Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism: Historicizing Modernism 9781472543127, 9781441111302

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Series Editors’ Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth- to twentieth-century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally-based exploration shall also be included here. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically-informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning

Preface This volume offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield’s work by bringing together recent auto/biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art. It arises out of an international three-day conference held at the former Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, in September 2008, co-organised by Ian Conrich, Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, which focused on the centenary of Mansfield’s arrival in London in 1908 and the start of her professional career as a writer. It features reinterpretations of Mansfield’s fiction in relation to her life, historical and aesthetic studies of her literary modernism, and readings of her work which focus on philosophy and fiction, class and gender, biography/autobiography, all within a framework of literary and political modernism. The latter years of this decade have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Mansfield, invigorated by the publication in June 2008 of the long-awaited fifth and final volume of Mansfield’s Collected Letters, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. The creation of the international Katherine Mansfield Society in 2009, of which the present editors are all Board members, has extended this interest in new and dynamic ways, as has the Society’s new scholarly journal, Katherine Mansfield Studies. Other recent landmarks in Mansfield scholarship and criticism included the announcement of the Katherine Mansfield Annual Essay Prize, which commenced in 2010. The Katherine Mansfield Society colloquium, held on 25 September 2009 in Menton (co-organized by the present editors), was the culmination of a week’s celebrations of 40 years of the Winn-Manson Mansfield Menton Fellowship, offered annually to a New Zealand writer. The editors hope the new interpretations of Mansfield’s work offered in this volume will expand understanding of her place in modernism for scholars, students and the general reader alike, interested in new interpretations of her work, reinterpretations of her life and times, and diverse literary contexts and readings. We anticipate that these essays will extend the flow of scholarship and criticism of Mansfield by forging links between current research and earlier and canonical interpretations of her writing and that of her modernist contemporaries, in a specifically twenty-first-century reinterpretation and reaffirmation of her expanding literary legacy. The editors would like to thank Matthew Feldman and Colleen Coalter, in particular, for their invaluable support and assistance in bringing this volume

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to fruition, members of the Katherine Mansfield Society, who have contributed to the enthusiasm and scholarship that inspired this collection, and the former Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, the School of Arts at the University of Northampton and The Open University for supporting this renewed scholarly activity on Mansfield. Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid

Notes on Contributors Valérie Baisnée is a Lecturer in English at the University of Paris 11. Her research interests include the personal writings and poetry of twentieth-century women, with a particular focus on New Zealand writers. She has published articles on women’s autobiographies and diaries, and is the author of Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras (1997). Isabel María Andrés Cuevas teaches several courses on English and English Literature at the University of Granada, Spain. Her interests are modernist and contemporary women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Sylvia Plath. She completed her thesis on Virginia Woolf in 2006. Anne Besnault-Levita is Senior Lecturer at the University of Rouen (France) where she teaches English literature. She is the author of a thesis on ‘Ellipsis in the short stories by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen’ and of Katherine Mansfield: La Voix du moment (1997). Her current fields of research are short story theories, modernist fiction and criticism, genre and gender studies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. Nancy Gray is an Associate Professor in English and Women’s Studies at The College of William and Mary, where she also twice served as Director of Women’s Studies. She is the author of Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing by Women (1992), and various articles and reviews on women writers and feminist theory. Bruce Harding researched the life of New Zealand detective novelist, Dame Ngaio Marsh, before embarking on a PhD on the figuration of criminality and deviance in Australian and New Zealand literature. He is Curator of the Ngaio Marsh House (Christchurch, NZ), a Research Fellow of the Ngai Tahu Research Centre, and an Associate of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies (University of Canterbury, NZ). Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in Literary Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne. One of her research interests is animals in modernist literature and film. She is currently working on a paper about dogs in screwball comedy. Apart from animals, her work on Katherine Mansfield (and John Middleton Murry) centres

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on their fascination with Russian literature and their work as literary critics. She is reviews editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. Kathleen Jones is the author of seven biographies, and her subjects include women writers such as the seventeenth-century Duchess of Newcastle, Christina Rossetti and Catherine Cookson. Her new biography of Mansfield – Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller – is published by Penguin NZ. She tutors creative writing for the Open University and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

Janka Kašcˇáková is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia. She received her PhD in English literature from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2007. Her research interests include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English literature, especially the works of Katherine Mansfield. Gerri Kimber is an Associate Lecturer at The Open University. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. 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). She is the co-editor of Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011). Joanna Kokot is Professor of English Literature at Warmia and Mazury University in Olsztyn, Poland. Her field of research comprises English literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. Publications include Plays with the Reader in Rudyard Kipling’s Short Stories (1993), The Baker Street Chronicler. Narrative Strategies in the Sherlock Holmes Tales by Arthur Conan Doyle (1999) and ‘This Rough Magic’: Studies in Popular Literature (2004). Miroslawa Kubasiewicz teaches English literature at the University of Zielona Góra, Poland. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Towards Authenticity of Existence: A Heideggerian Perspective on the Literary Works of Katherine Mansfield’. Ana Belén López Pérez is currently working on her PhD dissertation on Katherine Mansfield and female identity at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She has presented several papers and essays on Katherine Mansfield and on the short story genre at conferences, and has published translations from English into Galician of some stories by Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Jenny McDonnell teaches in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (2010) and has published essays on Mansfield and on Robert Louis Stevenson. She is co-editor of the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter and film reviews editor of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

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J. Lawrence Mitchell is Professor of English and Interim Head of the Department of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University. His biographical study, T. F. Powys: Aspects of a Life (Brynmill) appeared in 2005, and he is currently working on a book about boxing in literature and art. He has built a comprehensive collection of Mansfield’s work in British and American editions including copies of four numbers of the Queen’s College Magazine while Mansfield was there (one with her cousin Evelyn Payne’s signature), copies of Rhythm, two variants of the 1911 In a German Pension, the rare Cosmic Anatomy, and Murry’s Still Life inscribed ‘To Chaddie with love from Jack Murry’, December 1916. Eiko Nakano is Lecturer in the Faculty of Cultural Studies at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan. She received a PhD from the University of Stirling, Scotland, in 2005. She has published several articles on Mansfield, including ‘Katherine Mansfield and French Philosophy: A Bergsonian Reading of Maata’ in Katherine Mansfield Studies, vol. 1 (2009). Susan Reid is a founding member of the Katherine Mansfield Society, guest editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies (vol. 2, 2010), editor of the online ‘Katherine Mansfield Blog’, 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, but also engaging with broader questions of gender and identity, such as Englishness, the pastoral, and the utopian. Gerardo Rodríguez Salas is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Granada, Spain, where he teaches English Literature. His research interests cover modernist and contemporary women writers (Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter and Carmel Bird) and he has published extensively on Katherine Mansfield after completing his PhD on her works in 2003. Delphine Soulhat teaches at University Lyon Lumière while currently completing a PhD at University Paris 10. Her interests include modernist literature, and more specifically female modernist writers. Her research work is devoted to an analysis of Mansfield’s stylistic and narrative approach to the encounter with sexual, cultural and artistic otherness. Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton. Her research interests are in the white settler society, Australian and New Zealand literature and film, postcolonial and diasporic writing more generally. She has most recently co-edited Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (2010) and Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011). She is the editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, current vice-chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society, and chair of EACLALS. In 2010–11 she is Research Fellow in New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

Introduction J. Lawrence Mitchell

In his novel Mansfield (2004), C. K. Stead sends his protagonist out from a party in Hammersmith into the night in pursuit of T. S. Eliot – a ploy that permits him to allude to Mansfield’s celebrated reading of the newly published ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to assembled guests on the lawn at Garsington in June 1917.1 And while Mansfield embraced Prufrock as ‘by far and away the most interesting and the best modern poem’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 256), she also insisted to Virginia Woolf that Prufrock was really a short story (O’Sullivan and Scott 1987: 318).2 Part of what drew her to Eliot’s work – and implicitly to Eliot himself in Stead’s novel – is that she sensed that they were working along similar lines, instinctive modernists both. Prufrock was, in more ways than one, her kind of story. For his part, in After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot placed Mansfield in the vanguard of experimental writers, citing three stories ‘that turn on the same theme of disillusion’ and that are ‘all of very great merit’ (1934: 35): ‘Bliss’, Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, and D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’. So why was it, asks Sydney Janet Kaplan in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991), that Mansfield’s rightful place among modernists had been forgotten or – perhaps worse – so taken for granted that it provoked little or no discussion among critics? On the whole, critics had been unable to contemplate anything but a narrowly masculine modernism, ignoring evidence that ‘the original impetus for modernism came in fact from women writers’, as Clare Hanson bluntly puts it in her contribution to The Gender of Modernism (in Scott 1990: 303). Unfortunately, Kaplan suggests, feminist critics largely ignored Mansfield in their concern to ensure a place at the modernist table for Virginia Woolf, unaware that ‘her innovations in the short-fiction genre (especially the “plot-less” story, the incorporation of the “stream of consciousness” into the content of fiction, and the emphasis on the psychological “moment”) preceded Virginia Woolf’s use of them’ (Kaplan 1991: 3). Moreover, because Mansfield had never been completely lost to the literary world over the years – she was widely anthologized – it was assumed that she simply did not need to be rediscovered. But now, some 20 years later, Kaplan’s seminal book has helped reshape the critical landscape so that Mansfield’s work can no longer be ignored, marginalized or patronized. Bonnie Kime Scott argues, in Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928, that Virginia Woolf ‘envied Mansfield as much as James Joyce as a model of what she was trying to do’ (Scott 1995: 65). And in a recent Hesperus edition

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of Prelude, William Boyd epitomizes something of that changed perspective with his unequivocal statement: ‘What we regard as quintessential Virginia Woolf was there in Katherine Mansfield avant la lettre. As Chekhov gave life to Mansfield, so Mansfield gave life to Woolf’s mature style’ (in Mansfield 2005: ix). Now, too, there is an increasing number of studies that recognize the value of linking Mansfield and Woolf as complementary exponents of modernism. The most substantial of these, Angela Smith’s Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999), explores at length ‘the strange and, in many ways, unlikely affinity between them’ (1999: 5) and, in a series of close readings of, for example, ‘Prelude’ and To the Lighthouse, shows how ‘the formal and thematic preoccupations of their fiction intersect’ (p. 7). In Chapter 11 in this volume, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas and Isabel María Andrés Cuevas want to get past the ‘impassioned debate about who was the true modernist innovator’ and focus instead upon shared grotesque elements in the work of Mansfield and Woolf. In light of the miscarriage she suffered in Bavaria, there is good reason to classify ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, which was written shortly after Mansfield’s return to London, as ‘a repudiation of maternity’. The porcine allusions (‘swine’s life’ and ‘piggy clothes’) and the baby that seems to have ‘two heads, and then no head’, are disconcerting images and suggest a deeply disturbed mind – that of the child-maid who smothers the baby. Fertility is, of course, one of the targets for Woolf in The Years, where we find an image as grotesque as anything in Mansfield: ‘the women broke off into innumerable babies’. This description accords with her mindset at the time. According to her diary entry for 20 January 1931, the original idea had been a book ‘about the sexual life of women’ and she compared the drawn-out project, from which first came The Pargiters, as ‘like a long childbirth’ (cited in Johnson 1994: 305). It is ironic that John Middleton Murry, who worked so hard to maintain and enhance his wife’s reputation after her death, unwittingly managed to mask her status as a modernist by insisting so frequently, as in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, on ‘her rightful place as the most wonderful writer and most beautiful spirit of our time’.3 While his claims won some readers and helped boost sales of Mansfield’s work, they alienated friends and acquaintances, provoked unflattering fictional cameos of the couple, and cannot be dissociated from later critical ambivalence about and devaluation of her work. Dismissive labels such as D. H. Lawrence’s ‘not great’ (Roberts et al. 1987: 521), and Wyndham Lewis’s ‘mag.-story writer’ (cited in Alpers 1980: 372) are arguably by-products of Murry’s misguided efforts. Frank O’Connor admits as much at the beginning of his chapter on Mansfield in The Lonely Voice: ‘It may be that for me and people of my own generation her work has been obscured by her legend, as the work of Rupert Brooke has been’ (O’Connor 1963: 128–9). Yet when he discusses such stories as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, the names he invokes by way of comparison are James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Not bad company. So the stage is set for the latest contributions to Mansfield’s burgeoning reputation as a major modernist. What is most striking is the sheer range of countries from which the contributors hail – Australia, England, France, Ireland, Japan,

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New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and the United States. That Mansfield’s stories have proven so widely appealing should no longer be surprising. In 1937, when Guy Morris, an Auckland magistrate and Mansfield enthusiast, received an article about her in La Nación of Buenos Aires from Pat Lawlor, his friend and fellow collector, he determined to make a systematic search for translations. By the time he delivered his findings in 1944 he had located ‘Katherine Mansfield in ten languages’ (Morris 1944: 24). That number had grown to 28 in B. J. Kirkpatrick’s (1989) authoritative bibliography; and recent years have seen publication of Shifen Gong’s A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield (2001), Joanna Wood’s Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (2001) and Gerri Kimber’s Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). Katherine Mansfield now belongs to the world. The cheap jibe by Wyndham Lewis – calling Mansfield ‘the famous New Zealand mag.-story writer’ (cited in Alpers 1980: 372), as though her stories featured regularly in popular magazines – is patently false. From the time of her return to London in 1908, most of her work appeared in serious, usually literary, journals, although she did publish four stories in J. C. Squire’s The London Mercury and seven in Clement Shorter’s The Sphere. But three of The Sphere stories appeared in August 1921, just a month before Lewis met Mansfield, and the illustrations as much as the stories may have prompted his reaction. The haughty elitism of the ‘new men’ is reflected in the intellectual snobbery of T. S. Eliot, who became founding editor of The Criterion in 1922. He had little time even for the middlebrow London Mercury, complaining that it ‘suffers from the mediocrity of the minds most consistently employed upon it’ (Eliot 1921: 689). Oddly enough he also had little patience with Lady Rothermere whose money was behind The Criterion; so he must have been chagrined to hear that she deemed Katherine Mansfield ‘the most intelligent woman I have ever met’ (Eliot 1988: 588).4 In Chapter 3 of this volume, Jenny McDonnell takes up the challenge of Lewis’s dismissive characterization of Mansfield and provides a necessary corrective to the still prevalent belief that literary modernism and popular taste were irreconcilable. She traces the process by which Mansfield’s ‘prolonged association with the worlds of British periodical publishing’ led her to understand that ‘the categories of the “literary” and the “popular” need not be mutually exclusive’. Her initial ‘anti-commercial and elitist ideals’ were soon tempered by the real-world struggle to keep Rhythm afloat, as evidenced by the need to solicit advertisements (a task at which she was far superior to the hapless editor, Murry). Although a truly comprehensive study of the short-lived Rhythm: A Quarterly of Modern Literature and Art remains to be written, Gerri Kimber’s essay in Chapter 1 provides a useful guide to those unfamiliar with this now scarce journal and the cultural dynamics represented therein. In her systematic survey of the contributors and contents she shows that while ‘the artistic heart of the magazine was firmly in Paris’, the transnational ambitions of the journal were signalled by the list of international ‘correspondents’ – notably Floryan Sobienowski (Poland), Francis Carco (France), Julian Park (America), and Michael Lykiardopoulos

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(Russia). The contributors were an equally cosmopolitan group and included an impressive array of writers and artists. The artists – among them the ill-fated Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and a youthful Pablo Picasso – were recruited by Murry’s friend, the Fauvist painter John Duncan Fergusson. Fergusson famously provided a line-block for the wrappers of Prelude of which Virginia Woolf did not approve.5 He would later marry the dancer Margaret Morris who sometimes performed at the Cave of the Golden Calf, the legendary pre-World War One nightclub run by Strindberg’s wife, where Mansfield, Pound and the Rhythm artist Jessica Dismorr might sometimes be seen too. Strictly in terms of technique, Mansfield’s own evolving modernist style had not yet developed in her first story for Rhythm. ‘The Woman at the Store’ is very far from being a Chekhovian plot-less story, but it does reveal a whole new landscape of manuka bushes and tussock grass, as well as Mansfield’s already well-developed talent for the vernacular. But for an editor such as Murry whose manifesto railed against ‘narrow aestheticism’ and insisted that, ‘“before Art can be human again it must learn to be brutal”’ (Murry et al. 1911, 1 (1): 36), this grim story of domestic violence had irresistible appeal. And the idea of the avant-garde, of an emerging ‘modernism’, is pervasive, as in Murry’s polemical editorial ‘Art and Philosophy’ in the first issue of Rhythm: ‘Modernism is not the capricious outburst of intellectual dipsomania. It penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things’ (1911, 1 (1): 12). On the evidence of Mansfield’s subsequent artistic growth, we can be confident that she read and absorbed this message and that she would always be interested in ‘what lies beneath these strange rich surfaces’.6 Many years later, soon after she had finished ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Garden Party’, two of her best stories, Arthur Waugh of publishers Chapman and Hall approached her for a contribution to the first collection of Georgian Stories. She reported indignantly to Dorothy Brett: ‘he said the more “plotty” a story I could give him the better. What about that for a word? It made my hair stand up in prongs’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 311). Here, a decade after ‘The Woman at the Store’ and enjoying a surge of creativity, she could hardly have been further removed from such ‘plotty’ stories. McDonnell cites this scornful reaction as evidence of her unwillingness to compromise; so it is likely that it fell to her newly-appointed agent, J. B. Pinker, to select ‘Pictures’, the story of the desperate film extra, Miss Ada Moss, as closer to Waugh’s ‘preference for the old-fashioned story with a dramatic plot [. . .] rather than the modern subtle and psychological study of emotions’ (Waugh 1922: xii). Thus did the ‘literary’ lion make peace with the ‘popular’ lamb. In Between Two Worlds (1935), Murry recounts how he had gone to Paris afire with enthusiasm for the philosophy of Henri Bergson. One day he fell into conversation with the ‘Scottish philosopher-painter’ Fergusson, who invited Murry to ‘call at his studio and see his painting, which he believed to be somehow related to Bergson’s philosophy’ (1935: 135). From their subsequent discussions, Murry came to believe that ‘rhythm was the distinctive element in all the arts’ (p.156) and that he should start a literary magazine entitled ‘Rhythm’

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with a version of Fergusson’s painting by that name on the cover. In Chapter 2, Eiko Nakano focuses specifically on Rhythm as a ‘Bergsonian magazine’ and its inevitable impact upon Mansfield’s early stories, although she further argues that ‘the influence of Bergson’s theory was crucial throughout Mansfield’s writing career’. Perhaps, then, the strikingly Bergsonian character of ‘Prufrock’ was one of the features to which Mansfield responded – that admixture of clock time and personal time or durée. Mansfield was a ‘born actress and mimic’ Anne Besnault-Levita reminds us in Chapter 7 (on the authority of Ida Baker); so we hear, or seem to hear, many voices in her stories – yet, along with the narrator in ‘The Canary’, we are unsure and are obliged to ask ‘–Ah, what is it? – that I heard’. Following Merleau-Ponty, Besnault-Levita takes a phenomenological approach to ‘voice’ in Mansfield’s work, and productively hones in on the ways emotions manifest themselves – their affects. Thus in a Mansfieldian text our attention is drawn to ‘sighs, silences, dashes, exclamation and question marks, repetitions’ – all the modernist manifestations of a ‘dramaturgy of voice’. Sometimes the listening self is self-congratulatory (Raoul Duquette in ‘Je ne parle pas français’) and sometimes self-doubting (Beryl Fairfield in ‘Prelude’), but it is the whole range of possible selves – the ‘hundreds of selves’ that Mansfield famously embraced –that interest Valérie Baisnée in Chapter 14. She takes a fresh look at Mansfield’s so-called ‘journal’, now that Margaret Scott has given us the real thing. The three volumes edited by Murry between 1927 and 1954 are confirmed as ‘autobiographical fictions’, though they decisively shaped the Mansfield legend. Scott offers instead the materiality of 53 meticulously edited ‘notebooks’ and 24 sets of ‘unbound papers’ (Scott 1997). Furthermore she is generous about Murry in her introduction – praising his ‘courage and honesty’, his ‘quiet dogged hard labour’, and concluding that ‘he commands a respect and admiration that no amount of disapproval of his editorial methods can diminish’ (1997: xvii). At the same time, she acknowledges that there are simply too many differences between her interpretation of Mansfield’s difficult handwriting and Murry’s for her to list. Baisnée’s approach is ‘to attempt a reassessment of Mansfield’s Journal within the tradition of diary-writing’ and she shows that, though it fails to meet many of the traditional criteria of the genre, it is intimately connected with Mansfield’s productivity as a writer, for ‘creativity and diary-keeping coincide’. Mansfield evidently destroyed her ‘huge complaining diaries’; furthermore, she also voiced her determination to ‘leave no sign’ and added, in one enigmatic entry, ‘I keep silence as Mother kept silence’. Baisnée cites this passage as evidence of Mansfield’s growing distrust of ‘self-disclosure’. Yet the instructions to her husband to ‘leave all fair’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 235), still left to him the final decision about what to destroy and what to publish. Ever since Mansfield’s death, of course, there has been extensive controversy about Murry’s behaviour, especially concerning his critical role in the posthumous publication of her work. Most commentators have been unsympathetic, at least with his modus operandi, and Rayner Heppenstall once dubbed him ‘the best-hated man of letters in the country’ (cited in Lea 1959: 213). Kathleen

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Jones takes a decidedly different tack in ‘The Mansfield Legacy’ in Chapter 13. While she grants that he ‘often behaved badly and failed to meet Mansfield’s needs on many occasions’, she points out that he was ‘a much more vulnerable individual than is usually portrayed’ and, drawing upon manuscript materials hitherto rarely consulted, makes a refreshing attempt at presenting Murry’s side of the story. Alas, the appalling facts of his later life in particular – the various indiscretions and untimely confessions, the treatment of his children and much more – do little to engender sympathy. Jones admits that he was ‘emotionally illiterate’, and notes, with a hint of resignation, that his ‘diary entries concentrate mainly on his own sufferings’. And yet this was Mansfield’s man, to the despair of Frederick Goodyear, the ‘neo-barbarian’ who would happily have taken her hand in search of the ‘New Thelema’. Although their friendship was never entirely untroubled, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield had much in common. But were they really on different sides in the modernist battle of the sexes? Susan Reid examines one vexing aspect of their relationship in Chapter 12 – their seemingly rather different views ‘on the subject of maleness’. Lawrence was drawn, almost nostalgically, to ‘the old hardy indomitable male’ (Lawrence 1921: 114); these people, after all, were his miner-father’s kind of people. But Mansfield was made distinctly uncomfortable by his fixation with the male body; and, when the Lawrences and the Murrys briefly and disastrously tried living together in Cornwall, she complained to her friend Beatrice Campbell: ‘I shall never see sex [. . .] in everything’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 261). Mansfield’s own male ideal, Reid suggests, may have been Jonathan Trout, the rather feckless and unthreatening dreamer of ‘At the Bay’. However she finds plenty of evidence that ‘would also seem to position Mansfield closer to Lawrence than is usually acknowledged’ – for example, Bertha Young’s yearning to rediscover her body in ‘Bliss’, and the common interest in, and use of, the Sleeping Beauty myth. Intriguingly, she hints that ‘some of the difficulty’ between Mansfield and Lawrence on the subject of maleness may have been Murry’s fault – and that was why Lawrence once invited her to join him in Rananim without her husband. It is unlikely that Mansfield, who had fought so fiercely to return to London in 1908, would ever have agreed to anyone’s Thelema or Rananim. It was the city that ‘the little colonial’ yearned for – ‘the space of modernism’, as Ana Belén López Pérez terms it in her essay (see Chapter 10). Yet life was not easy for the kind of ‘new woman’ that Mansfield aspired to be and López Pérez shows how her love–hate relationship plays out in an early London story (‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’) and in a late one (‘A Cup of Tea’). Janka Kašcˇáková has marshalled a good deal of evidence to argue for ‘the important role played by the physical coldness of weather, body, rooms’ in many of Mansfield’s stories (see Chapter 15). Poor Ada Moss, another denizen of London, is out of work and is tormented by the ‘high, cold wind’ as she wanders the streets in search of a job. Indeed ‘coldness’, it seems, becomes a leitmotif for Mansfield – the ‘cold breath’ that chilled Linda Burnell’s love; the imaginary snowflakes that fall on Constantia and Josephine and prevent them from escaping the cold dead hand of their father; the ‘cold strange wind’ that disturbs the

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little governess. References to the cold recur in Mansfield’s notebooks and in her letters too, and suggest a state of mind as much as anything. In her June 1909 letter to Garnet Trowell, for instance, written while she sat alone in a Bavarian pension awaiting the birth of the son she would never have, she feels ‘heart coldness – hand coldness – soul coldness’. Yet when the solicitous little corporal sees his lover trembling in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and asks her if she is cold, she says no. Perhaps, then, we are to believe that love is the remedy; for coldness also signals ‘loneliness, abandonment, hostility, [and] alienation’. Mansfield’s intense interest in the world at large sometimes takes the form of a kind of sympathetic magic in which she identifies wholly with an object or animal or gives life to the inanimate. In Chapter 16, Melinda Harvey draws our attention to Mansfield’s letter to her painter friend, Dorothy Brett, in which she avers, ‘When I write about ducks I swear I am a white duck’. Harvey is nothing, if not ambitious in her aims: she views Mansfield’s work as ‘as contributing to an invisible, haphazard and often unnoticed undercurrent in literature [. . .]: the critique of anthropocentrism and the pursuit of an animal-centred discourse’. While acknowledging that writers like Melville have long ‘unsettled philosophy’s apparently clear-cut division between the human and the animal’, she sees an intensifying interest in ‘the animal’ in modernist circles, specifying Kafka, Lawrence, Hemingway – and Mansfield. Other examples come easily to mind – David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922), John Collier’s His Monkey Wife: or Married to a Chimp (1930) and even Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933). Harvey insists that Mansfield’s attention to animals makes sense in the context of ‘her oft-noted interest in alterity’ and offers other similarly thought-provoking aperçus in her stimulating essay. It seems that the two tigers (‘Tig’ and ‘Wig’) who lived in ‘The Elephant’ and dreamed of ‘The Heron’ are just a small portion of Katherine Mansfield’s menagerie. Other contributors have something relevant to say on the subject. Joanna Kokot’s primary focus in Chapter 5 is the elusiveness of reality and the limits of cognition in the stories. Thus she alludes to the blurring of fantasy and reality apparent in Kezia’s perception of her new home in ‘Prelude’, wherein the parrots on the wallpaper ‘persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp’ while outside her bedroom window ‘hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes sat in the sky watching her’. And in the aptly titled ‘Kezia in Wonderland’ (see Chapter 8), Delphine Soulhat points to the zoomorphism so prominent in ‘Sun and Moon’ and in ‘At the Bay’. The quasi-philosophical discussion about the ontological status of animals and insects in the Burnell washhouse (‘“You can’t be a bee, Kezia. A bee’s not an animal. It’s a ninseck”’) is wonderfully realized – and takes us into distinctly new modernist territory. Soulhat observes of the various identities adopted by the children (bull, rooster, donkey, sheep and bee): ‘this is no mere disguise – it is role play, the closest stage to transformation’. With this insight, it becomes hard to read Kezia’s desperate plea to Pat in ‘Prelude’ – ‘“Put head back!”’ – as anything but a heartfelt ‘cry against corruption’. It is widely agreed that ‘Prelude’ is a modernist masterpiece; and most critics see ‘The Aloe’ more or less as the rough diamond from which the true gem was

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carved. In Chapter 9, Bruce Harding begs to differ; for he explores a ‘hypothesis that in many important ways “Prelude” represents a diminishment of the raw energy and challenging vision of “The Aloe”’. He argues that ‘Mansfield wrote “The Aloe” in almost the same polemical spirit in which Woolf, decades later, penned Three Guineas (1938)’ and that the subsequent changes entailed ‘reducing the much stronger feminist dynamic [. . .] while also purging much that was psychically revelatory’. If his arguments are accepted – and they are very cogently presented – we must ask whether Mansfield was aware of the trade-off in sacrificing sociopolitical polemics for modernist compression. A good number of Mansfield’s stories have endings that are disputed or enigmatic in some way; so there has never been a shortage of ingenious critical ‘solutions’ or putatively authoritative interpretations. Nancy Gray wants no part of them. In Chapter 6 she points out that, although Mansfield – along with Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf – discounted ‘a self which is continuous and permanent’, we, the common reader, would like to ‘count on’ the promise of a ‘singular self’, as indeed do Mansfield’s characters, who are always worrying about the ‘real self’ and the ‘false self’. This insistence on trying to resolve inconsistencies and contradictions is misguided because ‘the notion of self that we encounter on Mansfield’s pages comes to us in forms persistently impervious to definition’. The secrets of ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘Bliss’, for example, simply are not there to be uncovered. Vincent O’Sullivan’s characterization of Mansfield’s life as of ‘a vivid existential shaping’ prompts Miroslawa Kubasiewicz ‘to analyze some of Mansfield’s stories to show that the concept of authenticity [. . .] also finds expression in her work’ (see Chapter 4). For the most part, we are confronted with negative exempla – poor unmarried Beryl Fairfield, for instance, smiling coyly over her cup at Stanley or the ‘aspiring writer’ Raoul Duquette, forever loitering with intent. But for Kubasiewicz only those individuals such as Mrs Fairfield who accept that ‘death belongs to the human condition’ can be said to have achieved an ‘authentic existence’. Kezia, of course, has witnessed death, but not yet come to terms with it. Apart from Kezia, Raoul Duquette, ‘the little perfumed fox-terrier of a Frenchman’, is arguably Mansfield’s most memorable creation. His story, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, was written during the first two months of 1918 while Mansfield was staying once again at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol. It suffered at the hands of Michael Sadleir, Murry’s old friend and Constable editor, who insisted on the excision of ‘objectionable’ material so that the ‘sharp lines’ she intended for the story were inevitably blurred. The unexpurgated Heron Press edition – perhaps no more than 60 copies – might as well not have existed, from the point of view of the story’s impact. So not enough attention has been given to the provocative claim by Antony Alpers – albeit buried in a footnote – that this story, which he labels ‘in a limited sense, her Waste Land’ was ‘before its time’. Had it appeared in its original form in Bliss (1920), Alpers suggests, she ‘would sooner have been recognized as the serious writer she was’ (Alpers 1984: 560–1). This fine collection of critical essays leaves no doubt about her seriousness.

Introduction

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Overall, then, this volume offers a rich and wonderful array of essays from many critical perspectives. There are some that entice us with refreshingly new approaches to familiar texts – as do Besnault-Levita, Harvey, and Soulhat – and others that work against the critical grain – Harding and Jones in particular. But all the contributors stimulate the discerning reader with new and valuable insights into the work of Katherine Mansfield, a writer who was a ruthless critic of her own work and whose artistic legacy as a modernist is surely now unassailable.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

It was Clive Bell who recalled this reading in his memoir, Old Friends, (1956: 122). See also Alpers (1980: 239 and 441). J. M. Murry to Ottoline Morrell, ‘Monday’ [January 1923] Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Vivienne Eliot to Ezra Pound, 4 November 1922. See further Brooker (2004), chapter 4. Cited from Athenaeum (13 June 1919), review of Joseph Hergesheimer’s Java Head by Mansfield in O’Sullivan (1997: 4).

Bibliography Alpers, A. (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. London: The Viking Press. –(1984), The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Bell, C. (1956), Old Friends: Personal Recollections. London: Chatto & Windus. Brooker, P. (2004), Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Eliot, T. S. (1917), Prufrock and Other Observations. London: Egoist Press. –(1921), ‘London letter’, The Dial, New York, 70, (6), (June): 686–91. –(1934), After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber & Faber. Eliot, V. (ed.) (1988), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, vol. 1. Gong, S. (2001), A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Heppenstall, R. (1934), John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality. London: Jonathan Cape. Johnson, J. (1994), ‘The years’, in Julia Briggs (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works. London: Virago. Kaplan, S. J. (1991), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Kimber, G. (2008), Katherine Mansfield: The View from France. Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang. Kirkpatrick, B. J. (1989), A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Lawrence, D. H. (1921), Sea and Sardinia. New York: Thomas Selzer. Lea, F. A. (1959), The Life of John Middleton Murry. London: Methuen. Mansfield, K. (2005), Prelude. London: Hesperus Press. Morris, G. (1944), ‘Katherine Mansfield – In Ten Languages’, NZ Magazine, 23 (3) May-June, 23–5. Murry, J. M. (1911), ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm, 1 (1), 9–12. –(1935), Between Two Worlds: The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry. New York: Julian Messner. Murry, J. M., Sadler, M. and Fergusson, J. D. (1911), ‘Aims and Ideals’, Rhythm, 1 (1), 36. O’Connor, F. (1963), The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing. O’Sullivan, V. (ed.) (1997), Katherine Mansfield: New Zealand Stories. Auckland: Oxford University Press. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vol. 1 (1984), vol. 2 (1987), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008). Roberts, W., Boulton, J. and Mansfield, E. (eds) (1987), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 4, 1921–1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, B. K. (ed.) (1990), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. –(1995), Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Scott, M. (ed.) (1997), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols. Canterbury, New Zealand: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates. Smith, A. (1999), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stead, C. K. (2004), Mansfield: A Novel. London: Vintage. Waugh, A. (ed.) (1922), Georgian Stories. London: Chapman & Hall, and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Woods, J. (2001), Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Penguin Books.

