I listen no more. Ach, I would like to go away – I hate this talk. I will not hear it. No, it is too much’. She leaned both elbows on the table – cupped her face in her hands and pouted. (40–1)

This is another of those moments in the collection when a character’s response to a situation seems worryingly excessive. The repetition of the negative ‘Ach’ suggests an almost visceral refusal to hear, or to think about, the pregnancy; the guttural pronunciation of the German word is well suited to pinpointing both her disgust and her determination to put the thought from her mind. Sabina’s privatelyuttered words allow us to intuit her unconscious thoughts, but their negative intensity remains mysterious. This affective ambiguity is heightened in the dramatic conclusion to the story, when a combination of the Young Man’s aggressive sexual pass at her in the ladies’ cloak-room, and the shriek of Frau Lehmann’s final labour pains, occasions an uncanny and indeterminate cry from Sabina: He pulled her closer still and kissed her mouth. ‘Na, what are you doing – what are you doing?’ she whispered. He let go her hands, he placed his on her breasts, and the room seemed to swim round Sabina. Suddenly, from the room above, a frightful, tearing shriek. She wrenched herself away, tightened herself, drew herself up. ‘Who did that – who made that noise?’ In the silence the thin wailing of a baby. ‘Achk!’ shrieked Sabina, rushing from the room. (41–2)

It has become a critical commonplace to view Sabina as both naïve and innocent, as if the two states were naturally linked.22 According to

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Katherine Mansfield Studies this reading, Sabina is a victim of the Young Man’s sexual attentions; she flees the room in suddenly realising the association between the urgency of the man’s embrace and the pain of giving birth. However, an attention to the manner of Sabina’s expression in these concluding lines suggests a fundamental and disturbing ambivalence in her response to her situation, and to the Young Man. Notice how, in the beginning, she whispers to him, perhaps still conscious of wanting to hide the exciting social transgression of encouraging him to enter the warmth of the ladies’ cloak-room. The whispered ‘Na’ which prefaces her questioning of him (a southern German negative significantly used earlier in the story by Frau Lehmann),23 seems not so much censorious as subtly coaxing. Her stoking of the fire in the oven of the cloak-room is clearly a symbol for the willing part she has played in stirring the Young Man’s desire for her, though its origin in domestic duty may suggest her careful attempt to conceal her motives from the Young Man, and maybe even from herself. We should recall here the effect that the Young Man’s presence creates in her: ‘a curious thrill deep in her body, half pleasure, half pain . . . ’ (38). She is another creature of halves: she may be appalled by the pain of the Frau, but she is also thrilled by the pleasure of a new bodily feeling, and her naivety should not distract us from recognising her willing manipulation of the Young Man and her excitement at being with him. Our understanding of Sabina’s psychological situation finally rests on the uncanny ambiguity of the phonetic neologism which she utters in the final line. ‘Achk’ appears to be a word related to ‘Ach’, yet it is evidently expressive of a more urgent sense of disturbance. We might understand it as identifying her disgust at the Young Man’s sexual advances, but it might equally signal her despair at being forcibly drawn out of her ‘most exciting adventure’ (41), and made to think again of childbirth and her employer. Our interpretation will rely on our reading of Sabina as either vulnerable and childlike, or calculating and coy. Once again, the key thing at stake in our understanding of the story is our comprehension of a female character’s ambivalent nature; like the Young Man, we are left wondering whether Sabina is ‘a child’ or ‘playing at being one’ (41). Sabina’s ambivalent shriek at the end of ‘At “Lehmann’s’’’ exposes the unsettling potential and rich ambiguity of spoken language in the German Pension stories. It registers one of those points of interpretive challenge, and of emotional dislocation and disturbance, which Mansfield’s first book cultivates on both formal and thematic levels. To respond fully to these early stories we must recognise their capacity to undermine our interpretive complacency; they show us how

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Mansfield’s In a German Pension language itself is always likely to reveal the foreign in the familiar, or to open out onto the indefinable ambivalence of uncanny feeling. Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Writings on Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 195. 2. Freud, p. 195. 3. Freud, p. 195. 4. Nicholas Royle discusses this ‘remarkable, cryptic and perhaps rigorously unreadable observation’, relating it to comments by Deleuze and Derrida, in the opening chapter of The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 19–20. 5. Freud, p. 201. 6. Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (London: Stephen Swift, 1911). 7. There is no mention of Mansfield in Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, eds, Gothic Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), in spite of the prominent references to Freudian elements in Mansfield’s short stories in C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), and Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 8. Clare Hanson, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Uncanniness’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 115–30. 9. Andrew Bennett’s comment on the collection is symptomatic of the low critical esteem in which it is still held: ‘Indeed, hatred may be said to impel In a German Pension, arguably to its detriment: with its intrusive and opinionated authornarrator, its insistence on emphasising the coarse, hateful Bavarian bourgeoisie, its sarcasm and cutting, pointed irony, the book has, for many readers, a strictly limited interest’. Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (Devon: Northcote House, 2004), p. 72. 10. Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension, ed. Anne Fernihough (London: Penguin, 1999). Further references to the German Pension stories are to this edition and page numbers are supplied in the text. 11. There is a fascinating reference to Zola in a letter of September 1911 from Mansfield to Edna Smith, where she writes: ‘I want to talk to you about Zola & ask if you have read the ‘joie de vivre’ / Emile Zola’. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 107. Even earlier, in 1908, she had written the following notebook entry: ‘Zola defines Art as nature seen through a temperament (drives in a victoria to see the peasants)’. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury, New Zealand and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 165. 12. Mansfield refers to ‘Dorschausen’ in ‘Frau Fischer’, though the actual name of the German village is Dorschhausen. It is located in a district of Bad Wörishofen. I am grateful to Jan Wilm for pointing out Mansfield’s foreshortening of this place

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13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

name, and for his advice and guidance on her use of German expressions elsewhere in the Pension stories. ‘Germans at Meat’, New Age, 6:18 (3 March 1910), pp. 419–20. On p. 419 of the New Age version, the Widow asks Kathleen ‘Have you any family?’ We are told that ‘Kathleen assured herself that it was the heated atmosphere that was making her flush’; she answers ‘No’. The detail about Kathleen flushing was omitted by Mansfield from the text published in the book. See Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (London: Stephen Swift, 1911), p. 11. The biographical details surrounding Mansfield’s stay in the Pension Müller at Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria are well known. (See, for example, Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Viking, 1980), pp. 95–106.) She suffered a stillbirth there in June 1909. The Child’s imagination humanises an oven and ‘a twisted mass of dahlia roots’ (58), and makes the struggling baby into a headless duck. Gerardo Rodríguez Salas and Isabel María Andrés Cuevas discuss Mansfield’s use of animal analogies in ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ and ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’ in their essay “‘My Insides Are All Twisted Up’’: When Distortion and the Grotesque became “the Same Job’’ in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’, in Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 139–48. A Latin phrase meaning ‘Thus passes the glory of the world’, viewed by some scholars as possibly an adaptation of a phrase in Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (1418): ‘O quam cito transit gloria mundi’ (‘How quickly the glory of the world passes away’). ‘Weh’ also connotes pain. ‘Jemandem weh tun’ means ‘to hurt someone’. ‘Nu’ would seem to be a shortened dialect form of ‘nun’, though it is also used more generally as an expression of bafflement and wonder. Dunbar, p. 31. The word ‘Ach’ appears in the stories ‘Germans at Meat’, ‘The Modern Soul’, ‘At “Lehmann’s’’’, ‘The Advanced Lady’ and ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’. Aside from ‘At “Lehmann’s’’’, it is only in the last of these stories that it is used in a negative way, when Viola fights off the attentions of the ‘strange man’: ‘Ach! don’t do that – you are hurting me!’ (79). In Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1990), pp. 6–7, J. F. Kobler refers to Sabina as a ‘naïf’ and ‘a complete innocent’. Similarly, in Katherine Mansfield (p. 55), Andrew Bennett describes her as ‘naive and sexually innocent’, while Pamela Dunbar (pp. 29–32), sees the ‘naïve young serving-girl’ as ‘open to exploitation on many counts’: she refers to the Young Man’s ‘seduction’ of Sabina. In the short and irritable exchange between Sabina and Frau Lehmann, the latter uses the expression ‘Na’ in response to a question before asking after the whereabouts of her indifferent husband: ‘Nothing else?’ ‘Na’, said the Frau, heaving up in her chair. ‘Where’s my man?’ (39). Sabina’s later use of this form of the negative suggests her alignment with the perspective of the disillusioned Frau Lehmann in expressing disapprobation at the behaviour of the Young Man. ‘Na’ can also be used in German as a common interjection, like ‘well’.

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes: ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Donkeyskin’ Motifs in Wharton’s Summer and Mansfield’s Short Stories Christine Butterworth-McDermott

Abstract Although their work was stylistically different, Edith Wharton and Katherine Mansfield shared a concern over the danger of fairy-tale fantasies of rescue for their female readership. Wharton’s Summer and several of Mansfield’s stories – ‘A Cup of Tea’, ‘Her First Ball’, ‘The Young Girl’, and ‘A Dill Pickle’ – all subvert the fairy tale of ‘Cinderella’ by exposing how lustful fathers and false princes are detrimental to self-actualisation. Both Wharton and Mansfield’s bittersweet narratives highlight the inequities of male and female sexual agency and show that in order for the female figure to grow, she must step away from the dominant male, whether father or prince. Wharton and Mansfield force the reader to question the ‘fantasy of deliverance by a man’ that ‘Cinderella’ projects, which is as Elizabeth Ammons puts it, ‘a culturally perpetuated myth of female liberation which in reality celebrates masculine dominance, proprietorship, and privilege’ (96). Key words: Wharton, Mansfield, fairy tales, ‘Donkeyskin’, ‘Cinderella’, feminism Edith Wharton and Katherine Mansfield are often considered antithetical, particularly in their aesthetic vision – Wharton using complex plotting and Latinate language, Mansfield employing sliceof-life technique and lyrical fragmentation. Their only definitive Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 63–78 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0028 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies connection is the less-than-glowing review Mansfield gave Wharton’s masterpiece, The Age of Innocence.1 Yet, both writers were concerned with courtship, marriage, and sexuality as they pertained to women in the early twentieth century, and surprisingly both drew upon the same fairy tales to metaphorically enhance narratives reflecting that concern.2 Wharton’s Summer (1917),3 which tells the story of Charity Royall’s coming of age, is loaded with vivid references to ‘Cinderella’ and its counterpart, ‘Donkeyskin’, as are several of Mansfield’s stories, including ‘A Cup of Tea’, ‘Her First Ball’, ‘The Young Girl’, and ‘A Dill Pickle’, all written between 1917 and 1922.4 Although it remains unclear whether Wharton and Mansfield read ‘Donkeyskin’, we do know they read Charles Perrault’s ‘Cinderella’ since they both allude to the ‘fairy godmother’ in discussing the story, a figure credited to Perrault’s original tale from 1697.5 Perrault’s version of ‘Cinderella’ enjoyed enormous popularity in the nineteenth century, particularly due to Gioachino Rossini’s 1817 opera of the same name (‘La Cenerentola’). The story, of course, is familiar: a young girl loses her mother, her father remarries, and she is left downtrodden and persecuted by her stepmother and stepsisters until a fairy godmother helps her to marry a handsome prince. Many readers do not know the darker variant, ‘Donkeyskin’, which also appears in Perrault’s collection, Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697). The conclusions of the stories are the same – the kitchen wench is elevated to royalty by marriage – but Donkeyskin’s persecution comes from an incestuous father, whose lust forces her to don a donkeyskin as a disguise. The animal skin reflects both her sexual shame and the necessity of diminishing beauty for spiritual escape. Like the traditional fairy tale tellers Marina Warner discusses in From the Beast to the Blonde, Wharton and Mansfield ‘encipher concerns, beliefs and desires in brilliant, seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage, making it possible to utter harsh truths, to say what you dare’.6 Their retellings force the reader to question the ‘fantasy of deliverance by a man’ that ‘Cinderella’ projects, which Elizabeth Ammons notes ‘is not a dream of freedom for women’, but ‘a culturally perpetuated myth of female liberation which in reality celebrates masculine dominance, proprietorship, and privilege’.7 Although seemingly differentiated by generation and style, Wharton and Mansfield similarly subvert ‘Cinderella’ to show that any female blindly assuming happily-ever-after will inevitably be disillusioned. Summer highlights the futility of believing in the rescuing Prince, as well as the dangers of being defined by the patriarchal father-figure. Mansfield’s stories also address responses to these figures, offering sly

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes alternatives for the ‘Cinderellas’ in question. Both authors’ bittersweet conclusions highlight the inequities of male and female sexual agency and show that in order for the female figure to grow, she must step away from the dominant male, whether father or prince. While Charity Royall and Rosemary Fell remain trapped as child-women, Mansfield’s other protagonists show an early feminist ability to move away from male definition. Wharton and Mansfield’s heroines live in a world of heady dreams – but their narratives stress the necessity of accepting reality, looking at it with open eyes, in order to move out of adolescence. In Wharton’s Summer, Charity is deluded by dreams of a ‘brilliant fate’ (38). The citizens of North Dormer never let her forget she was brought ‘down from the Mountain’, away from her prostitute mother and convict father by Lawyer Royall, as a charity case (4). Understandably, she longs for a ‘Cinderella’ rescue, a marriage to erase her past, one that will make her the social equal to Annabel Balch, the most sophisticated girl she knows. For Charity, Annabel’s ‘blue eyes’ (1) and ‘fair hair heaped up’ (42) contrast with her own ‘small swarthy face’ (1) and ‘sunburnt’ skin (42). Sara Halprin notes how ‘Donkeyskin’/‘Cinderella’ stories, which portray a ‘beautiful woman as someone barely human, close to animals, covered with dirt or ashes’, often echo the experience of women who ‘understand their physical beauty as a source of shame, trouble, or danger’.8 Royall, a ‘magnificent monument of a man’, protective of Charity, clearly values his ward (15). When Mrs. Royall dies and Royall tries to send Charity to boarding school, the school refuses to accept Charity as a pupil because of her Mountain heritage, a fact Royall finds infuriating. However, Royall is also significantly responsible for Charity’s tenuous self-esteem. When Charity is fifteen, he asks to be let into her bedroom, a drunk, ‘lonesome man’ (19). Marina Warner notes that traditionally, a fairy-tale heroine moves ‘from terrifying encounter[s] with Otherness, to its acceptance, or, in some versions of the story, its annihilation’.9 In ‘Donkeyskin’ narratives, the king ‘exposes his daughter to trials and tribulations’ but these ‘turn out to be initiatory for her’.10 During their encounter, Charity knows she can dismiss Royall’s request, and does, but this moment also highlights the uncontrollable nature of sexuality, which frightens her. In response, she begins to imagine sexuality as purely romantic, a position which leaves her ill-equipped for the arrival of handsome Lucius Harney, a visitor to North Dormer, who immediately takes a sexual interest in Charity. Rather than question his flirtatiousness, Charity imagines herself, in an echo of Perrault’s climax, as ‘a bride in low-necked

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Katherine Mansfield Studies satin, walking down an aisle’ (23–4). Harney encourages Charity’s trust in him, and she feels she ‘learned what she was worth when Lucius Harney, looking at her for the first time, had lost the thread of his speech’ (68). Joan Gould posits that for every Cinderella, ‘the turning point is the moment when she is transformed into an assertively sexual woman. [. . . ] When pride is real, it has nothing to do with ball gowns or the prettiness of regular features; it’s rooted in the body.’11 In ‘Donkeyskin’, when the Prince sees the beauty underneath the girl’s ‘skin’, it is the recognition of a quality that has always existed. Yet, Wharton’s Prince is no transformer. Harney does not want to spirit Charity away to a castle; his attraction to her has everything to do with her contrast to Annabel Balch, to whom Harney is secretly engaged. As Kathy Grafton asserts, Annabel is a girl ‘of respectable origin and social position’, whereas Charity, with her lower status, is an ‘acceptable and accessible choice for a sexual affair’.12 While Charity understands ‘the thing that did happen between young men and girls [which] North Dormer ignored in public and snickered over on the sly’, she chooses to live in a world of fantasy, obsessively elevating Harney to the role of Prince (68). When Royall tells her that the townspeople have seen her near Harney’s house at midnight and are gossiping, Charity’s subsequent anger has everything to do with a ‘fingering of her dreams’ (74). Royall tries to make her see that “‘there’s one thing as old as the hills and as plain as daylight: if he’d wanted you the right way he’d have said so’’’, but Charity’s need for Harney to be disconnected from Royall’s darker sexuality is clear in her reaction: ‘nothing could exceed the bitterness of hearing such words from such lips’ (75). Wharton solidifies Harney’s role as the false Prince during the couple’s clandestine trip to Nettleton for a July Fourth celebration. He deliberately isolates Charity in secluded locations and only takes her to the lake after evening has fallen. Throughout the sequence, there are hints that Harney’s intentions are not pure, but Charity’s ‘dream’ of being ‘isolated in ecstasy’ is only broken when Royall appears on the dock with a group of prostitutes (98). Royall, shocked that Charity, whom he thought innocent, may not be, calls her a ‘whore’, publically insisting on her role as ‘Donkeyskin’. No wonder Charity reacts with ‘the secretive instinct of [an] animal in pain’ (102). Although she equates herself with Royall here – she realises they are both standing, hatless and dishevelled, with potential sexual partners – she turns again to the episode ‘when [Royall] had tried to force himself into her room’ and decides what seemed ‘to be a mad aberration’ is really part of ‘a debauched and degraded life’ (105). Rather than believe her ‘dream of [Harney’s] comradeship’ is questionable, Charity compares

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes her ‘desire’ to Royall’s consorting with prostitutes and labels her own behaviour as pure. She tells Harney of Royall’s sexual indiscretion, and believes Harney guesses ‘her confused pain’ (109). Yet, as she elaborates, he is ‘no longer listening’, instead urging her to ‘kiss me again’ (112). Thus begins the sexual affair that will leave Charity pregnant. Deliverance here, as Ammons suggests, becomes proprietorship. ‘[If] a woman looks to a man as her deliverer, she acquiesces in the dispensation of superior power to men and consequently must accept as just and moral the subordination of women.’13 As the couple becomes intimate, Charity’s ‘fatalistic acceptance of [Harney’s] will’ (116) changes her into a ‘ghost’ (121). The futility of her relationship is shown when Charity assesses her dress for a town celebration, recalling the happilyever-after vision that came to her when first meeting Harney. As she tries on the slippers her friend Ally has given her – which in the ‘moonlight’, seem to be ‘carved of ivory’ – she realises they are Annabel’s cast-offs. Though she blames Ally for ‘parad[ing] all those white things on her bed’, her ‘blush of mortification’ comes from her realisation she is merely play-acting, wearing another’s costume (125). The next day, Harney’s engagement is publically revealed and Charity sees ‘the bare reality of her situation’ (130). ‘She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough’ (131). Charity’s subsequent perspiration and dizziness indicate her unknown pregnancy and the heat, normally positively associated with Harney, now descends ‘in smothering waves’ (131). Although Charity will later cling to Harney ‘desperately’, a new negativity emerges as she feels sucked ‘into some bottomless abyss’ (140). The dark sexuality she has thus far denied, now envelopes her. Despite promises to the contrary, Harney leaves, not to prepare to marry Charity, but Annabel, the socially acceptable choice. Charity is forced to confront the fact that she is pregnant and unwed. Although she has maintained that she does not care what others think, when she realises she will be the focus of scandal, she decides to escape to the Mountain. Tatar traces how in most variants of ‘Donkeyskin’, the father is ‘responsible for the flight of their daughters from home into nature. That flight into the woods, with its concomitant degradation of the heroine into a creature of nature, remains the lasting mark of the father’s attempted incestuous violation.’14 Even if an act of incest is never committed, ‘the heroine loses her exchange value – hence also her social status – once the father makes known his desire for her’.15 Charity’s flight to the Mountain is