Chapter 1

Mansfield, Rhythm and the Émigré Connection Gerri Kimber

Introduction1 From May 1911 to March 1913, Katherine Mansfield contributed to, and eventually helped to edit with John Middleton Murry, a short-lived little magazine entitled Rhythm, with a bias towards the arts and post-impressionism, and the philosophy of Bergson. It is now widely regarded as one of the earliest – and one of the most significant – modernist magazines. Indeed, it advertised itself elsewhere as ‘Rhythm: The Unique Magazine of Modernist Art’ (Brooker 2009: 263n). Its experimental modernism was closely connected to the visual arts, especially Fauvism. This article seeks to highlight Mansfield’s editorial – and financial – influence through her close association with Murry, together with her literary contributions to the magazine, focusing less on the short stories (which have been examined elsewhere), than specifically on a relatively unknown poem, ‘To God the Father’, for which I will offer a reading with biographical implications, and suggest a hitherto unnoticed visual source. In addition, the article will evaluate the impact of the unusual number of foreign and émigré correspondents and contributors, by way of a chronological overview of the magazine’s contents over its entire run of 14 issues. Mansfield herself was a colonial immigrant – a New Zealander – living in London. Indeed, Peter Brooker confirms that ‘[t]he modernists were [. . .] frequently émigrés and immigrants, displaced persons in an antagonistic relation to the features of metropolitan modernity in their host cultures’ (2009: 336); this was certainly the case with many of Rhythm’s contributors and is one reason for the magazine’s emphasis on radical experimentation in art.

Beginnings In the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was considered a literary and artistic Mecca. It was so for Mansfield and Murry, as it had been for hundreds of writers before them. By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris had become the literary, artistic and musical world’s most important city, disseminating its movements and influence internationally.2 In addition, writers and artists from all over the world sought refuge and artistic inspiration in France, and this state of affairs continued up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

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The two French Post-Impressionist Exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 in London had an unprecedented impact on both English artists and writers alike, including Mansfield, by introducing new modes of French aesthetic perception, and engendered the following hysterical response in the popular press: ‘[This is] a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting’ (Morning Post editorial, quoted in Smith 2000: 77). Eleven years after viewing the first of these exhibitions, Mansfield wrote to her friend Dorothy Brett, discussing the effect upon her of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’: That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn’t realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does. That and another of a sea-captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing which was queer, a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 333) It was therefore within this era of prolific cultural interchange that Murry, together with his Oxford friend Michael Sadler (who eventually became Mansfield’s publisher at Constable’s), and J. D. Fergusson (the Scottish artist whom Murry had met in Paris earlier in 1911) as co-editors, produced the first issue of Rhythm in the summer of 1911. From the very outset, Rhythm’s editorial slant was towards ‘the ideal of a new art’. As the editors famously stated in the first issue: ‘Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal’. Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch. (1911, 1 (1): 36)3 Angela Smith explains how Murry and the other ‘Rhythmists’, notably Fergusson, ‘found Paris stimulating because there, the return to the barbaric, with its simplifying of line and its emphasis on rhythm, was happening in a wide variety of art forms and in philosophy simultaneously’ (Smith 2000: 77). In the first issue, Murry himself attempts to clarify the editors’ ideals with one of the very first printed references to the word ‘modernism’: The artist attains to the pure form, refining and intensifying his vision till all that is unessential dissolves away [. . .]. He must return to the moment of pure perception to see the essential forms, the essential harmonies of line and colour, the essential music of the world. Modernism [. . .] penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things, rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world that is and lives. (1911, 1 (1): 12)

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Discernible in this early statement of belief from June 1911 is an uncanny resemblance to Mansfield’s own later artistic philosophy. Her memory of seeing a Van Gogh painting, quoted above, inspiring the notion of ‘shaking free’, reveals those ‘moments of pure perception’ expounded here by Murry. As Mansfield wrote in a letter on 2 May 1920: Delicate perception is not enough; one must find the exact way in which to convey the delicate perception. One must inhabit the other mind and know more of the other mind and your secret knowledge is the light in which all is steeped. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 4) On 3 February 1921, she moved further towards defining her artistic aesthetic: Here is painting, and here is life. We can’t separate them. [. . .] I believe the only way to live as artists under these new conditions in art and life is to put everything to the test for ourselves [. . .] to be thorough, to be honest [. . .] Your generation & mine too has been ‘put off’ with imitations of the real thing and we’re bound to react violently if we’re sincere. [. . .] I too have a passion for technique. I have a passion for making the thing into a whole if you know what I mean. Out of technique is born real style, I believe. There are no shortcuts. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 173) As Sydney Janet Kaplan observes, Mansfield imitated many different literary styles during her years of apprenticeship as a writer, and she was constantly and profoundly influenced by her interest in painting, reinforced by her many close friendships and connections with working artists. She also benefited from Murry’s involvement with avant-garde artists through his editorship of Rhythm and his knowledge of their work (Kaplan 1991: 204). The émigré status of many contributors to the new magazine, coupled with the plethora of international correspondents publicizing the new avant-garde movement, meant that Rhythm possessed a transnational identity from the outset. Many of the contributors, alive and dead – such as Picasso, Goncharova, Wyspianski, Carco, Derain, Sobienowski, Van Gogh – went on to become establishment names. Smith notes how many ‘Rhythmists’ displayed a sense of exuberance in their work, partly attributable to their discovery of a more metropolitan milieu in which to develop experimentation and their ‘voluntary exile from their own national, social, and familial constraints’ (Smith 2000: 78). As far as the established art world was concerned, as exiles they were also outlaws ‘occupying a position at odds with or opposed to a received mainstream, [. . .] out of a conviction that they stood for something better or more modern. This placed them in an alternative or counter public sphere of cultural formation’ (Brooker and Thacker 2009: 29). Moreover, roughly half of the regular contributors to Rhythm were women; they included Mansfield herself, Fergusson’s then partner, the American artist Anne Estelle Rice, Jessica Dismorr and Dorothy

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‘Georges’ Banks. As Brooker notes, discussing ‘this woven cultured alliance’ in Paris between 1907 and 1914, ‘one senses [. . .] the rare existence of a mixed and congenial, relatively democratically organized, male and female artistic community’ (Brooker 2009: 334–5).

Rhythm before Mansfield Murry claimed that by the autumn of 1911: Rhythm had become at last a succès d’estime. Gradually, most of the prominent writers of the younger generation had gathered round it: Gilbert Cannan, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton [. . .] Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke [. . .] and finally D. H. Lawrence. (Murry 1935: 238) In the first issue (Summer 1911 – it was initially published as a quarterly), no editors’ names are specified or foreign ‘correspondents’ mentioned. Francis Carco contributes two short pieces of creative prose in French: ‘Aix en Provence’ and ‘Les Huit Danseuses’ (1 (1): 20–21). There is an artistic study by a 30-year-old Pablo Picasso, already becoming a highly regarded artist, who in 1907 had exhibited with others in Paris at the recently-opened gallery run by Daniel-Heinrich Kahnweiler. A German art historian and collector, Kahnweiler became one of the leading Parisian art dealers of the twentieth century, promoting as well as Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain and others who had arrived from far-flung parts to live and work in Montparnasse. He marketed their work not just in Paris but also through Europe and the Americas. As Picasso famously remarked: ‘What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense?’ (in Cowen 1998: 118).4 This first issue also contains a picture by Anne Estelle Rice. Another initial contributor, who became a regular until the magazine’s demise, was Dorothy ‘Georges’ Banks, whom Antony Alpers describes thus: A big heavy woman with a flabby face like Oscar Wilde’s, she wore men’s clothes and was always weeping. In her chaotic flat [in Paris, Murry] got square meals, and he picked up her enthusiasm for a wild young Spanish painter named Picasso. (Alpers 1980: 132) From the outset Rhythm had a particularly strong French literary bias; throughout its short life both Tristan Derème and Francis Carco were regular correspondents and contributors, writing articles in French.5 In the second issue of Autumn 1911, there is a poem by an American, Julian Park, subsequently named in Issue 5 as Rhythm’s ‘American correspondent’. Park (1885–1965) was the first dean of Arts and Sciences (1919–1954) of the

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University at Buffalo, New York, and served as its first historian. In these first two issues there are no advertisements, foreign agents or correspondents. However, there is a range of articles on a number of European artists, artistic movements, writers and composers, including Fauvism, the philosophy of Bergson, Claude Debussy and Vincent van Gogh. The third issue, in the winter of 1911, includes two poems in French by Derème, a picture by the painter and sculptor Auguste Chabaud (1882–1955), who exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants with the Fauves, turning to cubism in 1911, a short story in French by Carco, a woodcut by Derain ‘by permission of M. Kahnweiler’, an article on Paul Gauguin and another study by Picasso. There is also a full-page advertisement for the first time: for Hanfstaengl’s gallery in London (a branch of the Munich-based Franz Hanfstaengl Fine Arts Publishing House), showcasing photographic reproductions by ‘the so-called Post-Impressionists’ (1911, 1 (3): ii).

Rhythm and Mansfield In Issue 4, Spring 1912, Mansfield makes her first appearance in the magazine with a story set in the wilds of colonial New Zealand – ‘The Woman at the Store’ (1912, 1 (4): 7–21), loosely based, as Jenny McDonnell notes, on another short story, ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (1892), by the Australian writer Henry Lawson (1867–1922).6 Both stories emphasize the loneliness and harshness of life in the bush – especially for women – and this ‘brutal’ aspect, which entirely accorded with the journal’s manifesto from Issue 1, as outlined above, particularly attracted Murry as editor. Mansfield also places two poems in this issue, ‘Very Early Spring’ and ‘The Awakening River’, apparently ‘translated from the Russian of Boris Petrovsky’ by Katherine Mansfield: (1912, 1 (4): 30). The reason for the Russian-sounding pseudonym is unclear, but it certainly extends the continental character of the magazine. As Vincent O’Sullivan notes, Mansfield, with a passion for all things Russian at this time, cultivated a ‘Slavic air’ in her verse, while her prose provided the brutality and colour that Murry’s editorial policy demanded (O’Sullivan 1988: xii). There is an equally strong Gallic feel to this issue, with reproductions of paintings by French Fauvist painter Henri Manguin (1874–1949), André Dunoyer-Segonzac (1884–1974), a poem in French by Jean Pellerin and two short stories in French by ‘Claudien’. In addition, there is a fulsome acknowledgement to Clovis Sagot for providing permission to reproduce the work of Chabaud, Herbin and Picasso, with the accolade that ‘when the history of the modern movement comes to be written none will hold a higher or more honourable place’ (1912, 1 (4): 34). Sagot’s celebrated art gallery (despite selling at inflated prices), had been founded at the turn of the century; he acted as official salesman for Picasso’s ‘Rose Period’ paintings (1904–1906) on behalf of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had bought the entire collection, and also

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mounted the first exhibition of Cubist painter Juan Gris in 1911. Also included in the ‘acknowledgment’ is an expression of indebtedness to Eugene Druet ‘for permission to reproduce the drawings of Manguin and Marquet [. . .] taken from the series of Druet photographs (Sole Agent for England, Hanfstaengl)’ (1912, 1 (4): 33). Eugene Druet from 1896 until his death in 1916 was a photographer for Rodin and represented both painters and sculptors in his famous art gallery. Daniel Kahnweiler is also acknowledged for permission to reprint the woodcut of Derain in this issue (1912, 1 (4): 33). These acknowledgments illustrate how the artistic heart of the magazine was firmly in Paris. And emphasizing this international feel, it lists for the first time its agents abroad: several in Paris and one each in New York, Berlin and Munich. After this issue, financial troubles beset the magazine; the ensuing hiatus lasted several months, until Mansfield suggested that Stephen Swift, the publisher of her collection of stories, In a German Pension (1911), take over the production. When Swift himself went bankrupt shortly afterwards, Martin Secker and Edward Marsh stepped in to help. Mansfield, ever practical, offered her annual allowance from her father to help keep the magazine afloat and with a sound business head, ‘worked hard at canvassing advertising which Murry [. . .] had earlier blithely declared as “unessentials”’ (Brooker 2009: 316). (Eventually, the debts left by Swift led to Murry declaring himself bankrupt in February 1914.) From Issue 5, then, in June 1912, Mansfield is officially listed as an editorial assistant to Murry, financially involved with the magazine, and now more able to bring her own contacts and specific literary interests to the attention of Rhythm’s readers – especially with regard to Eastern Europe and Russia. In fact, she, Murry, and their ever-widening social circle, held strong convictions about the singular importance of Russian literature and these were reflected in many of their creative endeavours.7 With this issue, the beginning of the second volume, the magazine moves to a monthly format and the editorial team is now mentioned by name: Editor: JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY. Assisted by KATHERINE MANSFIELD and MICHAEL T. H. SADLER. Art-Editor: JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON. (1912, 2 (5), inside front cover) And a foreign correspondent is listed for the first time, the American, Julian Park, an earlier contributor to Issue 2. A note at the end of this issue advertising a special exhibition of the work of Rhythm artists, part of an International Exhibition in Cologne, shows the growing reputation of the journal, in that English art was ‘to be represented there solely by the work of contributors to the Magazine’ (Murry et al. 1912, 2 (5): 36). In this issue, Mansfield publishes a poem using her own name: ‘The Sea Child’ (1912, 2 (5): 1). Its prominent position on the first page underlines her new-found status on the magazine’s staff. Furthermore, she also reviews a book by John Galsworthy, and with Murry writes a

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lengthy editorial-style piece on ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ (1912, 2 (5): 18–20): Art and the artist are perfectly at one. Art is free; the artist is free. Art is real; the artist is real. Art is individual; the artist is individual. Their unity is ultimate and unassailable. It is the essential movement of Life. It is the splendid adventure, the eternal quest for rhythm. (p. 20) The confidence of their beliefs, which such a joint ‘statement’ proclaims, and Mansfield’s strong voice throughout this issue, reveal much about their relationship (both personal and professional), and also reflects their joint editorial style and shared ambitions. In Issue 6, July 1912, a ‘Polish correspondent’ is first mentioned: the writer Floryan Sobienowski (1881–1964), whose involvement in Rhythm would have been at Mansfield’s suggestion. She had met Sobienowski in the summer of 1909 in Bavaria, following a confinement and subsequent still-birth; for a few months until December 1909 and her return to England, the two were lovers. Whether it was Sobienowski who introduced Mansfield to the work of Chekhov and other Russian writers is a matter of conjecture; but it is clear that he fostered in her a life-long love of Slavic and in particular Russian literature. During the time of their relationship in 1909, Mansfield wrote what was to become one of her most famous poems: ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianksy’. Although the poem was translated into Polish by Sobienowski and published in a Warsaw paper on 26 December 1910, it was published in English only in 1938.8 Murry records his own seemingly bitter reaction to the new ‘Polish correspondent’: ‘We were forced to find room for our Slavonic incubus, who by this time appeared to regard himself as our dependent for life’ (Murry 1935: 237), thus revealing how Mansfield’s personal life directly affected the affairs of the little magazine. In this issue, there are again acknowledgements to both Sagot and Druet for permission to reproduce the drawings of Auguste Herbin and the pictures by Othon Friesz and Albert Marquet respectively (1912, 2 (6): 72). Again, there is reference to ‘the Rhythm artists’ as a collective group, underlining the distinctive creative style and approach taken by the magazine: ‘The next number [. . .] will be illustrated by the majority of the Rhythm artists’ (1912, 2 (6): 72). Mansfield maintains her authorial and editorial prominence with two book reviews and another joint editorial piece with Murry, entitled ‘Seriousness in Art’ (1912, 2 (6): 46–9): True seriousness is an assertion, a courageous acceptance of the unexplored; the false is a negation, a cowardly clinging to the outworn known. The mob treads over this patch of threadbare ground with mechanical regularity, so poverty-stricken in itself that it asks for nothing but the tokens of poverty and is only comfortable and at ease when it finds nothing further. The land whereon these people live is barren and desolate, lying parcelled and monotonous in the midst of an unknown sea. The artists sail in stately golden ships over this

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism familiar and adventurous ocean. Their gay flags of greeting stream in the sunlight; and far-off winds blow in their great sails and in their hair, as they go sailing by. (p. 49)

Once more the editors comment on the lure of the new modernism with its greater seriousness and dedication, and the paucity of preceding artistic expression, in a manner redolent of some great Homeric adventure. Issue 7 – August 1912 – contains another study by Picasso, and another ‘Lettre de Paris’ by Derème. Many foreign correspondents are now listed, including, for the first time, a ‘Russian correspondent’ – Michael Lykiardopoulos (1912, 2 (7), inside front cover), described by Bruce Lockhart in Memoirs of a British Agent (1932) thus: Michael Lykiardopoulos was the talented secretary of the Moscow Arts theatre. ‘Lyki’ was a strange loveable creature; one third Greek, one third Russian and one third English [sic]. [. . .] His real work in life was as a translator. He had real literary flair, an excellent Russian prose style, and a quite remarkable knowledge of eight or nine European languages. He knew most of the great writers of Europe and had translated their best works into Russian. (Lockhart 1932: 74)9 These credentials made him an excellent choice as Rhythm’s Russian correspondent, as he is so named from Issue 7 until the journal’s demise. There is a curious connection between Bruce Lockhart – friend of the renowned occultist Aleister Crowley (introduced to Lockhart by Lykiardopoulos), as well as to others like H. G. Wells, Robert Ross, Lytton Strachey, Granville Barker and Gordon Craig – and Mansfield herself. Her lifelong friend, Ida Baker (also known as LM), noted that Mansfield, prior to first meeting Murry in December 1911, ‘was caught up briefly in an odd group of people [. . .] with an interest in the occult. The leader of this group was Aleister Crowley. Katherine was invited to an Evening, during which [. . .] Hashish was taken’ (Baker 1971: 85–6).10 One can speculate that during this period she met Bruce Lockhart, who in turn may have introduced her – as someone with a passion for Russia – to Michael Lykiardopoulos. There are now outlets for the magazine in Warsaw and Cracow, thanks to Sobienowski, together with a new outlet in ‘Helsingfors’, the Swedish name for Helsinki. Mansfield’s contributions consist of another book review and a trio of interlinked fiction sketches: ‘Early Spring’, ‘The Following After’ and ‘By Moonlight’ under the title ‘Tales of a Courtyard’, which, in their EasternEuropean settings and Russian names once more demonstrate her ‘Slavic’ air. ‘By Moonlight’, according to McDonnell, shows signs of Mansfield’s independence of Murry’s ideals and her growing confidence as a writer (McDonnell 2010: 68).11 As if to reinforce this growing confidence, there are four contributions by Mansfield in the next issue, number 8, September 1912: a poem by ‘Boris Petrovsky’

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on the first page, a short story, ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’, by ‘Lili Heron’ (a new Mansfield pseudonym, Heron being a Beauchamp family name and the middle name of her brother Leslie), another story, ‘Spring in a Dream’, under her own name, and finally a book review. Given Mansfield’s prominence as a contributor to Rhythm at this time, it is understandable that she resorts to pseudonyms. Yet her influence as assistant editor is just as dominant. ‘Spring in a Dream’ is preceded by a poem by William Orton, a former lover from 1910 to 1911, and the story itself is accompanied by a full-page pencil drawing of Sobieniowski by Casimir Wilkomirski. Both stories reveal Mansfield in full ‘Rhythmist’ mode; ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ (originally drafted in 1910), is an astonishingly ‘modern’ story of ‘Maori entrapment’ and ‘Pakeha assumption’ (Smith 2000: 44), whilst ‘Spring in a Dream’, almost completely ignored by critics, once more sees Mansfield in Eastern Europe with her characters ‘Dimitri’, ‘Gertrud’ and ‘Konrad’ and an autumnal Chekhovian rural landscape setting. The abundance of foreign contributions continues, including drawings by a new contributor and short-lived friend to Mansfield and Murry, Henri GaudierBrzeska (1891–1915), a landscape by a previous contributor, French Fauvist painter, Othon Friesz (1879–1949), a portrait of Sobienowski by fellow Pole, Casimir Wilkomirski as mentioned above, and a book review written in French by Carco. Issue 9, October 1912, may be viewed as the pinnacle of Mansfield’s creative and editorial domination of the magazine, underpinned by her financial backing. According to Jeffrey Meyers, at this time Katherine was brave, Murry cowardly; she was reserved, he wore his heart on his sleeve; and from the beginning she took the active male role and he became the passive female. Katherine liked to identify herself with George Sand and Colette, who were independent, impulsive, and imaginative women, proud of their desire for love and passion for art. (Meyers 1978: 75) In this issue, Mansfield publishes three short stories, and a book review; in addition, Georges Banks produces a full-page caricature of her. ‘New Dresses’ is an obviously New Zealand story given a German twist, with ‘Andreas and Anna Binzer’ portraying Harold and Annie Beauchamp, Mansfield’s parents and the models for many subsequent stories. ‘Elena’, the little girl protagonist, ‘a determined and rebellious’ child, foreshadows Kezia of the later, celebrated New Zealand stories. ‘The Little Girl’, written by ‘Lili Heron’, is an even more obvious New Zealand story, with no pretence at being of German origin. ‘Kass’ is Kezia – Mansfield herself – while Alice the servant girl and the grandmother are precursors of the same characters in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’. ‘Sunday Lunch’ by ‘The Tiger’ (another Mansfield pseudonym, shared with Murry, and the origin of ‘Tig’, Murry’s nickname for her, used until her death), is a biting social satire, ridiculing bohemian London. For McDonnell, the story reveals how Mansfield was becoming sceptical about Murry’s ideals of a literary community, having

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seen that the problems of survival made such goals unachievable (McDonnell 2010: 73–4). This issue contains many pieces by regular contributors, including a selfportrait by Picasso, an article on new French poets by Derème, French book reviews by Carco, and a story by a new contributor, Leonid Andreyev, translated from the Russian. Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev (1871–1919) was a playwright and short-story writer, who led the Expressionist movement in Russian literature, between the revolution of 1905 and the Communist revolution that finally overthrew the Tsarist government. The translator is not named, but may have been Michael Lykiardopoulos. Reviewed in this issue by Wilfred Wilson Gibson is a play by Aleister Crowley: Mortadello, or The Angel of Venice: A Comedy.

‘To God the Father’ In Issue 10, November 1912, Mansfield places prominently on the first page another of her poems, again ‘translated from Boris Petrovsky’ and quoted here in full: TO GOD THE FATHER To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer, The God with the long grey beard And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle Who sits nodding and muttering on the all-too-big throne of Heaven. What a long, long time, dear God, since you set the stars in their places, Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night. And longer the time since you looked through the blue window of Heaven To see your children at play in a garden . . . . Now we are all stronger than you and wiser and more arrogant, In swift procession we pass you by. “Who is that marionette nodding and muttering On the all-too-big throne of Heaven? Come down from your place, Grey Beard, We have had enough of your play-acting!” It is centuries since I believed in you, But to-day my need of you has come back. I want no rose-coloured future, No books of learning, no protestations and denials – I am sick of this ugly scramble, I am tired of being pulled about – O God, I want to sit on your knees On the all-too-big throne of Heaven, And fall asleep with my hands tangled in your grey beard. (1912, 2 (10): 237)

Image 1 ‘God the Father – Let it Be’ designed by Stanislaw Wyspianski. Church of St Francis, Cracow. Author’s photo.

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Following a visit to Cracow, I discovered by chance that Mansfield’s poem was directly inspired by a monumental stained-glass window entitled ‘God the Father – Let it Be’ (Bóg Ojciec – Stan´ sie˛), designed by Stanislaw Wyspianksi for the church of St Francis in Cracow, portraying a monumental figure of God in the act of creation. Mansfield’s description of the God in her poem directly refers to the image of the God figure as represented by Wyspianski. The window had been installed in the Franciscan church in 1904, three years before Wyspianski’s death in 1907; Mansfield could only have heard of it through Sobienowski, who may have shown her a photographic reproduction. However, it is also entirely feasible that she visited Cracow with Sobienowski in the autumn of 1909. Certainly we know that on 10 November 1909, she wrote to her youngest sister Jeanne, thanking her for her birthday money and announcing that she had bought ‘a fat Polish dictionary with a green leather binding [which] goes about with me every day’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 93). According to Alpers, Ida Baker recalled in old age that Mansfield had ‘“made plans with the Pole” to go with him to his homeland, and then to go perhaps to Russia’ (Alpers 1980: 101), but Ida only knew what Mansfield had told her, and the visit to Poland may well have been concealed from her. On 12 December 1909, Mansfield’s friend Vera French wrote to her, begging her to reconsider going to live with Sobienowski (see Alpers 1980: 103). But in any case, whether she saw the real thing or only a reproduction, the image from what has now become Poland’s most iconic stained-glass window was etched into her mind when she wrote the poem ‘To God the Father’. Meyers further reveals: Katherine, who had published poems in the Lone Hand (Sydney) and the Daily News (London) in October and November 1909, wrote an idealistic but rather poor poem ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianksi’ in January 1910, which was translated by Floryan and published in a Warsaw weekly that year; she also translated part of Wyspianski’s play, The Judges. (Meyers 1978: 269) Tantalisingly, this part-translation is apparently no longer extant. In this issue (in which the American correspondent Julian Park is no longer mentioned), there is an introduction (in French) to French literature by Carco and a reproduction of a painting by Henri Rousseau – ‘Le Centenaire’. In addition, there is a creative composition by a Japanese writer, who would henceforth contribute regularly: Yone Noguchi (1875–1947). Noguchi was a prominent writer of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. He made various trips to Europe and became a leading interpreter of Japanese culture to Westerners, and of Western culture to the Japanese. As well as in Rhythm, Noguchi was published in several English papers and journals around this time, including the Egoist, the New Age, and the Westminster Gazette. In Issue 11, December 1912, there is another prose piece by Noguchi. Two woodcuts are published by new contributor Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), a Russian avant-garde painter, costume-designer, writer, illustrator, and set

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designer, whose great-aunt was Natalia Pushkina, wife of Alexander Pushkin. There is also a drawing by Michael Larionov (1881–1964), one of the most famous Russian artists of the twentieth century, and a founder of the Russian avant-garde, who lived in France after 1915. Mansfield publishes two more poems under her own name: ‘The Opal Dream Cave’ (p. 306) and ‘The Sea’ (p. 307), both written in Rottingdean in 1910 at the same time as ‘The Sea Child’ (published in Rhythm in June 1912). However, perhaps the most important contribution to this issue is the article by Sobienowski on the life and achievements of Poland’s most celebrated artist, Stanislaw Wyspianksi (called the Polish ‘Leonardo’, because of his artistic talents in so many creative fields), together with a black and white version of a Wyspianksi self-portrait. Here in this article is a clue to the inspiration of ‘Boris Petrovsky’s’ poem ‘To God the Father’ from the previous issue: ‘From the National Museum the way leads to the Franciscan church, where there are three more of [Wyspianski’s] stained-glass windows, St. Francis, St. Salomea, and God the Father’ (1912, 2 (11): 312, my italics). The article is a eulogy by Sobienowski to his country’s very own ‘Leonardo’: ‘From farthest Poland crowds of sorrowing men came to Krakow. Thousands and thousands. A holy, profound silence possessed all the city; the common things of day were hidden away’ (1912, 2 (11): 311). On 19 January 1913, the same article appeared in the New York Times, as Sobienowski pushed for world-wide recognition of his country’s most celebrated artist. In the final two issues of the magazine, Mansfield and Murry are officially listed as joint editors. Issue 12, January 1913, features mainly regular contributors, with, in addition, a painting by Cézanne, and another drawing by Larionov. ‘Boris Petrovsky’ contributes another poem, ‘Jangling Memory’ (1913, 2 (12): 337), though curiously this time there is no mention of it having been ‘translated by Katherine Mansfield’. Mansfield herself contributes her seventh – and final – story to Rhythm: ‘Ole Underwood’ (1913, 2 (12): 334–7). ‘Millie’ would appear in the Blue Review in June 1913 and complete a trio of stories (including ‘The Woman at the Store’), disregarded for many years, but recently the subject of extensive critical analysis. Alpers claims that these stories offered ‘insights into the social isolation that used to be common in New Zealand [. . .] and they were written in a cultural isolation that was total for their author: no one who read them in London could have known what in fact they achieved’ (Alpers 1980: 155). For Smith, in these stories Mansfield explores the savagery of a group of Pakeha New Zealanders who have [. . .] limited choices. [. . .] They are impressive for their Fauvist vigour and have a Bergsonian dimension in their portrayal of the self [. . .]. These three New Zealand stories pivot on an obvious barbarism: each describes one murder and gestures towards a second. In all of them the interest is not primarily in the plot, but in the repression and inarticulacy of the inhabitants of a surreal and brutal landscape. (Smith 2000: 88, 95)

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In Issue 13, February 1913, there are several new contributors, including the modernist Australian artist Horace Brodzky who supplies a woodcut. Vladimir Polunin (1880–1957), also contributes an etching. Polunin came to England as Diaghalev’s main designer for the Russian Ballet and stayed on to teach scene painting at the Slade School of Art.12 This is the first issue since number 3 in which Mansfield makes no direct contribution. One can only guess at the reasons for this; biographical evidence is sketchy and affords no obvious clues. In the last issue of Rhythm – March 1913 – Mansfield’s final creative contributions to the magazine take the form of poems: one assigned to herself – ‘Sea Song’ (1913, 2 (14): 453–4) – and one written by ‘Boris Petrovsky’ – ‘There Was a Child Once’. ‘According to Ida Baker, the [latter] poem concerned KM’s friendship with William Orton’ (O’Sullivan 1988: 88). For Mansfield, these publications must have felt like the completion of a cycle, as issue 4, in which she made her first appearance with ‘The Woman at the Store’, had also contained two poems.

Conclusion The Blue Review, the successor to Rhythm, ran for only three months from May to July 1913, edited by Murry, with Mansfield as an associate-editor (though with far less influence), her role seemingly limited to correspondence (McDonnell 2010: 56). The list of contributors included D. H. Lawrence, Gilbert Cannan, Rupert Brooke and other minor poets, with contributions from Murry and Mansfield, together with some drawings and cartoons, but it lacks the international scope and visual excitement of its predecessor.13 There is a complete absence of foreign correspondents, so noticeable in Rhythm, and indeed of foreign contributors in general. The avant-garde feel has gone; and gone too, that sense of being at the very threshold of something new and original. Mansfield’s contributions to Rhythm over the course of the magazine’s short life consisted of eleven poems, seven stories, six book reviews and two editorials, co-written with Murry. This was in addition to her duties as an assistant-editor and then joint-editor, when her influence on the magazine’s contents and contributions was marked; many items which did not bear her authorial name would nevertheless have been edited or revised by her. But, intriguingly, her poetic contributions dominate, a fact which critical analysis seems to have overlooked. O’Sullivan remarks: ‘We may regard her poetry now as Mansfield herself tended to think of it – unassuming, often slight, serviceable enough for occasional published excursions into inherited effects and derived styles, yet capable too of unexpectedly inventive turns and intensity’ (O’Sullivan 1988: xiii). When Murry first knew Mansfield, however, he would have considered her a poet just as much as a short-story writer. Within five months of her death, in June 1923, Murry published The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, containing the stories which Mansfield had been working on prior to her death, most of which were complete. However, more tellingly, in November 1923 Murry published a collected edition of her poems, thereby demonstrating the importance he still accorded this

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element of her creative endeavours. As O’Sullivan wryly comments on Murry’s prolific posthumous publications of Mansfield’s work: Poems by Katherine Mansfield [. . .] was perhaps the single volume that would have caused her particular disquiet. Although she returned to writing verse at different times during her life, Mansfield made no claims to being a poet. Murry was determined to establish her as one. (O’Sullivan 1988: ix) But Murry had always viewed Mansfield as a poet. In his introduction to a newly expanded edition of her poems which he published in 1930, Murry remarked: I remember her telling me when we first met that the beautiful pieces now gathered together as ‘Poems, 1911–13’ had been refused, because they were unrhymed, by the only editor who used to accept her work. He wanted her to write nothing but satirical prose. This treatment made her very reserved about her verses. Those she published in Rhythm appeared as translations from an imaginary Russian called Boris Petrovsky. (Murry 1930: xii-iii) The ‘editor’ in question of course refers to A. R. Orage and his weekly journal, the New Age, in which Mansfield published so many stories prior to Rhythm.14 Murry’s relationship with Orage was never cordial. Indeed he blamed Orage for being instrumental in Mansfield’s early death, since it was Orage who had encouraged her to go to Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau, although Murry himself had counselled his mortally-ill wife against such a move. The butt of this 1930s jibe would have been obvious to all literary London. More importantly, Mansfield, together with the other foreign contributors who gathered round this little magazine, engendered an exotic ‘foreign’ air, expanding out of England and looking towards a creative horizon that encompassed not just Europe – East and West – but the whole world. Mansfield herself, as assistant and then co-editor and through her own connections, fostered the journal’s remit to escape beyond the confines of London – for both its contributions and its sales. At the height of its popularity, in Issue 7 of August 1912, Rhythm was naming seven distributors in France, two each in Poland and Germany, and single distributors in America, Finland and Russia. As a young, thoroughly ‘modern’, colonial New Zealander living in London, with a passion for the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ in music, literature and art, Mansfield could not have wished for a more creative home.

Notes 1

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of my colleagues Janet Wilson and Susan Reid in the preparation of this essay.

28 2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

13

14

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism English writers, such as Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater, were responsible for the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movement crossing the Channel from France to England. For a general overview of English and French cultural activity from the close of the nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth century, see Kimber (2008: 23–52). The main resource site for modernist magazines is the Modernist Journals Project, a joint collaboration between Brown University and The University of Tulsa. http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/about.html (accessed 28 December 2010). The project’s website includes the complete run of Rhythm and the Blue Review. By the fourth issue of Rhythm (Spring 1912), the Galerie Kahnweiler is included in a new list of ‘Agents for Rhythm Abroad’ (back cover). Claire Tomalin is critical of their contribution, claiming that their work as journalists was inferior to their talents as poets (Tomalin 1987: 99). For a detailed reading of ‘The Woman at the Store’ see Jenny McDonnell (2010: 48–55). For a detailed analysis of Mansfield’s Russian obsession, see in particular Joanna Woods, Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (Woods 2001). Privately printed by Bertram Rota, London, 1938. Bruce Lockhart (1887–1970), was Acting British Consul-General in Moscow when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, but left shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution of October that year. He then became England’s first envoy to the Bolsheviks in January 1918 and was implicated in a plot to assassinate the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. He was condemned to death and confined in the Kremlin as a prisoner, but was eventually exchanged for the Russian diplomat Litvinov. His Memoirs of a British Agent (1932), became a worldwide bestseller, and was later made into a film, British Agent (1934). James Moore also notes: ‘Katherine’s attendance at one of Crowley’s hashish parties is mentioned both by LM and Anne Estelle Rice’ (Moore 1980: 18n). For a detailed analysis of ‘Tales of a Courtyard’ see McDonnell (2010: 67–70). See http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8081/exist/mjp/plookup.xq?id=PoluninVladimir (accessed 18 April 2010). Editorial: Modernist Magazines website: http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8081/exist/ mjp/show_series.xq?id=1170697577471270 (accessed 18 April 2010). For a comprehensive survey of Mansfield’s association with Orage and the New Age, see McDonnell (2010: 15–45).

Bibliography Alpers, A. (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. London: Viking. Baker, I. (1971), The Memories of LM. London: Michael Joseph. Brooker, P. (2009), ‘Harmony, discord and difference: Rhythm (1911–13), The Blue Review (1913) and The Signature (1915)’, in P. Brooker and A. Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 314–36. Brooker, P. and Thacker A. (eds) (2009), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Cowen, T. (1998), In Praise of Commercial Culture. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, S. J. (1991), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Kimber, G. (2008), Katherine Mansfield: The View from France. Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang. Lockhart, R. H. B. (1932), Memoirs of a British Agent. London: Putnam. McDonnell, J. (2010), Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Meyers, J. (1978), Katherine Mansfield: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton. Modernist Magazines website: Available from: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/ about.html (accessed 28 December 2010). Moore, J. (1980), Gurdjieff and Mansfield. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Murry, J. M. (1911a), ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm, 1 (1), 9–12. –(1911b), ‘Aims and Ideals’, Rhythm, 1 (1), 36. –(1913), ‘The influence of Baudelaire’, Rhythm, 2 (14), xxiii–xxvii. –(1935), Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. Murry, J. M. (ed.) (1930), Poems by Katherine Mansfield. London: Constable. Murry, J. M. and Mansfield, K. (1912a), ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, Rhythm, 2 (5), 18–20. –(1912b), ‘Seriousness in Art’, Rhythm, 2 (6), 46–49. Murry, J. M., Sadler, M. and Fergusson, J. D. (eds) (1911–1913), Rhythm, issues 1–14, May 1911 – March 1913. Available from: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/ render.php?view=mjp_object&id=1159905483482363 (accessed 28 December 2010). O’Sullivan, V. (ed.) (1988), Poems of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Oxford University Press. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol.1 (1984), vol. 4 (1996). Smith, A. (2000), Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Sobieniowski, F. (1912), ‘Stanislaw Wyspianski – 1868–1907’, Rhythm, 2 (11), 311–6. Tomalin, C. (1987), Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. London: Viking. Woods, J. (2001), Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Penguin.

Chapter 2

Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm and Henri Bergson Eiko Nakano

This chapter discusses the significance of Henri Bergson’s philosophy in Katherine Mansfield’s early work first published in the magazine Rhythm, focusing on ‘The Woman at the Store’ and ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ (both published in 1912). Although the influence of Bergson’s theories was crucial throughout Mansfield’s writing career, I focus on her early stories because Rhythm aimed to be a Bergsonian magazine and her collaboration on it in 1912 and 1913 was especially formative in the development of Bergsonian traits in her writing. As scholars such as Mark Antliff and Mary Ann Gillies have confirmed, Bergson became a worldwide cultural phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The apparent accessibility and novelty of Bergsonian philosophy attracted a great number of people, including the general public. In Britain, this reception began around 1910 to 1911 following the publication of his translated works.1 In 1911, Bergson also gave lectures in Britain, which were immensely popular and well-attended. This ‘fashionable’ philosophy was introduced in numerous articles and books published in Britain during this period, when modernism was starting to flourish. Such articles were found in, for instance, the New Age, a magazine of politics, literature and art edited by A. R. Orage, in which Mansfield published her first stories as a professional writer. At a time when English translations of Bergson’s works were being read by those with some intellectual curiosity, the New Age offered a lively debate about his philosophy. An active advocate in this group was T. E. Hulme, who knew Bergson personally and translated An Introduction to Metaphysics in 1913. Hulme frequently wrote for the New Age to promote better understanding of this philosopher, who was so famous that many knew about him without properly understanding his theories, as I will discuss later. Bergson’s philosophy introduces two ways of knowing time: intellectual and intuitive. The former is the way we chronologically recognize ‘the time’, and the latter is the way we psychologically experience time, or what Bergson calls ‘duration’. According to Bergson our intellect ‘spatializes’ time, which means it divides time into artificial units such as hours and minutes, while intuition tends to connect up what could otherwise be recognized as separate moments. In other

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words, spatialized time is associated with quantity by our intellect, and duration is linked with quality by our intuition. Bergson explains that spatialized time is a time that has already passed; it is therefore no longer lived or acted but thought and represented, unlike duration, which is a time that is passing right now. In Matter and Memory, Bergson provides a detailed account of this difference, using the process of learning a lesson by heart as an example. Before memorizing the lesson perfectly, one has to repeat it. Then, when the person has learned, there are two forms of memory; one is the memory about each reading, and the other is the learnt lesson: the lesson once learnt bears upon it no mark which betrays its origin and classes it in the past; it is part of my present, exactly like my habit of walking or of writing; it is lived and acted, rather than represented: I might believe it innate, if I did not choose to recall at the same time, as so many representations, the successive readings by means of which I learnt it. (Bergson 1911a: 91) In an intellectual sense, people often repeat the same types of action automatically in their daily lives, but from an intuitive perspective, they can never repeat the same action, since they cannot experience the same time once it has passed. Although Bergson articulates these differences between intuition and intellect, he also argues that they are created only by the degree of tension or relaxation of consciousness. When the consciousness is most tense, it is associated with intellect only, and when it is most relaxed, with intuition only. In reality, however, human consciousness never becomes either exclusively tense or exclusively relaxed, and never stays at the same degree of tension or relaxation. Bergson argues that there are different ‘rhythms’ of duration, and our consciousness is changeable in terms of the degree of its relation with intellect and intuition respectively. In other words, these apparently opposite factors are inseparable in human consciousness. Bergson eloquently explains that duration is a multiplicity, which is continuous and heterogeneous at the same time, by using his famous metaphor of melody. He states that, although different notes compose a tune, they ‘[melt], so to speak, into one another’ (Bergson 1910: 100). Despite his emphasis on the changing balance of intuition and intellect, Bergson is often associated with ideas that focus solely on intuition rather than intellect, such as the stream of consciousness technique. Even in his lifetime, Bergson’s philosophy was often incompletely understood, partly due to its overpopularity. Fascinated by the new idea of duration, intuition and heterogeneous continuity, many people simply failed to follow the interrelationship of Bergson’s philosophical formulations. This superficial appreciation of Bergson’s philosophy helped its quick dissemination, but also gave rise to misunderstandings and negative critiques. Bergson’s idea that time is not only internally and intuitively perceived but also intellectually externalized or spatialized was frequently

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ignored; not just by casual admirers of Bergson but by other philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, who condemned Bergson as anti-intellectual and wrote that ‘in the main intellect is the misfortune of man, while instinct is seen at its best in ants, bees, and Bergson’ (Russell 1912: 323). His misunderstanding of Bergson’s philosophy is apparent, for example, when he accuses Bergson of dealing with ‘instinct as the good boy and intellect as the bad boy’ (1912: 324). Bergson does not regard either as good or bad. If anything, Bergson implies that it is ‘bad’ for a life to be exclusively intuitive or exclusively intellectual, because to reach either of the extreme positions signifies the end of life. Even when he was most popular, Bergson was often unreasonably considered to oppose the intellectual in favour of intuition and thus inspired both enthusiasm and contempt. Some admired Bergson because they were satisfied with this reductive interpretation of his philosophy, while others were unconvinced by anti-intellectual concepts, which they wrongly believed were Bergsonian. John Middleton Murry perhaps experienced both reactions; he first showed his appreciation of intuition, which prompted him to start Rhythm with his friends in the summer of 1911, but had already dismissed it by the time he wrote in the Blue Review, the journal which succeeded Rhythm, in May 1913: ‘“Instinct” or “Intuition” is no panacea for the realities of life. The intellect and the desires of the intellect are as potent and as valuable to their possessor as instinct and the blind impulses of instinct’ (Murry 1911: 60). This suggests that Murry rejected his own earlier idea of intuition rather than Bergson’s. Although Murry was inspired by Bergson and borrowed the Bergsonian term ‘rhythm’ for his new magazine, he did not fully understand the relationship between intuition and intellect.2 Unlike Murry, Mansfield and some others working on Rhythm grasped the crucial Bergsonian notion of the balance of intuition and intellect. For example, J. D. Fergusson’s enigmatic painting Rhythm (1911) is full of contrasting motifs: the figure’s apparent femininity is evoked by her breasts and legs, while masculinity is suggested by her angular arm and torso; curves and circles versus straight lines; calmness versus movement. As Angela Smith notes, although the figure is seated, her ‘feet are almost cloven, and certainly look as if she is on tip-toe, poised to move, not sedentary’ (Smith 2000: 80). Fergusson’s creation of the impression of movement in the feet of a seemingly static woman echoes many other drawings in Rhythm of women dancing, a favourite expression of rhythm by many artists at that period. While drawings of dancing women can explicitly depict rhythm and movement, Fergusson’s painting, Rhythm, seems subtly to imply an inner rhythm, which often passes unnoticed because it is hidden, but which exists all the time, even when one does not appear to be dancing. Mansfield also explores the balance between the dynamic and the static in her story, ‘The Woman at the Store’ (1912), by contrasting yet linking the two states. The narrator and Hin regard the woman at the store and her child as mentally ill, and just as in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, the normal and the abnormal pairs in Mansfield’s story are repeatedly compared and contrasted in relation to the different ways they associate themselves with the present and past.

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Bergson suggests that, although it seems as if the past has ceased to exist while the present exists, it is not the present but the past that exists. The present has not come to exist yet; it is always only becoming. The Bergsonian present and past are expressed as the image of an inverted cone standing on its apex (S) on a rectangular plane (P) with its base (AB) uppermost:

Image 2

Adapted from Bergson (1911a:197)

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism If I represent by a cone SAB the totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while the summit S, which indicates at all times my present, moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual representation of the universe. At S the image of the body is concentrated; and, since it belongs to the plane P, this image does but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed. (Bergson 1911a: 196)

The present never exists in an intuitive sense, but it acts or is useful. Conversely, the past does not act nor is it useful any more, but it exists. The present and the past are united in the sense that human consciousness moves freely between them, or anywhere inside the cone. In ‘The Woman at the Store’, the way in which the narrator and Hin differ from the woman and the child is suggested most clearly at the end of the story as the difference between those with and without mobile consciousness, as described by Bergson. The morning after seeing the child’s drawing of the woman, shooting at a man they presume to be her murdered husband, the narrator and Hin leave the store, a place of the past. While these two are mobile, the woman and the child are confined within their place. Just as anticipated in the child’s words, ‘I’ll draw all of you when you’re gone’ (Mansfield 1912a: 16), the narrator and Hin are expected to leave, but the child is always there, representing the past in her pictures. The narrator is also taken back to the past in a dream in which she is scolded by her mother, but unlike the child, she is able to return to the present moment. In short, the story ‘The Woman at the Store’ represents Bergson’s discussion of intuition and intellect, implying the unity of the present and the past, and of a flowing time and a time which has flown. ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ can also be read in relation to Bergson’s theory on intuition and intellect, as the story implies the co-existence of contradictory interpretations of Pearl’s experiences. Although Joanna Woods claims that this story is ‘very different from “The Woman at the Store”’, because it ‘bears no traces of the fashionable brutality and far from seeking to shock, it draws the reader into the sunlit world of a New Zealand childhood’ (Woods 2001: 101), its title clearly raises the possibility of brutality and shock. Indeed, the end of the story ironically reveals that brutality may be found not in exotic and uncanny people but in more familiar ones, the ‘little blue men’ (Mansfield 1912b: 139),3 who ‘kidnap’ Pearl by taking her away from a place where she enjoys herself. That is, although the story seems for a while to concern Pearl’s kidnap by people who seem to be Ma¯ori, the child is never afraid of her ‘kidnappers’; instead, she experiences extreme happiness in her adventure with them. It is Pearl’s own family and the police of her own community that (brutally, if you like) force her to return to the boring life in the ‘House of Boxes’ where she can no longer be free and mobile. Mansfield’s unusual way of paragraphing this story seems designed to reinforce its contradictory messages. In this very short story, there are only three

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paragraphs. It opens as follows: Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide-and-seek in it. They blew Pearl Button’s pinafore frill into her mouth and they blew the street dust all over the House of Boxes. Pearl watched it – like a cloud – like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off. She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song. Two big women came walking down the street. One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green. (Mansfield 1912b: 136) This single paragraph continues until they ‘walked a long way’ after deciding to go together to a place where the women can show Pearl ‘beautiful things’ (1912b: 136). The reader would expect the long, opening paragraph to break, or at least to find a modifier or modifiers suggesting the chronological order of events, such as a temporal conjunction like ‘then’ between the sentences: ‘She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song’ and ‘Two big women came walking down the street’. Contrary to the expectations of an adult reader, events in the story – Pearl swinging on the gate, little winds blowing the street dust, Pearl singing, and the two big women walking towards her – happen in a continuous flow. Even the sudden appearance of the so-called ‘kidnappers’, which would seem to represent a turning point in the story, is not marked out in any way. This narrative technique implies that within Pearl’s consciousness there are no breaks or paragraphs that sort things out ‘intellectually’. The story is told through Pearl’s consciousness, in which time is experienced as duration rather than as measured or spatialized; in such a story, the idea that one scene is followed in sequence by another does not apply. Just like the long, continuous paragraphs, Mansfield’s similes, ‘like a cloud’ and ‘like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off’ (Mansfield 1912b: 136), also serve a similar purpose of comparing and linking ‘different’ things within Pearl’s consciousness. In these ways, Mansfield’s method of paragraphing the story seems to reflect Bergson’s words about poetry in relation to life’s continuity: ‘through the words, lines and verses runs that simple inspiration which is the whole poem. So, among the dissociated individuals, one life goes on moving’ (Bergson 1911b: 272–3). Bergson argues that the evolutionary process is guided by the push of the élan vital, or vital impetus, which is the single source of life. Derived from the same flow of life, different species or individuals share various faculties in common, although they can be classified into different ‘tendencies’. The evolutionary movement does not take a single direction but ‘proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly burst into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long’ (1911b: 103). Although Pearl changes, or evolves, while constantly experiencing a new environment, the past Pearl remains within her

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as an indivisible part of her life, and furthermore, she herself is also a part of one large life in the process of organic evolution. In order to demonstrate that the narrative is based on the child’s experience of duration, paragraphs and other common marks of categorization are eliminated. For example, the act of taking a young child away without the permission of her parent is not recognized as ‘kidnapping’ by Pearl. She does not identify the two big women as Ma¯ori, either. Here the reader is invited to follow the child’s intuitive perception instead of intellectual identifications. Although Pearl might not know that the two women can be ethnically described as Ma¯ori, this does not mean she cannot identify people or things intellectually. She shows her ability to give her own definition of what she sees or knows, indicating that she can recognize things intellectually as well as experiencing them intuitively both at home and in a new environment. For example, when she is asked where her mother is, she answers: ‘“In the kitching, ironing-because-it’s-Tuesday”’ (p. 136). Pearl’s immediate and automatic linking of ironing and Tuesday shows, however innocent it may sound, that she is to some extent familiar with an adult intellectual way of identifying what she knows. A similar moment comes when she has to sit down on the dusty floor: ‘She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places’ (p. 137). As a result of her upbringing, Pearl instantly reacts to dust and automatically sits in the best way of sitting in such a place. Again, when she eats a peach which one of the Ma¯ori women offers her, she is worried about the juice she spills over her clothes. Unlike her mother, who is staying at what Pearl calls the ‘House of Boxes’ and has to repeat the same ironing every Tuesday, Pearl is mobile. So is her consciousness. It keeps moving between the intuitive and the intellectual with different rhythms. The title of the story, which represents the intellectual perspective, then, illustrates the way people look back at and define what has already happened, or the time which has passed. The reader seems to experience this dream-like story as a dream, as if it were real and happening in the present moment. It is only when the reader awakes, or finishes the story, and reflects that he or she realizes it was a dream. This is also the moment when the reader can interpret the story (or the time which has flown) more intellectually, as the reader realizes that Pearl’s mother was so worried that she contacted the police; it is the reader’s consciousness that moves now.4 Bergson explains this concept of a time which is flowing and a time which has flown with an intriguing metaphor of art which must have attracted the attention of certain artists of the era, including Mansfield and her friends: The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colours spread out on the palette; but, even with the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would have been to produce it before it was produced – an absurd hypothesis which is its own

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refutation. Even so with regard to the moments of our life, of which we are the artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. (Bergson 1911b: 7) The title of Mansfield’s story allows the reader to anticipate something before reading it. However, the story is quite different from what is expected. Although Mansfield wrote the story, each reader is also an artist who takes part in creating lives by means of reading the story about these lives. Portraits such as Pearl’s are produced in the reader’s consciousness, influenced by, as well as influencing, what he or she is. Thus while different readers share the same story, each of the reading experiences of each reader (or each ‘artist’) can create a new story about new lives. Bergson’s quotation about portraits and colours also reminds us of the significance of colours in Mansfield’s story. She was inspired by her Colourist painter friends from Rhythm, such as Fergusson, and accordingly, colours play a significant role in ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’. When Pearl encounters new people or things, she might not know what they are called, but she does notice their colours. For example, when the two women first appear, they are introduced in relation to the colours they wear. Also it is Pearl’s white teeth that attract the two women in their first conversation with her. Later in the story, Pearl’s yellow curls and white neck also impress the Ma¯ori people. The frightening people who come to ‘rescue’ Pearl are not identified as the police but as ‘little blue men’ (p. 139). It is also interesting that when Pearl makes ‘a cup of her hands’ and catches some water from the sea: ‘it stopped being blue in her hands. She was so excited that she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing’ (p. 139). Pearl is part of nature but at the same time takes part in creating nature.5 Her extreme excitement after changing the colour of the water can be linked to the excitement of the child in ‘The Woman at the Store’, which she expresses while showing her drawings to the narrator and Hin. Both girls are ‘creators’ although, unlike the child in ‘The Woman at the Store’, Pearl creates the present reality which is acted instead of represented. Indeed, the story is not about what happens and how, but about how Pearl feels and lives. During her short adventure, she sees, hears, smells, touches, tastes, laughs, cries, and feels shy, happy, tired, hungry, scared, hot and excited. All these ever-changing feelings spring from within Pearl, rather than from external circumstances; Pearl’s changing feelings are the rhythms of her life that are performed and heard throughout the story. In addition to the stories discussed so far, ‘The Woman at the Store’ and ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’, Mansfield published several other stories between 1912 and 1913 in Rhythm and its successor the Blue Review. To conclude this discussion, I will briefly consider how some of these other works may relate to Bergson’s concepts. In particular, the very short passage from ‘Epilogue: Pension Seguin’, published in the Blue Review in May 1913, can be read as evidence that Mansfield was familiar with Bergson’s metaphor of music:

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All through the afternoon Mademoiselle Ambatielos and the piano warred with the Appassionata Sonata. They shattered it to bits and remade it to their heart’s desire – they unpicked it – and tried it in various styles. They added a little touch – caught up something. Finally they decided that the only thing of importance was the loud pedal. (Mansfield 1913: 40) After their attempts to break the Appassionata Sonata into different parts and rearrange it, Mademoiselle Ambatielos and the piano reach a Bergsonian conclusion: that is, that to connect the parts together with the loud pedal is the most important thing. This idea suggests a direct link to Bergson’s account of duration in which, although different notes compose a tune, they melt into one another, while the idea that the performer and her instrument are inseparable in creating music can be also associated with Bergson’s theory of matter and memory. For Mansfield, who once wished to be a professional cellist, musicality is significant in writing. Analyzing Mansfield’s writing with a special emphasis on rhythm that works in the course of time, W. H. New remarks on some drawings and marks that Mansfield uses in her later manuscripts, such as drawings of plants and dancers and narrative-division markers of treble clefs. New suggests that they could be linked to ‘the repeated subjects: music and the seasonal cycle of nature – in other words, rhythmic movement’ (New 1999: 56). Rhythm is also important in Mansfield’s stories written in 1912–1913. Sounds in changing rhythm play a crucial role in ‘Ole Underwood’ and ‘Millie’, for example, especially in the protagonists’ inner voices and heart beats which reflect their life and consciousness. Such connections between stories suggest a structure and interrelationship between all Mansfield’s stories in Rhythm and the Blue Review, which can also be interpreted as Bergsonian. The stories of this period could be divided into the following categories: l Group 1: ‘Brutality’ of colonial New Zealand l l l

‘The Woman at the Store’. Rhythm, Spring 1912 ‘Ole Underwood’. Rhythm, January 1913 ‘Millie’. Blue Review, June 1913

l Group 2: Girls from middle-class New Zealand l l l

‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’. Rhythm, September 1912 ‘New Dresses’. Rhythm, October 1912 ‘The Little Girl’. Rhythm, October 1912

l Group 3: Geneva l l l

‘Epilogue: Pension Seguin’. Blue Review, May 1913 ‘Epilogue II’. Blue Review, June 1913 ‘Epilogue III: Bains Turcs’. Blue Review, July 1913

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l Group 4: Others l l

‘Tales of a Courtyard’. Rhythm, August 1912 ‘Spring in a Dream’. Rhythm, September 1912

The first group, to which ‘The Woman at the Store’ belongs, deals with raw colonial life in New Zealand, based largely on Mansfield’s observations as a tourist.6 The second category, which includes ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’, is also a group of New Zealand stories, but, as Woods suggests (2001: 101), they are more like her later stories in the sense that each is a story of a middle-class girl who is more or less like the young Mansfield. However, as I have already mentioned, ‘Pearl Button’ is not necessarily detached from ideas of brutality, nor are the other stories in this category. The third category is a group of three stories entitled ‘Epilogue’, which are set in Geneva. In other words, each story which appeared in Rhythm or the Blue Review can be read either on its own or as part of a series, each group concerned with one particular place, separated from another place described in another series. It is very unlikely that Mansfield did not consider the relationship between the stories she wrote for these journals, as indicated by some hints of connections between seemingly unrelated stories and poems. For example, the words ‘little blue’ which appear in ‘little blue men’ in ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ can also be found in her poems ‘Very Early Spring’ (Rhythm, Spring 1912) and ‘The Sea Child’ (Rhythm, June 1912). Mansfield wrote ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ under the pseudonym Lili Heron, while ‘Very Early Spring’ is one of the poems that Mansfield presents as the work of a fictional Russian poet Boris Petrovsky, ‘translated’ by Katherine Mansfield. It therefore appears that Mansfield created a situation in which three different contributors to Rhythm, that is, ‘Boris Petrovsky’, ‘Katherine Mansfield’ and ‘Lili Heron’ used the same image. Also, images of fruits and seasons, changes in nature, are repeated in such stories as ‘Spring in a Dream’ and ‘Tales of a Courtyard’. These examples in Mansfield’s works for Rhythm can be recognized as her representations of rhythms of life which are repeated but arranged all the time to create new rhythms. Although Mansfield’s curiosity about Bergson may have begun when she was writing her German stories and before her involvement with Rhythm (Nakano 2005: 32–4), earlier stories are more concerned with showing consistency within the same German ‘series’. In Rhythm and the Blue Review, Mansfield shows more variety, while also suggesting some links between separate stories and poems.

Conclusion This chapter summarizes my Bergsonian interpretations of Mansfield’s early works, published in Rhythm and the Blue Review in 1912 and 1913. Of particular relevance to her later writing are the facts that the works of this period hint at the inseparability of intuition and intellect (instead of merely focusing on

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the innovative and attractive notion of ‘intuition’) in their treatment of the characters’ continuously changing consciousnesses and that different stories, plus different groups of stories, can be read as independent of, and yet, linked to, one another. Many of Mansfield’s early works such as ‘The Woman at the Store’ and ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ imply that the intensity of intuitive and intellectual aspects of human consciousness keeps changing with different rhythms, and therefore one can be more intuitive than intellectual, or vice versa, depending on the moment. Although the significance of quantitative or spatialized time in Bergson’s theory was neglected by many people such as Russell and Murry, who believed that Bergson favoured inner time, the notion that qualitative and quantitative elements of reality are indivisible is crucial both in Bergson’s philosophy and in Mansfield’s writing. Her early stories are often read with emphasis on the space where a particular character is located, such as New Zealand, and later stories tend to be discussed in terms of the form which helps show Mansfield’s modernist interest in how a character experiences time. However, the inseparable relation between spatial and temporal aspects (or between intellect and intuition) is central to her early work as well as to her later stories.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Bergson’s earliest and most famous books, Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, were originally published in French in 1889, 1896 and 1907, respectively. The English version of Time and Free Will, translated by F. L. Pogson, was published in 1910, with the translation of Matter and Memory by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer in 1911, and of Creative Evolution by Arthur Mitchell in 1911. It might not have been particularly important for Murry to represent Bergson’s theory itself when editing Rhythm. In explaining how popular the word ‘rhythm’ was during this period and why, Faith Binkes notes that the ambiguity of the term made it ‘tremendously useful’ (Binkes 2007: 23). All further references to ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ are from the version printed in Rhythm (Mansfield 1912b). This comment was influenced by my former student, Chisato Inoue, who suggested that the story can be read as a dream experienced by Pearl. She notes the mysterious ways the story jumps from one scene to another and the sudden end caused by the unrealistic ‘little blue men’ (who appear to her as monsters), and finds the story similar to a dream. Another former student, Youmi Nakamura, who also notices the unreality of the story, suggests that the story is about a pearl as an accessory. When the pearl is bought by the women, it is in a ‘box’ and carefully wrapped with paper and ‘ribbon’ which are removed by the women later. At the end of the story, when the woman drops the pearl on the beach it is taken to the sea, that is the pearl’s home, by the ‘little blue’ waves. I offer a more detailed account of the significance of ‘intelligent’ tools in chapters 1 and 3 of my PhD thesis (Nakano 2005).

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In 1907, the young Mansfield went camping in the Ureweras, in New Zealand’s North Island. See The Urewera Notebook (Mansfield 1978).

Bibliography Antliff, M. (1993), Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bergson, H. (1910), Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, F. L. Pogson (trans.). London: Swan Sonnenschein. –(1911a), Matter and Memory, N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (trans.). London: Allen and Unwin. –(1911b) Creative Evolution, A. Mitchell (trans.). London: Macmillan. Binkes, F. (2007), ‘Lines of engagement: Rhythm, reproduction, and the textual dialogues of early modernism’, in S. W. Churchill and A. McKible (eds), Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 21–34. Gillies, M. A. (1996), Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal, QC: McGillQueen’s University Press. Mansfield, K. (1912a), ‘The Woman at the Store’, Rhythm, 1 (4), 7–21. –(1912b), ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’, Rhythm, 2 (8), 136–9. –(1913), ‘Epilogue: Pension Seguin’, Blue Review, 1 (1), 37–42. –(1978), The Urewera Notebook, I. A. Gordon (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murry, J. M. (1911), ‘Aims and Ideals’, Rhythm, 1 (1), 36. Nakano, E. (2005), ‘One or Many: Bergsonian Readings of Katherine Mansfield’s Modernism’. PhD thesis. University of Stirling. New, W. H. (1999), Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form. Montreal, QC: McGillQueen’s University Press. Russell, B. (1912), ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, Monist, 22 (3), 321–47. Smith, A. (2000), Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave. Woods, J. (2001), Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Penguin.

Chapter 3

‘The Famous New Zealand Mag.-Story Writer’: Katherine Mansfield, Periodical Publishing and the Short Story Jenny McDonnell

In 1907, Katherine Mansfield took her first step to becoming a professional author, when she earned £2 for publishing some short symbolist vignettes in the Australian paper the Native Companion.1 In the course of her correspondence with the journal’s editor, E. J. Brady, the young writer attested to her artistic credibility by describing herself as ‘poor – obscure – just eighteen years of age – with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 26). By the end of her career, the perception that Mansfield’s literary principles were indeed dependent on the lightness of her purse would contribute to Wyndham Lewis’s dismissal of her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’ (Alpers 1980: 372), while Virginia Woolf confided to her diary on 12 December 1920 that she had an ‘obscure feeling that [Mansfield] advertises herself’ (Bell and McNellie 1978: 78). Similar criticism of her suspect literary credentials would linger in Mansfield’s posthumous reputation, as in Frank O’Connor’s summation of her in the 1960s as ‘the brassy little shopgirl of literature who made herself into a great writer’ (O’Connor 1965: 136). As Roger Robinson notes, for some time Mansfield continued to be perceived as ‘the woman author publishing suspiciously popular stories on the fringes of a rather male Modernism’ (Robinson 1994: 1). The restoration of Mansfield to a canon of modernist writers has effectively sought to write out such ‘suspiciously popular’ tendencies. Her reputation has been re-established as a key innovator of the modernist short story form, the natural successor to the late-nineteenth-century avant-garde challenge to mass market fare. However, the relationship between these two apparently opposing forces is now being reconsidered, in studies such as Winnie Chan’s The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s, which argues, [r]ead in the context of the periodicals that published them, ‘the short story’ [. . .] emerge[s] as the product of both mass culture and the backlash against it. The aims of commercial success and literary value became incompatible precisely during the period of the genre’s definition – anticipating, hastening, and complicating the ‘great divide’ that has come to

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characterize modernism. (Chan 2007: xi) By the early decades of the twentieth century, the short story had emerged out of ‘a chaotic print culture in transition from Victorian to mass culture’ and continued to be characterized by an ‘oscillation between mass culture and high art’ (p. x). This was the tradition that Mansfield inherited, and it may be argued that her own career was marked by a similar fluctuation between commercial viability and literary credibility in her engagement with the short story form and the literary marketplace. The variant readings of Mansfield as either commercial ‘Mag.-story writer’ or technically innovative ‘modernist’ are predicated on the idea that the categories of popularity and literariness are fundamentally antagonistic camps that reside on either of side of the ‘great divide’ (Huyssen 1986: viii). However, recent scholarship has increasingly sought to challenge ‘the commonplace of modernism’s inveterate antagonism to mass culture’ (Morrisson 2001: 5), providing a frame of reference that is fruitful to reinterpreting Mansfield’s career. In fact, Mansfield’s prolonged association with the worlds of British periodical publishing in particular contributed to her growing realization that the categories of the ‘literary’ and the ‘popular’ need not be mutually exclusive, and she ultimately came to challenge such closed interpretative categories in her shrewd negotiation of a variety of sites of periodical publication and her practice of the short story form. Between the years 1910 and 1922, Mansfield emerged as a short story writer at work in a vibrant and varied book and journalistic industry. Indeed, even when convalescent on mainland Europe, her letters frequently attest to her ongoing awareness of the literary marketplace for which she actively continued to write until well into 1922. In addition to negotiating contracts for the publication (and sometimes the marketing) of three books of short stories and two single-story volumes, Mansfield also co-edited three little magazines between 1912 and 1915; wrote a weekly review column in the Athenaeum between 1919 and 1920; and corresponded with a range of editors, publishers and agents in her placement of her stories in a total of 16 different journals, magazines and newspapers. As the opening exchange with Brady indicates, though, Mansfield initially equated artistic integrity with her pose as a poverty-stricken and obscure author who both invited and resisted the reduction of her ‘art’ to the status of a mere commodity in a necessary but conflicted engagement with the marketplace. These impulses would serve her well from 1910 on when she began to make a name for herself in a series of periodical publications in Britain, almost all of which displayed a similarly fraught relationship with all things ‘popular’, commercial and profitable. Her earliest association was with A. R. Orage’s political weekly the New Age (tellingly nicknamed the ‘No Wage’ by its editor), a journal which did not pay contributors. From here, she moved to the little magazine Rhythm, beginning the professional and personal relationship with John Middleton Murry that would continue for the remainder of her short life.