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Katherine Mansfield Studies an attempt to escape once more the degraded role in which she finds herself. The Mountain, however, is no sanctuary but a ‘wintry world’ in which a hapless community ‘herd[s] together in passive promiscuity’ (173). Observing this, Charity revolts, realising that ‘to save her child from such a fate, she would find strength to travel any distance, and bear any burden life might put on her’ (174). Kathy A. Fedorko suggests Charity’s Mountain journey lets her confront ‘the paralysing limitations and degradations of her mother’s primitive world’,16 allowing her to move beyond naiveté. Thus, she makes a realistic decision to return home – even though she must return to Royall, who comes to fetch her. The transformed Charity is now able to engage in the realities of her life. Pregnant and unwed, Charity hesitates when Royall proposes. Her shame at carrying another man’s child causes her to speak in a halting plea: “‘I want to be [fair to you] now [. . . ] I want you to know’’ [. . . ] her voice failed her’ (180). When Charity tries again to confess, Royall refuses to let her berate herself: “‘Come to my age, a man knows the things that matter and the things that don’t’’’ (180). Although Geoffrey Walton sees the union as ultimately negative, he does note how ‘a new solicitude and humanity have been brought out in Royall and Charity submits to his rough kindness and accepts the humble security and social respectability that he can offer’.17 She worries about the ‘temptation of taking what she no longer had a right to’, but Royall does not judge her unworthy due to her sexual past (180). By doing so, he ironically removes the final burden of her ‘donkeyskin’. Charity’s return to North Dormer as Mrs. Royall is, in equal parts, destruction and rebirth. At its darkest, Donkeyskin marries her fatherfigure, giving him the triumphant domination he seeks. Masked forever, she is doomed ‘to perpetual daughterhood’.18 At its most positive, Summer shows Charity is no longer the girl who sees only the beauty of summer or the savagery of winter; she understands their co-existence. Through her experiences with the incestuous father, she recognises the false prince and learns to rely on herself, growing from a naïve child to a knowledgeable woman, aware of the blurring joy of love – and its stark realities. Wharton’s deliberate use of ‘Cinderella’ causes the reader to hope for a romantic conclusion, but Charity’s pregnancy leaves her few options. As Ammons puts it, ‘the culture, in Wharton’s opinion, offers [women] no means of realising their dreams’, so they ‘end up in bondage to the past not because Edith Wharton was cruel but because the liberation was in her view,

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes a mirage’.19 In preventing Charity’s move up the social ladder, Wharton exposes the falsity of rags-to-riches stories. Katherine Mansfield wrote: ‘why is the Fairy Godmother, the coach, the plumes and glass slipper just – faery – and all the rest of the story deeply, deeply true? [. . . ] one is awfully sorry for [Cinderella], but she does become a bore, doesn’t she’.20 This ‘backstory’ of the Cinderella myth fascinated Mansfield and while there is no evidence she read Wharton’s Summer, it is clear that she, too, felt Cinderella’s tale offered a sort of code for discussing female concerns in the changing Edwardian world. Like Wharton, Mansfield explores the dangers of becoming a child-wife, whose sexual interest is sublimated under her husband’s patriarchy. For Ammons, Summer’s narrative shows that ‘the free expression of female sexuality represents a profound threat to patriarchal power, and is therefore assiduously guarded against’.21 In ‘A Cup of Tea’, Mansfield uses the characterisation of Rosemary Fell as fairy godmother and Miss Smith as Cinderella to say the same thing. Rosemary seems to have it all; she is ‘young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read’, but Rosemary is unsatisfied, a collector of material items that apparently afford her little satisfaction (332). At the beginning of the story, she is tempted by an enormously expensive little box, and asks the owner of the antique store to hold it for her, just in case. Later, confronting the bleak reality outdoors, Rosemary feels ‘a strange pang’ and wishes for the box to ‘cling to’ (333). She notes how, ‘There are moments, horrible moments in life, when one emerges from shelter and looks out, and it’s awful’ (334). While this could be a catalyst for soul-searching, Rosemary decides instead that ‘one oughtn’t to give way’ to these horrible moments (334). Rosemary’s choice keeps her in an immature state, so that she is emotionally unprepared for her encounter with Miss Smith, ‘a thin dark, shadowy’ girl who asks for the price of a cup of tea (334). Rosemary, hungry for magic, begins a ‘Cinderella’ fantasy, although Mansfield counters our expectations, shifting focus away from Cinderella and onto the fairy godmother. Already her own monetary ‘princess’, Rosemary feels no qualms about transforming someone else, seeing it as an act of benevolence. The reader quickly recognises Miss Smith is merely another acquisition for Rosemary, a trinket to take home, a substitute for the box. Acquiring Miss Smith is ‘like an adventure’, or ‘one of those things she was always reading about or seeing on the stage’ (334). Embracing such fantasy, Rosemary imagines she’ll ‘prove to this girl that – wonderful things did happen in life,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies that – fairy godmothers were real, that rich people had hearts, and that women were sisters’ (335). As is common in Mansfield’s work, the ensuing enchantment is conveyed through metaphoric description. Rosemary sees herself as ‘charming, protecting’ while her home is full of ‘warmth, softness’ (335). Its opulence echoes that of a palace, with ‘wonderful lacquer furniture, her gold cushions and the primrose and blue rugs’ (335). After having tea, poured by Rosemary herself, Miss Smith successfully transforms into ‘a new being, a light, frail creature with tangled hair, dark lips, deep, lighted eyes’ (335). It is this magical being that Philip, Rosemary’s ‘charming’ husband, walks in to see lounging ‘in a kind of sweet languor’ (335). The desired ‘spell’ has worked, though not through Rosemary’s efforts. Rather, having at last been fed, the girl’s natural beauty is revealed. Rosemary explains to Philip how she wants to be “‘frightfully nice’’’ and “‘look after her’’’, but he immediately notes it “‘can’t be done’’’ as Miss Smith is “‘so astonishingly pretty. [. . . ] absolutely lovely’’’ (337). Noting he is “‘bowled over’’’, he tells his wife she’s “‘making a ghastly mistake’’’ (337). Rosemary has hoped the transformation will give her a special importance, something that seems to be lacking in her marriage. Philip’s response is not intentionally malevolent; he just points out that sexual rivalry makes it impossible for these women to be ‘sisters’. He makes Rosemary see Miss Smith as a human rather than object for the first time, and shortly after, she sends Miss Smith on her way. The threat of another’s beauty shows how the flip side of male attraction may be female jealousy. Maria Tatar suggests that the narrative of ‘Donkeyskin’ provides an explanation for the cruelty Cinderella suffers at the hands of her stepmother – the father sets up the daughter as rival.22 Rosemary easily steps into the role of stepmother, banishing Miss Smith. At the same time, before she returns to Philip, she ‘Cinderellaises’ herself, doing ‘her hair, darken[ing] her eyes’ (338). Intent on seduction, she sits in Philip’s lap, touches his face, and makes her voice, ‘sweet, husky’ (338). The story closes with Rosemary’s plaintive question to Philip: “‘am I pretty?’’’ (338). Here, a woman in the social position of Annabel Balch is fearful of the Cinderella figure. Philip seems to have given Rosemary far less cause for worry than Harney, but the fear is the same: I am not worthy because I am not beautiful. Mansfield gives little background about Philip so we can only guess if he would act on his attraction, but his dialogue seems to suggest it. Rosemary does not see Miss Smith as a rival until Philip’s commentary – and because it is Miss Smith’s extraordinary beauty he focuses on, Rosemary’s panic makes sense. The story itself opens with

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes the narrator questioning Rosemary’s physical charms: ‘Pretty? Well, if you took her to pieces. . . . But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces?’ (332). After Philip’s comments, Rosemary metaphorically takes herself to pieces, performing the mutilation for which the sisters in the Grimms’ version of ‘Cinderella’ are known.23 This keeps her in a childish, passive state which she cannot hope to change. As with the conclusion of Summer, the fairy tale of ‘A Cup of Tea’ ends askew, leaving the reader in an uneasy state. Wanting Rosemary to be happy, we see her, like Charity, clinging to a prince, which does little to help her self-awareness. Moreover, Rosemary does not even gain the selfknowledge Charity discovers on her Mountain journey, and continues to look to Philip for definition. Her end question is pitiful. The way some of Mansfield’s other Cinderellas deal with labelling by patriarchal figures offers a sense of progress. Each hints that resisting a male’s definition, whether he acts as a father-figure, a fairy godfather, or a prince, is essential in the female quest for self. In ‘Her First Ball,’ ‘The Young Girl’, and ‘A Dill Pickle’, each of Mansfield’s Cinderellas is convinced that the labelling accorded her by a male protagonist is incorrect and that, like Donkeyskin, each Cinderella has ‘the confidence to know that, beneath the dirt and rags covering her, she preserve[s] the heart of a princess’.24 As the narrative of ‘Her First Ball’ begins, Leila is already enchanted by the cab, her ‘first real partner’, and the way that the road sparkles ‘with moving fan-like lights’ (273).25 Couples seem ‘to float through the air’ and even in the ladies room, the gas jet ‘dances’ (274). The setting is reminiscent of Perrault’s ball; the dance floor is ‘gleaming, golden’ and ‘the azaleas, the lanterns, the stage at one end with its red carpet and gilt chairs and the band in a corner’ are described as ‘heavenly’ (275). For Leila, ‘every single thing was so new and exciting’, and she feels she might ‘faint, or lift her arms and fly out of one of those dark windows that showed the stars’ (276). Leila’s naiveté is child-like; she finds it ‘strange that her partners were not more interested. For it was thrilling. Her first ball!’ (277). Her moment of transformation, like Charity’s, is radiant and powerful. She sees herself, ‘at the beginning of everything’ (277). This enchantment, however, is immediately thwarted. Instead of being whisked away by Prince Charming, Leila is greeted by his antithesis: a fat, bitter man, who has spent thirty years at such events. The fat man is an amalgam of three of ‘Cinderella’s’ archetypes: he acts as the cursing father, fairy godmother/father, and would-be prince. While he is the only one who recognises this is Leila’s first dance, he also instantaneously crushes her: ‘you can’t hope to last anything like

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Katherine Mansfield Studies [thirty years]’ (227). He suggests Leila will soon ‘be sitting up there on the stage, looking on, in your nice black velvet. [. . . ] and you’ll beat time with such a different kind of fan – a black ebony one’ (277). This anti-transformation, this dance with the harbinger of death rather than the bringer of dreams, is Mansfield’s answer to the mythos of Cinderella. The man covers Leila in the soot and ash of inevitable death: ‘you’ll smile away like the poor old dears up there, and point to your daughter, and tell the elderly lady next to you how some dreadful man tried to kiss her at the club ball. And your heart will ache, ache [. . . ] because no one wants to kiss you now’ (277–8). The man’s speech, like Royall’s actions in Summer, serves the important purpose of initiating Leila into adulthood. At first, she wants to escape him and he leads her to the door, but she does not go outside, staying instead on the periphery of the dance. Though she longs to retreat home, when a ‘ravishing tune’ begins, she puts her hand on the sleeve of a new, younger partner, and ‘in one turn, her feet glided, glided. The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel’ (278). She does not retreat back into her Donkeyskin state, but rightfully claims what is hers. When her current partner bumps into the fat man, she, triumphantly ‘smile[s] more radiantly than ever’, noting she ‘didn’t even recognise him again’, her powerful Cinderella-self ruling the ball (278). Obviously, she does recognise the father-figure who wants to define her, but chooses not to acknowledge him. With clear knowledge of the ultimate dance with death, she fights for her right to enjoy her first ball. The encounter with this Other is absolutely central to Leila’s development, since her decision to not retreat into a childlike state shows she is ready to welcome maturation. Already, she has progressed much further than Charity Royall or Rosemary Fell. Another character exposing the falsity of ‘Cinderella’ is the eponymous character of ‘The Young Girl’. Like Cinderella, the girl was once wealthy and is now ‘broke’ (238). Here she fits in with Jane Yolen’s notion that ‘Cinderella’ ‘is not a story of rags to riches, but rather riches recovered; not poor girl into princess but rather rich girl (or princess) rescued from improper or wicked enslavement’.26 Wanting to improve her chances at a reversal of fortune, the girl hopes to enter a casino with her mother. Only seventeen, the daughter is denied admittance, and as Mrs Raddick rushes back to try her own luck, she foists the girl onto a family friend who has agreed to take care of the girl’s brother, Hennie. Mansfield does not reveal the sex of the friend who narrates the events, but for the purposes of reading the story as a Cinderella text, the narrator can function as another male in Mansfield’s work,

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes who sees the female as an object of acquisition. Though acting as a guardian – or ‘godfather’ – the narrator’s description of the girl is quite voyeuristic. She is described by him as a vision ‘with her cheeks lightly flushed, her blue, blue eyes, and her gold curls pinned up’ and he idolises her, noting she ‘might have just dropped from this radiant heaven’ (238). This ‘angelic’ daughter blasts his stereotype, however, as she ‘twiddl[es] her foot on the step, miles away’ (239). The girl seems to subliminally sense the narrator’s gaze as harmful and wraps ‘her dark coat round her – to escape contamination’ (239). The potential for romantic interest is revealed when the girl complains, ‘[it’s the] stupidity I loathe, and being stared at by old fat men. Beasts!’ (240). Here, Hennie gives her a quick look, then stares out the window, made uncomfortable either by his sister’s position as commodity, or by her insult to their older male companion, or both. The narrator takes Hennie and the girl to a restaurant, ‘an immense palace of pink-and-white marble with orange-trees outside the doors’ (240). Despite the opulence, the girl sneers, “‘Oh well, there seems nowhere else’’’ (240). The girl’s agitation is clearly felt as she ‘drum[s] on the table. When a faint violin sounded she wince[s]’ (240). Trying hard to be sophisticated, she denies the desserts. However, just as the waitress turns away, she orders hot chocolate. When the chocolate arrives she complains about its sweetness and proceeds to reject a tray of pastries. Yet, once Hennie takes one, she eats three. The pastries serve as a metaphor to show the push-pull of courting. The scene also reveals the fine line between adolescence and adulthood that the seventeen-year-old repeatedly crosses over and retreats from, avoiding offers when their price is too costly. This is especially revealed by the girl’s behaviour with the narrator. When the narrator asks if he can smoke, she ‘really did smile’ for the first time and says, “‘Of course, [. . . ] I always expect people to’’’ (241). A connection almost forms, but is ruined by Hennie breaking a pastry horn across the table. The narrator flies ‘to the rescue’, but it is too late, and the girl returns to complaining about the outdated music (242). Here again, the girl emphatically holds herself above what is ‘old’. The annoyed narrator insists the restaurant seems “‘rather a nice place’’’, while the girl looks about ‘trying to see what there was’ (242). Eventually, the narrator senses ‘she couldn’t stand this place a moment longer’ and the party retreats outside. While they wait for the car, the girl stands ‘on the step, just as before, twiddling her foot, looking down’ (242). That the girl equates the narrator with her mother is indicated by Mansfield’s repetition of the girl’s ‘twiddling her foot’ on the step. When the car comes she urges the driver to “‘drive as fast as

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Katherine Mansfield Studies he can’’’, an indication of her desire, like Cinderella’s or Donkeyskin’s, to flee (242). When they arrive at the casino, Mrs. Raddick is still inside. The girl insists on waiting on the steps, although the narrator would “‘rather not leave [her]’’’. She tosses off his concern, “‘Good heavens – why! I – I don’t mind it a bit. I – I like waiting’’’. Flushed and teary, she insists that “‘I love waiting! Really – really I do! I’m always waiting – in all kinds of places’’’ (243), suggesting her mother’s continual abandonment and her desire to turn the waiting into something eventually beneficial. This avowal allows the narrator to see her fully as a sexual possibility as there is no guardian, including himself, around: ‘Her dark coat fell open, and her white throat – all her soft young body in the blue dress – was like a flower that is just emerging from its dark bud’ (243). Rather than being ‘a stranger, whom the heroine would never have met in the ordinary turn of events, [who] strips away her outer disguise’ to reveal her ‘as the shining creature she was meant to be’,27 the male narrator here shows the girl her ‘physical beauty as a source of shame, trouble, or danger’.28 Mansfield emphasises this by equating the narrator to the ‘very good-looking elderly man’ who previously stared at the girl in the restaurant. Although the narrator of ‘The Young Girl’ does not try to act upon his desire, in this story and ‘Her First Ball’,29 Mansfield demonstrates that a male admirer is as likely to be a dirty old man as a handsome, benevolent rescuer. To their credit, both Leila and the young girl, though upset, are not cowed – and their ‘tossing off’ of the situation is, although not feminist in action, a step in the right direction. Both reject the fatherly advice and the wouldbe prince to wait for something better, each positioned on the dance floor or the staircase, emotionally fleeing those chains of servitude that would bind them. Neither falls completely into the storyline written for them by these men. For the young girl, the denial of attention from lustful older men is a step forward: ‘[t]here was a hole in the air where he was. She looked through and through him’ (242). She refuses, despite financial impecunity, to become the consort to a father-figure. Again, like Wharton, Mansfield condemns both the incestuous father-figure and society’s false princes. With this in mind, one of Mansfield’s most significant subversions of ‘Cinderella’ comes in ‘A Dill Pickle’ when Vera, another character once privileged and now in reduced financial circumstances, meets the man she threw over six years prior. Although she recognises that his ‘trick of interrupting her’ remains, she also notes he is much handsomer than he was when they broke off their affair (133). Despite remembering him as embarrassing, Vera shifts her opinion when he talks of that afternoon’s

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes “‘warm sunshine’’’ (133). ‘His [version],’ she decides, ‘was truer’ (133). She lingers over this fantasy of the past, even though she knows that it does not reflect reality. Her longing for specialness, for enchantment, is elevated as he relates his adventures in Russia, a place they had planned to go together. He highlights its dark beauty, and she imagines ‘the mysteriously Black Sea, black as velvet, [. . . ] rippling against the banks in silent, velvet waves’ (135). The foreign object of a dill pickle is seen as a prize in a ‘greenish glass jar with a red chilli like a parrot’s beak glimmering through’ (135). But she sucks in ‘her cheeks; the dill pickle was terribly sour’ (135). This imaginary bittersweetness is the centre of Mansfield’s piece and shows that the fantasies of youth can often fade, just as Vera’s ability to spend ‘seven and sixpence’ on ‘a little pot of caviare’, is well in the past, along with the piano she sold ‘ages ago’ (135). Desiring transformation, Vera concentrates on what is sweet, and remembers how ‘their souls’ had ‘put their arms round each other and dropped into the same sea, content to be drowned’ (136). The man plies her with beautiful phrases, “‘When you look at me with those wild eyes I feel I could tell you things that I would never breathe to another human being’’’, and although she senses a ‘hint of mockery’, she is hooked (136). Despite the fact that he cannot remember his own childhood dog from a story he told her, hinting that her assessment of him as the wrong prince at the wrong time was indeed correct, she remains seated until he confirms her original view of reality: ‘After I had recognized you today – I had to take such a leap – I had to take a leap over my whole life to get back to that time. [. . . ] I’ve often thought how I must have bored you. And now I understand so perfectly why you wrote to me as you did – although at the time that letter nearly finished my life. I found it again the other day, and I couldn’t help laughing as I read it. It was so clever’. (136–7)

The comment on age, as well as his laughing at her attempts to make him understand her feelings, break the spell. Vera wisely begins to retreat but he catches ‘up one of her gloves from the table’, clutching it ‘as if that would hold her’ (137). He apologises: “‘I see so few people to talk to nowadays, that I have turned into a sort of barbarian’’’, and her anger dies as he reminds her how he used to wish he was “‘a sort of carpet for you to walk on so that you need not be hurt by the sharp stones and mud that you hated’’’ (137). This causes ‘the strange beast in her bosom [. . . ] to purr’ (137). As he goes on to say that he recognised she was “‘more lonely than anybody else in the world’’’, but she was also “‘the only person in the world who was really,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies truly alive’’’, her faith in him as her Prince Charming is restored. ‘This was the only man who had ever understood her. Was it too late? Could it be too late? She was that glove that he held in his fingers’ (137). This moment is doubly seductive for Vera as it both sets up the expectation that her former ‘royal’ rank will be restored, and that there may be a chance for romance. One of the crucial aspects of romance is the idea that through joint experience, lovers create a world of their own. As Anthony Giddens explains, ‘the telling of a story is one of the meanings of “romance’’, but this story now [becomes] individualised, inserting self and other into a personal narrative which [has] no particular reference to wider social processes’.30 This shared ‘exception’ from society encourages spiritual and sexual consummation because it creates a new discourse that exists solely between the couple. This is what occurs when the Prince and Cinderella dance at the ball: the world that has judged Cinderella as ‘cinder girl’ rather than ‘princess’ spins past, the unnatural father is left behind, the cruel stepsisters become wallflowers. Vera thinks she is headed back into this world, but the man abruptly hands back her glove, stating they are just the ‘same’ as before. The symbolic glove is no longer worthy of his attention as he reveals his theoretic, rather than romantic, analysis of the former affair: ‘we were such egoists, so self-engrossed, so wrapped up in ourselves that we hadn’t a corner in our hearts for anybody else’ (137). As he rambles on, Vera flees. In their moments of flight, Mansfield’s heroines echo Perrault’s Cinderella who ‘rose up and fled, as nimble as a deer. The Prince followed, but could not overtake her.’31 Leaving Leila, the young girl, and Vera in flight, suggests that rejecting the confines of definition by fathers and false princes is essential for self-actualisation. Seeing Charity and Rosemary in their cages also highlights the desire for freedom from male dominance. By using allusions to ‘Cinderella’, and its underlying connection to ‘Donkeyskin’, both Wharton and Mansfield expose how the fantasy of male rescue into ‘happily-everafter’ is delusory, and suggest that a bad prince is worse than no prince at all. The appeal of fairy tales hinges on fulfilled fantasies and on the meek triumphing over the strong, yet, as Tatar notes, no fairy tale can be read ‘without pausing to reflect on the contrast between the happy endings of fairy tales and the hard facts of fairy tale life’.32 By using vivid fairy tale imagery to reveal the young girls’ plight in the patriarchal society around them, Wharton and Mansfield make those hard facts resonate. On the surface of things, Wharton seems to differ from Mansfield, but this is stylistic rather than thematic.