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At Rhythm, Mansfield gained invaluable first-hand experience of the financial pressures of the world of publishing, after she quickly rose to the ranks of assistant editor by June 1912. Her duties immersed her in the practicalities of running the paper, and came particularly to the fore when Rhythm’s finances began to flounder. In his autobiography Between Two Worlds, Murry offers an image of a determined Mansfield at work to secure advertising revenue as a means to keep Rhythm afloat: ‘Katherine was far braver at this unholy task than I. Whereas one rebuff would incapacitate me for the business for the rest of the day, she would persevere till she had gone through all the names on her list’ (Murry 1935: 242). She was also part of a group that came up with a plan that the journal might be floated on the stock market as a Limited Liability Company, and channelled her own allowance into maintaining the paper. This hands-on experience proved a useful reminder of the fact that, like many other coterie publications, Rhythm’s status as a published commodity meant that it was forced to acknowledge the practicalities of its financial obligations in order to carve out a niche for itself in the literary marketplace. Murry wrote a slightly defensive editorial in the third issue in which he went to some lengths to justify a recent decision to publish advertisements by arguing that the magazine was concerned with ‘free expression, not on the methods by which that freedom is secured’ (Murry 1911: 36). In order to promote its brand of ‘modernism’ in the face of the philistinism of the contemporary reading public, it seems that the journal saw its acquiescence to such practicalities as a necessary evil. Nevertheless, young Murry frequently expressed disdain for the general reading public that routinely ignored Rhythm’s efforts, and Mansfield initially joined him in these denunciations. It was in her collaborations with Murry, on a number of essays published in Rhythm in 1912, that Mansfield articulated most fully these anti-commercial and elitist ideals. In both ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ and ‘Seriousness in Art’, Murry and Mansfield argue that the relationship between the artist and an uncomprehending public (which they present as a ‘mob’) is a fundamentally antagonistic one. More damning still was the pair’s appraisal of contemporary writers, dismissed as mere tradesmen who pander to the ideals of this mob. ‘Seriousness in Art’ explicitly targets the commercial writer in its opening sentence: ‘To-day the craft of letters is becoming a trade instead of an art’. It claims that the majority of contemporary writers are ‘intensely serious in their effort to reach a comfortable competence’, but that this seriousness is that of ‘any tradesman’. To the commercial writer, literature is ‘a somewhat disreputable means to a purely commercial end, means only to be justified by financial success’ (Murry and Mansfield 1912b: 46). By contrast, the writers who populated the pages of Rhythm sought to oppose these forces of mediocrity. However, Mansfield’s attitude to these coterie ideals was to undergo a radical change in the years that followed, and she began to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the potential link between the artistic and commercial values of her own writing as she developed the short story techniques on which her reputation now rests. Of course, her aesthetic breakthrough with ‘Prelude’ came at a time when she was not actively associated with any single journal after the demise of the Signature,

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the short-lived collaboration between Mansfield, Murry and D. H. Lawrence in 1915. Unlike almost all of her work up to that point, which had been produced within the journalistic environs of either the New Age or one of Murry’s little magazines, ‘Prelude’ saw Mansfield experiment with a much longer form, making it more difficult to market; as the TLS review of the story put it in January 1920, it is a story ‘of the “awkward” length which, as publishers declare, the public finds too long for a short story and too short for a novel’ (Childs 1920: 63). Saralyn R. Daly suggests that it was free of any editorial policy (Daly 1994: 54) and it is ostensibly the independent product of an author who seems untrammelled by the commercial demands of the marketplace. This would seem to be supported by the fact that the story was first published privately in a prestige edition by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. However, the composition of ‘Prelude’ marked an additional breakthrough for Mansfield, one that is fundamentally linked with an increased willingness to engage with a wider reading public (the so-called ‘mob’ that she had once denounced), and to embrace more fully a commercial publishing realm. With ‘Prelude’, Mansfield developed the touchstones of the technique that influenced her mature work: the presentation of subjective experience and free indirect discourse; the use of ‘significant moments’ or epiphanies and symbols as structuring principles; and a rejection of plot and conventional form. Instead, she sought a new form, as she declared in January 1916, in the famous journal entry in which she professed her ambition to write an elegy for her brother, Leslie Beauchamp: I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World. [. . .] I want to write a kind of long elegy to you . . . perhaps not in poetry. Nor perhaps in prose. Almost certainly in a kind of special prose. (Scott 1997: 33) Having professed her ambition to produce the formally inventive and innovative material that would eventually yield ‘Prelude’, Mansfield soon clarified a second ambition when she became determined to produce material that would be commercially viable: This year I have to make money & get known. I want to make enough money to be able to give Lesley [Moore, or Ida Baker] some. In fact I want to provide for her. That’s my idea & to make enough so that Jack and I shall be able to pay our debts and live honourably. I should like to have a book finished & numbers of short stories ready. (Scott 1997: 58) In this way, Mansfield’s consolidation of a modernist aesthetic in her fiction actually coincided with her increasing desire to engage with a commercial publishing realm. Given this, her famous resolution to ‘make our little undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World’ may be read in a new light, implying

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a newfound desire to address as wide an audience as possible that may be linked with her developing commercial ambition. Each of these ambitions could be achieved by availing of the short story’s malleability as a form that might be both popular and experimental, and could also take advantage of the fact that the public Mansfield had once regarded as a ‘mob’ could make time for fiction if it was short and readily available and accessible. However, the initial publication of ‘Prelude’, in an edition of 300 copies hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf (some of which got the title of the story wrong in the running header), was unlikely to reach a particularly large readership. The second publication of the story would help it reach a larger public, when it was included in the 1920 collection Bliss and Other Stories, published by Michael Sadleir (another Rhythm alumnus) at Constable. By now, though, Mansfield seems to have become increasingly aware that an even wider audience could be addressed through different kinds of periodical publication, and she was to take advantage of a range of magazine and journalistic publishing in the latter stages of her career. In fact, when she returned to short story writing and periodical publication after a brief hiatus as reviewer for the Athenaeum between 1919 and 1920, she began to produce fiction that – in formal and marketable terms – sought to dismantle the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ (McDonnell 2009). This is most apparent in her chosen sites of publication during the years 1920 and 1922, as Mansfield aimed for a synthesis between a series of ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ papers, placing her work in eight different journals (half of her career-long tally of 16). Between these years, her short stories appeared in: Art & Letters; the Athenaeum; the London Mercury; the Nation & the Athenaeum; the Sphere; the Saturday (or Weekly) Westminster Gazette; the Sketch; and the Storyteller. Throughout 1920, her stories appeared almost exclusively in the Athenaeum, but after she resigned as literary reviewer at the end of December 1920, she began the process of placing her work elsewhere, eventually aided by J. B. Pinker, the literary agent whom she hired in August 1921. The most ‘literary’ of her new associations was probably the rather middlebrow London Mercury, despised by T. S. Eliot for one as having ‘no standing among intelligent people’ (Eliot 1988: 362). The Mercury was chosen as the site of publication for ‘The Stranger’, ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, all of which rank among Mansfield’s most experimental writing, the natural sequels to ‘Prelude’. By contrast, in an example of the self-promotion that Woolf found so distasteful, ‘The Garden Party’ was serialized in the Westminster Gazette in the same month that saw the publication of the collection of the same name. The most daring experiment saw the publication of seven stories in Clement Shorter’s popular illustrated paper, the Sphere, throughout 1921. After the appearance of ‘The Singing Lesson’ in April 1921, Shorter commissioned Mansfield to write six more stories, at ten guineas each. These were: ‘Sixpence’; ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’; ‘An Ideal Family’; ‘Her First Ball’; ‘The Voyage’; and ‘Marriage à la Mode’. Many of these have gained a reputation as mere ‘hackwork’, a lucrative venture that helped fund Mansfield as her health worsened. Mansfield was the first to admit that her association with the Sphere was a profitable one, telling

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Ottoline Morrell that: ‘I have been doing a series for The Sphere, because it pays better than any other paper I know’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 252). However, this is not to say that her motivation was exclusively financial, and as Daly suggests, ‘clearly Mansfield took the Sphere stories as seriously as her important “At the Bay”’ (Daly 1994: 107). With the exception of ‘The Voyage’, though, the stories are often routinely dismissed, as in Lorna Sage’s introduction to the Penguin edition of The Garden Party and Other Stories: ‘She worked on these with great speed, and in some cases it shows, in the rather pat shapes, and stagey effects’ (Sage 1997: xvii). However, these stories merit closer critical re-evaluation as Mansfield’s most sustained experiment with mass-market publishing. In them, she gained the opportunity to exploit fully the location of the short story form at the crossroads between the ‘literary’ and the ‘popular’; and indeed, these stories display a fusion of her ‘special prose’ with popular cultural forms. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’ is a case in point, a slice of romance fiction in which the protagonist Reggie takes measures to propose to the coquettish and flighty Anne. Mansfield herself subsequently expressed dissatisfaction with the story, writing in her notebook in July 1921 that ‘I finished Mr and Mrs Dove yesterday. I am not altogether pleased with it. It’s a little bit made up. It’s not inevitable’ (Scott 1997: 278). In truth, Mansfield remained her own harshest critic, holding all of her writing up to such fastidious standards that she described ‘The Garden Party’ in October 1921 as ‘moderately successful’ (p. 294). Likewise, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’ is a much more interesting story than Mansfield acknowledges, and exemplifies her skilful negotiation of the space between the ‘literary’ and the ‘popular’. Clearly, its publication in the Sphere is indicative of her willingness to engage with a mass market, yet a closer examination of the story at a textual level reveals the ways in which this engagement was decidedly on her own terms. In ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’, Mansfield produced a story that simultaneously adhered to and challenged the conventions of romance fiction, in prose that remained accessible and marketable to a popular audience, yet which also bears many of the hallmarks of Mansfield’s modernist technique. The story begins in media res, plunging the reader directly into Reggie’s perspective in order to present his insecurities and uncertainties, as in the description of his walk to Anne’s house, during which he intends to collect his thoughts in advance of proposing: The empty road gleamed, the hedges smelled of briar, and how big and bright the hollyhocks glowed in the cottage gardens. And here was Colonel Proctor’s – here it was already. His hand was on the gate, his elbow jogged the syringa bushes, and petals and pollen scattered over his coat sleeve. But wait a bit. This was too quick altogether. He’d meant to think the whole thing out again. Here, steady. But he was walking up the path, with the huge rose bushes on either side. It can’t be done like this. But his hand had grasped the bell, given it a pull, and started it pealing wildly, as if he’d come to say the house was on fire. (Mansfield 1921e: 172)

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In this way, Reggie’s character is entirely presented obliquely through free indirect discourse; his hesitancy and insecurities summed up in the staccato sentences that punctuate his thoughts, his lack of control evident in the careful use of the past tense to describe actions he has already unconsciously taken. This lack of control is further evident in the fantasy sequences that recur throughout the narrative, which overtly introduce the trappings of conventional imperial romance into the story: And just for the moment he was with her [Anne] on the way to Durban. It was night. She sat in a corner asleep. Her soft chin was tucked into her soft collar, her gold-brown lashes lay on her cheeks. He doted on her delicate little nose, her perfect lips, her ear like a baby’s, and the gold-brown curl that half covered it. They were passing through the jungle. It was warm and dark and far away. Then she woke up and said ‘Have I been asleep?’ and he answered, ‘Yes. Are you all right? Here, let me –’ And he leaned forward to . . . He bent over her. This was such bliss that he could dream no further. (Mansfield 1921e: 172)2 Reggie’s inner life is characterized by his fantasies of being Anne’s protector in his vision of their life together should she accept his proposal, a romantic and exotic projection of the kind of man he would like to be. However, he is not a romantic hero, and the image is thoroughly contrasted with what is implied about his actual life lived under the thumb of his overbearing mother. The distance between the two versions of Reggie is further reinforced when Anne rejects him on the grounds that she ‘couldn’t possibly marry a man I laughed at’, prompting a new image to displace Reggie’s vision of himself as Anne’s lover: it seemed to Reggie that a tall, handsome, brilliant stranger stepped in front of him and took his place – the kind of man that Anne and he had seen often at the theatre, walking on to the stage from nowhere, without a word catching the heroine in his arms, and after one long, tremendous look, carrying her off to anywhere . . . . (Mansfield 1921e: 173) Reggie’s new vision continues to invest in popular romance conventions – this time, conveyed as overtly theatrical – but he now removes himself from the equation, granting Anne the kind of lover he can only ever imagine himself to be. It is apparent that Reggie spends his inner life in the pages of a romantic fiction that is contrasted with his more prosaic existence as a harassed son and ineffectual lover. What is significant, though, is that the concluding stages of ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’ manage to fulfil the demands of romantic fiction while simultaneously undermining them. This is achieved by the use of a potentially heavy-handed structuring principle that compares the relationship between

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Reggie and Anne with that of the two doves of the title. Before Reggie’s proposal, the birds are presented as follows: To and fro, to and fro over the fine red sand on the floor of the dove house, walked the two doves. One was always in front of the other. One ran forward, uttering a little cry, and the other followed, solemnly bowing and bowing. ‘You see,’ explained Anne, ‘the one in front, she’s Mrs. Dove. She looks at Mr. Dove and gives that little laugh and runs forward, and he follows her, bowing and bowing. And that makes her laugh again. Away she runs, and after her,’ cried Anne, and she sat back on her heels, ‘comes poor Mr. Dove, bowing and bowing . . . and that’s their whole life. They never do anything else, you know’. (Mansfield 1921e: 173) Here, Anne’s repetitive language in her description of the birds’ behaviour is consciously mirrored by the narrative’s use of repetition to convey the cyclical nature of the birds’ actions. This helps establish the double effect of the story’s conclusion. After Anne responds to Reggie’s proposal by laughing at him, the story ends abruptly in another apparently straightforward equation of the two birds with the two protagonists: ‘Roo-coo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo-coo!’ sounded from the veranda. ‘Reggie, Reggie,’ from the garden. He stopped, he turned. But when she saw his timid, puzzled look, she gave a little laugh. ‘Come back, Mr. Dove,’ said Anne. And Reginald came slowly across the lawn. (Mansfield 1921e: 173) On one level, this could be read as evidence of Anne’s change of heart, which would appear to leave the story poised on the proposed nuptials, a resolution that meets the generic demands of romance convention without completely fulfilling them. Yet the story only provides a partial resolution, as it offers a snapshot from a sense of endless repetition that is in keeping with the Doves’ behaviour. In closing with the cyclical movement, then, the story seems both to be resolved and left open, satisfying a number of impulses at once. This makes for an inherently fragmentary form that is further heightened by the context of periodical publication – ephemeral, disposable and competing with the clamour of material that attracts the reader’s attention on the pages of the magazine. It was concerning one aspect of these attention-diverting items – namely the illustrations that appeared alongside many of them – that Mansfield expressed her only real source of dissatisfaction with the Sphere publications. She wrote to Dorothy Brett in August 1921: My stories for the Sphere are all done, thank the Lord. I have had copies with ILLUSTRATIONS! Oh Brett! Such fearful horrors! All my dear people looking

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism like – well – Harrods 29/6 crepe de chine blouses and young tailors gents. And my old men – stuffy old wooly [sic] sheep. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 271)

In her comparison of the illustrations to a Harrods catalogue here, it might be possible to detect an element of discomfort about the commercial nature of the Sphere venture. However, there is another reason for Mansfield’s dissatisfaction, as the illustrations ran the risk of imposing external meaning on the stories, limiting the open-ended and disruptive potential that is typified by the resolution of ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’. If there is an element of anxiety about the ‘commercial’ nature of the illustrations, it is that they sought to impose too stringently a single interpretation on each story, precisely the kind of straightforward closure that Mansfield’s prose actually seeks to dismantle, as my reading of ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’ has demonstrated. By exploiting the flexibility of the short story as both a popular and an experimental form in this way, Mansfield successfully established herself as a writer for the popular periodical press while continuing to write prose that could function on complex technical levels. In doing so, she finally perfected the commercially viable modernist aesthetic that she had begun to develop during the composition of ‘Prelude’ throughout 1916. At the end of her career, Mansfield experimented with bringing together the opposing forces of genre fiction and technical innovation, adopting a democratic approach to her writing that is further apparent in her chosen sites of publication: a middlebrow monthly, a political weekly, a weekend newspaper and an illustrated paper. When it came to the publication of The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922, Mansfield quarried all of these periodical publications, placing Sphere stories alongside those from the London Mercury, and Athenaeum stories alongside those from the Westminster Gazette. She chose to exclude only one of the Sphere stories, ‘Sixpence’, which emerges as the only out-and-out failure of the experiment. Mansfield herself wrote to Michael Sadleir at Constable asking that it be removed from the collection, telling him that ‘I have a horrible feeling it is sentimental & should not be there’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 327). This would imply that she had faith that the other Sphere stories were good enough to graduate from the ephemeral realm of periodical publication into the permanent collection of the book. It also implies that Mansfield was aware of the limitations of trying to write to a set of pre-conceived audience expectations. ‘Sixpence’ is the only story that reads as though she actively tried to write something that might prove amenable to ‘popular’ tastes and, as Alpers notes, the story’s ‘totally uncharacteristic opening sentence [‘Children are unaccountable little creatures’] betrays unease’ (Alpers 1984: 569). Such straightforwardness was something Mansfield strove to avoid in the remainder of her so-called ‘Mag.-stories’, and there is no such unease in the rest of the Sphere stories, which ultimately perform a balancing act between the oncewarring factions of popularity and literariness. As her career drew towards its end, she reacted with scorn to a request for a technically ‘marketable’ story in November 1921, telling Dorothy Brett:

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I ate such a stupid man with my tea – I cant digest him. He is bringing out a book of Georgian Stories and he said the more ‘plotty’ a story I could give him the better. What about that for a word? It made my hair stand up in prongs. A nice ‘plotty’ story, please. People are funny. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 311) But she also aimed for accessibility in her art, telling Eric Pinker in April 1922, for example, that ‘I haven’t any desire to be fashionable and exclusive or to write for the intelligentsia only’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 140–1). In this way, she refused to cater to wilfully ‘intellectual’ obscure tastes or popular ‘plottiness’, producing material that could occupy both spheres at once. Thus, Mansfield’s late career was characterized by her efforts to overcome the tension between popularity and literary respectability by actively embracing popular cultural forms and avenues of publication. Her critical and commercial success ultimately rested on her ability to occupy the space between the ‘great divide’, then, cannily producing stories that challenged the binaries of literary and popular in order to occupy both spheres at once; and in the end she managed to be simultaneously experimental and accessible; a brassy little shopgirl and a great writer; an innovative technician and a ‘Mag.-story writer’.

Notes 1

2

A version of this essay also appears in my (2010), Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan and is reproduced here with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. In the original publication in the Sphere, Reggie imagines travelling to Durban. All subsequent editions amended this to Umtali, which seems more likely as Reggie’s farm (like Umtali) was in Rhodesia.

Bibliography Alpers, A. (ed.) (1984), The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Alpers, A. (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. New York: Viking. Bell, A. O. and McNellie, A. (eds) (1977–1985), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols. London: Hogarth, vol. 2 (1978). Chan, W. (2007), The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s. London and New York: Routledge. Childs, H. S. (1920), Unsigned review of ‘Prelude’ and ‘Je ne parle pas français’, in Times Literary Supplement, 941, 29 January 1920, 63. Daly, S. R. (1994), Katherine Mansfield: Revised Edition. New York: Twayne. Eliot, V. (ed.) (1988), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 2 vols. London: Faber and Faber, vol. 1.

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Huyssen, A. (1986), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mansfield, K. (1921a), ‘Marriage à la Mode’, Sphere, 31 December 1921, 364–5. –(1921b), ‘The Voyage’, Sphere, 24 December 1921, 340–1. –(1921c), ‘Her First Ball’, Sphere, 28 November 1921, 15–25. –(1921d), ‘An Ideal Family’, Sphere, 20 August 1921, 196–7. –(1921e), ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’, Sphere, 13 August 1921, 172–3. –(1921f), ‘Sixpence’, Sphere, 6 August 1921, 144; ii [sic]. –(1921g), ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, London Mercury, 4 (19), 15–30. –(1921h), ‘The Singing Lesson: A Story’, Sphere, 23 April 1921, 96; ii [sic]. –(1921i),‘The Stranger’, London Mercury, 3 (15), 259–68. –(1922a), ‘The Garden-Party: Part I’, Saturday Westminster Gazette, 4 February 1922, 9–10. –(1922b), ‘The Garden-Party: Part II’, Saturday Westminster Gazette, 11 February 1922, 10. –(1922c), ‘The Garden-Party: Part III’, Weekly Westminster Gazette, 18 February 1922, 16–17. –(1922d), ‘At the Bay’, London Mercury, 5 (27), 239–65. McDonnell, J. (2010), Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. –(2009), ‘“Wanted, a new word”: Katherine Mansfield and the Athenaeum’, Modernism/Modernity, 16, (4), 727–42. Morrisson, M. S. (2001), The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences and Reception 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Murry, J. M. [‘The Editor’] (1911), ‘What We Have Tried to Do’, Rhythm, 1 (3), 36. –(1935), Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. Murry, J. M. and Mansfield, K. (1912a), ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, Rhythm, 2 (5), 18–20. –(1912b), ‘Seriousness in Art’, Rhythm, 2 (6), 46–9. O’Connor, F. (1965), The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. London: Macmillan. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol.1 (1984), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008). Robinson, R. (ed.) (1994), Katherine Mansfield: In From the Margin. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Sage, L. (1997), ‘Introduction’, The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Penguin, pp. vii–xxi. Scott, M. (1997) The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols. Canterbury and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, vol. 2.

Chapter 4

Authentic Existence and the Characters of Katherine Mansfield Miroslawa Kubasiewicz

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. (Mansfield cited in Murry 1933: 271)

As Vincent O’Sullivan has observed, the life of Katherine Mansfield was of ‘a vivid existential shaping, before such a word or concept was to hand’ (O’Sullivan 2008: xi). Most of the themes commonly associated with existentialism 1 – alienation, dread of death, or the search for freedom and authenticity – manifested themselves in her life and found reflection in her work. Mansfield experienced alienation and extreme loneliness when her illness estranged her from the world and the man she loved, and painful loss when her beloved brother died. Most, if not all, critics agree that isolation, and emotional and spiritual loss, are among the dominant themes in her stories and reflect her view of the human condition: [Mansfield was] isolated, with hope of neither human understanding nor supernatural help or pity. Though she gallantly affirmed beauty to the very end, the casual destructive forces always lurked nearby, and in joy sadness waited. Katherine Mansfield’s life taught her to admire the rose but, in her own repeated image, to look for ‘the snail under the leaf’. (Daly 1965: 23) From an existential point of view, what seems to be most important in Mansfield’s life is her search for the truth about herself and her desire for authenticity of existence. Independent in her thinking and behaviour from a very early age, she fought for a life on her own terms and did not hesitate to act against the expectations of the society in which she lived and worked.2 All the decisions which she made, from leaving Wellington to entering the Gurdjieff Institute, show her

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as a person of independent mind, whose main aim was to find her own voice in her professional and private lives. The desire to be true to herself, and thus authentic, seems to have reached its culmination in the last year of her life: It is more compelling over these last twelve months to note in the more confiding of her letters, in the few stories she completed, and in the notes she wrote only for herself, a mind and temperament striving, against the clock, to wrest meaning and coherence, not from metaphysical assurance but from the reality that inevitably was hers. (O’Sullivan 2008: ix) What, then, does authentic existence mean? While all philosophers of existence, in spite of considerable differences between them, agree that authenticity is the ultimate aim of human existence, none of them satisfactorily defines it. Instead, they concentrate on inauthentic modes of existence and on the search for authenticity. In this immense world, man is alone, his existence is contingent and transitory, and the full responsibility for endowing it with sense rests on his shoulders. The realization of this contingency, transitoriness and responsibility generates anxiety, which man strives to avoid. An escape from this anxiety is facilitated by the world of everydayness, which involves man in its structures, and requires the performance of certain social functions or the adoption of expected modes of behaviour. In other words, man accepts the views and behaviours of those with whom he shares his world. Martin Heidegger explains that: we enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the ‘great mass’ the way they withdraw, we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness (Heidegger 1996: 119)3 Heidegger does not reject all conformity, as it organizes the world in which we live and in which we can make important decisions about our existence. However, when a human being loses himself in present concerns and preoccupations to such an extent that he lets others define his identity in exchange for a sense of belonging and loss of anxiety, it is at the price of never discovering who he is. ‘The absorption of Da-sein (human being) in the they and in the “world” taken care of reveals something like a flight of Da-sein from itself as an authentic potentiality for being itself’ (Heidegger 1996:172).4 In other words, ‘the subject’s existence is inauthentic and it is only on occasion that he becomes aware of his condition. A similar view of inauthenticity is represented by Jean-Paul Sartre,5 who terms it bad faith. Joseph S. Catalano points out that: in bad faith, we attempt to see ourselves both as the product of our environment and heredity, and as ‘cursed’ by not being able to be what we would wish to be.

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We then choose this failure and attempt to rest and enjoy it. (Catalano 1980: 90) In bad faith man exists in one of the patterns – as a thing or as a role. In the former state, by avoiding confrontation with the truth of his situation and letting events develop without his intervention, man reduces himself to a passive object. However, even a decision to do nothing is a choice for which man is responsible. Man cannot escape responsibility for himself; he can only deceive himself that his being-in-the-world is sufficient to determine his existence. Being a role, on the other hand, refers to the situation in which a person identifies with his role in the sense of being-in-itself, being an object, being nothing more, for example, than the ‘essence’ of a waiter and not an independently thinking person. In both situations, man is dishonest to himself. An inauthentic self, then, not only seeks security in fixed roles and accepts unquestioningly the values of the world in which it exists, but also, by objectifying itself conceals its being and, by objectifying others, makes genuine relationships impossible. If human existence is, to a great extent, determined by social conventions, the question arises whether authentic existence, or good faith, is at all possible? It is, on condition that man accepts his own finitude, that is, his own death, not as a biological fact but as a possibility, and anxiety as a mode of his being, and not a psychological state. William Barrett explains that although taking death into ourselves is terrifying, it is also liberating, as it offers freedom to make our lives our own. Allowing oneself to feel anxiety offers a way out of one’s ‘fallen state’ – it individualizes one down to oneself and makes authentic existence possible. It allows one to achieve personal integrity by taking responsibility for one’s choices, for one’s existence, oneself. However, it requires escape from roles, discarding masks, and rejecting mechanically accepted values and facts, excuses and determinisms that have offered a refuge to our dishonest selves. Authentic existence is a process of self-creation in which Da-sein transcends itself but can never be achieved for good. ‘Falling is essential to our existence so authenticity of Dasein is intrinsically limited. [. . .] we are mortals, not gods’ (Zimmermann 1981: 46–7). The victory of authenticity, then, may be limited to a moment only. In existential terms, Mansfield’s life can be interpreted as an authentic project (remembering that it is a kind of a circular function, never a straight line), in which she adopted roles but never ceased to search for her own self. My intention in this chapter is to analyse some of Mansfield’s stories to show that the concept of authenticity so crucial to her life also finds expression in her work. Mansfield does not speak directly about authenticity of existence, but rather guides readers in such a way that they notice the inauthentic behaviour of her characters and, as a result, become aware of how they themselves are conditioned by the objective values imposed on them by society. Mansfield’s characters act out roles, and most of them do not think that they could change this state until they are confronted with an extreme situation that disturbs their sense of what is right, proper or usual, and so offers them a chance

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to stop and look at themselves from a new perspective. Some of the characters are aware of their own inauthenticity, although only for a while, and others are already on their way to authentic existence. There is even a character who understands and is able to verbalize the existential nature of the human condition: Jonathan Trout from ‘At the Bay’, who has a perception of his life: I am like an insect that’s flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God’s earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I’m thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, ‘The shortness of life! The shortness of life!’ I’ve only one night or one day, and there’s this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored. (Mansfield 2002: 308)6 Jonathan can see the contingency and impermanence of human existence. He is aware of his imprisonment in his role as a clerk and of his inauthenticity, yet he lacks the strength and determination to transcend himself and carry out a project that would let him discover his true self. In this, he is completely different from men like Stanley Burnell, who are competitive, energetic and successful, who do not ask themselves any questions, who are honest and sincere but not authentic, who exist as roles. Another character who is aware of her own inauthenticity is Beryl Fairfield (‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Doll’s House’). Beryl’s main desire is to find fulfilment in romantic love. She constantly plays a role, which social expectations have imposed on her, of an attractive young girl waiting for a prince who will protect her, provide her with status, and ‘save’ her. Habitually, she acts in front of an imagined potential lover, for example, when playing the guitar or in her bedroom at night.7 There are moments, however, when she falls out of this role. When writing to her friend, Nan Pym, she suddenly becomes aware of her own pretence. To escape the confrontation with her real self and to stay in the role which she knows so well, she turns to a mirror to seek confirmation of her attractiveness. As her true self is not appeased she tries another strategy; she pities herself and then hypothesizes that ‘If she had been happy and leading her own life, her false self would cease to be’ (p. 119). At last she admits that she was her true self only for brief, rare moments: At those times she had felt: ‘Life is rich and mysterious and good, and I am rich and mysterious and good, too. Shall I ever be that Beryl for ever? Shall I? How can I? And was there ever a time when I did not have a false self?’ (pp. 119–20) Beryl is aware that her existence is not authentic; she even seems to desire a change, but this is only another of those infrequent ‘moments’, for on hearing that there is a man coming to lunch she hastily resumes her role. Like many other female characters in Mansfield’s stories, she is confronted with an

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extremely challenging situation – her night encounter with Mr Harry Kember. The irony is that he appears just when she is romanticizing about a satisfying relationship with a perfect lover. Mr Kember is Beryl’s ‘snail under the leaf’. Her romanticizing is innocent, so she manages to defend herself against the real-life seducer. But will the experience open her eyes to the fact that the romantic idealization of her self and others has little correspondence to reality? Will she continue to expect her real self to be shaped by others? Inauthenticity is also the narrator’s mode of existence in ‘Je ne parle pas français’. Raoul Duquette, a 26-year-old Parisian, is an aspiring writer, a pimp and a male prostitute. As narrator he seems to be speaking directly to the reader, for there is no evidence of any other listener, and the story is a rare example of a first person point of view in Mansfield’s stories. He tells us about his life, sharing his intimate experiences with us; evidently he needs somebody to show off to, who will not ask questions but will be impressed, and who, perhaps, will try to understand and accept him. Above all, Raoul wants to be perceived as a writer and so he tells us about his interest in literature and about his books – real and invented. Proud of his metaphors, he wants us to admire them too; for example, he sees people as ‘portmanteaux’ that are packed and tossed away or lost and found until, in the end, ‘the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle’ (p. 143). This image brings to mind the contingency and transitoriness of human existence, and invokes concepts of death and nothingness. Raoul leaves the sentence unfinished, seemingly rather proud of its apparent depth. From an existential point of view, realizing and accepting the nature of human existence requires a great deal of courage, because it means at the same time taking responsibility for endowing one’s own life with sense. This, however, requires shedding masks and getting out of roles. And Raoul cannot exist without a mask. Duquette wants to be a writer because he longs for the social acceptance this would bring and which he cannot obtain in his other roles (that estrange him from the rest of society, despite providing an indispensable service to others). He is aware of his own game. When he looks at his reflection in the mirror, for example, he says: ‘You – literary? [. . .] But I didn’t listen’ (p. 154). And so, he does not let that whisper of self-awareness spoil his fun. He wants to impress Dick Harmon, his English acquaintance, with his literary success, but even the titles he invents for his books are pretentious. He is self-conscious and constantly controls and congratulates himself on his behaviour, for example, when he sees the phrase ‘Je ne parle pas français’ written on a writing pad in a café, he experiences ‘agony’ (p. 145). It reminds him of Mouse, Harmon’s deserted fiancée, and, possibly, of a wasted opportunity for another life, which the encounter with her inspired maybe ‘encouraged’ him to imagine. But although he seems to experience genuine pain for a moment, he soon cynically praises himself for the intensity of his feelings: ‘I must be first-rate. No second-rate mind could have experienced such an intensity of feeling so . . . purely’ (p. 145). It seems that Raoul’s attitude towards himself and the world was shaped by an experience of sexual abuse in his early childhood which taught him how to manipulate

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others: ‘I seemed to understand everybody and be able to do what I liked with everybody’ (p. 116). In seeking gratification, he objectifies people and, at the same time, himself. Rejected by his family and not accepted by society either, he needs to prove to himself and to others that he is better than circumstances have conspired for him, and that he can shape his life himself. That is why he constructs the role of a cynical literary man. However, he is aware of and constantly fights his other self, which has different desires and longings from those he devised for himself. Duquette’s need for a meaningful relationship becomes evident when he confides to Harmon ‘things about my submerged life that really were disgusting and never could possibly see the light of literary day’ (p. 151). The irony is that being so focused on himself Duquette misinterprets Dick’s comment as an expression of genuine interest and understanding. When he meets Mouse, a desire for a fulfilling, ordinary life is awakened in him – he imagines them happy together in some idyllic place. This vision, in fact, has nothing to do with a genuine life; rather it serves as a contrast to his present existence. Raoul enjoys seeing himself in a ‘better’ role, and so when Harmon deserts the girl, he has to fight a desire to go to her hotel the next morning as he has promised. This internal struggle, however, only reinforces his character as a cynical and self-centred man. He will not let himself slip out of his role: ‘It wouldn’t be me, otherwise’ (p. 166). Later, in a café, provoked by the phrase on the writing pad, his other self, which he compares to a dog, spontaneously wants to find Mouse, but he controls this urge and turns his suffering into a narrative. Raoul’s existence is inauthentic as he lets others define his identity – as a pimp and a prostitute. He knows that these roles are socially unacceptable, and that he needs a better identity, but by choosing the role of someone socially acceptable, a writer, rather than genuinely being a writer, he only confirms society’s definition of himself. In that different, better life which he imagines for himself with Mouse, he cannot go beyond a cliché. By refusing to recognize and accept the spontaneous voice of his other self, he relinquishes the opportunity to discover who he really is, and he accepts the values imposed on him by the world in which he lives. Most of Mansfield’s characters play roles, but some seem to fulfil the existence of a ‘Thing’. They want to believe that they are in control of their lives, whereas, in fact, they refuse to face the reality of their situations. Bertha Young (‘Bliss’) wants to believe that she has everything; a good husband, a wonderful child and close friends, and that she is happy. It does not occur to her to question anything, although we know that she does not feel comfortable when the nurse appropriates her daughter; we know that she does not really admire her friends if she is capable of seeing a monkey in Mrs Norman Knight, and we know that, unable to do anything about her sexual coldness, she puts it out of her mind, satisfied with the conviction that she and her husband are ‘such good pals’ (p. 178). The shocking discovery of her husband’s infidelity at the moment when she, for the first time, feels a desire for him, could, paradoxically, be a turning-point for Bertha. She has a chance to discover that her idea of being ‘modern’ is false, that her friends and her husband are pretentious hypocrites,

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and that she is not a child who can be dominated by her baby’s nurse. But most importantly, she might realize that an unquestioning acceptance of the views of others and the leaving of problems unresolved will always lead to a falsification of ‘her’ self. Whether she will take this opportunity to authenticate her existence is an open question. Another character who passively accepts her existence is Millie (‘Millie’). The hardworking wife of a farmer, she does not think about her own self at all. However, when we meet her, she is wondering why she and her husband never had any children, but lets it drop with: ‘Well, I’ve never missed them’ (p. 25). Nevertheless, when she sees the young man accused of murder hiding in her yard, she naturally and spontaneously wants to take care of him. She seems a good woman, but perhaps her act of protection is also an expression of the maternal instincts which, ironically, she has rejected a few minutes earlier: ‘“’E’s nothink but a sick kid”’ (p. 27). She does what she can to save the boy, and in this she is heroic, for she acts against the whole community including her husband. She chooses to follow her own instinctive morality and rejects the behaviour dictated by her immediate environment. When the boy escapes and the chase starts, Millie is overtaken by ‘mad joy’ (p. 28) – her moment of authenticity is gone, she returns to her old self with redoubled energy as she knows intuitively that what she has done constitutes a betrayal which would exclude her from the group; all memory of it has to be erased. We can imagine that she will never think about it again. Two other characters who are unable to reflect on their situations and define what they really want and whose lives therefore resemble the existence of a ‘Thing’, are the sisters in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’. The lives of Constantia and Josephine have been subjugated to the needs of their father to such an extent that they have never had a chance to shape their own separate existences. The death of their father could serve as a catalyst for the two women, free them from the domination of the colonel, and let them discover what is important for them as individuals. Although both women have experiences that could individualize them, they are unable to reflect on them. Constantia remembers her communion with the moon and the sea, and feels that this had once represented her real desires and offered her a potential fulfilment, not the life she has been living all those years – but what it meant, eludes her. Josephine hears a ‘queer little crying noise’ (p. 248) inside her, and wonders what their lives would be like had their mother not died. Uncertain about how to live now, she submits to ‘the thieving sun’ (p. 248) without any self-understanding. The sisters’ inability to take responsibility for giving meaning to their own lives is underlined by the failure of their conversation – both have forgotten what they wanted to say. The characters discussed briefly above are only a few examples of those in Mansfield’s stories who seem to exist as roles or things. As some of them are aware, their existence is inauthentic. The extreme situations in which they find themselves offer them an opportunity to stop and think about their real motives and desires, and to discover their real selves. Not all of them are strong enough

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to undertake such a challenge. After all, their roles have been imposed on them by society: to get out of them and discover their real self would require heroic determination. Although, in most of her stories, Mansfield depicts characters who for the most part accept their average everydayness, there are also characters whose existences represent authentic life projects. It is difficult to define authenticity objectively as it is a process of becoming, which varies from person to person. It must be gained in a process of searching for one’s true self in the situation, or facticity, in which one lives. However, a sine qua non of authentic existence is acceptance of one’s finitude or death. Only then can one attempt to define one’s self. One of the characters whose integrity is a result of her authentic existence is Mrs Fairfield (‘At the Bay’). She knows that death belongs to the human condition. ‘Life was like that’ (p. 298) she thinks, provoked by Kezia and, although she refuses to discuss death with her granddaughter, she does not try to stop Kezia’s questioning by giving her the answer which she wants to hear, that is, that both she – and Kezia herself – will never die. Mrs Fairfield accepts her human condition, and that is why she does not concentrate on herself but on life itself – she is able to notice the beauty of a new day, she puts the things around her in order, and thus organizes the everyday life of the whole family. The confrontation with death and alienation is not reserved for adults only – the children and adolescents in Mansfield’s stories are not spared this experience either, although it is Kezia who experiences both. In ‘Prelude’, she and Lottie are left behind when the family moves out, and Kezia, alone in an empty house, is petrified when it suddenly gets dark. Later, she encounters death for the first time in her life. When Pat kills a duck she alone, of all the children present, rushes at him to have the duck’s head restored. Even though death may be fascinating as a performance and a story (she wants her grandmother to tell her about Uncle William’s death again and again), the child is unable to accept the possibility of non-existence. For an older character, an encounter with death may have different consequences. Laura, teenage heroine of ‘The Garden Party’, sees a dead man for the first time in her life. Death does not terrify her in the way it does Kezia; she discovers that there is a strange affinity between life and death. These experiences at early stages of development form part of a process that can lead to the discovery of the nature of human existence and, possibly, one’s true self at a later stage. This later stage is represented by Linda Burnell, Mrs Fairfield’s daughter, a character who is on the way to defining herself. She thinks about the meaning of her life almost all the time and does not feel comfortable with what she discovers: her hatred for Stanley, her husband, in spite of her love for him, her lack of love for her children, and a desire to escape. Life for her is ‘absurd’ and ‘laughable’, and she feels disappointed and helpless: ‘And why this mania of hers to keep alive at all?’ (p. 116). But in ‘At the Bay’, Linda seems to have reached an acceptance of life with its finitude. Sitting under a manuka tree and reflecting on the transitory beauty of all creation, she suddenly becomes aware that her baby son is smiling at her and spontaneously, in spite of her declared dislike of children,

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she responds to him. Linda, for the first time, looks at her son as an individual and not as another unwanted burden in her life. (However, this does not mean that she automatically has come to terms with the discomforts of being a mother and a wife.) Linda’s authentic reaction (spontaneity is the core of authenticity) can be seen as her acceptance of the nature of human – and all other – existence, its beauty together with its transitoriness. Her changed perspective is later reinforced by her interpretation of the setting sun: ‘But to-night it seemed to Linda there was something infinitely joyful and loving in those silver beams’ (p. 309). This seems positive, although in this part of the story Jonathan complains to her about his life. In ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, therefore, we are offered the opportunity to witness the momentariness of the process of discovering a real self. It is a solitary quest, which does not mean that an ‘authentic self’ isolates itself from others. If alienation is an everyday experience in an inauthentic mode of existence, an authentic mode of existence experiences genuine sociability. Others are perceived as individuals, not as entities, and relationships can become meaningful. Most of the characters in Mansfield’s stories exist inauthentically. They are not aware of the fact that they have adopted a pattern of life that is expected of them, and it does not always occur to them that they have the right to change their perspective and endow their existence with new meaning. That state of complacency can only be shattered by a terrible realization of their own finitude. At such disturbing moments they see the inadequacy of their own existence, and long for a life in which they could be their real selves. This may start a process of individuation, yet in most cases the moment soon passes and they resume their old roles (Josephine, Constantia, Millie, Raoul). In other cases such as Bertha’s, the reader takes leave of the characters at a critical moment in their lives, and we are left wondering whether they will find the incentive to take responsibility for the quality of their own existence. Finally, there are reflective characters like Linda and Jonathan, torn apart by the pressures exerted on them by the conflicting demands of society and their own selves. Mansfield shows that escaping the roles imposed by society is a heroic task, which not everybody can face up to. If, in the case of her male characters, this inability is mainly a consequence of the character’s personality, then in the case of the women, it is more a result of the years of tradition, which have taught them to accept the roles that patriarchy has devised for them. Their moments of insight and reflection on their existence reveal dissatisfaction with their false identities. Even if the women as individuals fall into inauthenticity again, their experiences represent a stage in the process of individuation of a female self. Although authenticity of existence is of fundamental importance to Katherine Mansfield, she does not tell her readers what it means to live authentically. Instead, she makes us think about the roles we play, the masks we wear and the attitudes we adopt in our own lives. In the end, her stories tell us as much, if not more, about who we are as they do about the characters who exist in the world of her fiction.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Existentialism is here used as an ‘umbrella term’ to refer to the work of the philosophers of existence for whom the question of authenticity was of fundamental importance. There were, of course, many differences between them and indeed some of them refused to be called existentialists, including Martin Heidegger. Kathleen Jones writes: ‘Katherine was a passionate woman who dared to live outside the strict code decreed for young women at the beginning of the century and who did not deserve the cruelty of what she sometimes regarded as her punishment. She lived as a free spirit, loving both men and women, risking everything and paying a tragic price for freedoms which women now take for granted’ (Jones 2008: 1). The they is a translation of the German indefinite pronoun das Man, proposed in the first English translation of ‘Sein und Zeit’ by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. The same term has been used by Joan Stambaugh in the latest translation of the work. Some Heideggerian scholars, however, find this rendering of the German term imprecise (the they suggests a division into them and us, whereas the term ‘das Man’ includes everybody), and offer other translations. For example, Wrathall prefers the one (Wrathall 2005: 51) and Golomb – the anyone (Golomb 1995: 126). In the mode of ‘das Man’ (the they, the one, the anyone), we accept unquestioningly the seemingly objective values and modes of behaviour of the world in which we live, and in this way we become one of many similar entities. To find one’s self, it is necessary to realize how much of what we believe and do has been conditioned by the society in which we live. ‘The self of everyday Da-sein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self’ (Heidegger 1996: 121). Da-sein (literally: being there) is a term that Heidegger uses to denote a unique mode of being in the world (there) of human individuals who can take responsibility for their existence (which other entities cannot). Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking was initially strongly shaped by the early work of Heidegger. However, Sartre soon rejected this early influence and became preoccupied with questions of human consciousness and human freedom. Nevertheless, a number of similarities can be found in both philosophers’ perceptions of human existence. Cox notices, for example, that for both ‘embracing life’s finitude is a prompt to authentic action’, which ‘inspires a person to reject mediocrity (what Heidegger calls everydayness) in favour of being all that he can be’ (Cox 2007: 153). All further quotations from Mansfield’s stories are from this edition (Mansfield 2002) and only page references will be given in the text. Beryl never misses a chance to check her looks in mirrors and window-panes; she wants to be ready in case an unexpected (male) guest arrives. According to Simone de Beauvoir, in a patriarchal society it is the man who defines the woman’s identity, who endows her existence with sense and value. If a woman fails to find a husband, she faces a future marked by a solitary and marginalized existence. So Beryl’s expectations and the role she plays reflect the culture in which she lives.

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Bibliography Barrett, W. (1990), Irrational Man. A Study in Existential Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. Beauvoir de, S. (1972), The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Catalano, J. S. (1980), A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Cox, G. (2007), Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. Daly, S. (1965), Katherine Mansfield. New York: Twayne. Golomb, J. (1995), In Search of Authenticity. From Kierkegaard to Camus. London and New York: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1996), Being and Time, J. Stambaugh (trans.). Albany: State University of New York Press. –(2008), Being and Time, J. Macquarrie, and E. Robinson (trans.). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought. Jones, K. (2008), Katherine Mansfield: A Life and Legacy – A New Biography. Available from: http://www.katherinemansfield.net/life/briefbio1.htm (accessed 5 April 2010). Mansfield, K. (2002), Selected Stories, A. Smith (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murry, J. (ed.) (1933), Journal of Katherine Mansfield. Hamburg: The Albatross. O’Sullivan, V. (2008), ‘Introduction’, in V. O’Sullivan and M. Scott (eds), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. 5. Sartre, J-P. (1986), Being and Nothingness, H. E. Barnes (trans.). London: Methuen. Wrathall, M. (2005), How to Read Heidegger. London: Granta Books. Zimmerman, M. E. (1981), Eclipse of the Self. The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

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Chapter 5

The Elusiveness of Reality: The Limits of Cognition in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories Joanna Kokot

One of the fundamental difficulties that modernist prose writers had to face was ‘the very problem [. . .] of apprehending and making authoritative the traditional stuff of fiction, reality itself, in an effective order of words’ (Fletcher and Bradbury 1991: 394). However, this problem was not only an artistic one of ‘translating’ the world of perceptions into the world of words, but also an epistemological issue, raising questions concerning the possibility of the perceiving subject grasping the truth about reality (and also the possibility of passing on such truth in an act of communication). Literary techniques such as limiting the narrative point of view, free indirect speech, stream of consciousness, a focus on the inner life of the characters and ‘literary impressionism’,1 tended to foreground the observer by stressing the subjectivity of perception. The modernist writer (or artist) would seek to grasp and communicate the unique, individual vision of reality, often endowed with the characteristics of an epiphany. As Virginia Woolf states in her well-known essay ‘Modern Fiction’: ‘Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’ (Woolf 1966: 119). Similar issues are raised indirectly in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories: questions concerning the relations between the world and the observer, about the possibility and limits of intuiting both reality and another person. Accordingly, the plots of many of her stories are markedly scant or even ‘pretextual’.2 Her characters seem not to act, but rather experience the surrounding reality, reacting to impulses, succumbing to moods. As a result the reader’s attention is centred on the very nature of the world, of the person and of cognition, as for example in the following episode in ‘Prelude’, where the scene observed by Kezia acquires strange qualities and seems to be something different from what it really is: The dining room had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at a blue lawn

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism with blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence. As she looked, a little Chinese Lottie came out on to the lawn and began to dust the tables and chairs with a corner of her pinafore. Was that really Lottie? Kezia was not quite sure until she had looked through the ordinary window. (Mansfield 2007: 14)3

A moment is grasped when reality is transformed, even estranged, turning into something unfamiliar, different from what one can see ‘through the ordinary window’. The question is, however, whether in Mansfield’s world there is something like ‘the ordinary window’, whether in fact it is possible to grasp reality independent of the fleeting and impermanent effects emerging from what appears to be real. And the question not only concerns the outer, visual stratum of the world, but also its very essence and the essence of the person perceiving it. The problem is tangible enough because the world presented in Mansfield’s stories often hovers on the verge of reality. What is merely the figment of a character’s imagination becomes fact on the page, mainly due to the narrative strategy adopted by the writer. The character’s point of view blends with that of the narrator, and as a result the narrative distance from the protagonist’s fantasies is blurred; they are presented as facts, even if they become so only in the observer’s mind.4 One such example appears in ‘Prelude’, in the scene in which Mrs Jones, Mrs Smith and Gladys the maidservant appear. At first, there seems to be no doubt that these are new characters that the narrator is introducing into the story about the Burnell family. Only an absurd remark about Gladys ‘beating up a chocolate custard with half a broken clothes peg’ (p. 40) reveals the scene’s true nature: the children are playing at being grown-ups, with Lottie, Kezia and Isabel pretending to be sophisticated women. The girls’ serious attitudes towards their parts and their identification with the characters they are acting are matched by the tone with which the narrator introduces the scene. The border between reality and fantasy may thus become blurred in the observer’s consciousness. And again the fusion of both worlds has an equivalent at the level of the description: through the use of free indirect discourse, the scene is presented as it appears to the protagonist, Kezia. Thus – in spite of the parenthetical remark – the hall in Kezia’s new home becomes an unusual locale where the wallpaper design comes to life, filling the air-space around the girl: ‘Through a square hall filled with bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were only on the wall-paper) down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp’ (p. 19). The syntactic equivalence between the conjoined nouns ‘bales’ and ‘parrots’ creates an unexpected equivalence on the quasi-ontological level:5 in Kezia’s vision, the imagined flying parrots belong to the same world as the ‘real’ bales lying on the floor. Furthermore despite the reservation made in the parenthetical interjection, that the imagined world is no more than a wallpaper design, the narrator follows Kezia’s subjective response that the birds ‘persisted in flying’, as if by her own

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determined act of will they could change their behaviour. The ‘constructions’ of fancy become seemingly indistinguishable from the objective and concrete. Just as the painted birds come alive in Kezia’s perception, so does the night sky, which appears to the girl as a pack of cats with shining eyes. The device of the realized metaphor,6 makes a seemingly common simile (black cats – night sky, yellow eyes – bright stars) sound literal: ‘Outside the window hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes sat in the sky watching her [Kezia] – but she was not frightened’ (p. 21). The last phrase – ‘but she was not frightened’ – goes further than a poetic description of a starry night. The conjunction ‘but’ lends substantiality to what Kezia sees: the child is unafraid, not because there are no cats, but in spite of their presence. Both in the girl’s imagination and in the narrator’s description, fantasy becomes reality. A similar substantiation of the imagined world is suggested by the matterof-fact tone of the narrator’s appropriation of Linda Burnell’s point of view: ‘Things had a habit of coming alive like that’ (p. 27). In Mrs Burnell’s world things actually do come to life, as the crib pegs do when they acquire a particular personality: But no, there was always one who was impatient and hopped away as the other came up, and would not listen. Perhaps the white peg was frightened of the red one, or perhaps he was cruel and would not give the red one a chance to speak . . . (p. 51) Another example of the similarity between two objects leading to their mutual identification, or rather to the creation of a strange hybrid which displays traits of both, occurs in the scene where Linda notices analogies between the aloe plant in her garden and a ship: As they stood on the steps, the high grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a ship with the oars lifted. Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew. (pp. 52–3) At first, Linda is conscious of the difference between what is imagined and what is perceived: the slope is ‘like a wave’, the aloe ‘seems to ride up’, it is ‘like a ship’. But the second sentence points to the merging of fancy and reality, at both the levels of perception and description. The aloe leaves turn into oars submerged in the moonlight, the grassy slope into a wave sprinkled with the evening dew. In the end, the transformation is complete: the imagined ship and the actual plant become one: Looking at it from below she could see the long sharp thorns that edged the aloe leaves, and at the sight of them her heart grew hard . . . . She particularly

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Thus reality is transformed both in the character’s mind and the narrator’s description. The narrator presents the world metamorphosed in the observer’s vision as equally substantial as that which exists objectively. As a result, a character’s vision of the world does not come across as a deformation of what ‘really’ exists – but the shape of reality has a quasi-solipsistic dependence upon the observer, as the factual and the imagined attain some equivalence. The blending of the worlds of fantasy and reality foregrounds what seems to be the essence of the model of the universe in most of Mansfield’s stories. It appears that there is no ‘ordinary window’ that would show the world ‘as it is’. The dominance of a character’s point of view is a consequence of the observer’s manipulation of the observed object in such a way as to disturb the original order of the perceived reality. Let us compare the way Stanley and Linda perceive their home. To Stanley, the family scene he sees on returning from the office appears as an idyllic picture, the source of happiness and satisfaction: The lamp was lighted on the nursery table. Mrs Fairfield was cutting and spreading bread and butter. The three little girls sat up to table wearing large bibs embroidered with their names. They wiped their mouths as their father came in ready to be kissed. The windows were open, and the lamp made a big soft bubble of light on the ceiling. (p. 38) Linda perceives their home in a different way from her complacent husband. The motif of the window, mentioned briefly as part of the cosy domestic scene, returns when the narrator comes to represent the woman’s point of view. The tone of the narratorial voice changes, as does the window’s role in the observation of reality: At the words, and with the cold wet dew on her fingers, she felt as though the moon had risen – that she was being strangely discovered in a flood of cold light. She shivered; she came away from the window and sat down upon the box ottoman beside Stanley. (pp. 38–9) Here the stress falls on the world outside: strange, mysterious, even dangerous. While for the man the idyllic scene defines home as a place of a rest after a long day’s work, for the woman home functions as a shelter against the world outside. The different points of view, however much they may differ, are usually presented with equal importance in Mansfield’s stories. There is no authoritative,

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omniscient narrator to disparage any of the characters’ world visions. Thus instead of a ‘truth about reality’ what is revealed is the truth about the observer. In longer stories such as ‘Prelude’ or ‘At the Bay’ a whole spectrum of points of view is presented – the result being an incongruous mosaic of incompatible versions of reality that do not complement but rather exclude one another. Not only are these world visions incompatible, but they also seem independent, none being influenced or modified by anyone else’s. Indeed, a very important aspect of Mansfield’s world is the isolation of the individual.7 The epiphanies the characters experience are impossible to communicate and they isolate the subject from his or her immediate surroundings. This is the case with Laura (‘The Garden Party’) who, while looking at the dead carter – transformed in her vision almost into a sleeping Endymion – seems to experience the deepest truths about life and death. This insight allows her not only to liberate herself from the oppressive atmosphere of the place, but also to dissociate from the grief of the dead man’s family. Such psychic isolation finds its equivalent in physical separation from the mourners: Laura leaves the house through a door other than the one she entered by. The happiness felt by the man in ‘The Escape’ (‘Deep, deep, he sank into the silence, staring at the tree and waiting for the voice that came floating, falling, until he felt himself enfolded’ [p. 202]) appears to be the eponymous escape, efficiently isolating him from the ill-tempered wife. Similarly excluded from their immediate surroundings are Monica (‘Revelations’), when she experiences a feeling of freedom, and Bertha (‘Bliss’), living in her own world, unconscious of her husband’s infidelity. But such isolation is only one of several behavioural characteristics in Mansfield’s world. The personal vision of reality, including private revelation, appears almost impossible to transmit; many scenes are just such failed attempts at communication. Perhaps the most obvious example occurs in ‘Psychology’, where neither protagonist says what they think, and hiding one’s feelings takes place independently of the speaker’s will: There was another way for them to speak to each other, and in the new way he wanted to murmur: ‘Do you feel this too? Do you understand it at all?’ . . . Instead to his horror, he heard himself say: ‘I must be off; I’m meeting Brand at six.’ What devil made him say that instead of the other? She jumped – simply jumped out of her chair, and he heard her crying: ‘You must rush, then. He’s so punctual. Why didn’t you say so before?’ ‘You’ve hurt me, you’ve hurt me! We’ve failed!’ said her secret self while she handed him his hat and stick, smiling gaily. (p. 116) But in other stories as well, attempts to communicate one’s world vision, one’s experience – sometimes more general than a fleeting emotion – simply fail.8 In ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, Constantia for a moment feels liberated from the dominance of her father: a suppressed, intimidated woman turns

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into a free person (her experience of freedom is given an equivalent in the motif of the moonshine). However, she is not able to retain this sense of liberation nor transmit the feeling to her sister: A pause. Then Constantia said faintly, ‘I can’t say what I was going to say, Jug, because I’ve forgotten what it was . . . that I was going to say.’ Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, ‘I’ve forgotten too.’ (p. 285) It is not clear whether Constantia’s experience (and, almost certainly Josephine’s, too) is as elusive as she believes it to be – yet what is important is that she cannot describe it. Reginald Peacock’s world appears equally impossible to communicate (‘Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day’). Instead of a tale about the (real or imagined) splendours of the life he leads, he merely utters a phrase he used for addressing his pupils: ‘But of all those splendid things he had to say not one could he utter. For some fiendish reason, the only words he could get out were: “Dear lady, I should be charmed – so charmed”’ (p. 153). There is apparently no opportunity in these stories for participation in someone’s inner life, to empathize with another person, to share the same vision of the universe. Sometimes it seems that such contact has been made, yet the story reveals its illusory nature. The two former lovers in ‘Psychology’ apparently share the same cerebral worlds: For the special thrilling quality of their friendship was in their complete surrender. Like two open cities in the midst of some vast plain their two minds lay open to each other. And it wasn’t as if he rode into hers like a conqueror, armed to the eyebrows and seeing nothing but a gay silken flutter – nor did she enter his like a queen walking soft in petals. No, they were eager, serious travellers, absorbed in understanding what was to be seen and discovering what was hidden – making the most of this extraordinary absolute chance which made it possible for him to be utterly truthful to her and for her to be utterly sincere with him. (pp. 112–3) Further on, however, the conversation not only reveals basic differences in their interpretation of reality, but also the elusiveness of the contact itself (the man is at one point even bored with the problem they both discuss so eagerly). Equally fleeting is the sympathy a character may feel for another, which may find its expression in some symbolic gesture soon forgotten or abandoned. Monica (‘Revelations’) for a moment shares her hairdresser’s sorrow at the death of his daughter (though one may wonder whether it is not merely a reaction to the oppressive atmosphere in the shop), yet the resolution to send flowers for the funeral9 is dropped the moment the woman regains a sense of safety, having arrived at the place where she is to meet her husband. Isabel in ‘Marriage à la

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Mode’ is another case in point – her solidarity with her husband, ridiculed by her friends, is only temporary. Laura’s compassion is soon displaced first by the charms of the garden party and then by the fear of the mourners (‘The Garden Party’). Leila’s frustration, provoked by her partner’s remarks concerning the fleeting nature of youth, lasts only for a while (‘Her First Ball’). The characters live in their own worlds, which they find almost impossible to share with others. The distinctiveness of a given person’s universe is suggested in ‘Prelude’ by metaphors referring to distance or enclosure. The physical closeness when Stanley embraces his wife is accompanied by an emotional distance, as the motif of the well suggests: ‘Her faint far-away voice seemed to come from a deep well. “Good night, darling.” He slipped his arm under her neck and drew her to him. “Yes, clasp me,” said the faint voice from the deep well’ (p. 23). Not only is the phrase ‘from a / the deep well’ notably repeated, but also in the final sentence Linda is reduced only to a voice, so stressing her alienation. A similar distance is suggested by the simile of the clouds associated with the tumbled bedclothes – from where she watches Stanley: ‘But this amazing vigour seemed to set him worlds away from Linda. She lay on the white tumbled bed and watched him as if from the clouds’ (p. 25). Reality, therefore, in Mansfield’s stories, appears to be a medley of various interpretations and world visions; it is not clear what is objective and what is not; interpretations are not complementary but exclusive. Thus the limited point of view technique adopted by the writer delineates the shape of the observed universe as dependent on the observer. As a result the question concerning the coherence of the world leads to another question – that of an individual’s integrity. The difficulty of communicating or even defining one’s world-vision, of putting it into words, seems to have its origin in the very nature of that vision. A character’s attitude towards reality often changes on an impulse, thanks to a defined stimulus or emotion – and it changes drastically. When Miss Meadows (‘The Singing Lesson’) receives the message from her lover renouncing an earlier letter and returns to her class, she evidently does not remember the utter despair she was in moments before. The world turns from a grim place to a blissful idyll. And – on the contrary – reality, which at first seems to be friendly and benign, may appear ruthless and brutal – as in ‘Miss Brill’ when the young man’s thoughtless remark totally transforms the protagonist’s universe, or in ‘Bliss’, where the discovery of the husband’s infidelity turns the pear tree, formerly an epitome of beauty and happiness, into a cruel thing, indifferent to the woman’s suffering. The misunderstanding that the two friends from ‘Psychology’ experience makes the woman hate the traits in her former lover that she had previously admired. Monica from ‘Revelations’, suffering from a morning neurosis, is full of resentment towards her husband and the world in general, the view beyond the window – ‘a huge pale sky and a cloud like a torn shirt dragging across’ (p. 191) – now being unbearable. When her mood changes, so does her perceived reality:

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The world is no longer gloomy, hostile, irritating, but ‘vibrating, trembling, exciting, flying’, full of promises and possibilities. The wind, which was initially a depressive factor, now embodies freedom and liberation. Yet everything changes once more when the woman yields to the oppressive atmosphere of the hairdresser’s shop: ‘Oh, how terrifying Life was, thought Monica. How dreadful. It is the loneliness which is so appalling. We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows – nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away’ (p. 195). In Mansfield’s world, a person is not a continuum, where the present world vision results from earlier experience, and evolves, retaining the memory of its past. On the contrary, the praesens historicum, so often used by the narrator, suggests the importance of the present moment, or rather the fact that there is only the present moment and the stimuli influencing the character. The moment is neither rooted in the past nor does it affect the future. The impulses and the world visions resulting from them form a discreet sequence, not a continuum.10 Thus there is practically no evolution, no development in Mansfield’s world; everything is suspended in time – yet usually in a way different from other modernist writing, where past and present are blended in the character’s consciousness. Here, time is divided into short segments, into independent moments. There is no maturing, gaining experience, understanding – only reacting. Such a fluctuation of moods, world visions and attitudes provokes a question about the ‘true self’, sometimes pondered upon by Mansfield’s characters too. Monica (‘Revelations’) experiences her real self when for a while she feels free and independent as the wind. Beryl (‘Prelude’), always playing some part before others, is conscious of this fact and of the false appearances she assumes. Constantia (‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’) goes back into the past for a moment and frees herself from the dominance of her despotic father: There had been this other life, running out, bringing things home in bags, getting things on approval, discussing them with Jug, and taking them back to get more things on approval, and arranging father’s trays and trying not to annoy father. But it all seemed to have happened in a kind of a tunnel. It wasn’t real. It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now? (p. 284)

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The final questions, however, suggest that what could be the real self and real life – identified as freedom from any restraints and external influences – appear to be ungraspable, impossible to develop. Indeed, there is no development of the characters in Mansfield’s worlds, not just because of the eternal and absolute nature of the here-and-now of a given person, but also because the ‘real self’ never has a chance to come to the surface, never a chance to dominate completely. Monica, when she succumbs to the oppressive atmosphere at the hairdresser’s, forgets the sense of freedom she has just experienced. Beryl hides behind a number of masks, which make her ‘lose sight of the real Bertha’: ‘She saw the real Beryl – a shadow . . . a shadow. Faint and insubstantial she shone. What was there of her except the radiance? [. . .]. And was there ever a time when I did not have a false self? . . .’ (‘Prelude’, p. 59). Indeed, it is a question that can be asked about many of Mansfield’s protagonists. Not only does the outer world apparently lose its integrity, but so does the protagonist. The self appears elusive, because it depends on circumstances for its substance; it is only what it is at a given moment. Just as there is no ‘ordinary window’ to observe reality, there is practically no such ‘window’ to observe a person, a true self. Paradoxically, therefore, substituting a character’s point of view for that of an omniscient narrator does not result in a clearer and more authoritative image of the inner life of a person. The latter appears to be as evasive and impossible to grasp as the external reality. Thus the main feature of Mansfield’s reality is its elusiveness, its ephemerality. The task of the writer is to render its nature, its changeability and dependence from the point of view of the observer.11 One might think about analogies between Mansfield’s stories and the Impressionist school of painting, not so much on the level of artistic devices that allude to the pictorial arts, but on the level of the stories’ composition. Just as the Impressionists produce several versions of the same object, all different depending on the momentariness of their circumstances (and constituting a ‘set’ rather than a sequence), so Mansfield concentrates on particular moments that flavour her world views with a unique character. Furthermore, Mansfield’s stories communicate the ephemerality and elusiveness of the world and a person, while being themselves elusive, constituting objective correlatives of the model of reality they create. The fleeting, momentary and unstable visions often cannot be rendered into words (words fail already on the level of the communication between characters, or on the level of narration – notice how the narrator of ‘Je ne parle pas français’ avoids speaking in plain words,12 whereas the title phrase might refer to his own utterance), they cannot be analyzed precisely. This finds its equivalent in the artistic strategies adopted by the writer. What the impressionist painters acquired by utilizing light and colour effects, by chromatic blots and blurred contours, Mansfield achieves by understatement, vague suggestions, subterfuge, concealments, and shifting points of view, none of which is authoritative, and, as in symbolist poetry, by reiterating phrases that suggest a determined meaning, which, however, is never completely revealed. The stories and their essence appear just as elusive as the reality they create.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

‘The literary Impressionists believed that fiction should locate itself where we “have an impression”: not in sense, nor in thought but in the feeling that comes between’ (Matz 2001: 1). This term means a certain way of reconstructing reality as it is presented in a literary text, not only by references to the impressionist school of painting (although the connections between the modernist texts and the contemporary pictorial conventions cannot be denied or underestimated). Compare, for example, Holloway (1990: 214–5). See, for example, Dominic Head (1992: 17), who interprets this type of plotreduction as a commentary on the more traditional short story. All further references to Mansfield’s stories are from the Mansfield (2007) edition and only page numbers will be given. A similar technique is often used when introducing retrospective scenes. For example, in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ or ‘The Life of Ma Parker’, the narrative concerning the past events recalled by the protagonist blends into that relating the character’s here and now – thus not only disturbing the border between the real and the imagined, but also between the actual and the remembered, the present and the past, even if such a disturbance occurs mainly on the level of the communicative situation. Such a narrative strategy is usually viewed as imitating contemporary cinematic techniques (flashbacks) (Lohafer 1996: 476). ‘Quasi’, because from the point of view of an external observer, the birds would remain what they really are: figures on the paper. The term was coined by the Russian formalists to refer to a metaphor which eventually turns into ‘the poetic reality’; that is, it seems to become an aspect of the presented world (Z˙yrmunski 1970: 316). Even so there seem to be exceptions, such as Laura and Laurie in ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘Her First Ball’, who apparently share the same world vision as Matilda and Bogey in ‘The Wind Blows’. Yet such communication (provided that it really takes place) is evidently reserved for siblings, in particular brother and sister. See Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy (1999: 256–7) on Bertha’s (‘Bliss’) inarticulateness at the apparent moment of bliss. The metaphor of ‘the rare fiddle’ kept in a case (and hence is mute), which she interprets as a metaphor of repression, may also represent inability to express one’s emotions. Moreover, Monica’s thoughts evidently concentrate on the aesthetic dimension of this gesture: ‘Oh, what a perfect thought. Lilies-of-the-valley, and white pansies, double white violets and white velvet ribbon . . . From an unknown friend . . . From one who understands . . . For a Little Girl . . .’ (‘Revelations’, p. 211). Events seemingly recorded in one’s memory appear to be fleeting, impermanent, changeable, according to external impulses. Vera’s remembered image of her lover (‘A Dill Pickle’) – a petty and mean man – yields under the influence of their meeting, years after parting, to tender, pleasant memories of time spent with him. Memories in Mansfield’s stories do not mould a character, but are provoked by present stimuli, as in ‘A Dill Pickle’, but also, for example, in ‘The Man Without a Temperament’, and ‘Je ne parle pas français’, where particular words or scenes provoke memories of other past scenes and emotions. The artistic characters in Mansfield’s stories seem deprived of such a consciousness. The literary woman from ‘Psychology’ is as submerged in the present status quo

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as Miss Meadows from ‘The Singing Lesson’. The limitations of Mr Bullen and Mr Peacock (the music teachers from ‘The Wind Blows’ and ‘Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day’, respectively) are revealed by the repeated phrases delivered to their pupils. The young painter from ‘Feuille d’Album’ is incapable of distinguishing his daydreams from reality. See Sarah Henstra on ‘the elusive narrative gap between what a character says and what the text intends us to hear’ in a discussion of the self-consciousness of the narrator and the ‘theatricality of the story’ (Henstra 2000: 125).