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Lustful Fathers and False Princes Both Wharton and Mansfield retell ‘Cinderella’, to ‘challenge and resist cultural restrictions’.33 They are less concerned with creating comforting endings and more concerned with what Warner calls ‘the context of the tales, their relation to society and history’.34 Instead, they show us that ‘happily-ever-after’ in the arms of Prince Charming offers ‘scant help compared’ to the promise ‘things could change – and they might’.35 While the characters in Wharton’s novella and Mansfield’s stories may not be able to see how that promise will manifest itself, their struggle away from the false prince toward reality is the stroke at midnight that changes the course of the fairy tale. Notes 1. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Family Portraits,’ review of The Age of Innocence (1920), in Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ed. Candace Waid (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 398–9. 2. Significant arguments have been made about the incorporation of fairy tales into the work of Wharton and Mansfield, although not these particular fairy tales. For Wharton, see specifically Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 57–96; Carol J. Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 23; Peter L. Hays, ‘Signs in Summer: Words and Metaphors’, Papers on Language & Literature, 25 (1989), pp. 114–19. Katherine Mansfield’s connection to fairy tales has been explored in C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 83–84, 213–21; Delphine Soulhat, ‘Kezia in Wonderland’ in Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 101–112; Richard Corballis, ‘A Neglected Story by Katherine Mansfield’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 8 (1990), pp. 45–8. 3. Edith Wharton, Summer (New York: Signet, 1993). Further references to Summer are to this edition and page numbers are supplied in the text. 4. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Wordsworth, 2006). Further references to Mansfield’s stories are to this edition and page numbers are supplied in the text. 5. Wharton refers to Perrault’s version in The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905): ‘But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon wearied of the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken pumpkin back again into the golden coach’ (p. 194). Mansfield discusses Perrault’s ‘Cinderella’ in the Notebooks and uses the term ‘fairy godmother’ in several of her stories, as discussed elsewhere in this article. 6. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. xxi. 7. Ammons, p. 96. 8. Sara Halprin, Look at My Ugly Face! (New York: Viking, 1995), p. 244. 9. Warner, p. 276. 10. Halprin, p. 245. 11. Joan Gould, Spinning Straw into Gold (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 68–9.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 12. Kathy Grafton, ‘Degradation and Forbidden Love in Edith Wharton’s Summer’, Twentieth Century Literature, 41 (1995), pp. 350–66. 13. Ammons, p. 96. 14. Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads! Fairy tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 133. 15. Tatar, p. 133. 16. Kathy A. Fedorko, Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1995), p. 79. 17. Geoffrey Walton, Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), p. 91. 18. Ammons, p. 141. 19. Ammons, pp. 48–9. 20. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury, New Zealand and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 2, p. 160. 21. Ammons, pp. 142–3. 22. See Tatar, pp. 120–39. 23. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Cinderella.’ in Maria Tatar, ed., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 117–22. 24. Charles Perrault, ‘Donkeyskin’, in Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales, p. 113. 25. See also Hankin, pp. 217–18 for a discussion of ‘Her First Ball’s’ Cinderella motifs. 26. Jane Yolen. ‘America’s Cinderella.’ in Alan Dundes, ed., Cinderella: A Casebook (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 296. 27. Gould, p. 72. 28. Halprin, p. 244. 29. This can also be seen in Mansfield’s ‘A Little Governess’, which has elements of ‘Cinderella’, but more closely echoes ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. See Ann Martin, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Although different from my own arguments, I highly recommend Pamela Dunbar’s discussions of ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ and ‘The Little Governess’ as ‘Cinderella’ in Radical Mansfield (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 30. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 45. 31. Charles Perrault, ‘Cinderella’, in Alan Dundes, ed., Cinderella: A Casebook (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 20. 32. Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. xxxii. 33. Tatar, Off With Their Heads!, p. 237. 34. Warner, p. xxi. 35. Warner, p. xxi.

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POETRY

‘Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand. . . ’ Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand, A fathom of earth, alive in air, Aloof as an admiral on the old rocks, England below me: Eastward across the Midland plains An express is leaving for a sailor’s country; Westward is Wales Where on clear evenings the retired and rich From the french windows of their sheltered mansions See the Sugarloaf standing, an upright sentinel Over Abergavenny. When last I stood here I was not alone; happy Each thought the other, thinking of a crime, And England to our meditations seemed The perfect setting: But now it has no innocence at all; It is the isolation and the fear, The mood itself; It is the body of the absent lover, An image to the would-be hero of the soul, The little area we are willing to forgive Upon conditions. For private reasons I must have the truth, remember These years have seen a boom in sorrow; Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 79–83 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0029 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies The presses of idleness issued more despair And it was honoured, Gross Hunger took on more hands every month, Erecting here and everywhere his vast Unnecessary workshops; Europe grew anxious about her health, Combines tottered, credits froze, And business shivered in a banker’s winter While we were kissing. To-day no longer occupied like that, I give The children at the open swimming pool Lithe in their first and little beauty A closer look; Follow the cramped clerk crooked at his desk, The guide in shorts pursuing flowers In their careers; A digit of the crowd, would like to know Them better whom the shops and trams are full of, The little men and their mothers, not plain but Dreadfully ugly. Deaf to the Welsh wind now, I hear arising From lanterned gardens sloping to the river Where saxophones are moaning for a comforter, From Gaumont theatres Where fancy plays on hunger to produce The noble robber, ideal of boys, And from cathedrals, Luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone, The high thin rare continuous worship Of the self-absorbed. Here, which looked north before the Cambrian alignment, Like the cupped hand of the keen excavator Busy with bones, the memory uncovers The hopes of time; Of empires stiff in their brocaded glory, The luscious lateral blossoming of woe Scented, profuse; And of intercalary ages of disorder When, as they prayed in antres, fell

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Poetry Upon the noblest in the country night Angel assassins. Small birds above me have the grace of those who founded The civilization of the delicate olive, Learning the laws of love and sailing On the calm Aegean; The hawk is the symbol of the rule by thirst, The central state controlling the canals; And the blank sky Of the womb’s utter peace before The cell, dividing, multiplied desire, And raised instead of death the image Of the reconciler. And over the Cotswolds now the thunder mutters: ’What little of the truth your seers saw They dared not tell you plainly but combined Assertion and refuge In the common language of collective lying, In codes of a bureau, laboratory slang And diplomats’ French. The relations of your lovers were, alas, pictorial; The treasure that you stole, you lost; bad luck It brought you, but you cannot put it back Now with caresses. ‘Already behind you your last evening hastens up And all the customs your society has chosen Harden themselves into the unbreakable Habits of death, Has not your long affair with death Of late become increasingly more serious; Do you not find Him growing more attractive every day? You shall go under and help him with the crops, Be faithful to him, and to your friends Remain indifferent.’ And out of the turf the bones of war continue; ‘Know then, cousin, the major cause of our collapse Was a distortion in the human plastic by luxury produced,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Never higher than in our time were the vital advantages; To matter entire, to the unbounded vigours of the instrument, To all logical precision we were the rejoicing heirs. But pompous, we assumed their power to be our own, Believed machines to be our hearts’ spontaneous fruit, Taking our premises as shoppers take a tram. While the disciplined love which alone could have employed these engines Seemed far too difficult and dull, and when hatred promised An immediate dividend, all of us hated. Denying the liberty we knew quite well to be our destiny, It dogged our steps with its accusing shadow Until in every landscape we saw murder ambushed. Unable to endure ourselves, we sought relief In the insouciance of the soldier, the heroic sexual pose Playing at fathers to impress the little ladies, Call us not tragic; falseness made farcical our death: Nor brave; ours was the will of the insane to suffer By which since we could not live we gladly died: And now we have gone for ever to our foolish graves.’ The Priory clock chimes briefly and I recollect I am expected to return alive My will effective and my nerves in order To my situation. ‘The poetry is in the pity,’ Wilfred said, And Kathy in her journal, ‘To be rooted in life, That’s what I want.’ These moods give no permission to be idle, For men are changed by what they do; And through loss and anger the hands of the unlucky Love one another. W. H. AUDEN Copyright © 1936 by W. H. Auden, renewed. First appeared in LOOK STRANGER! published by Faber and Faber. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

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Poetry

Katherine Mansfield’s House I imagine Katherine nowhere to be seen. Her childhood home full now of stilted reverence, dark skirting boards, stairs. Of course the wash-house has a dried-out, blue-bag on the window-ledge. It has hush, stuff, the strain of time. Outside, the garden leaps and bounds bright inside its borders despite the hiss of rain. KAY MCKENZIE COOKE

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DIARY

From Isola Bella: A Writing Journal Chris Price A few days after first setting foot in the Katherine Mansfield Memorial room, Menton, in April 2011, I began to keep a journal in order to record the small things that would otherwise vanish from memory, to retain the fine texture of a year. I decided to impose some degree of concision by using a form approximating poetry, but I agreed with myself that I would not write capital p Poems unless they happened to barge in unannounced. The journal would be my private record of a marvelous year, memory on paper. It became my warm-up routine, then my avoidance strategy and place to have fun: this is a selection of entries from the month of May. 2 May A poem is as hard to like as a person says Emily Gould. Oh Emily, how true! Sometimes the person, sometimes the poem is harder. What makes the frog suppose you will appreciate him any better on the hundredth hearing? And yet he persists, with his three-note wonder. But the poem you dislike will not pursue you, which point is in poetry’s favour; and by the one you do you will be happily pursued.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 84–91 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0031 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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From ‘Isola Bella: A Writing Journal’ 3 May So terror’s dead. They chopped off its head. Is that the end? Not likely. All the water in Davy Jones’ locker won’t cleanse those hands or drown the hydra.* * Reading backwards is a fine thing. By means of it one realises, eventually and again, the personal truth of Shakespeare’s notion that there is nothing new under the sun, and refreshes one’s sense of one’s own ignorance. Things by other writers that seem original turn out to be knock-offs: for instance, I have just encountered Christopher Smart’s 1763 ‘My Cat Jeoffry’, even more fresh and wonderful than the Peter Reading poem I liked so much that I clipped it from the TLS to put in the course reader for students, and on which the Reading poem clearly and closely – I now discover – models itself. Perhaps every educated English person or TLS reader would know this, but until now I did not, imagining the Reading poem to be an entirely invented pastiche. Not only that, but one’s own productions also turn out to be, if not knock-offs, then at least unconsciously influenced by things one has not even read, thanks to the mysteries of tradition and transmission. I had not read David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) or Francis Ponge (prose poems) when I wrote Brief Lives: now I see that indirectly they were among my masters. I am gradually discovering that there is long tradition of digressive writers to whom I belong by both temperament and practice – not a mainstream, certainly, but a respectable tributary. At present I am anticipating the discovery that Thomas Browne is another of my ancestors. And looking forward to filling that great ancestral missing link, Montaigne. As for Kit Smart, he may have suffered from religious mania, but he instantly enters my pantheon. I wanted to put the book down and not spoil the effect by reading anything else. 4 May Of all the possible reasons to phone home a tornado in my father’s garden was

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Katherine Mansfield Studies not one. Green snowstorm of liquidambar leaves taking off before the tree came down, concrete hail of roof tiles from next door – but his house (my house) intact. In dreams my oldest hurts go there to stage themselves. The theatre could have been dismantled brick by brick, and me left stranded here without ID, no one to call in case of emergency. 11 May The lost cello concerto of Katherine Mansfield would contain the sound of two moths dining on a fur coat somewhere in Hamburg and the flare of the match as they lit their small postprandial cigars a child’s sullen sandals scuffing the dirt outside her own back door and that intermittent flutter which is the fear of two women in a villa the irritation of English rain the light-fingered scurry of green lizards and from summer’s busy till the unremitting sound of attention joyfully paid. I have left for last the sound of sobbing which is the cello’s special remit

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From ‘Isola Bella: A Writing Journal’ because it’s not motif or theme, but underpinning: invisible stays and struts and infusion of the wood’s warm breath, the smell of cedar, wax and orange blossom the high-strung bass note of horsehair on catgut. * Reasons to love a mistake (thank you Ezra Pound): A mistake may move a whole culture on A mistake may reveal what has been hidden A mistake can clear a space into which our own ignorance may step forward without blushing A mistake is only a mistake the first time you make it A mistake initiates conversation A mistake refines the experiment And sometimes a mistake is just a mistake and knows itself for the first time. 15 May (Palais Lutetia) At cocktail hour the white cockerel of Montée du Lutetia stretches his neck to crow over his patient floppy-eared companion, size of a small dog, that hops behind the chicken wire. He’s heard it all before. And now the conga player in La Consolation down below begins his nightly rehearsal: du-duk – tok — du-duk – tok. Rhythm and repetition, your wellworn tools, can sometimes feel like prison. Each day

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Katherine Mansfield Studies you open the same box, the same beak; is it madness to expect something different? 18 May I need to go back to the ants because they’re gone. For days I watched the tiny holes in the dirt outside my door, perfect circles of penetrating darkness at the centre of miniature volcanoes, and wondered what had made them. Eventually I saw the creature burrow back in – a flying ant, one of the band that had been executing a Parkinsonian scribble millimetres above the ground on which I had looked down for days from my perch atop the Latin-inscribed cushion on the doorstep in the sun with morning coffee. (Can’t read the cushion either.) Sometimes a flash of cadmium yellow or orange would fan out from an abdomen then fold back in. That’s all there is to say of it – their untranslated graffiti was a part of this. 19 May Peacock feathers: five sentences ‘from’ twenty-five words by Katherine Mansfield In no way ardent, all-over waxy, I was finally granted a sickle-shaped breath.

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From ‘Isola Bella: A Writing Journal’ Under ghastly mountains the lady’s maid loathed the foam chaufféd. In her sicklied bodice the babe in the wood makes not a ripple of difference. Each letter to Skeaton grows horns – a heliotrope confession. Her torrential Russian was adopted, the son of a fowl and a chunk of coal who could not keep him. For some, that would be enough – that would be the poem. For me, Charles Simic’s mojo hand is still needed to make art from chance, turn a throw of the dice into a full house. But there is something of Mansfield in those sentences, nonetheless, perhaps because the words came from the letters and journals. The blurb of the Collected Stories, in an unattributed quote, calls her ‘the one peacock in New Zealand’s literary garden’. I don’t think that could be said now: the tone is all wrong, and what does it mean anyway – that she was proud and exotic and magnificent, not small and brown and flightless? I once saw a peacock while out walking in the bush in deepest darkest Taranaki – it stalked slowly ahead of us, carrying its wedding-train behind it with perfect composure, up the old grass road that goes over the top of the hill where the one-lane, wood-braced tunnel known locally as the Hobbit Hole was later put through. One of the most astonishing moments – and yet I’ve never figured out a way to use it that would not be so freighted it would sink under the weight of its own obvious and over-rich symbolism. (There’s time yet, though, still time.) Never did like wedding-cake. Another day I’ll try the stories themselves and see what kind of hand they deal. * My dog is the biggest dog in Menton. When he walks down the Promenade du Soleil all the little shitting dogs tremble behind human legs. His tail clears wine and ice-cream from a table at a stroke. Four servants attend him, carrying a baldachin.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies He has the biggest mane, the best-clipped legs, and all the dogs of Menton know their bitches pant for him. Now he ascends above the yachts in the marina, barking as he goes, while down below the dogs of Menton shut their muzzles in wonder. He is Helios, sun-dog flaming above the Mediterranean on his way to a rendezvous with Pan and Cocteau. 25 May DSK – DNA. And Lars von Trier’s a ‘Nazi’. The local scandals glimmer and flash. We adopt them with our tenancy as if we’re not just in the world but worldly. 27 May Today the angry buzz of petrol and money can be heard all the way from Monaco, down here where the yellow glass and white globe of a dollsized oil-lamp supplies the necessary glow. Margaret Drabble’s reading of the story provokes a petty irritation – pronouncing Kezia like easier, not Kezia like desire. But the grand prix also delivers today’s visitor,

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From ‘Isola Bella: A Writing Journal’ English Adrian, dyed hair, failing sight, in perhaps his sixties, who stops by each time he’s here, he says, because hers was ‘such a sad little life’, which makes my pint-sized heart contract then momentarily enlarge at this glassdarkly glimpse of the sadness in his. *

A response to news of the death of Osama bin Laden on 2 May.

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Sunday Jessica Whyte

Hilda stood over the steaming range, the heat of the kitchen seeping into her skin. Silence consumed her, broken only by the occasional twitter of a lark. She usually savoured these moments of solitude, but today the silence stung her. She had heard them all laughing excitedly as they walked down the cliff path, full of rumours about the shipwreck, more than two hours ago. She glanced hopefully at the kitchen clock but it ticked mercilessly on. Outside, the sun was hazy and the seagulls wheeled above; it sounded to Hilda as though they called her name. A butterfly battered its beautiful wings outside the window and Hilda idly watched its hopeless quest to find a way in. The heat in the room was unbearable. The blackened copper churned the bed sheets in a rolling boil and her woollen stockings prickled under her skirt. A limp tendril of hair clung to her left ear. ‘Why not,’ she thought sadly. . . The answer belonged here in the kitchen. Hilda carefully laid the last piece of newspaper on the freshlyscrubbed flagstones and went through to the sitting room. She polished the painted oak dresser, carefully dusting each piece of crockery and the feel of the pottery beneath her fingers comforted her a little. A charred log slipped out of the grate and she pushed it back with the tip of her buckled shoe. The fire crackled melodically, like the bars of a song. Hilda hummed along under her breath, her fine voice subdued by the weight of propriety. Impatience made her clumsy and the bright fruit bowl with its perfect, waxy apples almost slipped from her grasp. Apples rolled across the limestone floor, bruising deliciously. Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 92–98 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0032 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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‘Sunday’ A small part of Hilda was disappointed, for she had already imagined the scene . . . broken shards of glass . . . browning apples . . . Mrs. Murry’s agitation. Hilda’s neck tingled with excitement under her starched collar as she imagined how they would finally notice her. . . maybe then she would become real. At lunchtime she had quietly ascended the stairs from Mr. Murry’s study to the tower, carefully balancing a tray. The poached egg had glimmered as the sun shone across its quivering yolk, while the camomile tea had curled a finger of steam into the dancing dust of the stairwell. Hilda had hesitated outside the door, hearing voices. She’d leant closer, and had bitten her lip with delight when she overheard their casual betrayals; ‘It’s no good Jack, I simply can’t write in this god-forsaken place. Bitterness swirls around them all the time like this vile, damp Cornish mist. The degradation of it all! If I have to endure another day with that immense German pudding Frieda I shan’t be responsible for what I’ll do. . . she devours Lawrence and he delights in it. I can’t be at one with such people.’ Hilda had imagined Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence sitting together next door, calmly oblivious to criticism, and she’d smiled. Hilda had missed Mr. Murry’s reassuring, muffled reply but the sound of his voice had made the blood rush to her cheeks. The imperious voice had risen again, ‘If it’s not the Lawrence’s it’s that dreadful Cornish Pasty downstairs. . . I could hear her all morning with her thick ankles positively stumping about. . . I swear she does it on purpose. She’s late with my egg again too. I put that kitchen clock forward to make her on time, but it’s made not a jot of difference. I even tried to write her into a story this morning, can you imagine? What was I thinking? I sat staring at a blank page.’ Hilda had felt tears prick behind her eyelids. . . the tray had shaken as she’d gripped it too tightly with her coarse hands. Her ankles had suddenly felt like lead weights tied to the bottom of her legs . . . dragging her down . . . pulling her under. She had swayed; the cooling egg had stared back at her with one yellow accusing eye. She’d been startled when the door flung open and Mr. Murry passed her on the landing, barely glancing at her as he’d made his way downstairs. His hair bounced in the sunlight but his dark eyes looked away. He stooped slightly as he walked, which always made Hilda’s heart rush with tenderness, making her wish she could run her rough fingers through his curly hair and let her coarse skin brush the delicate curve at the nape of his neck.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ‘Oh there you are at last, you’re three minutes late,’ Mrs. Murry had cried, her lips pursed in disapproval. Hilda had crept into the room with what she hoped was a penitent smile. ‘Put it on the desk,’ Mrs. Murry had said dismissively as she’d flung herself back onto the sofa. Hilda had heard the striking of a match and soon a wreath of cigarette smoke had enveloped them both. Hilda had hardly dared disturb the immaculate desk; books in neat piles. . . medicine bottles lined up together like soldiers awaiting commands. . . ink bottles full, a pen lying unused beside them. A rattling cough had come from the corner. Mrs. Murry’s hair was blunt and shocking to Hilda, like unexpected nakedness. She had been wearing an exquisite jacket in black and gold and Hilda had longed to reach out and touch the rich material but feared it would sting like a wasp. A few drops left over from yesterday’s rain had been seeping through the cracks in the ceiling, shimmering in the sunlight which streamed into the room from the huge windows. The rays had bounced back from the yellow walls and bathed Mrs. Murry in a near-angelic light. Hilda had gazed at her transfixed; she was breathtaking. . . marvellous! What Hilda wouldn’t give to be marvellous, even just for one day. The room was studded with Cornish pitchers to catch the rain, and Mrs. Murry had sat deep in thought, staring into the fire, the pitchers round her feet like an attentive crowd. Hilda had silently left the room, both hurt and enraptured. Hilda stared out of the small round window of the sitting room, an apple still in her hand. She imagined she was on a ship, staring out of the porthole onto a rolling sea. Lunchtime felt like a lifetime ago. She rested her hands on the windowsill and the cool stone soothed her chapped palms. A clock ticked loudly on the wall behind her. Outside, the rugged green landscape was scattered with granite boulders. . . lone sentinels gazing out to the distant peacock sheen of the sea. Hilda felt attached to these stern guards that encircled her, both sheltering and stifling. The gorse bells danced all the way down to the shore and in the distance she fancied she could see the speck of a shipwreck, but it was just a wheeling gull. The light wavered between the clouds with a honeyed glow and Hilda thought about Mr. Lawrence raving about Zennor’s ‘extraordinary light’. For Hilda, everything she saw was as familiar and everyday as the hard little bunions on her feet. A band of swirling mist crept up from the village, threatening the lazy heat of the afternoon. Under the window black chairs stood like a row of mourners. On one, Mrs. Murry had casually thrown a shawl, also black but interlaced with shimmering silver threads. Hilda admired its immaculate fringing,

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‘Sunday’ guiltily picking it up, feeling the silk run through her hands like water, daring to drape it round her shoulders. The rich black silk showed up the faded grey-black of her threadbare skirt. She looked in Mrs. Murry’s gold mirror . . . in the background she could see swaying gorse and a field full of primroses, but the girl who looked back at her was unfamiliar. Hilda gasped and threw her hand up to her mouth and the girl in the mirror did the same. The shawl slipped to the floor and Hilda was herself again. For a moment she had been frightened; the girl in the mirror had the same haunted eyes as Mrs. Murry . . . Hilda’s eyes were bovine, or so her father said. Back in the kitchen Hilda knelt painfully, pulling the damp sheets of newspaper from the floor. The butterfly had triumphed and found its way through a chink in the window, and now lay flapping its wings languidly on the windowsill. Hilda put a cloth over the saffron cake and lids on the freshly-made jam. Some jars stood empty, waiting to be filled when the blackberries were picked. Hilda lined them up regimentally. She carried the copper outside and ran the steaming sheets through a mangle. Underneath the dining-room window a calf had curled up in the shade and flattened the vegetable plots. Hilda knew Mr. Lawrence would get into one of his tempers but the calf wouldn’t move, just stared at her with sad, sullen, wide eyes. Hilda draped the damp sheets over a gorse bush to dry; the gorse smelt hot and sweet. The wind was picking up and the clouds were low in the sky. . . a shadow passed across her and she shivered. Reluctantly, she stepped into the outhouse and changed the bucket under the flimsy cane seat. The smell made Hilda wrinkle her nose as she slopped the contents into the garden waste pile. Was this really her destiny, her place in the order of things? She called out loud in sudden exasperation . . . ‘WHY?’ The rugged hillside echoed her question back to her, but gave no answer. ‘Hilda?’ She hadn’t heard the footsteps and she wheeled round, the stinking pail still in her hand. Charlie stood looking at her, puzzlement on his simple face. ‘I’ve been shipwrecking,’ he said with barely concealed excitement, ‘I got some useful wood. Once it dries out it’ll be good for kindling.’ ‘Any Spanish gold?’ Hilda asked, trying to feign disinterest. Charlie clutched a bunch of wilting primroses, bluebells and violets which he thrust towards her. ‘Got these for you,’ he said, grinning broadly from underneath his shock of curly hair. A stalk of grass hung from the side of his mouth, a crushed primrose in his buttonhole. Charlie should be on the farm, but everybody knew he couldn’t resist a shipwreck.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ‘Thank you,’ Hilda said, touched by the gesture. The flowers smelt of spring and the salt spray of the sea. Charlie made to follow her into the house; ‘Oh no you don’t, Charlie Jelbert, I’ve just scrubbed this floor. Be off with you, Mrs. Murry will be home any minute.’ He backed off reluctantly. ‘Oh and make yourself useful and move that calf from under the window.’ He touched his forelock in mock deference and she watched him effortlessly drove the calf away. She put the flowers in an empty jam jar and the butterfly settled on a bluebell, its fragile wings the intense turquoise of the sea. She had danced with Charlie at the last village social . . . he was Zennor’s best dancer and she had felt alive for a moment in his arms. But his hair, although dark and curly, was coarse . . . it could not compare with Mr. Murry’s silky curls. The kitchen door flew open and the clatter of muddy feet spoiled her spotless floor. Mrs. Murry’s thin, usually pale face was flushed with excitement as they tramped dirty footprints through to the sitting room. Hilda heard the rumble of happy chatter as she put the kettle on the range, pre-empting Mrs. Murry’s call for tea. She uncovered the saffron cake and lined up the teacups on a tray. She longed to know about the wreck but she made herself wait patiently whilst the kettle slowly boiled. Laughter and the smell of cigarette smoke tantalised her. She could hear Mr. Lawrence, his voice raised, loudly condemning the war. She took the tray through, poured the tea, and waited hopefully. Mrs. Murry coughed, while Mr. Murry sat apart, deep in thought. Mr. Lawrence bit his ink-stained fingernails and did not thank Hilda when she passed his cup. She looked at his straggly ginger beard and recoiled. He was goading Mr. Murry again. . . oh what an unpleasant, moody, sarcastic little man he was, Hilda thought. His wife Frieda smiled and met Hilda’s eyes, saying ‘ooh, delicious,’ when she tasted the cake. Hilda liked her stout, reassuring, motherly manner. She was radiant in a red crepe dress and a wide hat with a bright red velvet ribbon and as always, she was laughing. Beside Frieda, Mrs. Murry was diminished somehow, in her plain black straw hat, but her eyes glowed with fierce intensity under the shadowy brim. ‘The wreck was just divine,’ Frieda was telling her, ‘Lorenzo here got the whole story from those sailors, in French no less.’ She smiled at her husband but he rolled his eyes with disinterest; ‘the Emmanuel Espana it was called, which is frightfully exotic, don’t you think? We sat on the cliffs in the sun and watched the little boats circling the sinking ships like ants round a sugar bowl.’ Hilda devoured the news greedily but Frieda changed tack: ‘We got some mutton from Mr. Hocking, at the farm.’

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‘Sunday’ ‘Mutton, M’m?’ Hilda replied, confused. ‘Yes, for the pasties for dinner,’ Frieda said, handing Hilda a brown paper bag, a slick of blood oozing from its corner. ‘Mutton M’m?’ Hilda repeated, this time with a touch of irritation, ‘it’s beef in Cornish pasties, not mutton.’ Frieda looked briefly abashed, then laughed. ‘Well we shall have mutton,’ she cried with a dismissive wave. As Hilda left the room, flushed with anger, she heard Mr. Lawrence berating Frieda for her ignorance about Shelley. What did this Shelley matter when Hilda had to cook mutton instead of beef? She sighed to herself and prepared the pastry with a very bad grace. There was no-one to witness her frustration but the butterfly. Hilda watched the pasties cook on the range, her eyes filling with tears which she wiped away with a corner of her apron. It couldn’t be right, to endure mutton when you knew you deserved beef. She wept for the ruined pasties. The butterfly circled her head and she feared it would singe its precious wings. In the dying light outside the kitchen Hilda could see that Frieda has abandoned the others and was wandering forlornly between the two cottages, gulping back sobs. It was an all too familiar sight. Suddenly, Mr. Lawrence stormed through the kitchen and out into the night and Hilda watched, transfixed, as he dragged Frieda across the ground, both of them kicking and screaming: ‘I’ll cut your bloody throat, you bitch!’ he yelled, and in the dusky light Hilda thought he looked like a fox, red and sleek, his beady eyes twinkling with predatory delight. Frieda squealed like a trapped rabbit, fur flying, her neck hanging limp as she struggled for breath on the stony ground. She bruised deliciously. ‘Jack, save me,’ she cried, but Mr. Murry looked at the floor. Mrs. Murry’s eyes gleamed, two pinpricks of seething jealousy, and the look of disappointment she cast towards him was worse than any reproach. Hilda willed herself to intervene, but she was rooted by obedience. Finally, the rabbit broke away, fled back to the kitchen and fell panting into a chair. The fox soon followed, subdued and contrite. Hilda stared at the pasties. . . at the mutton, not beef. A thick, horrible silence drowned them all. Hilda dared not turn round; her heart thumped and tears slid silently down her soot-powdered cheeks. She wept because, despite everything, she still longed to be marvellous. Outside on the damp grass lay a crushed hat, its red ribbon trailing in the mud. ‘Did you read the Flaubert I lent you Jack?’ Mr. Lawrence asked and the tension dispersed as though taken by the wind. Mr. Murry cleared his throat, but instead Frieda spoke, her voice unnaturally bright.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ‘Hilda, I need coffee, and I think we should save the pasties for tomorrow. I fancy macaroni cheese tonight, what do you think Lorenzo? Do you remember that exquisite macaroni cheese we had in Genoa?’ Hilda watched Frieda pull herself upright and smooth her fair hair, unaware of her bruised apple face. ‘It was a particularly good macaroni cheese, if I recall,’ her husband replied, stroking his reddish chin, ‘a little rich, maybe?’ The group moved out of the kitchen as though nothing had happened, while Hilda poured hot water into the stone sink. She rolled up her sleeves. . . soap and soda water lathered around her stinging arms as she submerged the teacups and scrubbed until her hands felt raw. . . the scalding water was a welcome punishment. The butterfly cowered in the corner, perfectly still. She didn’t hear him come into the room but she felt his eyes on the back of her neck. ‘We’ll soon be leaving, I fear,’ Mr. Murry said mournfully. Without a word, he lifted Hilda’s hands from the soapy water, the slippery suds soaking the cuffs of his tweed jacket. He opened his mouth as if to speak; she thought maybe he was going to ask her to leave with him. She thought of her mother’s disapproval, but she brushed the thought away and her lips parted to say yes. He would be her Jack; she could run her rough fingers through his curly hair. . . her coarse skin could brush the delicate curve at the nape of his neck. He felt the detestable soapiness of her hands linger on his own. Those red, roughened arms were just like his mother’s had been and he shuddered at the recollection, which had taken him unawares. He saw the butterfly flutter its translucent wings on the windowsill and he dropped Hilda’s hands back into the murky water and trapped the fragile creature under a jam jar. Then, without a backward glance, he moved away towards the laughter and the roaring fire.

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A. K. Grant Introduction by Chris McVeigh A. K. Grant was born in Wanganui, New Zealand, in 1941. He was educated in Christchurch and graduated from the University of Canterbury with an LLB. Although Alan practiced law for about fifteen years, his first love was humorous writing and he retired from being what he described as a ‘scribbling barrister’, to take up full time writing and script editing for the rest of his life. He was a unique New Zealander, combining a deep knowledge and love of history and literature with an original and effortless wit. He had a gentle but acute sense of the absurdities of life and appreciated, more than most, that true comedy lay in the often yawning gulf between human aspiration and human achievement. His publications were numerous, ranging from his satiric history of New Zealand, first published as Land Uprooted High (1971), later rewritten and enlarged as The Paua and the Glory (1982), through to parodic verse, televisions scripts and successful libretti for stage musicals. Among his many achievements was to be selected by Frank Muir for publication in his Oxford Book of Humorous Prose (1990). Muir described Alan’s ‘light, literary, gently ironic touch [. . . as being. . . ] reminiscent of the New Yorker’s E. B. White’. Alan once wrote of himself that as the mantle of ages settled increasingly firmly on his shoulders, he ‘was slowing down from the lethargy which had consumed him in his youth’. His premature death in 2000 sadly deprived New Zealanders of further such deft insights.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 99–105 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0033 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Bliss! A New Mansfield A previously unknown and, until now, unpublished work by Katherine Mansfield. . . by A. K. Grant

Now that all the excitement, colour and pageantry of the Katherine Mansfield Centennial Year is like a watercolour fading under the harsh Antipodean sunlight, it is appropriate for me to announce the discovery of a significant new body of work by that first and most feminine of our great writers. I withheld news of these discoveries during the Year itself, so as not to present Mansfield scholars with the necessity of undertaking last minute radical revisions of work long and painstakingly prepared for the centennial celebrations. But the works belong to the world, and to the shade of Mansfield herself, and I shall withhold them no longer. In 1987 I occupied for a week or two, on a visit to London, a dingy bed-sit in St John’s Wood. Sitting in the ancient, claw-footed bath one morning I noticed that the artefact was even more unstable than was customarily its condition. When I was dressed, and in a position to investigate, I discovered that one of the two feet nearest the wall had been resting, obviously for many years, on a wad of paper which some disturbance had caused to shift. There was faint writing on the folded, wadded paper, and so, rather than merely replace it under the claw foot, I opened it and began to read. Imagine my excitement when I realised that what I held in my hand was a first draft of Mansfield’s The Aloe, itself, as we all know, a first draft of Prelude. This primordial first draft was written in France in 1915 while Mansfield was still besotted with her French lover Francis Carco. That Carco was not a benign influence on Mansfield can be seen from the fact that the work he inspired is a jolly, rollicking piece, full of one-liners and entitled Aloe, Aloe. There was no television in those days, but Aloe, Aloe suggests that Mansfield had the capacity to become a successful writer for the medium, perhaps, who knows? one day creating a successful drama series entitled Bloss or Gliss. The second discovery is also an atypical piece: a thoroughly researched enquiry into Teutonic superannuation schemes called In a German Pension Fund. It is not clear what prompted Mansfield to undertake this work, but it may have been a commission from her

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Bliss! A New Mansfield father, Sir Harold Beauchamp, who as a banker was naturally interested in superannuation schemes and all that pertained thereunto. Support is lent to this theory by the fact that In a German Pension Fund was found by me in a bottle which had bobbed ashore at Day’s Bay and which also contained a note addressed to Sir Harold. From the note it appeared Mansfield had committed the bottle to the ocean currents at Bandol in the Mediterranean in 1915. Tragically, In a German Pension Fund arrived in New Zealand some 70 years too late to enable Sir Harold to incorporate its recommendations in the constitution of the Bank of New Zealand staff pension fund, but an actuary who has studied its recommendations tells me that its theoretical bases and the conclusions drawn from them seem revolutionary, not to say ruinous, even in 1989. The third work, and the one l wish to present to our literature through the pages of this magazine, is a short story entitled The Video. This piece is not, like the two mentioned earlier, a trouvaille from Mansfield’s missing corpus. It was written by myself, or, to put the matter more truthfully, it was typed by myself, with the spirit, intelligence and creativity of Katherine Mansfield animating my fingers as they flew across the keyboard of my trusty Canon Typestar. It is truly her story, l was merely her medium, and it shows her command of a subject which did not exist in her short lifetime; to wit, the video cassette recorder. Here, then, is the latest work by our greatest dead writer.