Bibliography D’Arcy, C. C-G. (1999), ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “bliss”: “the rare fiddle” as an emblem of the political and sexual alienation of a woman’, Papers on Language and Literature. A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature, 35 (3), 244–69. Fletcher, J. and M. Bradbury (1991), ‘The introverted novel’, in M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (eds), Modernism 1890–1930. London: Penguin, pp. 394–415. Head, D. (1992), The Modernist Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henstra, S. (2000), ‘Looking the part: performative narration in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield’s “je ne parle pas français”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 46 (2), 125–49. Holloway, J. (1990), ‘Wyndham Lewis and the icons of art’, in B. Ford (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, 7. From James to Eliot. London: Penguin, pp. 213–29. Lohafer, S. (1996), ‘Why “the life of Ma Parker” is not so simple: preclosure in issue-bound stories’, Studies in Short Fiction, 33 (4), 475–86. Mansfield, K. (2007), The Collected Stories. London: Penguin. Matz, J. (2001), Literary Impressionism and Modern Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, V. (1966), ‘Modern fiction’, in J. James (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Selections from her essays. London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 116–23. Z˙yłowska, I. (2004), ‘Malarskie inspiracje w “Upojeniu” Katherine Mansfield’, Acta Neophilologica, IV, 29–38. Z˙yrmunski, W. (1970), ‘Metafora w twórczos´ci Błoka’, in M.R. Mayenowa and Z. Saloni (eds), Rosyjska szkoła stylistyki. Warszawa: PIW, pp. 313–34.

Chapter 6

Un-Defining the Self in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield Nancy Gray

In her 1925 essay, ‘Modern Fiction’, Virginia Woolf tells us that ‘the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it’ (Woolf 1984: 150). She argues that, unlike her predecessors, who rely on the familiarity of external cues and known structures, the modern writer must ‘look within’ for life that cannot be contained by the ‘ill-fitting vestments’ of conventional narrative practices (p. 149). Those practices have, in effect, rendered us unfit for recognizing meaning unless it is dressed in a manner we already know how to recognize. But if, Woolf writes, the writer has ‘the courage to say that what interests him is no longer “this” but “that”’, then ‘the accent falls a little differently’ and ‘a different outline of form becomes necessary’. In the process, an important shift takes place: ‘the emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all’ (p. 152). It is not Woolf’s intention to instruct us as to what we should find in those unexpected places; rather, she is alerting us to the importance and vitality of the complex possibilities their very unexpectedness puts into play. It takes a writer of particular skill to give us free access to those possibilities. Katherine Mansfield is just such a writer. If anything, she goes even further than Woolf urges. In her hands, and with the supplest of touches, the tension between ‘this’ and ‘that’ need not be resolved into a choice of one over the other, but is entered into, opened up, and set in motion to create narrative spaces that come alive with unexpected effects. In a journal entry from April 1920, she uses this kind of tension to interrogate the relation between writer and self. After invoking ‘the popularity of that most sly, ambiguous, difficult piece of advice: “To thine own self be true”’, Mansfield goes on to say, ‘True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well really, that’s what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves?’ (Murry 1954: 205). Here she brings into question the concept of the self as a singular entity, recognizing that the experience of self is never that simple or consistent. This is a phenomenon especially relevant to women. For if, as has long been argued by legions of feminist theorists from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler and beyond, women can never attempt self without also occupying the patriarchal category of man’s other, then any female sense of self is always at least split, if not (ideologically) impossible. The advantage of this condition is

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that women are well-positioned to be conscious of the self’s competing demands, and to use that consciousness to resist settling for just one self or another. This kind of awareness, coupled with modern fiction’s attention to those undefined new emphases of which Woolf spoke (Woolf 1984: 152), gave women writers in the early twentieth century an unprecedented opportunity to put ‘the self’ on the page as never before – to re-imagine it, subvert it, and displace it with far more interesting conceptions of human complexity. The selves that emerged are indeed troublesome, often downright unmanageable, and alive with a radical indeterminacy that frees them to behave in the most unruly of ways. Consider, for instance, Mansfield’s contemporary Dorothy Richardson, whose search in Pilgrimage for a new narrative consciousness in the form of ‘a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism’ yielded instead ‘a stranger’ with ‘a hundred faces, any one of which, the moment it was entrapped within the close mesh of direct statement, summoned its fellows to disqualify it’ (Richardson 1979: 10). Or consider Woolf’s protagonist in Orlando, who chases the (female) self through time, only to end up motoring into the countryside in possession of a great many selves – ‘some say two thousand and fifty-two’ – all of which defy ‘what some people call the true self [. . .] commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all’ (Woolf 1956: 308, 310). As for Mansfield, she noted that despite our ‘persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent’, what we get instead, what she herself got, are ‘moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the willful guests’ (Murry 1954: 205). It is precisely this tension between what we count on and what we get that Mansfield so ably evokes in story after story. Her famous use of ‘moments of being’ functions as a technique that invites us to occupy narrative spaces that feel uncertain or undefined: they do not tell us what happens but enact the experience of its happening. What emerges are ambiguous glimpses – for us as well as for the characters – into complex possibilities of self and consciousness that resist, when they do not simply evade, the imagined control of the ‘true self’. Even today, however well-schooled we are in the lessons of postmodern indeterminacy, we live with the legacy of psychology’s early attempts to map the development of the self and define its manifestations in or deviances from ‘proper’ identity categories. Gender is only one of the largest of these categories, though perhaps the most fundamental in its demands that we stay within prescribed boundaries designed to ensure that our every moment of being matches our ‘natures’ as determined by sex. However diffuse we now understand those boundaries to be, we are nevertheless in a continuing struggle of negotiation with them. This act of negotiation is, in a sense, that which is made visible by deconstruction’s recognition that, in Derrida’s words, ‘the center is not the center’ but rather a complex interrelation of ‘freeplay’, ‘supplement’ and ‘deferral’ in which coherence ‘expresses the force of a desire’ (Derrida 1989: 960). Judith Butler suggests that the desire to appear ‘under the sign of’ a coherent and nameable identity is always an encounter with identity categories as

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‘instruments of regulatory regimes’. Instead of contorting ourselves to fit their parameters of enforcement, she advises that we consider them ‘invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them, as sites of necessary trouble’ (Butler 1997: 301). One might almost imagine that Butler had been reading Mansfield. But of course this experience of an uneasy tension between who we are supposed to be and the countless moments of being that escape or exceed those expectations is available to anyone, at any time. And Mansfield knew it. She knew it and she knew how to put it into words alive enough to form narrative spaces that simply decline to enclose the meanings they make available. In her hands, what a story or a life or an incident means is seldom what, in Woolf’s words, ‘custom would have us believe’ (Woolf 1984: 150). More often than not, it is fleeting, uncertain, always in the process of becoming and un-becoming at once. Even armed with well-honed powers of interpretation and analysis, we are in the end left with the realization that both what happens and the meaning of what happens are unsettlingly undecidable. So, returning to Woolf’s observation about modern fiction’s tendency to put the emphasis where we’re not looking for it, let us consider the common reader – or in this case, undergraduates reading Mansfield for the first time in a literature class. Nine times out of ten, they are nonplussed. They know very well how to encounter the expository set-up, follow the quest, ferret out symbols they may carry like banners through the tale as they read, and arrive at the end equipped with satisfactory closure, or at least a pretty good idea of what the protagonist got from all that questing. But even when Mansfield offers up the proper cues, the ones we have learned to look for, the very next moment they prove to be incorrigibly slippery. ‘What happened?’ my students ask. Their training has led them to believe that even if authors leave them wondering, their instructors or the critical authorities will come to the rescue, tidying and ordering the confusing bits into heuristically sound determinations of what lies behind the words. Instead, I find it helpful to ask my students in turn: ‘what happened to you as you read? When did you first notice you were troubled, and what happened then?’ Their responses reveal their anxiety that somehow they missed something, that there are gaps in the story and they do not know what to do about them. They want the gaps to be filled in. They want to be reassured that gaps can always be filled in, and that when they are, meaning will appear. And not just any meaning, but meaning dressed in vestments they will know how to recognize. My job, as I see it, is to redirect them to those moments when the trouble started, and to the tension those moments produce – that is, to the experience of tension itself, not just the tension in the characters or the story but the tension that Mansfield’s approach has produced in them as readers. That sense of uncertainty, produced in and by those moments, matters. When readers are conscious of it, we are reading the text well. In response to my students’ scepticism, at this point I remind them that it is when you are most uncertain that almost anything is possible. They do like the sound of that, and of course they appreciate Mansfield’s ability to put so many possibilities into play, but that does not prevent them from wanting to know how to turn quandary into resolution.

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Everything else in their training, in their access to cultural ideals of mastery and academic goals of ‘Knowledge’, in their experience of the story of life as a story of beginnings leading to discernible ends, feeds their expectations of coming away with what Woolf called ‘a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever’ (Woolf 1957: 3). A little lack of closure in our stories is one thing. Uncertainty driven by plot is familiar enough, and if it leaves the reader with an enticing question or two, so much the better. But when characters inhabit the self without giving in to a sense of identifiable consistency, that is another matter altogether. It is not outside our comfortable expectations as readers to encounter characters that do not see themselves clearly; but we, self-aware and practiced in the arts of reading critically, are supposed to. In Mansfield’s texts, however, we must do without reliable hotel proprietors or authorial captain selves to manage the flow of traffic. Instead, Mansfield relinquishes control and invites us to do the same. She puts unresolved tension – in us, in the characters, in the text – into play in such a way that it becomes itself a site of meaning. The notion of self that we encounter on Mansfield’s pages comes to us in forms persistently resistant to definition. Nor does Mansfield set out to pin down or redefine this creature anew, but instead creates unstable narrative spaces where we are invited to catch sight of it as if out of the corner of the eye, register its effects, and let it go. The techniques Mansfield employs are as troublesome to conventional notions of representation as are the experiences they make available. Her talent for enacting the glancing blow of the unsaid in the said, for drawing an almost imagistic correspondence between objects and states of being, for evoking the insufficiency of narrative voice or human memory to safely contain experience, produces remarkably porous textual spaces of open-ended possibility. She achieves this effect by bringing her narratives to pivotal moments through acts of displacement that seem to release them in the very act of capturing them. Take for instance the final scene in ‘The Garden Party’. We have witnessed Laura’s excitement over the day’s festivities, watched as she vacillates between self-indulgent childhood enthusiasms and adult responsibility, and have begun to trust her as the ethical and social conscience of the story as she grapples with the implications of continuing the lavish party once she hears the news of a death in one of ‘those little cottages just below’ (Mansfield 1991: 289).1 As the story approaches its end, Laura has taken on the role of emissary to the dead man’s family, realizing too late the inappropriateness of the party food she has brought with her and the festive clothing she is still wearing. After fumbling her way through the ordeal, she has stood stock-still before the corpse, helplessly caught between wonder and an impulse to meet the expectations of sympathy that such a moment demands. All she has been able to offer the mourners is ‘a loud childish sob’ and a self-conscious plea: ‘“Forgive my hat”, she said’ (p. 296). Now at last she has fled. On her way back up the lane, she encounters another version of herself in the person of her brother Laurie and gives in to the tumult of her emotions. ‘“Don’t cry”, he said [. . .]. “Was it awful?’” She tells him no, struggling to put what she has experienced into words: ‘She stopped,

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she looked at her brother. “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life –”. But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood. “Isn’t it, darling?” said Laurie’ (p. 297). And with that, the story is over. But how can it be? What does Laurie understand? What are we supposed to understand about what he and Laura understand? After being carefully led through the machinations of the Sheridans’ perfect garden party on this perfect day, leading inexorably to that moment when Laura stands at the dead man’s bedside and apologizes for the hat that had so bewitched her earlier, we expect the dénouement to leave us more firmly in the know, not feeling led down the garden path. Instead, we are left wondering just who Laura is at this moment, what exactly changed for her as she stared life and death in the face, what it has taught her, and how it has brought her to this end, or for that matter, what precisely this end is. There are no more words on the page to help us, so we sift back through what we know. But how can we be sure that we know what we are meant to know? What if we cannot? What if this is all there is? Only an encounter with uncertainty in which our heroine has gone through something and it might mean ‘this’ or ‘that’ or almost anything at all, but we get only a glimpse of it, a feeling about it, a sense of the life in it? For, like Laura, we do recognize something, even understand something. We just cannot ‘tell’ what it is without recourse to those ‘regulatory regimes’ that promise meaning in the guise of already established categories. Our best hope, as Butler reminds us, is instead to understand these moments as ‘sites of necessary trouble’ capable of generating a kind of ‘pleasure produced by the instability of those categories’ (Butler 1997: 301) that would otherwise reassure us that instability is only a temporary stop on the way to the truth at the end of the story. The ending of ‘Bliss’ offers an even more troublesome pleasure in instability than that of ‘The Garden Party’. In this story, we have another heroine, another party, lots of powerful images of the promise of life’s little ecstasies, some witty critiques of modern sophisticates, a few portents that something will go awry, all culminating in a final scene that leaves us, like our heroine, as if empty-handed at the point where we would expect to have gathered the story’s threads into whole cloth. Bertha Young has simultaneously thrilled to the circumstances of her ‘absolutely satisfactory’ (p. 147) life and strained at its conventions. She is in a state. As her excitement builds, becoming almost too intense to bear, her free-floating desire suddenly finds its object – or rather two objects. There is her special guest, the silvery Miss Fulton, who stands gazing with Bertha into the moonlit garden at the exquisite flowering pear tree and understands, Bertha has not the slightest doubt, that this is a perfectly shared moment of bliss (as happens, she thinks to herself, ‘very, very rarely between women’ [p. 152]). And there is Harry, the spouse with whom Bertha is ‘really good pals’ until this night when, in a flash, she realizes that ‘for the first time in her life [she] desired her husband’ (p. 154). She cannot wait to be alone with him, but just as the guests are leaving, Bertha witnesses an unexpected moment, a moment that can mean only that Harry and Pearl Fulton are lovers. Bertha is awakened and betrayed at the same time. So what does she do? Not what we might expect. She stands again

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at the windows looking out at the pear tree ‘caught in that circle of unearthly light’, Miss Fulton’s goodbyes ringing in her head, and utters one satisfactory cry: ‘Oh, what is going to happen now?’ But nothing happens, except that ‘the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still’ (p. 156). Again, the story is over, and again we are left to ponder just what we should make of those final moments. Given the wealth of familiar cues – a heroine on the cusp, the juxtaposition of a perfect flowering tree and two creeping cats trailing past it, the obvious unreliability of the surface structures of Bertha’s life – it can be no surprise that readers (my students, for instance) often feel cheated of betrayal’s expected pay-off. Where are the tears, the crushing awareness of loss, maybe a dose of justified anger? Bertha’s question is our question: what happens next? There is no answer, only the image of the tree that has held the story’s title in place, and that last word ‘still’, as full of ambiguity as it can possibly be. Similar uncertainty characterizes nearly every moment throughout the few pages of ‘This Flower’, which is one of the most remarkable instances of unreliable narrative surfaces in Mansfield’s opus. The words on the page provide us with characters caught in a situation, a more or less logical sequence of time, an expression of relief at the end, even an epigraph at the beginning. But it is the unwritten parts of the text that capture our attention: they make the written parts feel like mere hints about what might be happening to the unnamed woman and her companion Roy. They are in a doctor’s office at a ‘shady Bloomsbury address’ because ‘one can’t be too careful in affairs of this sort’ (p. 194). Yet all we know for sure is that ‘as she lay there, looking up at the ceiling, she had her moment – yes, she had her moment!’ But ‘could she describe what happened? Impossible’ – only that she ‘had not been conscious all the time’, and despite ‘fighting against the stream of life’ had suddenly ‘yielded, yielded absolutely, down to every minutest pulse and nerve’ (p. 193). Then there is some business about getting the shady doctor to reassure Roy that the trouble is with her heart, and a barrel organ outside the window ‘laughing, mocking, gushing’ (p. 194), after which Roy settles the bill, rushes back to her side and does a little gushing of his own: ‘“Oh! Oh! Oh! the relief!” [. . .] “I thought we were in for it this time. I really did. And it would have been so – fatal – so fatal!”’ (p. 196). There are no more words after that. What ‘it’ was we never learn. This does not, however, prevent readers from believing they can guess with a high degree of accuracy. Doctor, shady address, stream of life, fatal secrets – the clues are all there. We can read between the lines. In fact, we must, for it is there, between the lines, that the ‘real’ action, whatever that is, seems to take place. What is said is only allusion, a fragment. Everything else goes unsaid. These examples suggest that we have a far richer sense of unscripted possibilities if we suspend our need to know in favour of simply entering Mansfield’s narrative spaces, remaining open to the dynamic tension they put in place between expectation and experience. Instead of dutifully mining her stories for the kind of outcomes we know how to find with more conventional reading practices, we would do well simply to read what she wrote and in the process pay attention to what happens not only in the text but in ourselves. The emphasis

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is in a new place. The reader as knowing self is as displaced as the knowledge she sets out to discover and the conventions designed to lead her there. But it is a displacement that generates much more than it sets aside. Mansfield invites us to venture beyond Woolf’s accentuation of ‘this’ not ‘that’ in order to make room for ‘this’ and ‘that’, for the complex possibility of both at once, equally present, equally viable. This brings us to Mansfield’s use of correspondences between objects and states of being. One may speak of a vocabulary of symbols in Mansfield’s narratives, but she manages again to go beyond what we might expect. Her objects are more than symbolic representations of characters’ inner worlds; they function almost as subject positions in themselves. That is, objects often have an almost animate presence that forms a relationship with characters’ selves, one that adjusts and shifts with the contingencies generated by interactions with the socially produced spaces in which the self must encounter its possibilities. An early instance of this occurs in ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’. As the narrative alternates between Rosabel’s external circumstances and her imagined internal life, objects appear in contrasting contexts to reveal her vulnerability to the seductions of cultural fairy tales, in a state of tension with reality and the class boundaries that narrowly circumscribe her options. As the story opens, Rosabel sacrifices proper sustenance in favour of buying a bunch of violets. Riding the bus home, she catches sight of ‘something about a hot, voluptuous night, a band playing, and a girl with lovely, white shoulders’ (p. 4) in a cheap romance novel held by the girl seated next to her. Disgusted, yet feeling quite overheated herself, Rosabel makes her way to her room at the top of four flights of stairs. There, kneeling at the window, she catches sight of herself inhabiting a perfect tale in which her small but costly extravagance and the cheap novel’s mawkish descriptions merge to transform her life. She recasts herself in the leading role, displacing the beautiful girl to whom she had earlier sold a hat and taking the girl’s handsome, if somewhat disreputable, companion, Harry, as her adoring suitor. ‘Yes, it was a voluptuous night, a band playing, and her lovely white shoulders’ (p. 7). Harry buys her ‘great sprays of Parma violets’ (p. 6) and declares, ‘“It is as you always should be, [. . .] with your hands full of violets”’, at which point ‘(Rosabel realized that her knees were getting stiff)’ (p. 7). Their engagement and marriage soon follow, whereupon ‘the real Rosabel got up from the floor’ and ‘groped her way into bed’ (p. 8). But the violets and the white shoulders have done their work, reifying the promise of escape-by-romance in which the Harrys of the world are not common opportunists but knights in shining armour, and Rosabel not a poor shop girl but a fair princess. Even the dull light of morning cannot uncouple the two Rosabels that have emerged: ‘Still half asleep, she smiled, with a little nervous tremor round her mouth’ (p. 8). Two later stories, ‘Miss Brill’ and ‘Psychology’, trouble the relation between object and being even further. A Derridean ‘supplement’ (1989) of meaning occurs when the supposed correspondence between object and being, or image and meaning, is revealed to be unstable. That is, the relation between signifier and signified does not form the coherent whole we expect. In that moment, Derrida’s

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‘force of desire’ (1989) encounters Butler’s ‘invariable stumbling-blocks’ to reveal the irreducible tension between subjectivity and the ‘regulatory regimes’ that would contain it. The longing inevitably involved in the self’s identification with something or someone – its ‘wish’ to be or be like or be explained by the object with which it is identified – cannot be satisfied. Instead, both character and reader are left with even more ambiguity than that with which they began. We first meet Miss Brill removing her treasured fur necklet from its box as she prepares for an outing in the public gardens. She brushes her ‘little rogue’ and rubs ‘life back into the dim little eyes’, noticing that the nose ‘must have taken a knock, somehow’, but ‘never mind’ (p. 298). As the band plays in the gardens, Miss Brill notes that the same people show up every Sunday, silent and old, looking ‘as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even – even cupboards!’. Then two couples catch her attention. The first, ‘an ermine toque and a gentleman in grey’ act out a scene that rouses Miss Brill’s sympathy when the ‘shabby’ woman ‘smiled more brightly than ever’ upon being spurned by the gentleman. ‘But the band seemed to know what she was feeling’ (p. 300), modulating its tones to match first rejection, then renewal, as the woman ‘raised her hand as though she’d seen someone else, much nicer, just over there, and pattered away’ (p. 301). Soon, as if on cue, a boy and a girl arrive, ‘beautifully dressed’ and in love, ‘the hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father’s yacht’ (p. 302). Miss Brill prepares to listen to their story, having become ‘really quite expert’ at ‘sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked around her’ (p. 299). Today, however, she has discovered the secret of her enjoyment: ‘It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. [. . .] No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all’ (p. 301). But what Miss Brill hears changes everything. As the girl resists the boy’s public display of affection, he asks, ‘But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?’ To which the girl adds, ‘It’s her fu-fur. [. . .] It’s exactly like a fried whiting’. At this moment the narrative comes to a standstill. There is a break on the page, an empty space in the text. When it resumes, Miss Brill climbs the stairs to ‘the little dark room – her room like a cupboard’. There she unclasps the necklet, and ‘without looking’, places it in its box; ‘[b]ut when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying’ (p. 302). The story stops here. Desire, generated in the displacement of the story’s closure by Miss Brill’s longing for identification between self and other that cannot hold, has met its match and stumbled. Possibilities have been returned to their cupboards. And yet in the silence that follows, there is something more, something that is brought into being but cannot be contained by words on a page. Teased into the open are irreducible tensions between narrative, experience, and social constructions of experience. ‘Story’ in its largest sense, as that structure into which we place the truths we count as most meaningful, is meant to close those gaps. For its sake, we readily accept the truism of a willing suspension of disbelief, generously setting aside the real world in favour of the demands of a well-wrought tale. The very act of setting disbelief aside reminds us that life seldom makes sense the way stories do, yet our trust in narrative’s ability

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to resolve that tension conspires against the realization. Everything from the fairy tales and heroic epics we grow up with to the anecdotes we tell about our day’s activities depends on the same strategies: we select some things, de-select others, and arrange everything in a storyline designed to communicate recognizable meaning. Even in the simple act of remembering, the difference between what happened and the story of what happened is elided when it’s ‘told’, when it reproduces the structures and strategies that reinforce the social constructs that shaped them in the first place. The suspension of disbelief is easy. The suspension of belief, however, is far more difficult. In ‘Psychology’, Mansfield combines the correspondences of objects and states of being with a realization of the way in which narrative is both necessary and insufficient to the task of providing the seamless connections we long for between experience and the social constructs of experience. The story functions on at least two levels at once. Not only is it about two people striving to break through external codes to meet each other on ‘some vast plain’ where ‘their two minds lay open to each other’, it is also about narrative structure itself as the plain where vastness promises unlimited freedom though inevitably bounded by the limitations of its own geography. As we watch the characters push against the parameters of convention while simultaneously invoking them, we have the opportunity to experience struggle itself as the story’s site of meaning. Consider this line: ‘She wanted time in which to free herself from all these familiar things with which she lived so vividly’ (p. 136). Here the comfort of the familiar, within the bounds of narrative as well as in life, occupies the same narrative space as does her longing for what can only be imagined. ‘Things’ make ‘the largest, most vehement claims’ on the story’s unnamed characters, but what they desire most is surrender to possibilities their comforts cannot encompass. They picture themselves as ‘eager, serious travellers, absorbed in understanding what was to be seen and discovering what was hidden’ (p. 136). But try as they might, they fail. Expectations and experience cannot meet without mediation. Every gesture is choreographed in clichéd poses (‘him, leaning back, taking his ease among the cushions, and her, curled up en escargot in the blue shell armchair’ [p. 136]), and over-determined sentiments about those things that claim them (‘your red chairs [. . .] the bowl of fruit on the black table [. . .] that marvel of a sleeping boy’s head’). Instead of surrender, ‘a new silence came between them’ (p. 138). Unable either to fill in the gap or open it wider to explore its depths, they give up. The story ends in retreat to a known landscape (‘the fall of the steps, the dark garden ringed with glittering ivy’ [p. 140]), and a familiar visitor, ‘an elderly virgin’ (p. 141) who embodies both the safety of the known and the danger of what lies ahead in the vastness. In mirrored moments that imitate closure, the unnamed woman embraces the elderly virgin and whispers, ‘Good night, my friend. [. . .] Come again soon’ (p. 142), then repeats these words verbatim in a note to the unnamed man. The struggle for connection remains ambiguously uncertain, meaning is deferred, and the story may begin again and again. It is, as ever, insufficient and necessary. Mansfield’s genius lies in her refusal to resolve that contradiction.

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The unexpected emphasis on moments that reveal the force of longing and desire, while refusing to contain or satisfy it, returns in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’. This time memory is the site of trouble: neither the act of remembering nor the telling of what is remembered can quite solve the problem of how to house under the same roof actual experience and the experiencing self. That is, the self who remembers is not the self who experienced the events or moments remembered, nor the self who wonders what might have been remembered if experience were otherwise. There is no singular self that oversees all the options. Yet the options do not disappear or scatter so much as multiply. Sisters Josephine and Constantia anxiously attempt to come to terms with the unsettling reappearance of their own potential, released into their awareness by their father’s death. At first they cannot seem to find themselves as they timidly occupy the house without him, remembering his one-eyed death (‘how much easier to tell people about it, if he had only opened both!’ [p. 242]), fearing his retribution for any small infraction of the rules he imposed so well they had become second nature, and imagining that he might spring out at them from the chest of drawers when they dare to enter his now-empty room. Then in the final scene something begins to shift. At the sound of a barrel-organ outside, Josephine cries, ‘Run, Con . . . Run quickly’. But they remember, ‘It didn’t matter. They would never have to stop the organ-grinder again’. A moment later, sunlight ‘thiev[es] its way’ (p. 256) into the room, lighting up their mother’s photograph and transforming the organ music into a ‘fountain of bubbling notes’. As they remember, they imagine: ‘Would everything have been different if mother hadn’t died?’ (p. 257), Josephine asks herself. Constantia sets herself to wondering, ‘but not as usual, not vaguely’. This time ‘her wonder was like longing’ as she recalls how once upon a time she had ‘crept out of bed [. . .] when the moon was full, and lain on the floor with her arms outstretched, as though she was crucified. Why?’. She knows ‘there had been this other life’, but ‘What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now?’. She turns to Josephine, meaning to say ‘something frightfully important, about – about the future and what . . .’. All she manages is a fragment: ‘Don’t you think perhaps –’ she begins; ‘I was wondering if now –’ (p. 258), Josephine says at the same moment. Each invites the other to continue, but in the end Constantia says, ‘I can’t say what I was going to say, Jug, because I’ve forgotten what it was . . . that I was going to say.’ Replies Josephine, ‘I’ve forgotten too’ (p. 259). The story ends with an act of forgetting in the very act of telling. And if what might be imagined cannot be told, then how can we know what it means? Mansfield’s narrative spaces open up fissures in the textual landscape that leave us face to face with realities that are available to us only in fiction’s form, yet irredeemable by fiction. We are so accustomed to trusting our stories to show us how to resolve the struggle to know who and how we are deep down as human beings, that when we are left with the struggle but not its outcome, we are apt to miss the shift in consciousness we have just been invited to experience. Consciousness is a way of being aware of internal and external states at once, and of the self’s proclivities for processing the entwined relationship between them.

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Mansfield provides a means of inhabiting narrative spaces that invites awareness in her characters and readers alike, of both the promising limitations for expressing what can be known, and of our contested limitations as knowing selves. The tension between our troubled encounters with those spaces and our desire to fit snugly into them is at once mundane and unspeakable. The emphasis is in a new place, not a place we can name, except provisionally, contingently, but a place that is simply ‘elsewhere’ than where we expected to go. And so what happens then? What self can, might, or does emerge in such conditions? No self, any self, all selves – an infinite possibility of selves in infinitely possible incarnations. But if that is so, what have we really got? Perhaps what so many of us have long struggled for, and what Mansfield so disconcertingly offers: subjectivity of the frailest yet most enduring kind, available to anyone, indeterminate and capable of almost anything.

Notes 1

All subsequent quotations from Mansfield’s stories are from this edition and only page references will be given in the text (Mansfield 1991).

Bibliography Butler, J. (1997), ‘Imitation and gender insubordination’, in L. Nicholson (ed.), The Second Wave. New York: Routledge, pp. 300–15. Derrida, J. (1989), ‘Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences’, in D. Richter (ed.), The Critical Tradition. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, pp. 959–71. Mansfield, K. (1991), Stories. New York: Vintage. Murry, J. M. (ed.) (1954), The Journal of Katherine Mansfield 1904–1922, Definitive Edition. London: Constable. Richardson, D. (1979), ‘Foreword’, in Pilgrimage, vol. 1. London: Virago, pp. 9–12. Woolf, V. (1956), Orlando. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. –(1957), A Room of One’s Own. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. –(1984), ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader, A. McNellie (ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 146–54.