The Video A short story by the vibrant spirit of Katherine Mansfield

‘I’m home darling,’ cried Stanley Burnell, bounding into his house as a great bear might have bounded if it had been in the habit of bounding into houses. From upstairs came the faintest, softest, response. ‘Welcome home, darling,’ whispered Linda Burnell, lying on her bed, her hand pressed to her forehead while old Mrs Fairfield chafed her feet with experienced hands. ‘Come and see what I’ve bought,’ cried Stanley Burnell, his voice exultant, as though he was announcing the birth of a new world, or the sale of a parcel of BNZ shares at oh! such a handsome premium. ‘I can’t, I’m not well,’ faintly cried Linda. ‘What’s that?’ cried Stanley. ‘She says she can’t, she’s not well!’ shrieked old Mrs Fairfield.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ‘Oh,’ said Stanley Burnell, disappointed. Of course it was not Linda’s fault that she was so delicate, and in fact he loved her partly because she was so delicate. But it did take some of the bloom off things. You’d have thought a man’s wife might have taken the trouble to come downstairs on the day that he came home with a brand-new video cassette recorder. Beryl Fairfield came down, with her lovely, lovely hair, the colour of fresh fallen leaves, brown and red with a glint of yellow. She then went back up again because she had forgotten to put on her housecoat. Stanley Burnell looked after her ruefully. Beryl was drinking a lot of gin these days, and Burnell had spoken to her about it. Beryl had looked at him as though he had molested her, had burst into tears, and had then begun to sing the Cyndi Lauper hit, ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’. Burnell couldn’t bear to a woman cry, or sing ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’. He shook his head and began to see to the unpacking of the video. It came in ever such a big cardboard box. The Burnell children crept around and watched the unpacking. ‘O-oh.’ They sounded as though they were in despair. It was too marvellous, it was too much for them. They had never seen anything like it in their lives. It had everything. It had a pause button and a record button and a rewind button and a fast forward button. It had a counter timer and a memory and a reset. It had little orange lights and little red lights and little green lights. It had controls which meant that while you were hundreds of miles away – in another country, even! – it would fail to record something for you. Lottie and Kezia were almost faint with excitement. They could hardly wait to get to school the next morning. But Isabel, bossy Isabel, said: ‘I’m to tell about it first, because I’m the oldest. And anyway, lots of the other kids have got them. And anyway I know how to work it and I’m going to choose who comes to see it first. And tonight I’m going to record Family Ties.’ At playtime Isabel was surrounded by her friends. They nudged and giggled and pressed up close. And the only two who stayed outside the circle were the little Kelveys. They knew better than to come anywhere near the Burnells, video or no video. For the truth of the matter was that all manner of children were forced to mix together at that school: judges’ daughters, doctors’ children, sons of extremely rich secondhand car salesmen, the offspring of state-owned enterprise executives, the young of politicians – and the Kelveys. The Kelveys were the daughters of a topdressing pilot who had gone bankrupt. No one knew where he was. Some said he was in jail, some said he was in Brisbane, some said he was living high in the rafters of a disused television studio at Avalon. Wherever he was, he wasn’t at home

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Bliss! A New Mansfield with the Kelveys. Mrs Kelvey supported herself and her two daughters on the domestic purposes benefit. She was too proud and too honest to take the cleaning jobs offered her by the wives of the judges and the secondhand car salesmen and the doctors and the politicians. So the Kelveys were very poor and wore the strangest clothes. Lil had lots of jeans and skirts and shirts but not a single item from Esprit. Our Else’s sweatshirts were always clean but she owned nothing by Fido Dido. The Kelveys were very close. Where one went, there you would find the other. Their appearances, even, were complementary. Lil was a little wishbone of a child, with cropped hair and enormous solemn eyes. Our Else was a little drumstick of a child, with cropped eyes and enormous solemn hair. Nobody had the Kelveys to play. Kezia would have liked to. She had once asked her mother if the Kelveys, Lil and our Else, could come to play. ‘Of course not, Kezia,’ Linda Burnell had replied. ‘You can’t possibly play with someone called “our Else’’.’ ‘Why not?’ Kezia had asked. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you?’ Linda had wearily replied. ‘Spell out what?’ a puzzled Kezia had queried. Linda felt as though her brain would burst. ‘Do I have to spell out for you everything I have to spell out for you!’ she had screamed, and had gone away to lie down and have her feet chafed by old Mrs Fairfield’s expert hands. The day after the video arrived, Stanley Burnell came bounding into the house like a great – well, anyway, he came bounding into the house and was delighted to discover that his wife was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs. ‘Hello, darling, you look wonderful!’ Stanley cried. ‘How about we pop upstairs for bit of the old how’s your father?’ ‘My father is dead, as you very well know, Stanley,’ a tearful Linda responded. ‘You know what I mean, angel,’ roared Stanley. ‘Come along, there’s not a moment to lose!’ ‘Oh Stanley,’ sobbed Linda, ‘the doctor says it’s bad for my heart, and we have three children already. I can’t face the thought of another.’ ‘But sweetheart,’ said a bewildered Stanley, ‘we aren’t going to have any more children. You’ve had your tubes tied and I’ve had a

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Katherine Mansfield Studies vasectomy.’ Really, Linda’s forgetfulness was becoming very provoking. But oh! how he loved her! And he bundled her up the stairs. Afterwards, Linda pulled her wrap around her and went to the window of the bedroom. ‘Oh Stanley!’ she cried. Stanley grunted. It was the grunt of a man whose wife had taken him in her arms and made him dream again. ‘Look!’ cried Linda Burnell. ‘The aloe!’ ‘What about it?’ sleepily muttered a satiated Stanley. ‘It’s flowering!’ Linda cried. ‘So what,’ said Stanley. ‘But it only flowers once every hundred years!’ exclaimed Linda Burnell. ‘Oh Stanley! We are blessed!’ ‘Hundred years, my foot!’ said Stanley, sitting up in bed and exposing his hirsute, ursine chest. ‘I wasn’t going to wait a hundred years to see the wretched thing come out. So I fixed it.’ ‘Fixed it? How did you fix it?’ cried Linda. ‘Simple,’ said Stanley. ‘I had it genetically engineered.’ A great, racking sob, torn from the very bedrock of her being, escaped Linda. ‘What’s the matter darling?’ asked Stanley. ‘l thought you’d be pleased.’ Kezia, swinging on the big white gates of the courtyard, saw the Kelveys walking by. She would invite them in, she would! Mother had gone to the National Gallery to sneer at the paintings and Aunt Beryl was insensible upstairs. ‘Hey Lil! Our Else!’ Kezia called. ‘Would you like to come and see the video?’ The Kelveys stopped. Their eyes widened. They looked frightened. But they came. Aunt Beryl was not insensible upstairs. She was upstairs, but instead of being insensible she was angry. Oh, how furious she was! She had just received a letter from a publisher, turning her book down, the fourteenth publisher to do so. Beryl Fairfield’s book exposed a major medical and a major meat processing scandal. In fiery but majestic prose it told of a hospital where the women patients were treated like

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Bliss! A New Mansfield cattle and of a freezing works where the cattle were treated like women patients. It was a story which had to be told, and Beryl knew that she, yes she! was the woman to tell it. Bother these silly, frightened publishers! Who did they think they were? She suddenly needed a good stiff drink, and went downstairs in search of Stanley’s gin. He always hid it, and Beryl always found it. Stanley was so unimaginative. Passing through the hall, Beryl heard the sound of the television. She strode into the sitting-room and saw Kezia and the Kelveys, sitting watching some silly video, entranced. Beryl marched across the room and punched the stop button. Out went the little red lights and the little green lights and the little orange lights. ‘Kezia!’ Beryl cried. ‘How dare you have these horrid, common little children in the house! Why, you might catch something from them! There’s a lot of it about! Be off!’ she cried to the Kelveys, and they scuttled out of the house without so much as a backward glance at the video, while Beryl stretched out languidly on the sofa and made Kezia fetch her a G and T. When the Kelveys were well out of sight of the Burnells they sat down to rest on a big red drainpipe by the side of the road. Dreamily they looked over the container facility and across towards the Overseas Passenger Terminal. What were their thoughts? Presently our Else nudged up close to her sister. But now she had forgotten the cross lady. She put out a finger and stroked her sister’s cheek; she smiled her rare smile. ‘I seen The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,’ she said softly. Then both were silent once more. First published in the NZ Listener on 22 April 1989

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REPORT

From Wellington to Fontainebleau: Three Unpublished Letters by Katherine Mansfield Gerri Kimber In 2008, the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington (ATL) acquired three letters written by Katherine Mansfield, not previously published in the O’Sullivan and Scott five volume Collected Letters.1 The first two letters, dating from 1907 and 1908, addressed to Thomas Trowell (Mansfield’s cello teacher in Wellington), and his family, form part of the collection of Trowell family papers donated to the ATL on 15 January 2008 by Thomas’s grandson, Oliver Trowell. The third letter, sent to Mansfield’s father Harold Beauchamp in 1922, was purchased by the ATL from Michael Treloar Antiquarian, Adelaide, South Australia, via http://www.abebooks.com in 2008. I am grateful to the Society of Authors, as literary representatives of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield, for granting me permission to reproduce the three letters in this report, and to the ATL for supplying images of the first letter. Mercifully, given the notorious difficulty of reading most of Mansfield’s handwritten manuscripts, her writing in all three letters is quite legible. I am, however, grateful to Vincent O’Sullivan for helping me to decipher one or two words which eluded me. I would also like to extend my thanks to Martin Griffiths, whose detailed research on the Trowells has considerably extended our knowledge and understanding of this remarkable family,2 and who answered several questions for me; also to Oliver Trowell, who responded so kindly to my queries about the donation of his family’s papers to the ATL. Thomas Luigi Trowell (1859–1945) became Mansfield’s cello teacher in Wellington during 1902, by which time his two twin sons (just a year older than Mansfield) – Thomas (known professionally as Arnold), and Garnet – were already highly proficient on the cello and violin Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 106–117 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0034 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Three Unpublished Letters by Mansfield respectively. Mansfield had become infatuated with Arnold, the gifted young cellist (whom she named ‘Caesar’), and was inspired to take up the cello herself at the age of thirteen. This teenage passion, which gave birth to anguished, yet rather self-absorbed letters, diary entries, and even an unfinished novel, ‘Juliet’, remained unrequited; as Antony Alpers succinctly notes: ‘His feeling for her was slight’.3 On her decision to start playing the cello, Ruth Elvish Mantz, Mansfield’s earliest biographer, describes how Her father was very proud of this new enthusiasm of hers, and bought her the expensive instrument and paid for her tuition. She threw all her suppressed ardour into learning to play; it became her passion. She even dressed in brown, when she could, to ‘tone’ with her cello. For the first time in her life she surrendered herself completely: she felt that she was a violoncello.4

In January 1903, Mansfield and her two elder sisters were taken to London to be educated at Queen’s College in Harley Street. Her passion for both ‘Caesar’ and the cello remained undiminished and she took lessons with the Queen’s College cello teacher, Professor Hahn. Meanwhile, in Wellington, a fund had been established for the young musical prodigies, and just six months later the Trowell twins sailed for Europe to further their musical education. In March 1906, Mansfield and her sisters were taken to Brussels by their Aunt Belle Dyer to hear Arnold perform at the conservatoire, where a Wellington gossip column reported: Young ‘Tommy Trowell’, son of Mr. Thomas Trowell, Wellington’s familiar fiddler and clarionetist [sic], is now called Arnold Trowell [. . . ], his second name having been considered more artistic than ‘Tom’, which did not go well with long hair and a tangled bohemian tie. ‘Tommy’ Arnold has made a terrific hit in that celebrated musical centre, Brussels, and the public went ‘wild’ over the cellist, if letters are to be trusted in.5

For the last three months of Mansfield’s time in London, the twins were also based there, performing well-received recitals. A school friend of Mansfield’s recalls: I met them both at the London Academy of Music, where Kathleen went to play in the orchestra every Friday (I believe). I thought them (the two T.’s) the most extraordinary beings I had ever met. Red-haired, pale, wearing huge black hats (a very familiar thing that, now) and smoking the longest cigarettes I had ever seen.6

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Fig. 1. Letter from Kathleen Beauchamp to Mr Thomas Trowell Esq, 26 September 1907, MS-Papers-8964-01, Arnold Trowell Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, N.Z.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Mansfield and her sisters arrived back in Wellington on 6 December 1906. She was now eighteen and resolute in her determination to return to London as quickly as possible. Prior to leaving the English capital, she had announced: ‘When I get to New Zealand, I’ll make myself so objectionable that they’ll have to send me away’.7 Her commitment to playing the cello remained constant during 1907–8, and she was a frequent visitor at the Wellington home of Thomas and Kate Trowell and their daughter Dolly, who were already making plans to join the twins in London in the autumn of 1907. In addition, Thomas Trowell and Mansfield performed publicly together several times, as described below for instance, in a musical afternoon tea held at the Beauchamp’s home in Fitzherbert Terrace: The feature of the tea was the delightful music from the daughters of the house, assisted by Mr. Trowell, the father of the famous twins, who are making such names in the musical world at home. Mr. Trowell is himself a fine musician, and played a violin solo charmingly. Miss Vera accompanied most sympathetically on the piano, and Miss Kathleen played the ’cello, an unusual instrument for a girl to master. The trios were exquisite, a composition of young Trowell’s being among the items.8

Mansfield’s considerable accomplishment on the cello at this time was noted by her friend Milly Parker: At the time I knew her Kass Beauchamp was a remarkable ’cellist for the short period which she had then been studying the instrument, and she was a person of unexpected replies, too, I recall. To a party of friends one afternoon she played the Boellmann Variation Symphonique very beautifully.9 At the conclusion of the piece someone exclaimed, ‘I do wish I could play the ’cello.’ ‘So do I!’ was the quick response.10

The Trowells left Wellington for England in September 1907. Mansfield was distraught, writing in her diary: ‘They leave N.Z., all of them, my people – my Father – it has come, of course. I used to think – as long as they are here I can bear it – & now? – I shall somehow or other go too. You just see!’11 The first letter in this report was written by Mansfield on 26 September 1907, just as the Trowells were preparing to depart. 4 Fitzherbert Terrace 26. IX. 07 My dear Mr. Trowell I cannot let you leave without telling you how grateful I am – and must be all my life – for all that you have done for me – and given me. You have

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Three Unpublished Letters by Mansfield shown me that there is something so immeasurably higher and deeper in Music – than I had ever realised before – And, do you know, so many times when we have been together I have felt that I must tell you, how when I came from London friendless – and disheartened – you changed everything for me – – – Looking back – I have been so stupid and you so patient – I think of that little Canon of Cherubini’s12 as a gate, opened with such great difficulty, and leading to so wide a road! And Music, which meant much before in a vague desultory fashion – is now full of inner meaning. I wish you everything in the future – Don’t you feel – that your Golden Age is coming now – and what I look forward to as the greatest joy I can imagine is to share a programme with you at a London concert – Thank you for all – and happily not goodbye Your loving, grateful pupil Kass.13

Curiously, this letter, written to her music mentor, would have a rich after-life. It presages another letter of gratitude she would write years later in 1921 to A. R. Orage, her early literary mentor, when he was editor of the Fabian weekly the New Age where many of her stories were first published.14 O’Sullivan and Scott also note that Mansfield would go on to parody it in ‘Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day’, in an effusive note sent by a music pupil.15 The letter nevertheless reveals a deep personal attachment to Thomas Trowell, together with a firm belief that she would also soon be in London again. A draft of this letter, found in Mansfield’s notebooks, was published in the Mantz biography and the first volume of the Collected Letters.16 It differs from the actual letter sent in several places, the draft being even more emotionally charged and effusive, with phrases such as ‘Please I want you to remember that all my life I am being grateful and happy and proud to have known you’, and ‘I wish you – Everything with both hands and all my Heart’, omitted from the letter which was subsequently posted. The second letter to be discussed was written four months later, the Trowells now in London. 4 Fitzherbert Terrace 10. 1. 08 My dearest Mr. and Mrs. Trowell and Dolly It is really as I thought – and I am now hoping to sail for London the month after next – but don’t expect me till I send that telegram from Graves End – which I shall most certainly not forget to do. What a magnificent recital Tom must have given on November 23rd. I heard

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Katherine Mansfield Studies about it from my friend Ida Baker – and she sent me a number of cuttings from the papers – Each one seemed finer than the last – Do let me tell you my plans. My relations wrote last mail saying that they might take me, as they thought of having a home in London after all – So Father has written and asked them to cable the one word ‘Kathleen’ if they finally decide to do so – and I shall leave here on receipt of the cable. How I am going to wait until I hear – I really do not know. Mr Johnson and his fiancée Miss Montague spent an afternoon quite lately with me. He had ‘picked up for a song’ in Palmerston an old Banks ’cello – so he brought it and played a great deal – Miss Montague is really a very clever pianist – she has such a fine grip of everything she plays, and a particularly full, round tone – He attempted a Klengle Concerto – Poppers Tarantelle – Alla Polacca – Goltermann17 – and a great deal more – It was not even pleasant to listen to – but Miss Montague enjoyed it. Oh, will that cable to come for me – please Mrs. Trowell, and then I know that it must. I felt I must just let you know how things were shaping. I am so wanting to hear from you – Shall I – soon? With much love to you from Kass18

The ‘relations’ in question refer to her Aunt Belle, now Mrs Harry Trinder, married to a stockbroker and living in Surrey. They would eventually decide against acquiring a house in London, thus potentially jeopardising Mansfield’s planned return. Mansfield had only recently returned from a month-long journey through the central North Island, sent by her father in a futile attempt to change her mind about returning to London, and also, Alpers suggests, ‘to get his troublesome daughter out of the house for a few weeks’.19 Harold Beauchamp may have achieved the latter, but his daughter was no sooner back than her moods became as black as they had been before. ‘I shall end of course – by killing myself’, she wrote in her diary on 10 February 1907.20 ‘Tom’s’ ‘magnificent recital’ on 23 November, refers to a concert given at the Bechstein Hall in London, with contralto Rosina Elston. Griffiths notes that, ‘[i]gnoring established tradition, Trowell featured in the publicity ahead of the singer’ in a programme that included ‘Popper’s Concerto in E minor, Paganini’s Non più Mesta and Trowell’s Rêverie du Soir’.21 ‘Mr Johnson’ is a misspelling of Mr Johnstone. Griffiths explains that ‘Mansfield attended [. . . ] a private recital by cellist Frank R. Johnstone. Johnstone was an Australian and had come from Melbourne for the Christchurch Exhibition

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Three Unpublished Letters by Mansfield Orchestra. Subsequently he settled in Wellington. His repertoire was, like Mansfield’s, almost identical to that played by young Trowell’.22 A ‘Banks ’cello’ refers to an instrument made by Benjamin Banks (1750–95), a violin maker working in Salisbury, who copied the instruments of Nicholas Amati. Mansfield did not ‘sail for London the month after next’ as she hoped to do in this letter, but finally left Wellington on 6 July 1908. The third letter acquired by the ATL in 2008 comes from a different period entirely in Mansfield’s life. At the time it was written, 30 September 1922, she was seriously ill and had barely three months left to live. 6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3. 30 IX 1922 Dearest Father Just a note to inform you that for the first time, I think, I have drawn my next months allowance in advance. I hope you will not mind. My reason was this. I went off to have my first treatment by the London man here and it was, to put it mildly, not at all satisfactory. It seemed to me all the appliances were different and the whole thing was of so experimental a nature that it made one feel very uneasy. Ever since I have not been well. Unpleasant internal symptoms manifested themselves at once. And the long and the short of it is that feeling rather ‘skewed’ I have decided to return to Paris at once and to go through with it there, on the spot, by the same original pa x rayer who did me so much good before. It seems such folly and more to spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar, even though the ha’porth is an expensive one. So the faithful Ida and I shall go straight off on Monday, look for a cheaper hotel than last time and there I shall remain until I am pronounced well when I shall wing my way to the South while the winter lasts. What an upheaval! But you know the very unpleasant feeling it is to be experimented on, for that is what the London treatment came to. The radiologist was most kind and anxious to do his best but there it was – he didn’t know the exact spot even, it seemed to me, and I am sure he started wandering blue rays in my liver. A great bother! My faithful Cave steamer trunk and hat box, good as ever after all these years are on the carpet again, eyeing each other, almost walking round each other, all ready for the fray. But to return to my New Zealand bank moutons. As my funds were rather low, darling, I sent a cheque and a note to Mr Mills asking him if

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Katherine Mansfield Studies he would oblige me with the money. He thereupon telephoned me from the Bank and said he would be delighted. I must say I don’t look forward to hotel life again. Mais que voulez vous? Anything to get quite well again and to be an independent human being who doesn’t need any special attention. This is not a letter. I will write fully from Paris. With fondest love, dearest Father Ever your devoted child Kass23

The matter-of-fact tone of the letter belies the urgency of Mansfield’s movements at this time, and the serious condition of her health. On arriving in London in August 1922, she had continued the Parisbased Russian doctor Manoukhin’s expensive x-ray treatment of the spleen, extolled as a cure for tuberculosis, with a London radiologist, Dr Webster. However, as the letter clearly reveals, her confidence in his treatment being as effective as that of Manoukhin’s was not high, and she therefore sought to return to Paris in order to continue the treatment with Manoukhin himself. The treatment was expensive – hence her need to draw an advance on her allowance – and ultimately useless. The letter was sent by Mansfield from the London home of Dorothy Brett to her father Harold Beauchamp who was in England, staying with her sisters Chaddie and Jeanne. Having completed her first sessions of radiation treatment in Paris earlier in 1922, she had then spent two months in Switzerland with John Middleton Murry, before returning with him to London on 17 August, she staying with Brett, he ‘simply tagging along in misery’,24 and lodging next door with Boris Anrep. During the month of September 1922, by which time Murry had escaped to Vivian Locke-Ellis’s house in Sussex, she renewed her friendship with Orage. Both were now fascinated with the esoteric theories of G. I. Gurdjieff on which they attended lectures given by P. D. Ouspensky. On the day this letter was written to her father, Mansfield had visited the London home of Ouspensky in order to obtain further details about Gurdjieff. Her intention was to return to Paris, not just to continue her treatment with Manoukhin, but with a notion of perhaps entering the community Gurdjieff was just then setting up – the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man – whose philosophy decreed that a cure for physical ailments such as tuberculosis depended first upon a healing of the inner spirit. Two days earlier, on 28 September, Orage had resigned his editorship of the New Age, in preparation for a similar move. For Mansfield, now seriously ill, this spiritual approach seemed to offer a real possibility of an alternative cure from her tuberculosis, in addition to her radiation treatment.

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Three Unpublished Letters by Mansfield The ATL holds a material remnant of this final journey to Paris; Mansfield’s faithful ‘Cave’ suitcase now forms part of its collection. H. J. Cave & Sons were London suitcase manufacturers, founded in 1839. As for the ‘New Zealand bank moutons’, I am indebted to Vincent O’Sullivan for pointing out that the term was a private joke she maintained with her father. The French expression ‘revenons à nos moutons’ derives from an anonymous medieval French play, and means ‘let’s get back to the subject at hand’. A similar expression meaning the same thing – ‘retournons à nos moutons’ – occurs in several letters by Mansfield. The phrase ‘pa x rayer’ expands on the Beauchamp family’s term ‘pa man’, used frequently by Mansfield and meaning an original, yet solid and dependable character. The original ‘pa man’, and source for several legendary stories which Mansfield delighted in recounting, was her paternal grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp.25 Mansfield returned to Paris on 3 October for further radiation treatment with Manoukhin. On 17 October she entered Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau. She died there just three months later on 9 January 1923. Notes 1. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008). Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number. 2. See Martin Griffiths, ‘Arnold Trowell – Violoncellist, Composer and Pedagogue’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Waikato, 2012). 3. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), p. 20. 4. Ruth Elvish Mantz and John Middleton Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1933), p. 168. 5. Anon, ‘All sorts Of People’, New Zealand Free Lance, 7: 314, 7 July 1906, p. 3. 6. Mantz, p. 218. 7. Mantz, p. xx. 8. Anon, ‘Life in the City’, Wairarapa Daily Times, 30 April 1907, p. 3. 9. Leon Boellmann (1862–1897), ‘Variations Symphoniques for Cello and Piano’, Op. 23. 10. Mantz, p. 251. 11. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury, New Zealand and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 107. Hereafter referred to as Notebooks, followed by volume and page number. 12. Martin Griffiths notes (via email with the author, 08/02/12), that the Cherubini Canon may be from Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley’s, A Treatise on Counterpoint, Canon and Fugue, Based upon that of Cherubini (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869). However, Mansfield could also be referring to the 1884 Novello, Ewer and Co.

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13. 14.

15.

16.

edition, a revision by Joseph Bennett of an 1854 translation by Mary Cowden Clarke. Novello’s editions were very widely marketed – and almost certainly cheaper than the Clarendon edition. (They were also the publisher of the 1854 edition in their Novello’s Library for the Diffusion of Musical Knowledge series.) Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. MS-Papers-8964. Letters from Kathleen Beauchamp to Mr Thomas Trowell, Esq. ‘I want to tell you how sensible I am of your wonderful unfailing kindness to me in the “old days.’’ And to thank you for all you let me learn from you. I am still – more shame to me – very low down in the school. But you taught me to write, you taught me to think; you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do’. Letters, 4, p. 177 [9 February 1921]. ‘I feel I cannot go to sleep until I have thanked you again for the wonderful joy your singing gave me this evening. Quite unforgettable. You make me wonder, as I have not wondered since I was a girl, if this is all. I mean, if this ordinary world is all. If there is not, perhaps, for those of us who understand, divine beauty and richness awaiting us if we only have the courage to see it. And to make it ours. . . . The house is so quiet. I wish you were here now that I might thank you in person. You are doing a great thing. You are teaching the world to escape from life!’ Extract from ‘Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day’, in Antony Alpers, ed., The Stories of Katherine Mansfield: Definitive Edition (Auckland: Oxford University Press), p. 262. See also Letters, 1, p. 25, n. 1. See Mantz, pp. 281–2, Notebooks, 1, p. 109, and Letters, 1, p. 25. The draft letter reads: My dear Mr Trowell I cannot let you leave without telling you how grateful I am, and must be all my life, for what you have done for me, and given me. You have shown me that there is something so immeasurably higher and greater than I had ever realised before in Music, and therefore, too, in Life. Do you know – so many times when you have been with me I have felt that I must tell you that when I came from England, friendless and sorrowful, you changed all my life – – – And Music which meant much to me before in a vague desultory fashion, is now fraught with inner meaning. Please I want you to remember that all my life I am being grateful & happy and proud to have known you. Looking back I have been so stupid and you so patient. I think of that little Canon of Cherubini’s as a gate, opened with so much difficulty & leading to so wide a road. I wish you – Everything with both hands and all my heart, & what I look forward to as the greatest joy I can imagine is to share a programme with you at a London concert. (Notebooks, 1, p. 109)

17. David Popper (1843–1913), ‘Tarantella’, Op. 33; Julius Klengel (1859–1933), a prolific composer of works for cello; Georg Goltermann (1824–1898) ‘Alla Pollacca’ (Morceaux Caractéristiques, Op. 48). In an email to the author (14/03/12), Griffiths states: ‘The Popper “Tarantelle’’ is a virtuoso piece that is still standard repertoire today. Julius Klengel’s concertos have recently been recorded by Christoph Richter and the Hannover Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. Georg Goltermann’s “Alla Pollacca’’ (Morceaux Caractéristiques, Op. 48), is included in a collection of pieces for cello and piano along with a transcription of Mark Hambour’s Volkslied (the same Hambourg Mansfield refers to in her letter, dated October 1907, to

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Martha Putnam). The collection is called Volume 1, Red Album of Twelve Pieces for Violoncello and Piano published by Schott and Co. I do not know the exact publication date but it must be in the first decade of the twentieth century.’ See also Griffiths, p. 41, n. 188. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. MS-Papers-8964. Letters from Kathleen Beauchamp to Mr Thomas Trowell, Esq. Alpers, p. 56. Notebooks, 1, p. 109. Griffiths, p. 64. Griffiths, p. 41. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. MS-Papers-9116. Letter from Katherine Mansfield to Sir Harold Beauchamp. Alpers, p. 369. Alpers, p. 7.

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A Note on Larkin on Mansfield C. K. Stead In his Selected Letters Philip Larkin had already been revealed as an admirer of Katherine Mansfield, though with a kind of butch embarrassment, as if it had to be explained to his male friends, and excused. Several things surprised me about the man revealed in the recently published Letters to Monica, published by Faber and selected and helpfully edited by Anthony Thwaite.1 The first was how genial Larkin could seem, how little there was of the famous reactionary (he is hardly political at all); and though there is something of the curmudgeon, he is more eccentric than that description suggests, always having difficulty doing ordinary things, worried about where his talent for fiction has gone and where his next poem is coming from; anxious, apprehensive, unable to make up his mind. But he is reading all the time, and commenting on his reading with uncommon keenness, indifference to accepted views, and high intelligence. And one of the admirations he shared with his friend and lover of many years, Monica Jones, was of Mansfield. In fact Monica seems to admit to using Mansfield sometimes to get him to write to her: ‘I’m touched and amused to see how, always, a little of KM shakes a letter out of you to me – it does, doesn’t it?’ (127, n. 1). Early on he has been reading Mrs Dalloway, and quotes Mansfield writing to Woolf: ‘You write so well, Virginia, so damned well’. ‘Well, yes’, Larkin says, ‘but there is so much wooden & dead in V.W.’ (16) – and those who know what Mansfield really thought know that she was not being quite honest with Virginia, and that she would have agreed with him. In the same letter he goes on to say Woolf lacks the ‘depth’ of Mansfield. The difference between V.W. and K.M. is the difference between E.M.F. and D.H.L. It is discouraging to reflect on K.M.’s experience & Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 118–121 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0035 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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A Note on Larkin on Mansfield apprehension of pain & suffering & to reflect how little she has become ‘known’ by it – I mean to say ‘Mansfield’ suddenly brings to mind a bright Russian-doll-childish person, not the lonely Shakespeare-annotating invalid of the Letters. You – or rather the Sunday Times – would never call her a mistress of the human heart, so little did all she ‘went through’ express itself in full. (16–17)

That was October 1950. About a year later, in a new job in Belfast, he writes, ‘Just as two years ago at Birmingham, [so here] my comfort and stay is K.M’s letters.’ But the effect on him then, in Birmingham, ‘was visionary: the world glowed with imparted radiance’. Now the effect is different. He is reading, one guesses, the volume of letters to Murry, and instead of getting ‘a series of brilliant “sketches’’ he is finding complete love letters, and feels he is ‘inhibited [. . . ] by knowing that it’s J.M.M. who is the recipient [. . . ] alas there is something suspect about it – it’s perfect, & therefore untrue, of the imagination only’ (57–8). A few weeks later he is complaining about a review in the New Statesman of the same volume of letters, which spoke about Mansfield’s ‘hate and anger’. The review made me quite angry: surely K.M. was only a simple case of passionate imaginative energy & love, damaged by a typical disease and by ‘loving’ (not to enquire into that word more than necessary) a slippery emotional character like Murry, who played up to her all-for-love twochildren-holding-hands line of talk but was quite content to live apart from her & indeed found actual cohabitation with her a bit of a strain. It takes her a long time to realise this discrepancy but when she does she immediately starts to shorten her lines, to be independent, & this involves curing herself [i.e. of Murry]. (62)

A few years on and he is reading the new enhanced version of what Murry called her Journal: and it has done me good – I mean I feel more sensitive, more receptive, happier, than before. O, I daresay there’ll be a few sneering reviews. [. . . ] I do think that she is one of the few people (Hardy is another) who set things moving, swinging, quietly, harmoniously, inside one, as if some thaw was taking place. And again it makes you dreadfully miserable, since you apprehend life more keenly, and since you know (or I know) that she’s so far ahead in unselfish observation and transcription.

He then quotes some of his favourites among her bons mots: ‘Be not afeared, the house is full of blankets’; ‘Why hath the Lord not made bun trees?’; [of a cat] ‘his whole little life side by side with ours’;

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ‘Every umbrella hides a warm bud of life’ (124); and the joke that Forster’s Helen Schlegel must have been got with child by Leonard Bast’s umbrella. The Journal causes him to ask himself a series of semicomic but searching questions about his own progress in life, and to see himself as ‘just drifting’, achieving little. [. . . ] my point about K.M. [is] that she is enormously dedicated, from page 1 (‘I mean this year to try and be a different person. . . ’) in 1904, to p. 334 (‘to be rooted in life. . . ’) in 1922, she was enormously aware of things unquestionably more pure, more significant, more beautiful than she was herself & of the problem of translating them by means of art, by catching hold of their tiny significant manifestations (‘Charles sat darning socks. . . When he took up the scissors, the cat squeezed up its eyes as if to say ‘That’s quite right’, and when he put the scissors down it just put out its paw as if to straighten them. . . ’). This seems to me to depend enormously on the fact that she did not distinguish between life and art [. . . ]. Art is good insofar as it catches life, and, really, the opposite is true too, in KM. (125)

He wrestles with this for a while and then pulls himself up: If you don’t believe art is better than. . . no, wait a minute, that isn’t what KM thought. If you don’t believe that good art is better than bad life, then bugger off, there’s plenty of room for your sort in the civil service. If you do believe it, then stay and try to convert the whole of life into art, until the smallest action is a ritual, an auto da fe, rejecting what you can’t transmute. (125)

Less than a week later he is at her again. Do you see what struck me? The incessant harping on the conviction that the apercus in which ‘life’ seemed most piercingly summarised (e.g. ‘On the wall of the kitchen there was a shadow, shaped like a little mask with two gold slits for eyes. It danced up and down’) put on her not only an artistic obligation to record them, but a moral obligation to ‘live up to’ them. This is stressed again & again & again. I think (but of course I’ve never been a girl) you do her less than justice in implying that ‘wanting to be a different person’ was only self-dramatisation. In its numerous contexts it reads to me more like the ordinary reaction of any person who sees anything beautiful – a wish to return thanks, or to – this is more like it – to struggle towards a state of mind in which such perceptions would be more common, and in which they wd be of some practical use. [. . . ] I only bother about this idea because her noticings (is that the English equivalent?) are so extraordinary. I am quite sure nobody has ever written to touch her, not even Lawrence. That sentence, or pair of

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A Note on Larkin on Mansfield sentences, about the shadow on the wall, seems to me to contain such a lot: the suggestion of gaiety, sinister because heartless, at the very centre of life – yet only a mask! What looks through it is still a mystery. (126)

He admits that ‘there is a lot about her I don’t care for’, and mentions ‘the childish racket’, the ‘fits of temperament’, the ‘self-will’, though he finds excuses for each of these in her illness, as he does for what he calls the ‘crankiness & mystic notions and dramatics’ (126). He acknowledges that the stories don’t measure up to the quality of the literary mind found in the letters and journals. But what we find in this correspondence with Monica Jones is a notable literary intelligence engaging with Mansfield, thinking it out as he goes, and relating what he finds there to his own life and his work as a writer. How does this fit with the current received notion of Larkin? To me it came as a very pleasant surprise, a bonus in a book which has, of course, a great deal else to admire and enjoy. Notes 1. Anthony Thwaite, ed., Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica (Faber & Faber: London, 2010). All page references given in the text are to this edition.

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A Note on Auden’s ‘Kathy’ Susan Reid Scholars of W. H. Auden have long been aware of the allusion to Katherine Mansfield in his poem ‘Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand’, printed in full in the current issue of this journal. When the poem first appeared, as number ‘XVII’ in Auden’s 1936 collection Look, Stranger!, F. R. Leavis was quick to recognise the reference to Mansfield six lines from its end; and this has become a standard note, though little more, in subsequent commentaries on the volume, including the recent Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture.1 But in presenting Auden’s poem to readers of this journal, Gerri Kimber has uncovered a treat for readers of Mansfield, who will doubtless want to know more about this unexpected connection with one of the twentieth-century’s leading British poets. Moreover, Auden’s poem juxtaposes an extract of ‘Kathy’s’ journal – ‘To be rooted in life,/ That’s what I want’ – with a quotation from Wilfred Owen to form a second intriguing pairing.2 And as if that were not enough, Leavis also recognises the strong influence of Burns and Yeats throughout the Auden collection, while elsewhere in this journal volume, C. K. Stead draws attention to the influence of Mansfield on Philip Larkin.3 How, we might wonder, has Mansfield found herself in the company of so many great male poets? It is to be hoped that these interconnections will give rise to new studies of Mansfield’s influence, but, in the meantime, Auden’s poem itself repays a careful reading. Leavis, who was ever critical of Auden, found much to condemn in Look, Stranger!, which he finds ‘essentially immature’, primarily because ‘Mr Auden still makes far too much of his poetry out of private neuroses and memories’.4 Auden’s references to Owen and Mansfield as ‘Wilfred’ and ‘Kathy’ in ‘XVII’ are a case in point – ‘It is a significant habit that is betrayed in this mode of referring to them’ – and this passage at the conclusion of the poem leaves Leavis questioning: ‘is Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 122–125 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0036 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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A Note on Auden’s ‘Kathy’ what is implied here more properly to be called a public world or a private?’.5 This perceived blurring of public and private spheres was a recurrent theme among contemporary reviewers and, in this light, it seems significant that Auden alludes to Mansfield’s journal – a ‘really private’ record made public after her death and which reveals the personal life behind the artist’s mask.6 While Auden scholars have acknowledged that he borrowed Owens’s ‘characteristic pararhyme’, what traces of Mansfield might we find imprinted within the text of Auden’s work?7 Auden would no doubt have recognised and responded to the itinerant aspects of Mansfield’s life as reflected in her journal. As Richard Hoggart observes, ‘The figure of the Wanderer, the isolated man on a search, appears more frequently than any other in Auden’s poetry [. . . ] He is physically isolated and surveys from a great height the interesting but muddled life of those below’.8 This is, of course, precisely how poem ‘XVII’ begins, with the narrator standing on a ‘narrow ridge’, ‘aloof’, his home land of ‘England below me’. An even greater geographical distance separated Mansfield from her native New Zealand, allowing her to revisit it with piercing insight and in merciless detail – for her, too, the ‘bird’s eye’ view was characteristic. But Auden’s poem also reflects many of the concerns that accompany this artistic detachment and which would have been apparent to him from Mansfield’s journal: ‘isolation and fear’ (l. 17), ‘the body of the absent lover’ (l. 19), ‘the truth’ (l. 23), ‘the presses of idleness’ (l. 25). All of these themes are particularly strong at the culmination of the 1927 version of Mansfield’s journal, which concludes with her love of John Middleton Murry and the potential of ‘all the help we can give each other . . . ’.9 Most truly then does the mood of ‘Kathy in her journal’ inform the closing of Auden’s poem: These moods give no permission to be idle. For men are changed by what they do; And through loss and anger the hands of the unlucky Love one another. Indeed, this mood is a keynote of Look, Stranger!, a volume in which, according to Monroe K. Spears, ‘Learning love and unlearning hatred is proposed as a remedy in almost every poem’.10 And there are many other parallels to be drawn between the preoccupations of Auden and Mansfield. Appropriately for the focus on the fantastic in this number of the journal, Auden was powerfully attracted by fantasy, with the fairy tales of Andersen and the Grimms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies exerting ‘a compelling influence upon his imagination’, as did work by Lewis Carroll, Ronald Firbank and George Macdonald.11 Throughout his life, he created private fantasy worlds, which again may have found echoes in ‘Kathy’s’ journal, with its allusions to imaginary children, invocations of her dead brother as a haunting presence, and an increasing emphasis on dreams. Towards the end of the 1927 version, Mansfield reminds herself, sharply, ‘You do know that J. and you are only a kind of dream of what might be’,12 much as the narrator of Auden’s poem ‘XVII’ is ultimately awoken from a mesmeric, dreamlike state, by the chiming of the Priory clock. Another important shared influence was that of music. While the young Mansfield aspired to be a professional cellist, Auden dreamed of being a concert pianist or opera singer. Yet, despite a long period of collaboration with Benjamin Britten, which began just before the publication of Look, Stranger!, critics have been slow to recognise the musical aspects of Auden’s poetry or indeed what Monroe K. Spears claims as ‘the fact that he is the finest writer of songs, ballads, libretti, and other forms for music among the modern poets’.13 Auden would have appreciated the musicality of Mansfield’s prose as Britten later appreciated that Owen’s poems would suit the musical setting of his War Requiem – a coincidence which might speak to Auden’s juxtaposition of ‘Wilfred’ and ‘Kathy’. Both writers were slow, too, to gain admission to the modernist canon and although their reputations continue to grow, Auden was a notable omission from Michael Whitworth’s recent study Reading Modernist Poetry (2010). While Mansfield has long been recognised as a pioneer of the modernist short story, Auden’s style has been considered more conventional, with even his champion Spears admitting that, ‘He uses the traditional genres more than most moderns’.14 But some contemporary scholars are reappraising Auden to find, like Kenneth Ligda, that Look, Stranger! is ‘an extraordinarily transitional work. [. . . ] as a major poet’s record of growth in the midst of political crisis, and as a document from the endgame of modernism, it has few rivals’. It seems fitting, then, that Mansfield is recognised within its pages. Notes 1. Steven Matthews, ‘W. H. Auden: Look, Stranger!’, in David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, eds, A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), pp. 287–96. 2. The full quotation appears on the final page of the 1927 version of Mansfield’s journal – which would have been available to Auden when he wrote poem ‘XVII’ – ‘But warm, eager, living life – to be rooted in life – to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less’. John Middleton

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Murry, ed., Journal of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1927 [repr. London: Persephone Books, 2006]), p. 251. F. R. Leavis, review in Scrutiny, 5:12 (1936), repr. in Hugh Haffenden, ed. W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (London & New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 222–5, p. 224. Leavis, p. 223. Leavis, p. 223. First published by John Middleton Murry in 1927, the Journal was reissued and expanded in 1954; it was superseded by a 2 volume edition by Margaret Scott, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997). Kenneth Ligda, ‘Look, Stranger!’, http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index. php/Look,-Stranger! [last accessed on 5 March 2012]. Richard Hoggart, ‘Introduction to Auden’s Poetry’, in Monroe K. Spears, ed., Auden: A Collection of Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), pp. 10–25, p. 17. Murry, p. 251. Murry’s 1927 version of the Journal omits all subsequent material pertaining to Mansfield’s stay at the Gurdjieff Institute near Fontainebleau in the months preceding her death. Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 124. Spears, Poetry, p. 10. Murry, p. 249. Spears, ‘Introduction’, in Auden: A Collection of Essays, p. 6. Spears, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.