Chapter 7

‘– Ah, what is it? – that I heard’: Voice and Affect in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fictions Anne Besnault-Levita

In her study of ‘double discourse’ in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, Pamela Dunbar warns the reader that the author of ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ is ‘far from being the “safe” writer the lyrical surfaces of her most famous stories proclaim her to be’ (Dunbar 1997: ix). Dunbar’s response to ‘The Canary’, for example, stresses the irony of the story, pointing out the risk of focusing exclusively on the ‘emotion’ aroused by the first-person narrator’s confession: Mansfield is here tilting at the traditional view of love as inspired by the charms of the lover. The heroine, herself an adept student of emotion, makes the point: I loved him. [. . .] At the same time, by making a bird the object of her heroine’s emotions, the author allows the pathos of her portrait to dip over into the grotesque. In this story emotional complexity resides, not in the psychology of the key figure but in the irony of the presentation. Romantic in her emotional reach and in her association with a songbird, the narrator is disqualified by her sex and lack of social status from the exalted status of the Romantic poet. (Dunbar 1997: 72) Although I tend to agree with this analysis of Mansfield’s ‘double discourse’ and the suggestion that the story’s pathos might be undermined by irony, my own critical distance is in turn undermined by the vulnerable presence of the protagonist’s voice, the plea for a reader’s response inscribed in the accumulation of narrative and typographical ellipses, and the immediacy of the impersonated speech metaphorizing the female lonely self. When reading ‘The Canary’, I cannot but feel ‘interpellated’ in the position of an empathic reader as listener, whose soul and mind will long resonate with the narrator’s final haunting question:1 . . . All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to–-to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep

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What is this ‘it’, that is meant to be listened to, that we can almost ‘hear’ in so many stories by Mansfield, and how is it related to affect and to subjectiveness, as the presence of a subject in and through language?3 There is indeed an emotional mystery in the ‘something’ Miss Brill hears crying when she puts on the lid of the box containing her fur, or in the ‘something’ which stirs in the ‘breast’ of the man who listens to the sound of a woman’s voice at the end of ‘The Escape’. In those short fictions, as in some others, the epiphanic moment involves the perception of a voice – human, physical, sometimes beyond words – always concretizing an effect of individuation while drawing the reader into a process of revelation. And yet most of Mansfield’s critics have insisted, as Dunbar does, on the ironic distance always lurking beneath the masks of authenticity, self-spontaneity and voice-performance, so that the question of whether ‘voice’ in Mansfield’s fictions can in fact be considered as the privileged location of the subject’s presence, still remains unanswered. To address this question, I have chosen to adopt a phenomenological approach in which ‘voice’ is represented on the written page as a sonorous phenomenon. In this respect, this study is indebted to the works of the French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a later phenomenologist, Jean-Luc Nancy, while also being inspired by Henri Meschonnic’s linguistic and poetic work on the notion of ‘voice’.4 It extends my own work on ‘voice’ in the modernist short story (BesnaultLevita 1995), and tries to offer new answers, if only partial, to questions that have usually been tackled from narratological or psychoanalytical perspectives.

Individuation Mansfield’s fictional world is clearly a sonorous world of speaking voices, and one of the first things we can actually hear in her short fictions is her talent as ‘a born actress and mimic’ (Baker 1972: 233), and her pitch-perfect impersonations of male and female characters, whether adults or children: ‘Tone should be my secret [. . .] this is in my power because I know I possess the power of holding people’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 84). According to the modernist code, most of Mansfield’s characters are not defined externally by their age, circumstances or physical appearance; but they always have a ‘voice’ that in her writing is often associated metonymically with the ‘self’: ‘Jonathan was gone before Stanley had finished. “Pass, friend!” said the bass voice gently, and he slid away through the water with scarcely a ripple . . ’ (‘At the Bay’, p. 209). Most of the time, the physicality and singularity of this voice is described in the narrator’s reporting clause – ‘“Have you a garden?” said the cool, sleepy voice’

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(‘Bliss’, p. 102) – or represented through lexis, punctuation, sound pattern, tone, syntax or rhythm: What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? . . . (‘Bliss’, pp. 91–2) In all of Mansfield’s impersonations, whether they are conveyed through direct or free indirect speech, ‘voice’ is a literary effect. Yet, the way that Mansfield chose ‘the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her [characters], and to fit them on that day at that very moment’ (Stead 1985: 213), means that her representation of referential voices always suggests a subjective presence in language: ‘Now [the band] started again. And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill – a something, what was it? – not sadness – no, not sadness – a something that made you want to sing’ (‘Miss Brill’, p. 334). In Mansfield’s stories, the changes in a character’s emotions are indeed usually suggested through the representation of a frail and wavering enunciation – partly typographical, partly stylistic – that anchors their embodied selves in a subjective time and space. Thus, in ‘At the Bay’ when Kezia’s grandmother evokes memories of the death of her uncle William, Mansfield suggests the coexistence of spoken words and inarticulate affect, while linking the vacillations of voice to the mortal condition: Kezia lay still thinking this over. She didn’t want to die. It meant she would have to leave here, leave everywhere, for ever, leave – leave her grandma. She rolled over quickly. ‘Grandma,’ she said in a startled voice. ‘What, my pet!’ ‘You’re not to die.’ Kezia was very decided. ‘Ah, Kezia’ – her grandma looked up and smiled and shook her head – ‘don’t let’s talk about it.’ (p. 227) In ‘The Garden Party’, Laura’s changing emotions are embodied by the shifting tones of her voice. The difficulty she experiences in playing the gendered, social role which her mother imposes on her is first betrayed by her ‘copying her mother’s voice’ (p. 246) – ‘“Good morning,” she said [. . .]. “Oh – er – have you come – is it about the marquee?”’ – and by her timid answers to the workmen in her garden: ‘“Only a very small band,” said Laura gently’ (p. 247). When she comes across her brother later on, her voice betrays an overplayed excitement: ‘“Oh, I do love parties, don’t you?” gasped Laura’. On discovering the ‘shallow tray full of pots of pink lilies’, she ‘moan[s]’ a little and cannot believe her eyes: ‘“O-oh,

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Sadie! [. . .] It’s some mistake,” she said faintly’ (p. 249). Then, her ‘horrified’ response to the news brought by Godber’s man of a ‘poor chap’s death’ contrasts with Jose’s ‘astonishment’ at her wanting to stop the party (p. 253). When Laura tells the ‘dreadful story’ to her mother, ‘breathless and half choking’, she hopes her plea will be understood: ‘“Of course, we can’t have our party, can we?” she pleaded’ (p. 255). Her answers to the compliments she receives from Laurie and the guests a little later, when they admire her ‘topping’ hat, are expressed ‘faintly’ and ‘softly’, suggesting that she becomes less certain that taking a basket to the dead man’s family is ‘quite the best plan’ (pp. 256–7). At the end of the story, Laura’s ‘loud and childish sob’ – ‘“Forgive my hat,” she said’ (p. 261) – therefore emerges as the result of a complex interior cognitive experience conveyed, among other things, by the written performance of a singular voice. In Mansfield’s fiction, this dramaturgy of voice is foregrounded whenever the traces of narrative discourse are erased and replaced by long dialogues – as in sections from ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ which focus on the children’s conversations – and by the extensive use of free indirect speech. This work on speech and voice can be regarded on one level as typically modernist in the way it rejects the notion of plot while playing on the conventions of genre.5 In her monologic stories (‘The Canary’, ‘The Lady’s Maid’, ‘Late at Night’, ‘The Black Cap’) and her conversational pieces – (‘Two Tuppenny Ones, Please’, ‘A Dill Pickle’, ‘Psychology’), Mansfield’s representation of voice and use of direct discourse disrupt the expected balance between third-person narration and reported speech in a way that verges on poetic lyricism or theatricality, and it transforms the reader into a listening audience: ‘. . . Have you kept birds? If you haven’t all this must sound, perhaps, exaggerated’ (‘The Canary’, p. 421); ‘. . . Oh dear, I sometimes think . . . whatever should I do if anything were to . . . But, there, thinking’s no good to anyone – is it, Madam? Thinking won’t help’ (‘The Lady’s Maid’, p. 380); ‘Often when I go to bed now I want to pull the clothes over my head – and just cry. Funny, isn’t it!’ (‘Late at Night’, p. 639). Even in her more traditionally narrated fictions, Mansfield’s third-person narrators sometimes have a ‘voice’ that erases the boundary between the written and the spoken word as if discourse always meant a form of individuation through voice: ‘And then, after six years she saw him again’ (‘A Dill Pickle’, p. 167); ‘And after all, the weather was ideal’ (‘The Garden Party’, p. 245). Mansfield’s dramaturgy of voice is also distinctly modernist in the way it foregrounds impersonations that both ‘probe’ and ‘problematise’ the means whereby ‘“self” could be expressed’, as Dennis Brown argues (Brown 1989: 7). But her quest for an effect of individual presence in language also implies some attention to voice as a physical interior phenomenon. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains in The Visible and the Invisible: Among my movements, there are some that go nowhere – that do not even go find in the other body their resemblance or their archetype: these are the facial movements, many gestures, and especially those strange movements of the throat and mouth that form the cry and the voice. Those movements end in

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sounds and I hear them. Like crystal, like metal and many other substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own life as is the voice of no one else. (Baldwin 2003: 260) In Mansfield’s short fictions, some characters are shown to experience this phenomenological sensation of hearing their ‘sonorous’ own ‘vibration’. The male character in ‘Psychology’ hear[s] himself say: ‘“I must be off; I’m meeting Brand at six”’ (p. 116). ‘“No, no. I’m getting hysterical”’ is Bertha Young’s reaction when hearing her own laugh in ‘Bliss’ (p. 93). Furthermore, the interior ‘vibration’ evoked by Maurice Merleau-Ponty – the voice that belongs to ‘no one else’ is only an ‘echo of its articulated existence’ without – often acquires a kind of physical autonomy in Mansfield’s stories: Some little sparrows, young sparrows they sounded, chirped on the windowledge. Yeep–eyeep–yeep. But Josephine felt they were not sparrows, not on the window-ledge. It was inside her, that queer little crying noise. Yeep–eyeep–yeep. Ah, what was it crying, so weak and forlorn? (‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, p. 283) ‘You’ve hurt me; you’ve hurt me! We’ve failed!’ said her secret self while she handed him his hat and stick, smiling gaily. [. . .] ‘You’ve hurt me – hurt me,’ said her heart. ‘Why don’t you go? No, don’t go. Stay. No – go!’ (‘Psychology’, pp. 116–7) Whether spoken, secret or silent, the voices represented on the pages of Mansfield’s text bear the iconic traces – sighs, silences, dashes, exclamation and question marks, repetitions – of their subjects’ idiosyncratic affects, emotions and perturbations.

Division In Mansfield’s terms – those that she uses in her letters and journals to speak of emotion, writing and the self – this iconicity of affect might correspond to ‘the moment which, after all, we live for – the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and the least personal’ (Stead 1985: 173), a moment when the characters leave ‘the Masked Ball’ (Stead 1985: 136) and escape from their socially constructed selves. In ‘Bliss’, Bertha Young wonders whether there is any way she can express her new feelings ‘without being “drunk and disorderly”’. ‘How idiotic civilization is!’, she thinks: ‘Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?’ (p. 92). Beryl in ‘Prelude’ knows very well how ‘“silly and spiteful and vain”’ she can be, that ‘“I’m always acting a part. I’m never my real self for a moment”’ (pp. 58–9). These epiphanic

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revelations – always painful, never lasting – of the gulf separating the characters’ inner selves from their socially constructed selves is clearly related to the ‘initial emotion[s]’ at the source of Mansfield’s creative process, emotions which ‘alone can give incidence and sequence, character and background, a close and intimate unity’ (Murry 1930: 236): I’ve two ‘kick offs’ in the writing game. One is joy – real joy – the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline [. . .]. Then something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath – knowing that all about it is warm and tender and ‘ready’. And that I try, ever so humbly, to express. The other ‘kick off’ is my old original one, and (had I not known love) it would have been my all. Not hate or destruction [. . .] but an extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster [. . .]. There! as I took out a cigarette paper I got it exactly – a cry against corruption – that is absolutely the nail on the head. (Stead 1985: 97–8) Strikingly, the use of punctuation, italics and repetition in this famous 1918 journal entry echoes the manifestations of pain or excitement in the free indirect discourse reporting of the train of thought of some characters: ‘Wasn’t there anywhere in the world where she could have her cry out – at last?’ (‘Life of Ma Parker’, p. 308). But while the traces of subjectiveness and affect in the ‘cr[ies] against corruption’ of Mansfield and Ma Parker entail emotional engagement, in other cases similar syntactic and rhetorical effects are meant to sound ‘fearfully affected’ (‘The Garden Party’, p. 246) and deceptive: ‘The voice of the letter seemed to come up to her from the page. It was faint already, like a voice heard over the telephone, high, gushing, with something bitter in the sound. Oh, she detested it to-day’ (‘Prelude’, p. 57). In ‘Je ne parle pas français’, the very title negates the possibility of empathy with the first-person narrator. The treacherous monologue of the detestable Raoul Duquette whose self-centeredness and self-indulgence point to a form of play-acting, achieves its satirical point: ‘But, ah! the agony of that moment! How can I describe it? I didn’t think of anything. I didn’t even cry out to myself. Just for a moment I was not. I was Agony, Agony, Agony’ (p. 64). In this respect, Mansfield’s ‘personae’ – the speaking voices of her characters – do not so much refer to the unified self of the lyric subject as to the mask covering their divided selves. In ‘Prelude’, Beryl wonders if there was ‘ever a time when [she] did not have a false self’ (p. 59). In ‘Je ne parle pas français’, Raoul Duquette’s dramatic monologue conjures up a process whereby confession becomes a complicated form of solipsism placing the reader more in the position of a voyeur than in that of being ‘interpellated’ as an empathic listener. In ‘Psychology’, self-division is enacted through a double dialogue, in which the silent inner voices of the characters’ authentic selves are masked by the speaking voices of the same characters’ inauthentic selves. Between the two protagonists is a gap which resembles the unbridgeable gulf described by Mansfield in one of her poems:

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A gulf of silence separates us from each other I stand at one side of the gulf you at the other I cannot see you or hear you yet know that you are there. Often I call you by your childish name And pretend that the echo to my crying is your voice. How can we bridge the gulf? never by speech or touch. Once I thought we might fill it quite up with tears Now I want to shatter it with our laughter. (Scott 2002: 86) In fact, the feeling Mansfield’s characters experience when they hear the sound of their own voice is not exactly the expected estrangement linked with the ‘impotency to superpose exactly upon one another the [. . .] the auditory experience of my own voice and that of other voices’, as Merleau-Ponty explains it.6 Rather, the experience takes the form of a pathetic feeling of failure or of alienation that only the character’s consciousness or the reader is aware of. This division between ‘being’ and ‘acting’, between authenticity and self-deception can, and indeed, has been understood along several lines. First there are Mansfield’s contradictory impulses as a writer, as illustrated by another famous quotation from her journal: Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the dead leaves and through the mould, thrusts a scaled bud through years of darkness until one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free and – we are alive – we are flowering for our moment upon the earth. (Stead 1985: 173) On the one hand, Mansfield’s fiction can be shown to echo her impulse towards fusion and the discovery of a unified self that might ‘flower’ in an epiphanic moment of self-revelation; on the other, it suggests the modern impulse towards the deconstruction of the self as being non-authentic, inaccessible, multiple. In more generally modernist terms, one could argue that Mansfield’s writing emphasizes subjectivity while problematizing identity, that her post-Freudian attacks on the coherence of the Cartesian ego suggest that the self can no longer be regarded as the result of an accumulative formation or experience and that the language that used to express its ‘truth’ has become treacherous. In this respect, Mansfield’s preference for free indirect speech over unmediated free direct speech might reflect her perception of the limits of authenticity, immediacy and epiphany. Inevitably, feminist critics have taken different approaches to the apparent disjunction between self and speech that Mansfield explored in her fiction. For Mary

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Burgan, for example, ‘Mansfield sought to project the bodiliness of the self at a new degree of intimacy in her fiction’, a projection that gave way both to ‘insights into self-fragmentation and the multiplicity of roles’ and to the conviction that ‘selfhood’ is ‘an essential foundation for resistance to the threat of disease’ (Burgan 1994: 71–4). According to Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, if Mansfield’s stories are ‘feminine’ or ‘childish’ – then they have at the same time a disturbing elliptical quality, what we might call withdrawal from, or ironic inflation of their own illusion. This quality, in the final analysis, constitutes a process whereby Mansfield inscribes into her writing a resistance to her discursive inheritance as a woman. (Parkin-Gounelas 1990: 500) Whether ‘this discursive inheritance as a woman’ implies the disruption of the phallocratic order of language through affect or, on the contrary, a prison-house of unspoken truths, it is difficult to say. At any rate, the danger might be of essentializing, so to speak, the dichotomy thematized by Mansfield’s representation of voice and utterance, and to see in it the unbridgeable gap separating the world of speaking voices and divided subject from the prelapsarian realm of wordless voices, framed with silence.

Reception Of course, the overture of ‘At the Bay’ evokes such a prelapsarian world: ‘the sleepy sea’ murmurs ‘Ah–Aah![. . .]. And from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again’. The sibilants and the assonance musically suggest ‘a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence that it seemed someone was listening’ (p. 205). In other stories, the epiphanies imply the presence of an inarticulate voice whose mere existence seems to frame an ephemeral revelation that dialogue has failed to make possible. In ‘Honeymoon’, ‘a thin, faint voice, the memory of a voice singing something in Spanish’ breaks a silence that unexpectedly replaces failed communication: ‘It wavered, beat on, touched the high notes, fell again, seemed to implore, to entreat, to beg for something, and then the tune changed, and it was resigned, it bowed down, it knew it was denied’ (p. 397). In ‘The Escape’, the male protagonist’s epiphanic experience is triggered off by the sound of a woman singing: The warm untroubled voice floated upon the air, and it was all part of the silence as he was part of it. Suddenly, as the voice rose, soft, dreaming, gentle, he knew that it would come floating to him from the hidden leaves and his peace was shattered. What was happening to him? Something stirred in his breast. (pp. 201–2)

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In each instance, the interiority of the voice is associated with a form of anteriority, a quest for lost origins – ‘the memory of a voice’ – or for archaic emotions: to ‘implore’, to ‘entreat’, to ‘beg’. The rising voice affects the characters beyond words: ‘his peace was shattered. What was happening to him?’ (‘The Escape’, p. 202). But the voice also ‘interpellates’ the character and the reader as listening subjects, triggering a process of reception inscribed in the text by the use of modalizing adjectives: ‘resigned’, ‘soft’, ‘dreaming’, ‘gentle’, ‘warm’, ‘stifling’. The epiphanic moment is here more auditory than visual. It offers ‘comfort’ and ‘company’ (‘The Canary’, pp. 420–1), if not understanding: ‘so great was his heavenly happiness as he stood there he wished he might live for ever’ (‘The Escape’, p. 202). For Jean-Luc Nancy, the manifestation of any sonorous phenomenon, like the manifestation of any visual phenomenon, implies a form of reflexivity.7 But Nancy argues that this reflexivity, which he calls a ‘mimetic tendency’, is stronger when our sight is involved than when we are listening.8 This acute sense of an intrinsic duality linked with the act of hearing – an act which for Nancy implies a sharing of ‘interiority and exteriority, division and participation, disconnection and affection’ (Nancy 2002: 33) – seems to me to describe the way Mansfield’s representation of voice, whether articulate or not, opens a space for intersubjectivity and participation. In this stage-like space voices perform while speech means, which implies that Mansfield’s voices cannot be essentialized, since they are the locus of a form of theatricality: Aren’t those just the signs, the traces of my feeling? The bright green streaks made by someone who walks over the dewy grass? Not the feeling itself. And as I think that a mournful, glorious voice begins to sing in my bosom. Yes, perhaps that is nearer what I mean. What a voice! What power! What velvety softness! Marvellous! (‘A Married Man’s Story’, pp. 423–4) Whether the characters on Mansfield’s stage try to express their natural identities or like Raoul Duquette are reduced to the roles they play, their performative self-representation implies a subject, an audience and the reconciliation of representation and affect: There is no voice without a subject. [. . .] The more there is affect in voice, the more voice implies the subject. The more writing is subjectivized, the more writing can claim to be the voice of the subject. The more writing there is in writing, the more writing is a voice. (Meschonnic 1997: 36, my translation)9 In this respect, the trauma experienced by Miss Brill, Ma Parker, or the caretaker in ‘The Canary’ is not the tragedy of the unspeakable, but of the inaudible. Something that should have been heard, then listened to, has not been heard: the speaking subject is irremediably returned to himself and the text to the

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reader’s response. And yet, Katherine Mansfield’s impersonated voices have broken the silence, letting us hear through them a pulse, a throb of life, a rhythm, the presence of subjects in language, our own voice and subjectivity as readers and as listeners, our own desire to share with her characters and her writing ‘l’affect de dire le vivre’ (Meschonnic 1997: 25).10

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

I borrow this notion of interpellation from Jean-Jacques Lecercle, who is in turn indebted to the French philosopher Louis Althusser and the American philosopher Judith Butler: ‘interpellation is illocutionary force plus perlocutionary effect. The important point is that what circulates in the [pragmatic] structure [of language and interpretation], the object of exchange, is not communication but force and affect’ (Lecercle 1999: 172). All subsequent quotations from Mansfield’s stories are from this edition and only page references will be given in the text. I give to ‘affect’ the general sense of ‘a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion’. Available from: http://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/affect (accessed 25 April 2010). The notion of ‘affect’ has been given a number of meanings, from its Greek and Latin origins to the psychological and then the psychoanalytical sense the word acquired in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as its synonyms suggest: ‘passions’, ‘sentiments’, ‘emotions’, ‘feelings’ and so on. But my aim here is not to locate Mansfield’s use of ‘affect’ within a particular ontology or theory; it is rather to explore to what extent the representation of affect in speaking voices implies a literary and critical reflection on the self and on ‘subjectiveness’ (that is, the presence of a subject in language and through language). Henri Meschonnic is a French poet, critic, translator and linguist whose theory of literature has been notably influenced by Émile Benvéniste’s work. In Meschonnic (1982), he offers an anthropological study of voice, which is extended in his later works. A similar strategy can be found in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Oh, Madam . . .’ (Bowen 1983: 578–82) or in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’ (Woolf 2003: 132–5), ‘The Evening Party’ (2003: 90–5), ‘The Introduction’ (pp. 178–82) or ‘Together and Apart’ (pp. 183–8). Merleau-Ponty takes the phenomenon of touching one hand with the other hand as an example of the reversibility of what he calls our ‘flesh’ and of our ambiguous status as both object and subject. He then extends his conclusions from touch, to sight and to voice: ‘Likewise, I do not hear myself as I hear the others, the sonorous existence of my voice is for me as it were poorly exhibited; I have rather an echo of its articulated existence, it vibrates through my head rather than outside’ (Baldwin 2003: 262). For Merleau-Ponty ‘the movements of phonation and hearing [. . .] have in me their motor echo. This new reversibility and the emergence of the flesh as expression are the point of insertion of speaking and thinking in the world of silence’ (Baldwin 2003: 259). ‘Le visuel serait tendanciellement mimétique, et le sonore tendanciellement

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méthexique (c’est à dire de l’ordre de la participation, du partage ou de la contagion. [. . .] L’écoute formerait ainsi la singularité sensible ou sensitive (aisthétique) comme telle: le partage d’un dedans/dehors, division et participation, déconnexion et contagion’ (Nancy 2002: 27–33). ‘The visual tends to have a mimetic function, while the sonorous is more methexic – participatory, implying a form of sharing and of contagion. [. . .] Sonority thus forms our perceptible or aesthetic singularity: it refers to our sharing of an inside/outside, of division and participation, of disconnection and contagion’ (my translation). ‘La voix, c’est du sujet. [. . .] Plus il y a d’affect dans la voix, plus on a du sujet dans la voix, dans sa voix; plus l’écriture est subjective, plus elle peut se dire la voix du sujet. Plus l’écriture est écriture, plus elle est la voix’ (Meschonnic 1997: 36: original text). To translate Meschonnic’s critical writings is challenging, if not impossible. Hence I have chosen to let his French speak for itself. In his introduction to ‘Le théâtre dans la voix’, Meschonnic defines voice as having a sense. This sense (or meaning) implies the ‘greatest possible affect’, the affect that is inseparable from the animal and historicized voicing of the process of living: ‘l’affect de dire le vivre’ (1997: 25).

Bibliography Baker, I. (1972), Katherine Mansfield, The Memories of L.M. New York: Taplinger. Baldwin, T. (2003), Merleau-Ponty:Basic Writings. London: Routledge. Besnault-Levita, A. (1995), ‘La nouvelle moderniste et la voix’. Aspects de la nouvelle, Cahiers de l’Université de Perpignan, 18, premier semestre, 166–81. –(2008), ‘The dramaturgy of voice in five modernist short fictions: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Canary”, “The Lady’s Maid” and “Late at Night”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “Oh! Madam . . .”, and Virginia Woolf’s “The Evening Party”’, The Journal of the Short Story in English, 51, 81–96. Bowen, E. (1983 [1980]), The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. London: Penguin. Brown, D. (1989), The Modernist Self in Twentieth Century English Literature: A Study in Self Fragmentation. London: Macmillan. Burgan, M. (1994), Illness, Gender and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dunbar, P. (1997), Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. London: Macmillan. Hanson, C. (1987), The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield. New York: St Martin Press. Lecercle, J-J. (1999), Interpretation as Pragmatics. London: Macmillan Press. Mansfield, K. (2007 [1981]), The Collected Stories. London: Penguin. Meschonnic, H. (1982), ‘Le poème et la voix’, in Critique du rythme. Paris: Verdier, pp. 273–96. –(1985), ‘Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?’, in Les États de la poétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 93–133. –(1990), ‘L’oralité poétique de la voix’, in La Rime et la vie. Paris: Verdier, pp. 264–91. –(1997), ‘Le theâtre dans la voix’, in Penser la Voix, La Licorne. Poitiers: Presses Universitaires de Poitiers, pp. 25–42.

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Murry, J. M. (ed.) (1930), Katherine Mansfield: Novels and Novelists. London: Constable. Nancy, J-L. (2002), À l’écoute. Paris: Galilée. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 1 (1984). Parkin-Gounelas, R. (1990), ‘Katherine Mansfield’s piece of pink wool: feminine signification in “The Luft Bad”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 27(4), 495–508. Scott, M. (ed.) (2002), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, vol. 2. Stead, C. K. (ed.) (1985 [1977]), The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection. London: Penguin. Woolf, V. (2003 [1985]), A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. London: Vintage.

Chapter 8

Kezia in Wonderland Delphine Soulhat

Katherine Mansfield died childless but nevertheless wrote about motherhood and childhood with acute insight. Her sources were varied and included her own memories, together with her interest in psychoanalysis.1 But this seems altogether insufficient to account for her talent in rendering children’s inner lives, since this is also a matter of expert technique. And Mansfield owes much in her portraits of children’s interiority to her mastery of viewpoint. At first glance, what she chooses to display is the richness of children’s inner lives – a teeming world, enhanced by the power of imagination, focusing on the children’s interaction with the natural world as well as with the adult sphere. This leads Mansfield towards an exploration of the theme of childhood as the key to her theory of corruption.2

A landscape of the childlike mind In Mansfield’s New Zealand fiction, childhood is not a time, but a place. What she displays is a landscape of the child’s mind, as well as a dramatic setting. On the surface, Mansfield’s children live in a fantasy world of their own; or rather, the world as they see it uncovers a potential for fantasy. Internal focalization gives the stories a sense of the children’s sensitivity and imaginative understanding of the world. Sensorial filters magnify colours and sounds, which render the children’s experience of hyper-sensitivity. The first part of ‘Prelude’, as seen through Kezia’s eyes, stages a whirlwind of sensory experiences: ‘she liked to stand so before the window. She liked the feeling of the cold shining glass against her hot palms’ (Mansfield 2007: 15).3 Kezia thus seems to indulge in the various tactile experiences which are offered to her. Sensory pleasure is initiated. Children are particularly sensitive to the myriad colours and sounds which define the landmarks of their world. The doll’s house in the eponymous story is a patchwork, an assemblage of bright patches of colours: There stood the doll’s house, a dark, oily, spinach green, picked out with bright yellow. Its two solid chimneys, glued on to the roof, were painted red and white, and the door, gleaming with yellow varnish, was like a little slab of

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toffee. Four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow. (p. 383) In this passage, Mansfield seems to weave words together as one might sew squares of fabric, assemble pieces of a miniature house, or harmonize strokes of paint on a canvas – bringing the art of writing close to craft.4 The subtlety of this play on the graphic quality of her writing is particularly striking in ‘Prelude’, in which the new Burnell property establishes a bi-chromatic backdrop. Kezia sees the world as if through kaleidoscopic glasses: a blue bottle knocked against the ceiling; the carpet-tacks had little bits of red fluff sticking to them. The dining-room had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at a blue lawn with blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence. (p. 14) This chromatic peculiarity is the result of a double choice on Mansfield’s part: she manages to display both the simplistic perception of a child viewing New Zealand landscapes – blue associated with the natural environment of New Zealand and yellow with its light – and the elaborate entanglement of shades, which is typical of the impressionist movement. This backdrop of childhood is supplemented by an aural dimension. In the above-quoted passage, alliteration and multiple plosive sounds, complementing the introductory onomatopoeiac ‘Zoom! Zoom!’ (p. 14), introduce dynamism and depth. If the backdrop of childhood is a quiet impressionistic Monet, its intensity lies in a cartoon-like play on sounds. Mansfield blends genres and achieves the ‘iconotext’ (Nerlich 1990: 255–302) of ‘her’ children’s fantasy world. Mansfield thus establishes an environment which enhances the imaginative understanding of a world populated by the distinctive features of fairy tales. Amongst such idiosyncrasies are peculiar characters and magic. This is how Kezia – in the opening pages of ‘Prelude’ – on her way to the new Burnell house, sees the buggy as a magical vehicle: ‘the buggy twinkled away in the sunlight and fine golden dust up the hill and over’ (p. 12), as if vanishing by a touch of magic. The choice of the word ‘twinkle’ suggests a presence/ absence and cannot be fortuitous. As a child, Mansfield was a fervent reader of fairy tales and found inspiration both in the stories and in their specific language. In this enchanted world, children are likely to bump into legendary characters. The Burnell children get along very well with a tough and nice ‘pirate’ (in reality the Burnells’ handyman), wearing an earring. The ‘pirate’, named Pat, tells them stories about the feats of the Kings of Ireland (p. 44). Childhood is populated by unlikely heroes who pop up and vanish in a few moments – or pages.

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The technical outcome of this life-enhancing landscape is an early stylistic attempt at cinematic performance, in which depth and movement are provided on a coloured background, as if Mansfield were already anticipating the technique of animated films. The spatial is substituted for the temporal, enhanced by the children’s mental capacities, while their environment is animated by innumerable living objects that attract their attention. The landscape of their mind is a place of profusion, making them share their human space with the vegetable, mineral, and animal. The world as the children see it is teeming with animals – ducks, tiny owls, a bull, and ‘hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes’ (p. 21) – which are the objects of their curiosity. The children’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge makes them aware of the unbelievable diversity of the vegetable and mineral. In ‘Prelude’, ‘clay banks’, ‘steep hills’, ‘bushy valleys’, and ‘wide shallow rivers’ open up to Kezia’s gaze (p. 17). The most precious offerings of the mineral world are within reach when the children find what they imagine to be an emerald, in ‘At the Bay’ (p. 216). With such objects for attention, space becomes a playground, though not a flat and delimited square of land. On the contrary, it is the most intricate of all playgrounds, shaped as a labyrinth; driven by curiosity, children become explorers with countless possibilities, and so embody the topos of wandering that Mansfield uses recurrently, especially through the character of Kezia. ‘Prelude’ (p. 14) is largely devoted to Kezia’s wanderings through the house and garden. And yet, such wanderings are not merely a pretext to introduce the reader to the setting. Children have multiple destinations but only one purpose; thus, the metaphor of the labyrinth is also a way of emphasizing the child’s search for a target, an object of attention that will supplant every other object. This quest for meaning and stability in ‘At the Bay’ takes place in a threedimensional labyrinth, the depth, length, and width of which are revealed through an analysis of the landscape’s topography (p. 214). There, ‘sliding, slipping hills’ are to be walked across, obstacles appear to Lottie, who repeatedly fails to clamber over fences – the vertical obstacles of the labyrinth. But once more – and quite logically – Kezia’s circumstances in ‘Prelude’ are even more significant. As she gets to know her new territory – and thus tries to make it her own – the reader is told that Twice she had found her way back to the big iron gates they had driven through the night before, and then had turned to walk up the drive that led to the house, but there were so many little paths on either side. On one side they all led into a tangle of tall dark trees and strangest bushes with flat velvet leaves and feathery cream flowers [. . .] this was the frightening side, and no garden at all. The little paths here were wet and clayey with tree roots spanned across them like the marks of big fowls’ feet. (p. 32) The multiple horizontal lanes of the labyrinth are manifested here. In this labyrinth, children are adventurers and Mansfield uses the lexical field of

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exploration at length. ‘They looked like minute puzzled explorers’ the narrator notes in ‘At the Bay’ (p. 214). ‘Look what I’ve discovered’, one of the children exclaims further upon coming across a find, a ‘treasure’ (p. 215). The ultimate pleasure of the imagination is to reach and push back its very limits. Only children usually have the creative potential to go to such extents without second thoughts. As Cherry Hankin suggests, this fantasy world may reveal a form of nostalgia for lost childhood (Hankin 1994: 28). Mansfield remains close to Edwardian writing and preoccupations by staging the marvellous adventures of children as an escapist strategy leading to carefree moments. Yet she qualifies such bright evocations of the mental landscape of childhood by considering this space as liminal, situated between bright naivety and darker prospects, and this gives her text a distinctly modernist tone.