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The Parrot Wallpaper in ‘Prelude’ Angela Smith Leanne Davies’s Wallpaper (2009) almost conveys the sensation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice falling down the rabbit-hole, the picture’s deep focus leading the viewer down the passage to a door into the future. Alice is asleep when she falls into the tunnel; Kezia at this point in the story is nearly asleep. The sensation of entering a strange world – when she is on the boundary of waking and sleeping – is the end of a perplexing day. The story opens in the afternoon with Kezia gazing at her mother who is about to set off in a buggy with her ‘absolute necessities’,1 which include Linda’s mother and piles of domestic items but not her two smaller daughters. From this point in the story until the episode of the parrot wallpaper the perspective is Kezia’s, though as she is probably only about five years old her sense of abandonment is conveyed obliquely, through her senses. Unlike her adults, she has nothing by which to measure what is happening to the family, whereas her aunt says the new house is ‘a million times better than that awful cubby-hole in town’ (117). Kezia’s senses are heightened by fear of the unknown, each of them threatening to reduce her to panic. After her humiliation by Stanley Josephs she wanders into her own empty house where the ‘Zoom! Zoom!’ (82) of a blue-bottle knocking against the ceiling increases her sense of entrapment. The familiar is made terrifyingly strange. Her perception of what was the known world is distorted as she looks through the yellow glass in the dining-room window and sees ‘a little Chinese Lottie . . . . Was that really Lottie?’ (82). The cold feel of the window against her fingers calms her briefly but then the sound of the wind ‘snuffling and howling’ (82) and the banging of a piece of loose iron on the roof terrify her. She is only reassured by the storeman who ‘smelled of nuts and new wooden boxes’ (83) and whose sleeve ‘felt hairy’ (84). She tells him that she hates ‘rushing animals Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 126–127 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0037 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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The Parrot Wallpaper in ‘Prelude’ like dogs and parrots. I often dream that animals rush at me – even camels – and while they are rushing their heads swell e-enormous’ (84). Her nightmare becomes reality when the sleepy child is entrusted with the ‘bright breathing’ lamp by her grandmother, a gesture of confidence, but it makes ‘hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were only on the wall-paper)’ (85) persist in flying past her. The parenthesis suggests that Kezia is telling herself not to be frightened. The subtle currents of this opening flow in new directions later through the evocation of other birds: the duck whose decapitation reveals that trust in Pat’s protectiveness might be misplaced, and Kezia’s mother’s nightmare which is a mature woman’s version of Kezia’s terrors. In Linda’s dream a tiny bird in her hands ‘began to swell, it ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger’ (90) and turned into a huge baby, the reverse of Alice’s experience where the Duchess’s baby turns into a creature, a pig. Linda is trying to suppress terror of pregnancy and childbirth, and of the process that creates it. Lying in bed in the morning, she traces a poppy on the wallpaper and the hairiness that Kezia found comforting becomes menacingly phallic: ‘In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that’ (92). She does not want to think about Stanley’s erotic enthusiasm but she can’t help it because he ‘was too strong for her; she had always hated things that rush at her, from a child’ (115). The vision of their domestic setting as uncanny and animist invites the reader to see an affinity between Kezia and her mother in spite of Linda’s apparent indifference to her daughter. Linda dreams of birds after Kezia’s encounter with the parrots, and can articulate an experience which Kezia can only fear: But the strangest part of this coming alive of things was what they did. They listened, they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they were members of a secret society and they smiled among themselves. (93) Notes 1. Angela Smith, ed., Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), p. 79. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and the page references are given in the text.

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‘Wasp’-ishness in ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ W. Todd Martin While the authorship of the anonymous tale ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’, published in August 1911, is contested,1 it would have been the last of Katherine Mansfield’s German stories to appear in the New Age, only a few months prior to the release of her first collection of stories, In a German Pension (1911). Diane Milburn, who sees Mansfield’s general tone towards the Germans as more ‘gently ironic’ than ‘openly hostile’, suggests that the story’s omission from the collection is ‘all the more noticeable’ because it ‘is sympathetic towards Germans’.2 Both its absence from the collection and its presumed shift in attitude towards Germans may well be reasons for the contention over the authorship. However, it seems that its exclusion could be attributed instead to the fact that its setting was not Bavaria, and I would argue that ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ shares much of the same biting satire as Mansfield’s other German stories. Frau Breidenbach’s ‘portentous’ lament at the last of ‘the good Munich sausage’ suggests that their cupboard is practically bare, yet it is later revealed that they have ‘a shoulder of lamb for dinner, with potatoes and a marrow’ as well as ‘jelly and custard and cheese and coffee’, which she declares sufficient for dinner.3 Likewise, the Herr Doctor is so overweight that he must find a bank to sit on so he can eventually get himself up off the ground, and failing to find one, he relies on his wife and daughter to help him up. Milburn’s assessment of Mansfield’s sympathies derives mainly from her belief that Mansfield is concerned with the ‘attitude of the local community’ toward the Breidenbachs, drawing specifically on how ‘rural England giggled audibly from behind its window-curtains’ when the family walks by. But the ridiculousness of the family – especially Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 128–131 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0038 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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‘Wasp’-ishness in ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ Herr Doctor wearing his red woollen scarf in August – is enough to explain their amusement, rather than something more antagonistic. They are likely the equivalent of the gaudily dressed American tourists in Europe today, especially to the rural population. More to the point, the Breidenbachs are responsible for their own ostracism. Aside from her own presumption that German food is superior to any other, the Frau’s obliviousness to her own superciliousness in showing her landlady the photo of the Kaiser is tempered only by her recognition that she might have offended her. But even this sentiment is dismissed by Herr Doctor, revealing a cultural detachment compounded at the end of the story when, after Maria has freed some wasps from a labourer’s trap, Frau and Herr Breidenbach misinterpret the labourer’s ‘bewildered’ look for ‘enmity’. Setting the context early on with Herr Doctor’s comment that ‘the reputation of the English judges was declining, and that wasps were numerous in the country districts’, Mansfield introduces the symbolic potential of the wasps, a symbolism that further reveals the family’s pretension. Later in the story, after watching the labourer set up a trap for wasps, Maria tears a hole in the paper covering the jar and places a stick in the jar, allowing the wasp to escape. According to the narrator, her motives derive from her ‘tender heart’, but her sinister silence at the end of the story belies any positive intent. The result of her ‘tender heart’ is that ‘presently wasps came in dozens and scores, and as none were caught and all sipped and flew to tell the others and returned to sip again, the field literally began to buzz’. Thus, Maria undermines the labourer’s attempt to eliminate the wasps which ‘were numerous in the country districts’, actually attracting more wasps. Seeing this, Maria moves away, deflecting any possible blame. The symbolic implications of the wasps gain significance when one considers the parlance of the day. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a figurative use of the term ‘wasp’ would have included ‘persons characterized by irascibility and persistent petty malignity, esp. to a multitude of contemptible but irritating assailants’, a definition supported by a quotation from Lord Roseberry’s Chatham, a book published the year prior to Mansfield’s story and which, according to a New York Times review, was praised by both American and English critics.4 In this context, Frau Breidenbach’s comment, ‘Everywhere are bad judges and wasps [. . . ]’, suggests that nowhere is exempt from irritating people. However, what she and Herr Doctor fail to realise is that their own ‘irascibility’ and ‘petty malignity’ are responsible for the ill-will they feel surrounds them. The Germans, then, foster the enmity that they read on others’ faces; it is they who

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Katherine Mansfield Studies are blameworthy. Blinded by her own prejudices, however, the Frau especially insists that the English are responsible: ‘These English – and I have always heard so! – do not mind insects!’ They, themselves, are the wasps, the irritants; they are the interlopers. The conversation then turns to war, with the Frau mocking the ineptitude of the English who can’t even capture wasps. The key irony of the story, though, lies in Herr Doctor’s comment that ‘we shall never give them the casus belli’ – they will never give the English justification for an act of war. Yet, to the extent that the wasps act as the symbol of antagonism, Maria is responsible for drawing them there, instigating the misunderstanding that creates the ill-feelings between them and the labourer. Despite this, Maria makes no effort to rectify the misunderstanding; instead, the story ends with her smiling and saying nothing. So doing, she acts as the ‘casus belli’. Contrary to what Milburn suggests, then, this story implies German antipathy – even if inadvertently – more prominently than any of the other German stories, except for perhaps ‘Germans at Meat’. If, as Jenny McDonnell points out, ‘Mansfield’s sarcastic lampooning of a series of German institutions and stereotypes was granted an obvious marketability in the years leading up to the First World War’ and ‘Mansfield’s proclivity for this kind of writing during her New Age years’ was ‘indicative of the influence of the editorial policies of both Orage and Hastings’,5 it is unlikely Mansfield would have, by this point, abandoned both of these influences, even though she was beginning to loosen her ties with the editors and would later reject stories like ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ as being juvenile and ‘ “not what I mean; it’s a lie’’ ’.6 Contrary to what Milburn suggests, the Germans of the story retain many of the same negative characteristics as those in In a German Pension, and the symbolic qualities of the wasps belie any positive portrayal of the Germans, even if they do feel the paranoia of the outsider. In general, this paranoia is caused by their own selfconsciousness of their prejudices and exacerbated by their aloofness to their cultural insensitivity. Notes 1. Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan in the new edition of the Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Vol. 2, p. 713, place the story in an appendix of attributed stories, with the following comment: Antony Alpers, in the Life, p. 148, thought ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ was a clever parody of the German Pension stories, written by Beatrice Hastings and C. E. Bechofer, both colleagues and occasional friends of KM in her early association with the New Age. In the Bibliography, p. 150, B. J. Kirkpatrick placed

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‘Wasp’-ishness in ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ it among ‘Doubtful Contributions’, together with ‘The Mating of Gwendolen’, which nevertheless was accepted by Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr in Katherine Mansfield (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), p. 12, but not by Alpers – see the Life, p. 151. 2. Diane Milburn, The Deutschlandbild of A.R. Orage and the New Age Circle (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 106. 3. ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’, in New Age, 9:16, 17 August 1911, p. 371, http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/1140814049984098.pdf [accessed 12/19/2011]. For some reason, the story is not listed in the journal’s Table of Contents on the first page. All subsequent quotations from the story are from this source. 4. ‘Literary Notes from London’, in The New York Times, 3 December 1910, http://query. nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FBOB15FC385D11738DDAA0894DA415 B808DF1D3 [accessed 12/19/2011]. 5. Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 34–5. 6. John Middleton Murry, ‘Introductory Note’, In a German Pension, in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2006), p. 580.

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Gerardo Rodriguez-Salas and Isabel Maria Andrés-Cuevas, The Aesthetic Construction of the Female Grotesque in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Interplay of Life and Literature (Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), 134 pp., £39.95 (US$49.95), ISBN 978 0 7734 1565 2 Vincent O’Sullivan’s Foreword to this small volume offers a neat, engaging and concise overview of Gerardo Rodriguez-Salas and Isabel Maria Andrés-Cuevas’s intriguing though uneven discussion of selected works by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. The authors in their Introduction, subtitled ‘A Public Meal for Two’ (a pun on Woolf’s characterisation of her relationship with Mansfield as a ‘public of two’), review the familiar ways in which Mansfield and Woolf interacted and influenced each other’s work. The first chapter, titled ‘Contextualising the Female Grotesque and Cannibalism’, explores theorisations of maternity, female bodily functions and the animalisation and objectification of women, grounding the argument in the works of Mary Russo, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin among others. Here and elsewhere in the work the argument relating to cannibalisation is less developed and less convincing than that of the female grotesque. In Chapter Two, ‘ “My insides are all twisted up’’: The Female Grotesque and Maternity’, the strongest and most conceptually coherent section of the volume, the authors apply their version of the female grotesque from a strongly feminist standpoint to several of Mansfield’s stories that focus on aspects of maternity. The stories they select include ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, ‘A Birthday’, ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ and ‘The Woman at the Store’. Offering close readings, the authors touch on multiple interrelated themes in these stories with exceptional precision. They tease out rich subtleties from Mansfield’s chilling exposés that reveal the socially sanctioned commodification of women, men’s callous indifference to female reproductive vulnerability and suffering, and Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 132–141 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Reviews the starkly eugenic impulses of an exhausted child servant who suffocates her employers’ youngest baby, and a crazed woman who murders her husband. Chapter Three, ‘Cannibalism and Gender’, addresses mainly the perverse and complex connections between food and animal motifs in Mansfield’s stories, touching first on ‘The Doves’ Nest’, where the authors argue that the women who entertain their guest ‘become Mr. Prodger’s hot meat, the victims of his voracious cannibalism and sexual abuse’ (68). In a later section, the authors offer an analysis of ‘Sun and Moon’, further examining Mansfield’s ‘gastronomic discourse’ (89) as they scrutinise the children’s animalisation of their parents and their parents’ guests at a lavish dinner party. The authors also focus on food in ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, but here they bring in both fairy-tale and religious elements that, although definitely thought-provoking, seem to be forcibly superimposed on Mansfield’s narrative. In their Conclusion, the authors sum up their prior arguments but offer no new insights and infrequent, uncaught typographical errors (some quite amusing) are a distraction from the authors’ argument. Overall, the work is more relevant for Mansfield scholars than for Woolfians and a single-author study could have productively enabled the authors to explore Mansfield’s work in greater depth. The authors’ adept analysis provokes suggestions of further connections and strong resonances with other works by Mansfield which tantalise the reader of this study. Given the authors’ specific areas of interest, one wishes they were able to incorporate references to relatively recent publications such as Lee Garver’s ‘The Political Katherine Mansfield’ (in Modernism/Modernity 8.2, April 2001, 225–43) and Diane McGee’s Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (University of Toronto Press, 2002). Importantly, most of Mansfield’s stories that the authors examine are ones less commonly discussed, and their work contributes to the current discourse on Mansfield in ways that will trigger further inquiry. Vara Neverow Southern Connecticut State University DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0039

Anne Mounic, Monde terrible où naître: La voix singulière face à l’Histoire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), 505 pp., e100, ISBN 978 2 7453 2323 1 Those not familiar with Anne Mounic’s work may not expect to find the final words of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Canary’ – ‘—Ah, what is it? — that I heard’ – at the crux of this wide-ranging work on

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Katherine Mansfield Studies twentieth-century war poetry. The book looks at the philosophical repercussions of the poet’s voice speaking across national and ideological divides, from one war to the next, from one epoch to another. Rarely, indeed, is the ethical potential of comparative literature as striking as in this immense study, which considers writers from Shakespeare to Imre Kertész, via Hopkins, Eliot and Mansfield and theorists from Hegel and Kierkegaard to Levinas and Meschonnic. From this vast panorama develops a poignant and urgent reflection on what it means to say ‘I’ to ‘you’. Mounic celebrates the ‘singular voice’ not as a form of lyrical solipsism but as a means to give voice and substance to a ‘you’, defying the objectifying otherness of the third-person. This is achieved, for example, by Hopkins’s instress and inscape, which illuminate language with what the philosopher Robert Misrahi calls ‘luminous nothings’ (‘rien de lumière’, p. 90). Life proves the source of Rosenburg’s poetry read in the light of Tolstoyism, while David Jones and Robert Graves illustrate the immense gift of poetry, freely given to resist the crude utilitarianism of war, one (among many) exquisitely chosen examples underlining this: ‘But if we let our tongues lose self-possession, /Throwing off language and its watery clasp, [. . . ] We shall go mad no doubt and die that way’ (quoted on p. 145). Two immense chapters demonstrate not only why war poetry matters and must be read outside the contingency of the war, but why it must be read across national boundaries. Impressive surveys of war memoirs show linguistic representations of I/you feeding into the now complementary, now contradictory forces of the community and the collective. Mounic shows poets and philosophers writing through the temptations of war – its mysticism, fierce energies, abjection and hubris, and uses Blunden’s ‘Undertones of War’ to illustrate understatement as resistance. Amongst the many virtues of her trans-European counterpoint to the dialectical antagonisms of war, we should mention the place given to lesser-known voices (Lynette Roberts, Benjamin Fondane) alongside the established names in the canons of war writing. Mounic equally weighs up the contribution of voices resisting classic (anti-)war writing, such as Yeats and Jünger. So why Mansfield? The answer lies firmly in her exquisitely singular, poetic voice sounding from the margins of war experience to denounce its shattering force in human lives. Sensitive readings of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and ‘The Fly’ bring to the fore Mansfield’s delicate prosepoetry, which blends pain and pastoral to challenge the logic of warfare, virility and determinism. Her writing is thus inscribed in the in-betweenness that defies the geographies and other absolutes of national narrative. Mounic shows, for example, how even on the

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Reviews verge of battle, life is preserved by giving voice and individuality to the instruments of warfare (for even the bayonets speak), countering the inhumanity of faceless violence by making it fugitive, contingent and all too human. Not that she evades its savage destruction, as the study of ‘The Fly’ proves, which poses the appalling question of whether it is better to come to terms with loss or to refuse the solace of mourning. The closing chapters thus bloom out from the poetry of the everyday, the anti-heroic, preferring a very Mansfieldian resistance to mechanical symbolism, whereby from dialogue, music and fragments, meaning is assembled within verbal exchange. The link here between Mansfield and Kertész is particularly resonant, celebrating the resistance of the outsider. Again it is the ephemeral beauty of the speaking ‘I’ without a destiny that matters, not in terms of defeat or despair, but because destiny serves the same unforgiving teleological impulse as national history. Mounic’s work is challenging and insightful, making an impassioned defence of poets as a choir of singular voices whose music can ensure a gentle, human counter-melody to the impersonal march of international violence. She thus shows how translation, exegesis, philosophy and literary criticism resonate politically as profound reminders of both the privilege and the necessity to say ‘Stop . . . Listen’. Claire Davison-Pégon Université d’Aix-Marseille, France DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0040

Jeanne Dubino, ed., Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 282 pp., £55 (US $84), ISBN 978 0 2301 0706 9 On or about December 1904, Virginia Stephen changed. The publication of her first review initiated a literary career that would ultimately see the emergence of Virginia Woolf, novelist, journalist, and publisher. Literary modernism has undergone a critical re-evaluation to emerge as a movement that courted the principles of the mass marketplace as much as it denounced them, and writers once firmly encamped on one side of Andreas Huyssen’s ‘Great Divide’ have undergone similar reconsideration. This new collection of essays is the first ‘devoted entirely to Woolf in the literary marketplace’ (1), as Dubino notes in her introduction. It seeks to reveal how Woolf contributed to the production of literary modernism in an occasionally

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Katherine Mansfield Studies conflicted relationship with the literary marketplace. In doing so, it adds to an ever-expanding body of work that argues that ‘Woolf engaged, in very material and practical ways, with the public and its palate, and in the world of commodity culture’ (18). At the same time, it sheds new light on the ways in which that public might have encountered Woolf’s writing in book and periodical form. These essays explore Woolf’s location in the marketplace as an author and publisher and in the literary artefacts that bear her name, in ways that address intellectual, national and gender boundaries. Two separate essays by Elisa Bolchi and Sara Villa discuss how Woolf’s writing was translated and disseminated in Fascist Italy in the 1930s. Essays by Caroline Pollentier (on Woolf’s practice of the familiar essay) and Melissa Sullivan (on the publication of extracts from A Room of One’s Own in the feminist magazine Time and Tide) add further to reappraisals of the divides between low, middle and highbrow markets. Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta’s analysis addresses how changing trends in the covers of Woolf’s books ‘shed light on the literary, cultural, and aesthetic value systems that produced them and into which they emerged’ (239). Woolf’s attitudes to these value systems also inform Karen Leick’s lively analysis of the writer’s (anti-Semitic) reaction to Gertrude Stein, ‘not only the most intelligible, but also the most popular of living writers’ (122), as Woolf sarcastically notes. One might almost imagine Woolf applying a similar description to Katherine Mansfield, as their friendship was characterised as much by mutual hostility as appreciation. The rivalry is once again discussed here by Katie Macnamara, who focuses on literary gossip and textual links between ‘Bliss’ and Mansfield’s letters to Woolf. As a whole, the essays gathered together here demonstrate the extent to which an understanding of Woolf’s publishing contexts might offer new insight into her writings. Yet perhaps the most intriguing essay in the collection is by Patrick Collier, which raises further questions about how we read these publishing contexts themselves. In ‘Woolf Studies and Periodical Studies’, Collier discusses the periodical publication of ‘The Patron and the Crocus’ to draw attention to the need for a critical apparatus with which to read periodicals as unique literary artefacts, ultimately calling for ‘a scholarship in which we allow the periodical itself to upstage Woolf’ (154). For now, though, Woolf remains centre stage in Dubino’s collection, and compellingly so. In the essay that opens the volume, Beth Rigel Daugherty quotes the young Woolf saying that the ‘real delight in reviewing is to say nasty things’ (35). However, the ‘real delight’ in reviewing Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace is to detect the

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Reviews wealth of scholarship currently being undertaken on Woolf’s role as a literary professional, and to anticipate the ways in which this may ultimately change our understanding of the marketplace itself. Jenny McDonnell Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0041

Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 150 pp., £50, ISBN 978 0 7546 6646 2 This is an ambitious book, cogently framed by reference to the ethnographic study of liminality formulated by Arnold van Gennep and developed by Victor and Edith Turner. Drewery’s argument is that the short stories she discusses have a disturbing quality, depicting threshold states comparable with what ethnographers describe as rites of passage. The book is of particular interest in its comparison of stories by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf with much less familiar fiction by Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair. The focus of the six chapters is on pilgrimage; mourning; dying; the uncanny; the inner life; and the revelatory moment. In an analysis of Richardson’s story ‘Death’, Drewery indicates how the liminal moment is expressed grammatically: ‘The impossibility of “knowing’’ ones [sic] own death whilst attempting directly to confront it is conveyed through shifts between the third-person and the first-person narrative’ (54). In a persuasive generalisation about the form of modernist stories by these four writers, she argues that at their conclusion the ‘transitional phase remains incomplete, the story is suspended before the limen phase is concluded, and the protagonist and the reader are left suspended in the space of the waiting room’ (31). A reading of Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’ articulates perceptively the liminal moment at which the reader is invited to make a link between the ‘ermine toque’ and Miss Brill, though Miss Brill does not make the connection herself. Drewery strives to include a variety of theoretical and critical positions, but this, to some extent, undermines the four-way comparison as the plethora of perspectives at times works against a sense of coherent interpretation. It is clearly productive to link the work of Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva to Turner’s exploration of liminality as Drewery does, but other theorists such as Henri Bergson appear fleetingly – in his case with a lightning outline of his concept

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Katherine Mansfield Studies of duration – but then do not re-appear. This may be comprehensible for the reader who knows the work of the theorist but for those who don’t it could prove unnecessarily challenging. The writing assumes that the reader is in accord with such enigmatic phrases as ‘an implicit recognition that life is dependent on the non-being which is at the heart of ourselves and without which we cannot exist’ (51). This is based on a paradox proposed by Eagleton but needs to be articulated as an argument in relation to the literary texts. At times the lists of critical opinions dominate the stories and clarity is lost; childhood and old age are described as liminal states which makes fuzzy the definition of liminality as any stage of human life can be seen as transitional. There is also an occasional blurring of critical accuracy, as when the scene in ‘Bliss’ ‘is viewed through the eyes of an unreliable narrator who is already unable to identify the sources of her emotions or to recognize her sexuality’ (118). The ironic subtlety of the narrative voice in the story seems to this reader to depend on the fluid movement in and out of Bertha’s perspective, not to be identified with it. What Modernist Short Fiction by Women achieves is to focus, through the comparison with work by Woolf and Mansfield, on fiction by Richardson and Sinclair that deserves to be better known than it is. Drewery chooses to write about stories that open up sometimes playful and always surprising aspects of women’s lives and deaths in the first half of the twentieth century. Angela Smith University of Stirling, UK DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0042

Anna Jackson, Diary Poetics, Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2010), 185 pp., £80 (US $125), ISBN 978 0415 99831 4 Previous studies have used diaries as source material for a version of a life or to justify interpretations of a writer’s work. Diary Poetics concentrates on prose stylistics: ‘graphy’, rather than ‘bio’ (3). Anna Jackson contests the idea ‘that the diary is a formless genre’ (18), acknowledging the influence of Tom Paulin’s article ‘Writing to the Moment’ which calls for “‘a wider poetics of prose’’’ (10). She considered epistolary poetics in ‘Mansfield and the Familiar Letter’;1 this study encompasses a similarly provisional autobiographical form. After an Introduction neatly summarising previous scholarship, Jackson meticulously evaluates diaries by Antonia White, John Cheever, Joe Orton, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia

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Reviews Plath. Following chapters appraise ‘The Dash’, ‘Sentence Fragments’ and ‘ “I’’ and “You’’ ’. Jackson has a poet’s sensitivity to formal detail. She evaluates the use of ampersands, colons, rhetorical questions and exclamations. She considers juxtaposition, montage, sequencing, parataxis, accretion, asides, ellipses and closure. She also addresses the contradictions arising from the autonomy of each extract set against the effects of sequencing. She shows how adapting, shortening and cutting affect meaning. The implied dialogue between writer and potential addressee as well as the diarists’ habitual use of tense and person is addressed. A challenge is issued to the whole idea of the diary as ‘a form of female life-writing’ (3), suggesting that stylistic features, such as gaps and fragmentation, may be ‘responses to the formal demands of the genre itself’ (4). In her chapters on Mansfield, Woolf and Plath, Jackson is especially interested in sequencing; she interrogates the authority of an editor to ‘select, extract, and collate entries’ (8). She prefers unabridged versions but judges Margaret Scott’s 1997 edition of The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks ‘as much an editorial construction’ as the ‘pared-down, aesthetics-focused vision’ presented in Murry’s contentious 1927 selection (17). Scott also mediates to impose a form. In taking abandoned scraps of paper – shopping lists, sketches, recipes, gardening and reading notes – Scott has made an integrated, continuous whole, ‘a text in its own right’ (78). Jackson shows the paradox of making a ‘new textual “surface’’ ’ from autonomous fragments (78). There is a sense of constraint in this book, which is perhaps the result of distilling ideas from Jackson’s longer DPhil thesis. Readers less familiar with her chosen writers might benefit from additional notes on the many ‘minor’ characters mentioned such as ‘Djuna’, ‘Kenneth’ or ‘Kot’. Her final chapter reads like a ‘hold-all’ for random ‘odds & ends’ (1); rather than concluding she opens up new areas for study, and it is to be hoped that she extends this project. Jackson effectively evokes the materiality of manuscripts: the ink marks; the quality of paper; whether the writer uses loose-leaf sheets, notebooks or a journal with printed dates. She gives us a sense of the diarist’s pen speeding across a page ‘without syntactic analysis’ (117), hesitating, interrupting, recording but also leaving silences. This slim, but densely-packed, volume will return scholars to the edited diaries but will also refresh an appetite for the archives. Her enthusiasm for first-hand research is shown by the Proustian frisson she receives when she discovers a preserved ‘still yellow’ kowhai flower between two handwritten pages by Mansfield (17). This emphasises what she sees as

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Katherine Mansfield Studies central to Katherine Mansfield’s autobiographical writings: the ‘reader has a sense not just of the present of the moment of writing, but of the ‘presence’ of the moment’ (71). Her acute analysis of the elements of style allows a kind of revitalisation; inevitably, such precise attention to the graphy also reveals the bio. Gill Lowe University Campus Suffolk DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0043 Note 1. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (London: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 202–13. Review by Faith Binckes in Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011) pp. 121–3.

Sue Orr, From Under the Overcoat (Auckland: Random House, 2011), 348 pp., NZ$29.95, ISBN 978 1 8697 9057 8 It takes a lot of nerve, writing your own set of stories ‘after’ Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, Anton Chekhov and so forth. Most fiction contains an implicit response to texts that have gone before, since most authors pick up the art of writing, and the urge to write, from the habit of reading. Intertextual borrowing seems especially prevalent amongst short story writers. I’m thinking not only of Mansfield’s own debt to Chekhov, but, for instance, of Alice Munro, whose work contains numerous references to the writers she admires – including, naturally, Mansfield. Sue Orr’s collection brings this kind of relationship right to the surface, offering each of her ten stories as a response to one of ten classic tales, including a Maori legend. This is quite a risk. How could any story measure up to the originals? For the most part, however, Orr pulls it off. Inspired by ‘The Doll’s House’, ‘The Open Home’ is one of the most successful stories in this collection, exposing the peculiar conventions of the adult world through a child’s sensibility, in a manner much like Mansfield’s. In ‘The Open Home’, the narrator’s mother is trying to sell their home, a dilapidated ‘heritage property’ in the Karori district of Wellington, the setting of ‘The Doll’s House’. The perverse behaviour of Martha, the eccentric mother, and the exasperated reactions of her estate agent, Claudia Button, generates some wonderful comic dialogue: ‘Have you tried this method yourself, Martha?’ ‘Method?’ asked Mum.

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Reviews ‘Yes, this method of selling whereby you just wait for a wealthy person to drive by your house, fall in love with it and march right up to offer you an amazing amount of money to take it off your hands?’ (60).

Orr applies Mansfield’s image of the doll’s house swinging open, exposing myriad private spaces, to the concept of the ‘open home’. Mrs Button prepares the house for viewing by doggedly unscrewing its sealed doors and windows: ‘You could see everything inside our house – into the big house, the little table and chairs’ (81). The image is extended, as the child narrator imagines her absent father restored, like miniature figure inside the house. Other stories are equally successful, both intertextually and in their own right. Like the Maupassant story that inspires it, ‘Journeyman’ shows events spiralling out of control as characters find themselves socially out of their depth through their own fatal misjudgements. ‘Spectacles’ cleverly substitutes an expensive pair of glasses for the eponymous overcoat of Gogol’s story. In her introduction and her notes on the original stories, Orr stresses what she sees as their universal, humanist values, rather than any aesthetic or technical aspects. Her own stories are fundamentally realist, and are grounded in social observation. ‘A Regrettable Slip of the Tongue’ moves away from contemporary New Zealand, which she chronicles so beautifully in the other stories. But a feminist debunking of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, narrated by Gretta Conroy in an uneasy Irish voice appears reductive, lampooning Gabriel as a self-regarding fool, needlessly obsessed by a chance remark. Orr’s note on ‘The Dead’ makes the odd assertion that ‘critics have debated whether all or any of the Dubliners’ ‘ “moments’’ constituted true epiphanies’ (296). Gretta’s monologue dismisses the whole notion of the epiphanic as some fancy idea got up by academics. Orr is doing both herself and Joyce a disservice when she strips the ambiguity away from ‘The Dead’. She is a subtle and accomplished writer, however, and the best of her stories are worthy tributes to their inspiration. Ailsa Cox Edge Hill University, UK DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0044

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

W. H. Auden (1907–73) was an Anglo-American poet born in England who moved to the United States in 1939, and became an American citizen in 1946. He is regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. Christine Butterworth-McDermott is an assistant professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches courses in modernism, fairy tales, and creative writing. Her critical work has been published in American Transcendental Quarterly, The Henry James Review, The Critical Companion to Henry James, and Twice-Told Children’s Tales (Routledge). María Casado Villanueva is a PhD candidate at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and occasionally works as a graduate assistant teacher at the same institution. Her doctoral thesis explores the relevance of fairy tale motifs in the short fiction of Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. Kay McKenzie Cooke lives in Dunedin, New Zealand. She has had two books of poetry published by Otago University Press. She is currently working on her third collection of poetry, with the working title of Born To A Red-headed Woman. Ailsa Cox’s story ‘The Not Knowing’ appeared in Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010). Her short-story collection, The Real Louise (2009) is published by Headland Press. Other books include Alice Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 142–146 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0045 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Notes on Contributors Munro (2004) and Writing Short Stories (2005). She is the editor of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (2011). Delia da Sousa Correa is Senior Lecturer in English at the Open University and is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She was educated in New Zealand, London and Oxford. Her published research centres on connections between literature and music in the nineteenth-century and modernist periods. Claire Davison-Pégon is Professor of Literature and Literary Translation at the Université d’Aix-Marseille, and the current President of the Société d’études woolfiennes. She recently edited the tenth volume of International Ford Madox Ford Studies: Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence, and is co-editing A Contemporary Woolf/ Woolf contemporaine due to be published in 2012. Her current research centres on Anglo-Russian networks in the modernist era. A. K. Grant (1941–2000) graduated from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, with an LLB. Although Alan practised law for about fifteen years, his first love was humorous writing and he retired from being what he described as a ‘scribbling barrister’ to take up fulltime writing and script-editing for the rest of his life. His publications were numerous, ranging from his satiric history of New Zealand, first published as Land Uprooted High (1971), later rewritten and enlarged as The Paua and the Glory (1982), through to parodic verse, televisions scripts and successful libretti for stage musicals. Andrew Harrison is a lecturer in English Literature and Director of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He is editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and a member of the International Advisory Board for Katherine Mansfield Studies; he is currently writing the volume on D. H. Lawrence for the Blackwell Critical Biographies series. Gerri Kimber, Senior Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Northampton, is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, and Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society. With Vincent O’Sullivan, she has coedited the two volume annotated Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield (2012). She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). In addition, she is co-editor of two essay collections on Mansfield published in 2011.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Gill Lowe is Senior Lecturer in English at University Campus Suffolk. She teaches courses on Textual Studies, Auto/biography, Adaptation and The Short Story. She edited Hyde Park Gate News, juvenilia written by Vanessa, Thoby and Virginia Stephen. She has published articles in international journals about Woolf and life writing. Todd Martin is Professor of English at Huntingdon University, USA. His research focuses on twentieth-century British and American literature. He has published on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat and Katherine Mansfield. He is the Membership Secretary for the Katherine Mansfield Society. Jenny McDonnell is an Assistant Lecturer in Critical Theory, Modernism and Postmodernism at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (2010) and editor of a collection of essays on Mansfield, Robert Louis Stevenson and Samuel Butler (forthcoming). She also edits the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter and is film reviews editor for the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. Chris McVeigh is a Queen’s Counsel practising and living in Christchurch, New Zealand, who counts himself both fortunate and honoured to have been a close personal friend of the late Alan Grant. He knew Alan for some 35 years and collaborated with him in a number of ventures, most notably for a Christchurch satirical revue group known as The Merely Players and later as script writers and performers in the award winning, weekly New Zealand satirical television comedy series A Week of It. Vara Neverow is a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Southern Connecticut State University. Her recent work includes the Introduction and annotations of Jacob’s Room (2008), ‘Virginia Woolf and City Aesthetics’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts edited by Maggie Humm (2010) and ‘Woolf’s Editorial SelfCensorship and Risk-Taking in Jacob’s Room’ in Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace edited by Jeanne Dubino (2010). Chris Price was the 2011 New Zealand Post Mansfield Menton Fellow. When not preoccupied with her writing journal, she worked on a book about the life and death of the nineteenth-century poet, anatomist and

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Notes on Contributors suicide, Thomas Lovell Beddoes. In ordinary life she teaches creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. Susan Reid is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies; co-editor of the recent essay collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011); editor of the online ‘Katherine Mansfield Blog’ http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/today; and reviews editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her published work includes articles on Mansfield, Lawrence and Woolf, with a particular focus on masculinity. Angela Smith is an emeritus professor in English Studies at the University of Stirling. Her books include East African Writing in English (Macmillan 1989), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Clarendon 1999), Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Palgrave 2000), an edition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin 1997), and of Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories (Oxford World’s Classics 2002). C. K. Stead, Professor Emeritus, University of Auckland, is known as a critic of twentieth-century modernism, and of New Zealand literature, including Mansfield. He is the author of a dozen novels, and as many volumes of poems recently gathered in Collected Poems, 1951–2006. He was awarded a CBE in 1985, and in 2007 his country’s highest award, the ONZ. Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher Education at the University of Brighton, where she is Head of the Centre for Learning and Teaching. Gina teaches English literature undergraduates and supervises doctoral students. Her research interests include the Gothic, fantasy, twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury women’s writing and postcolonial literature. Her most recent book, Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of her Fiction, was published in 2012. Jessica Whyte is a freelance copywriter who is also currently studying for an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Sussex University. Her dissertation is on Katherine Mansfield, Fauvist art and the postcolonial. She recently graduated from an English and Creative Writing degree and is now writing a novel.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Rishona Zimring is Associate Professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches courses on modernism, postcolonial literature, and gender studies. She has published essays and reviews on Gissing, James, Conrad, Woolf, Rhys, Rushdie, Mansfield, Munro, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Her book Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain is forthcoming (2012).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank the artist Leanne Davies for permission to use her painting entitled ‘Wallpaper’ for our front cover image. We are also grateful to Terry Stringer for granting permission for us to reproduce his drawing, ‘Katherine Mansfield: Study for Sculpture’, and the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, for supplying the reproduction image. Thanks are also due to Tony Mackle, Becky Master and Mark Hutchins, for facilitating the requests to use this drawing. We would also like to thank Murray Webb for permission to use his pencil caricature of Katherine Mansfield. For permission to print W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand. . . ’, first published in Look Stranger! (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), the editors would like to thank Curtis Brown, Ltd. We would also like to record our gratitude to Professor Todd Martin, who worked tirelessly on our behalf in the USA to arrange the necessary permission. We are grateful to The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield for permission to use the three unpublished Mansfield letters in Gerri Kimber’s report, and to the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, for providing the reproduction images of one of the letters which illustrate the report. A. K. Grant’s parody was first published in the New Zealand Listener on April 22, 1989. Our thanks go to Chris McVeigh, QC, and Kevin Ireland, for facilitating our use of this piece, and A. K. Grant’s two daughters, Isla and Laura, and his executor Bill McMenamin, for permission to reproduce it here.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 4 (2012): 147–148 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2012.0046 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Finally, we would like to thank the judges of the Essay Prize on ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic’ – Professor Susan Sellers and Dr Marie Mulvey Roberts – together with the Chair of the Judges, Professor Gina Wisker – for the difficult task of selecting the winning essay by María Casado Villanueva from such a strong field of submissions.

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