From fantasy world to wonderland Mansfield’s New Zealand stories do not depend upon archetypal fairy tale structures. In Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland,5 as in Mansfield’s, codes can be arbitrary. As a subtext, the fairy-tale is subverted by Mansfield’s narrative and technical choices. The most prominent devices she uses are the topoi of the labyrinth and of liminality. These structural metonymies are meant to depict children as standing on a liminal place between a fantasy world and a wonderland – the imaginary realm where light and darkness compete, and where dream and nightmare merge. The passage from childhood to adult reality crosses a form of limbo. Mansfield’s wonderland is indeed a place where dream and nightmare recurrently overlap. References to hallucinations or nightmarish happenings give surrealistic undertones –characteristic of wonderlands – to the child’s realm. Space and shape are affected. People and objects assume deformed dimensions, for the child’s scale of measurement is flawed by a low-angled perspective. This limited visual scale, the result of the child’s diminutive size, but also of its position within space, produces gigantic figures. Unlike Alice, in Mansfield’s stories it is not children who grow or shrink, but the size of others, and the world which surrounds them. In ‘Prelude’, as Kezia gazes at nature, the union of opposites in size is presented in antithetical structures: ‘The red-hot pokers were taller than she; the Japanese sunflowers grew in a tiny jungle’ (p. 33). Kezia is standing between the tall pokers and the tiny jungles. Nature in its diversity appears as a reference scale for them, however flawed and relative this may be. In a story significantly titled ‘The Little Girl’ the actual effect of such impressions of gigantism become explicit, as intensifiers insist on the little girl’s low-angled perception of her father: ‘He was so big – his hands and his neck, especially his mouth when he yawned. Thinking about him alone in the nursery was like thinking about a giant’ (p. 568, my emphasis). The adult, her father,

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becomes a giant, a space devourer, someone who potentially threatens her own space and her own bodily integrity. Another story, ‘Sun and Moon’, shows that if the adult as subject is potentially threatening to children, then they often turn to objects, making them objects of desire in a search for satisfaction which involves a deformation of perception, a blurring of the borders between fantasy, nightmare, and reality. Using internal focalization as a narrative principle in this story, Mansfield emphasizes the children’s perception of the preparations for the party: When you stared down from the balcony at the people carrying them the flower pots looked like funny awfully nice hats nodding up the path. Moon thought they were hats. She said: ‘Look. There’s a man wearing a palm on his head.’ But she never knew the difference between real things and not real ones. (pp. 153–4) This enchanting experience of metamorphosis is here conveyed by the shift from free indirect discourse (‘Moon thought they were hats’) to direct speech (‘There’s a man wearing a palm on his head’). Yet, for the landscape of childhood to become close to a Wonderland, there should be possibilities for disturbing as well as enchanting experiences, and ‘Sun and Moon’ stages an upsetting and disquieting episode. Another object of the children’s desire is the little edible ice-cream house, with its nut for a handle – a ‘repository of desire’, as Pamela Dunbar observes (Dunbar 1997: 150); but in the last section this becomes a half-melted house, suggesting the annihilation of any possible satisfaction. The little boy, Moon, participates in his sister Sun’s nightmare at the sight of the house by swallowing the nut and then reacts aggressively, even violently. Such violence can be accounted for by the very nature of desire in children, which apparently, according to Mansfield, is only possible because they themselves are pure subjects of desire. But being driven by desire which is deprived of materialistic contingencies, a desire to know and feel rather than to have, Mansfield’s children – like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who is depicted with hunger and thirst – also expose themselves to the very perils of desire. One of the drawbacks of children’s desire is the altered perception of time and space. In this wonderland, time and space stretch out, as shown by the experience of night-time in ‘Prelude’. Kezia notes that ‘the big dray rattled into unknown country, along new roads with high clay banks [. . .]. Further and further’ (p. 17). The hyperbolic effect of the comparative ‘further’ reflects Kezia’s feeling of an unending trip. Both time and space are affected by the children’s perception in ‘The Voyage’. Fenella, on a boat trip with her grandmother, is given some money by her father before leaving and thinks: ‘A shilling! She must be going away for ever!’ (p. 323). Upon reaching their destination, Fenella exclaims, ‘It’s land’, as explorers do, and to increase the impression of time and space stretching, the narrator adds, ‘as though they had been at sea for weeks together’ (p. 328), thus underlying the little girl’s illusion of endlessness.

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Illusive, too, are the experiences of metamorphosis and anamorphosis, that is to say, a change or distortion of form or nature as the result of an actual process. Both are corollaries to a flawed perception. In Carroll’s Wonderland as in Mansfield’s, shapes are altered, identities shift, causing Alice and Mansfield’s children to experience or witness something halfway between metamorphosis and anamorphosis. In ‘Sun and Moon’, as already stated, plants are imaginatively transformed into hats, and the topos of metamorphosis recurs because it is a game between the two children. This is how ‘all the lights were red roses’; ‘in the middle [of the room] was a lake with rose petals floating on it; two silver lions with wings had fruit on their backs and the salt-cellars were tiny birds drinking out of basins’ (p. 155). Unlike Alice, Sun and Moon are not dreaming, but they do have an imaginative power of transformation which, like Alice’s, epitomizes their desire for a world with expandable limits. This imaginative power is precisely what enables different realms of existence to overlap. As in Carroll’s novel, Mansfield’s short stories often stage anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Anthropomorphism can be traced in ‘Prelude’ (p. 44) when Pat shows the ducks to the children and introduces them as military men, as in the Irish Army. Zoomorphism is striking when Kezia discovers her new house in ‘Prelude’: ‘The soft white bulk of [the house] lay stretched upon the garden like a sleeping beast. And now one and now another of the windows leaped into light’ (p. 18). In ‘Sun and Moon’ it is also the result of the children’s sense of observation. The ‘fat man with a pink head’ is obviously like a pig; ‘rustling ladies and men with funny tails on their coats’ are like birds or ‘beetles’ as Sun puts it. In ‘At the Bay’, ‘a strange company assembled in the Burnell’s washhouse after tea. Round the table there sat a bull, a rooster, a donkey that kept forgetting it was a donkey, a sheep, and a bee’ (p. 231). The children themselves choose to impersonate animals. But this is no mere disguise – it is role play, the closest stage to transformation: at the level of narration, their first names are replaced by animal names (‘the bull was cross with her’), while in dialogue they use onomatopoeia (‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’, ‘Hee haws!’, ‘Bss-ss! said the bee’, ‘Mooe-ooo-er!’, ‘Baa!’ [p. 234]). This zoomorphic gathering around a table appears as the exact opposite of Alice’s ‘tea party’ where animals have anthropomorphic features.

Maturation or corruption? Yet, nonsensical meanings should not be deduced here, only those that are unsatisfactory or incomplete, born out of conflicting logic. If codes are arbitrary in Mansfield’s wonderland, children need to crack them anyway: this is the condition for maturing. The price for exploration is the encounter with otherness in its various forms. Mansfield’s children discover otherness as embodied by subjects or objects which belong to their so-called wonderland. In ‘The Little Girl’, the child is confronted for the first time by sensual masculinity and sexual desire – by proxy. Her imposing father is also the subject through whom the girl

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discovers sensual promiscuity in relation to the male body. As he comforts her on his lap, her perception of him eventually changes and she concludes: ‘Poor father! Not so big, after all – and with no one to look after him . . . . He was harder than the grandmother, but it was a nice hardness . . . ’ (p. 571). If this encounter with otherness seems pleasant, lacking as it does the adult female sense of the male body as threatening, other experiences are far less agreeable in stories that focus on mature – or rather more mature – women. The maturing process also involves an encounter with darkness. In ‘Prelude’ Kezia experiences outdoor darkness as a metaphor for ontological darkness: As she stood there, the day flickered out and dark came. With the dark came the wind snuffling and howling [. . .]. She was frightened. She wanted to call Lottie and to go on calling all the while she ran downstairs and out of the house. But IT was just behind her, waiting at the door, at the head of the stairs, at the bottom of the stairs, hiding in the passage, ready to dart out at the back door. (p. 15) By means of the uppercase indefinite pronoun ‘IT’, darkness is here embodied as a creature hounding the little girl – she cannot escape this creeping presence. Young as Kezia may be, she already feels fate as ominous, and this is nothing but an intuition of death. Contrary to common belief, Mansfield does not spare her children. She writes plainly about their discovery of death and destruction. The word ‘discovery’ may not be the ‘mot juste’ here, as the encounter with death happens to be quite cruel. ‘Prelude’ stages such an experience in the well-known and thoroughly-analysed episode of the duck. Pat cuts off the duck’s head and turns this moment into an exhibition for the Burnell children. Fictional time seems quite long compared with narrative time in this episode. The moment is reduced to a five-word sentence: ‘down came the little tomahawk’ (p. 46). Death is as simple as that, as blunt as the contrast between the semantic lightness of ‘the little tomahawk’ and the syntactic abruptness of the inversion ‘down came’. To the children, the moment is one of puzzlement and lasting pain. Just like Alice, who fails to understand the Queen’s stubborn acts of violence – she cuts heads off recurrently – Mansfield’s children fail to assimilate such a quick and violent transition from life to death. Paradoxically, as they seek sensory experiments, they also experience alienation from their own sensory system, becoming distanced from their own bearings. In ‘Prelude’ Kezia, who is wandering, suffers an irrepressible confrontation with alienation, and Mansfield concentrates such impressions with phrases such as ‘Everything looked different’, ‘everything familiar was left behind’, ‘unknown country’ (pp. 16–17). The surrounding environment is defamiliarized. In both cases, the result is fear. The lexical field of fear is used more than once by Mansfield when she uses internal focalization in representing children. In ‘Prelude’ Kezia ‘was frightened’ (p. 15), and when the children are confronted with the death of the duck, Rags is ‘shivering all over’ and the narrator refers to ‘frightened little Lottie’ (p. 46). In other words children are destabilized in

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the maturing process; their balance is disrupted by a new and subtle emotional range. Duality develops into a new paradox – the fullness of experience is counterbalanced by impossible well-being. Frustration as a psychic and ontological phenomenon is now a reality to children. What they have already absorbed is the social order of adult control which puts an end to imagination, and imposes borders to the landscape of the mind. Such borders materialize both in diegesis and language. In the New Zealand stories, role-play epitomizes this phenomenon. The locus of fantasy – that is to say, role-play as full immersion in fiction – becomes the locus of convention. Once more Mansfield uses a double-edged topos. When they reproduce adult life, the ersatz structures enable superficiality to resurface as happens in ‘Prelude’ when the children start playing together (p. 43). If the children are playing games they are also reproducing adult patterns: the washhouse is a reproduction of the main house; their gathering is a reproduction of the party of adults in the main house. Kezia, as often in the stories, is the odd-man-out who points out the repetitiveness of the adult social ritual because, like Alice, she recognises that she is being forced into a game where she will inevitably confront adult rules. In her comment – ‘“I hate playing ladies” […]. “You always make us go to church hand in hand and come home and go to bed”’ (p. 43) – Mansfield inscribes repetitiveness in language through parataxis and binarism. In ‘At the Bay’, reproduction of adult social rites is not merely part of a game but becomes a way of life, and an intragenerational movement. Lottie is reluctant to play, so her older sister shows her how to: ‘and Isabel, repentant, said exactly like a grown-up, ‘“watch me, Lottie, and you’ll soon learn”’ (my emphasis, p. 233). Isabel stands exactly between childhood and adulthood, between game and social positioning. This life-ritualizing process is no more than a sign of the children’s need for stability. They seek new bearings in rituals but when stability comes to mean sclerosis, this movement towards adulthood turns against them. In ‘Prelude’ the children ‘play ladies’, they do not play ‘families’ (p. 43), that is, they deal with social identities rather than with affective bonds or family links. Maturing becomes a mechanical and artificial process before being an emotional one. In ‘At the Bay’, modals are repeatedly used by Mansfield as part of Isabel’s language when she teaches her younger sister how to behave: ‘“No Lottie, you can’t do that. You mustn’t look first. You must turn it the other way over”’ (p. 233, my emphasis). The game instructions are nothing but linguistic imitations of social barriers. And yet this tendency needs qualifying. Although the children do teach each other the rules of the games as adults teach social rules, they still hesitate between adult schemes and animal regression. In ‘At the Bay’ they impersonate animals, suggesting their position between the instinctive, uncivilized, and the fully cultural and social. Moreover both in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, the awkwardness of their situation can be traced in aborted reproductions of adult schemes. In ‘Prelude’ their role-play is barely initiated before it is already over. They are incapable of agreeing on it (will they play ladies or hospitals? [p. 43]). This hesitation, as well as the reversibility and concomitancy of socialized rites

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and primitive traces, may well be used by Mansfield’s children as a delusional strategy so they would not choose a path in order to achieve wish-fulfilment. Childhood then would appear to be the time when everything is possible, but also when subjects can only live on the edge of things. Such an attitude seems to suggest an identity crisis or identity transition. This leads some of the children to struggle with reality. The first stage is denial. In ‘Sun and Moon’, the little ice house is broken, and this triggers a cry of despair from Sun, as a cry against the corruption of the balanced fantasy world she had been living in for a few hours. In ‘At the Bay’, the episode of the beheaded duck causes Kezia to yell to Pat: ‘“Put head back!”’ (p. 46). Faced with the experience of the irreversibility of death and destruction, unable to integrate and articulate the truth, the children are reduced to what Mansfield calls a ‘cry against corruption’ (Stead 1977: 97) or rather a cry against loss – the loss of innocence that only the narrator is aware of. Children set up various strategies of resistance against such corruption. Alienation from the adult space is one. This can be geographic as in ‘At the Bay’, where the children remain in the wash-house, a place separated from the adult space by walls. But this tendency to resist also manifests itself at the level of language, by means of unconscious distortions of language, phonetic alterations. In ‘At the Bay’, the children are on a treasure hunt when they eventually uncover an object which looks like an emerald (p. 216). Yet they call it a ‘nemeral’. Two different interpretations are possible. This can be seen as a commonplace sign of maturing language, but also as a form of resistance to adult rules of expression. A psychoanalytic interpretation is always tricky, and yet, it is difficult not to see this phonetic distortion as a protective foil which is produced – consciously or not – as a way of keeping the ‘treasure’ of childhood. By reshaping language, they create their own world. The children thus seek autonomy through imperfect phonological modelling (on adult sounds, that is to say they have misunderstood where the word break comes between ‘an’ and ‘emerald’, elided them, and also lost the final dental consonant [d]). And this distance from articulate linguistic conventions also appears in their perception of the radical other, which is death. In ‘At the Bay’, Kezia projects an altered image of death. When thinking about her late uncle, William, she imagines him as ‘[a] little man fallen over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole’ (p. 226). The naïve simile presents a sharp contrast with the gloomy perspective of a man literally eaten up by darkness, and creates a tolerable iconography of death. For children, resistance starts as a negotiation between antagonistic forces: light and dark, convention and alteration, proximity and distance. As readers of Mansfield’s stories, we also follow the children’s progress through life, although the episodic and fragmentary narrative structure may be thought of as an obstacle to any easy assumption of progress. These episodic tales of childhood and maturing revolve around the setting up of a distinctive environment which matters as much as the characters themselves. What drives them through this landscape is desire. Yet maturing is mostly an encounter with darkness and impending sclerosis. Paradoxically, movement takes an

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overwhelming part in the maturing process. Children do move forward towards their adult life; they do decide to take steps through the looking glass into the alien adult reality. The border between natural maturing and irrepressible corruption initiated by the adult world is very narrow. What emerges is the antithetical pair, satisfaction and frustration of desire. For maturing is an oxymoronic process, both as a discovery or enlargement and as a deprivation or restriction of perspectives. The power of the mind, of the imagination, saves the children from early disillusionment; a touch of literary artistry for Mansfield, a touch of magic for ‘her’ children.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

According to Sylvia Berkman (1952: 59), Mansfield discussed psychoanalytical theories at length with the Lawrences in 1914. The ‘snail under the leaf’ theme, recurrent in her letters and journals, is tackled by Julia Van Gusteren amongst others (Van Gusteren 1990: 133–4). She attempts to analyze Mansfield’s interest in ‘man’s delusion’, the conflict between illusion and truth – the leaf and the snail – which points out the potential corruption of all things. The theme originates in Mansfield’s own experience of deception or disappointment. All quotations from Mansfield’s stories are from this edition (Mansfield 2007) and only page references will be given in the text. Another example of this technique is described by Mansfield in a 1917 letter: ‘It’s a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details. Par exemple. In Miss Brill I choose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence. I choose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her, and to fit her on that day at that very moment. After I’d written it I read it aloud.’ (Stead 1977: 213, Mansfield’s emphasis) Although no clear reference to Mansfield reading Alice in Wonderland can be traced, we may assume that she read Lewis Carroll’s novel as she sent a copy to Dolly Trowell for Christmas 1909 (Tomalin 1990: 103).

Bibliography Berkman, S. (1952), Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study. London: Oxford University Press. Dunbar, P. (1997), Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hankin, C. (1994), ‘Katherine Mansfield and the cult of childhood’, in R. Robinson (ed.), Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Mansfield, K. (2007), The Collected Stories. London: Penguin. Nerlich, M. (1990), ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un iconotexte? Réflexion sur le rapport texteimage photographique dans La Femme se Découvre d’Evelyne Sinnassamy’, in

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A. Montandon (ed.), Actes du Colloque des 17–18 mars 1988 à l’Université Blaise Pascal de Clermont-Ferrand. Clermont-Ferrand: C.R.C.D./Ophrys. Stead, C. K. (ed.) (1977), The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection. London: Penguin. Tomalin, C. (1990), Katherine Mansfield: Une Vie Secrète. Anne Damour (trans.). Paris: Éditions Bernard Coutaz. Van Gusteren, J. (1990), Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi.

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Chapter 9

‘The Women in the Stor(y)’: Disjunctive Vision in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Aloe’ Bruce Harding

I This chapter investigates the integrity of feminist visioning by Katherine Mansfield in her first draft of ‘Prelude’. It suggests that ‘The Aloe’ manuscript, an early version of ‘Prelude’, was far more engaged and hard-hitting in its examination of the neurasthenic woman as a valid, often necessary, existential form of female resistance to roles imposed by late Victorian society. Mansfield, as a young New Zealand woman, had found the patriarchal order, in its colonial inflection, alienating, and her critique of its gender dynamics inspired some of her most critically acclaimed fiction. Writing ‘The Aloe’ in England after the tragic stimulus occasioned by the sudden death of her brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp in Belgium (1915), when demonstrating grenade-throwing, Mansfield’s Proustian ‘remembrance of things past’ eschews an Edenic vision of her New Zealand childhood and explores, with equal delicacy and robustness, a kind of sororal vision of women of varying stages and ages negotiating their way through the maze of post-Victorian patriarchy, using a bracing mix of past-to-future time-framing, fictional perspectivism (a ‘soft’ version of Gertrude Stein’s verbal cubism), the continuous present tense, and often shocking interior monologues. Christopher Isherwood once suggested that Mansfield’s writing life was a symbolic variant ‘of the garden of Eden theme’, where a childhood paradise was lost and almost regained (cited in Bachardy and White 1989: 176–7). I suggest that Mansfield’s response to her southwest Pacific birth-land was more complex than this disavowal of its provincialism and aesthetic crudity, and that her recoil from colonial patriarchy, augmented by the covert misogyny of elements of the London avant-garde, did much to foment her sharp psycho-social insights, as ‘the critical, witty adult Mansfield’ (Writer B) reflected on the experiences of Writer A, ‘the childlike, intuitive Mansfield’ (1989: 181). And as Witi Ihimaera noted in his centenary homage to KM: Miss Mansfield, we in New Zealand have laid proud claim to you because you were born and brought up a New Zealander. Although you spent most of your

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adult years in England and the Continent, you always looked back to these southern antipodean islands as the main source for your stories. (Ihimaera 1989: 9) This was certainly so for ‘The Aloe/Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, the proto-texts for a novel. The New Zealand which Mansfield left in 1908 recalled J. G. Huneker’s remark about America: ‘a land of bathtubs, not bohemia’ (cited in Bradbury and Corker 1975: 19). F. R. Leavis was sadly astray when he wrote: ‘How the tiny talent of Katherine Mansfield was acclaimed, how promptly, and to what an inflationary tune!’ (cited in Bertram 1980: 84). Mansfield’s alterations to a radical work like ‘The Aloe’ and John Middleton Murry’s attempt to construe his wife as a pale ‘angel in the house’ may have contributed to this false estimate of a pioneer in the making of a twentieth-century feminist axiology. In Vincent O’Sullivan’s astute assessment, Mansfield’s writing offers us ‘a modern, extremely clear, extremely tested, twentieth century voice’ (O’Sullivan 1989: 15); a voice that limns a verbal psychology which enacts Gertrude Stein’s notion about the ‘feeling of words doing as they want to and as they have to do when they have to live’ (cited in Cunliffe 1975: 51). O’Sullivan locates the transitional point of Mansfield’s evolution into a fluidly ‘cinematic’ writer with a keen interest in verbal montage, as the period when Mansfield re-fashioned the year old and unfinished manuscript of her experimental proto-novel ‘The Aloe’ into the 12 sequences that later became ‘Prelude’ (a refined text in which a third of the primary material of ‘The Aloe’ had been shed). The evidence suggests that it was this lyrical impulse, spurred on by the sudden and tragic death of her beloved only brother Leslie, which helped to free the writing log-jam that had stalled progress on ‘The Aloe’ manuscript. What I wish to explore here is the hypothesis that in many important ways ‘Prelude’ represents a diminishment of the raw energy and challenging vision of ‘The Aloe’, which is a more vibrant and romantic text. In February 1916, Mansfield re-read the stalled ‘Aloe’ text and, except for its lack of reference to Leslie, pronounced it ‘right’ and ‘lovely’ (cited in Stead 1977: 66). If we ally this assessment with Virginia Woolf’s secondary judgement that ‘Prelude’ was ‘a little vapourish [. . .] and freely watered with some of her cheap realities’ (cited in Bell 1990: 46), we are surely entitled to ask ourselves whether or not a falling away, a veritable leaching of power, occurred during the transition from ‘The Aloe’ to the more elegant ‘Prelude’. We are, frankly, too apt to get taken up in the chorus of praise which has long surrounded ‘Prelude’. Antony Alpers, for example, celebrated the re-shaping of ‘The Aloe’ for the Woolfs (after Mansfield completed it at Bandol in April 1916): ‘The whole work was sharpened and tightened’, he notes approvingly, ‘diffuseness noticed and removed, slack dialogue condensed or cut’ (Alpers 1980: 245). In fact, much insightful misogynistic critique against patriarchy was eliminated in favour of a highly perfumed, ‘soft’ feminism which did little to unsettle prevailing androcentric assumptions.

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II I fully share Sydney Janet Kaplan’s conviction that Mansfield’s concerns ‘about the construction of gender and about sexuality as an organising principle [inhere] in the unconscious aesthetics that structures her work’ (Kaplan 1991: 9). Kate Fullbrook, in evaluating Mansfield as a subversive and transformative writer, implies that Mansfield was engaged in a form of psycho-social ‘gothic’ of ‘direct cultural criticism’, which ‘radically questions the forms and ideas that bind women, and men as well, into inauthentic lives’ by exposing those moments of ‘ethical terror’ as people are forced to confront ‘the vulnerable, confused and unstructured self beneath the [social] mask’ (Fullbrook 1986: 15). This discerning analysis reads like a direct exposé of the frustrations which rise to the surface of Linda Burnell’s conscious life in ‘The Aloe’, as Mansfield plumbs those recurrent and life-sapping anxieties which are not fully accessible to Linda – what Fullbrook labels ‘the psychological base of oppression’ (1986: 9) -- known to psychoanalytical theorists as the objectification of women into an ‘out-caste’ group. And if Fullbrook is correct, Mansfield’s ‘uneasiness about the romantic vocabulary of the self’ must be connected to ‘her clear understanding of the mental effects of the social subordination of women’ (p. 22). In a journal entry, strikingly reminiscent of ‘The Aloe’, Mansfield expanded upon the quest for a non-contingent substratum of being, via the wonderfully luminous image of ‘a green spear’ pushing through the dank undergrowth of life (that is, the constrictions of convention and the various sublimations and displacement activities of socially sanctioned, and circumscribed, behaviours), in search of the light which will facilitate that full ‘flowering for our moment upon the earth’ (cited in Murry 1939: 137). Ian Gordon inaccurately described Mansfield’s later New Zealand fictions as exercises in picturesque remembrance, thereby ignoring the sharp messages and the complex colonialist register within them. Gordon asserts, in a gross simplification, that Mansfield created a Keatsian ‘romantic dream-world’ in which New Zealand ‘becomes an Arcadian country’ (Gordon 1974: xvii). Such sentiments seem loosely applicable to ‘Prelude’, a family saga with obviously nostalgic and Wordsworthian connotations (implanted there by Murry, who re-titled the work). Jeffrey Meyers observes that the narrative outwardly details the move of the Beauchamp family from Thorndon to Karori (in Wellington, New Zealand) at Easter 1893, suggesting that the Mansfield substitute, Kezia Burnell, ‘is moving to new experience [. . .] and to greater perception’ (Meyers 1978: 128). Such a reading conveniently focuses upon the little girl and much less upon the senior female figures of her mother and spinster aunt in the narrative. Certainly, little Kezia is the organizing focus of the montage sequences of ‘Prelude’, the rewritten and re-named text of 1917, which displaced the darker insights and more dangerous focus upon Linda Burnell’s painful self-awakening in the primary ‘Aloe’ text of 1916. It is worth attending to Fullbrook’s insistence that Mansfield’s reputation as ‘a delicate female stylist with a reassuring line in colonial nostalgia [. . .]

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is rightly being revised’ (Fullbrook 1986: 127), for, as we shall see, the crisis afflicting Linda Burnell, her sisters, Dora Trout and Beryl, and (one imagines) her daughter Kezia, is precisely that, in the colonized antipodes at the turn of the century, patriarchal authority was showing no signs of effective decline – even after New Zealand women attained rights of suffrage in 1893 – so that there was little to be nostalgic about there. (As Somerset Maugham noted in the early twentieth century, Mansfield’s home town, Wellington, ‘is trim and neat and English; it reminds you of a seaport town on the South Coast’ [Maugham 1974: 159]). We should be mindful, also, of the signal importance of garden and flower imagery in Mansfield’s personal lexicon of liberation, especially in a narrative originally entitled ‘The Aloe’, in which the flowering of female selfhood is a recurrent textual concern in her adoption of a non-linear, spiral pattern of incremental construction held together by the logic of symbol and image. Mansfield herself acknowledged that ‘The Aloe’ is a problematic text, marvelling at one point that she had ever written it (cited in Alpers 1980: 206) and noting to Murry just after she had kicked it off in Paris on 24 March 1915: ‘It’s queer stuff’ (cited in O’Sullivan 1982: 11). The dimensions of this struggle are presented starkly in ‘The Aloe’ and were further considered by Virginia Woolf in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), in which Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay, like Linda Burnell, finds herself able, in a state of contemplative self-quiescence, to merge her subjectivity to participate in a wider phenomenal world: ‘Often she found herself sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at’ (Woolf 1938b: 73). And, intensely reminiscent of Linda Burnell, Mrs Ramsay ponders the mystery of ‘how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things, trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one’ (1938b: 74). This is a fascinating conjunction, especially given the fact that Linda, Kezia and Mrs Fairfield are all linked by the central unifying symbol of the aloe plant. But of course the difference between the two women, Ramsay and Burnell, is that the former is married to a sophisticated London intellectual whereas Linda Burnell is wedded to a blustering and hearty colonial businessman who is, therefore, trapped within New Zealand’s paralysing puritan civil structure – a place where, as Ngaio Marsh once observed, outmoded conventions remain in ‘antipodean cold-storage’ (Marsh 1966: 224) long after they were rejected and abandoned by the parent culture. Thus, while both Mrs Ramsay and Linda Burnell have accommodated themselves to living within patriarchy, Fullbrook is correct to insist upon the sharpness of Mansfield’s depiction of Linda Burnell as ‘one of the finest examples’ in her oeuvre ‘of the disintegration caused by sexuality perceived as bondage’ (Fullbrook 1986: 77). This makes Woolf’s tart misreading of ‘Prelude’ (as ‘pure observation’, devoid of ‘thoughts or feelings, or subtleties of any kind’ in her characters [cited in McLaughlin 1978: 381]) particularly interesting, given the revisions that deleted much challenging and self-revelatory material from ‘The Aloe’.

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III Cherry Hankin contends that ‘the symbolism of “Prelude” unequivocally damns [Linda] for being an unloving mother’ (Hankin 1983: 131). Correctly divining that Linda’s most powerful fantasies are ultimately annihilationist in tendency, Hankin characterizes Linda Burnell’s fantasy life in terms of desiring a ‘regression to a state of asexual, childlike dependence upon her mother’. But surely Linda’s ‘secret happiness at casting off the children’ and her dwelling in fantasies of escape from what Hankin terms ‘a kind of living death’ (p. 130) amount to nothing less than a spirited, and even rather desperate, rejection of the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’ ideology, imaged best in the imprisoning valorization of the ‘pelican woman, feeding her brood with her own vital substance’, in Phyllis Rose’s excellent phrase (Rose 1978: 157). For it is clear, that in writing both ‘The Aloe’ and ‘Prelude’, Mansfield partook of an act of sympathetic engagement with the anguish of the mature wife and mother as she grapples with the many demands placed upon her. The level of emotional identification is, in fact, quite profound in these texts, yielding an unusual intensity of affect and calling to mind Mansfield’s tribute to her own mother, written to Woolf after Mrs Beauchamp’s death in 1918. Mansfield described her mother as ‘such an exquisite little being, far too fragile and lovely to be dead for ever more’, and in 1920 wrote in her Journal of ‘My little mother, my star, my courage, my own. I seem to dwell in her now’ (cited in O’Sullivan 1974: 7). Such a judgement well suited Mansfield the literary warrior, doing battle with the terrifying pressures and often cruel exigencies of a patriarchal culture for, as Sally Shuttleworth has shown, the Victorian ethos of ideal motherhood was potentially emotionally ruinous in its warped attempt to impose – and enforce – upon women the barbarous edicts of a medicalized ethic based on fraudulent and patently ideological notions of female biology and child-bearing (Shuttleworth 1994: 38). And it is in this matter of control, of biological self-regulation, that we can find the locus of Linda Burnell’s chief problem, which is psychic rather than directly physiological (that is, her ‘illness’ is a textbook case of the psychosomatic, deriving from primary causes that are psychologically constituted, as a complex undercurrent of guilt and rage against entrapment in the role of official primary caregiver to her husband and family). In this perspective the precise nature of Linda’s ‘dysfunctionality’ needs to be carefully registered and assessed, and Shuttleworth’s focus upon Victorian maternity manuals throws a hitherto unconsidered and unexpected light on Linda’s unconscious strategy of role-resistance. I am proposing that Mansfield wrote ‘The Aloe’ text in almost the same polemical spirit in which Woolf, decades later, penned Three Guineas (Woolf 1938a). We must accept that Mansfield recognized that she lived in a strongly gendered culture (that is, one with tightly prescribed male/female roles) and that an oppressive marriage bond lay at its disfiguring root. Such ‘radical’ speculations and questionings may well have been generated (or at the very least focused) by Mansfield’s reflections upon her own mother’s life and her evident belief in Mrs

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Beauchamp’s vulnerability in the face of an authority-structure that the mother could never have defined as patriarchal. In this perspective, there is indeed a pervasive irony in Alpers’s description of Mansfield’s radical cutting of ‘The Aloe’ in terms of ‘condensation’ (he asserts that she removed and ‘condensed [. . .] much dross’ from the draft [Alpers 1980: 245, 189]), for although this word usually connotes compression and a thickening (Latin: condensatus), as in the transformation of a gas or vapour to a liquid or solid state, the further connotation of the reduction in volume of a substance, as when, for instance, a definable quantity of water is lost in the evanescence of steam, also exists. Such a loss of real volume and ethical compass (in my pursuit of the metaphor), I suggest, ensued when Mansfield sharpened and transmuted ‘The Aloe’ into ‘Prelude’, thereby softening and reducing the much stronger feminist dynamic and ‘gynocritique’ inherent in the prior work, while also purging much that was psychically revelatory (by way of an ethically embracing confessional discourse), as well as much that was socially incisive vis à vis the patriarchy, whose strictures she was clearly outgrowing. Milan Kundera once discussed an art of radical divestment via ‘a technique of ellipsis, of condensation’, which proffers insight into the complexity of existence ‘without losing architectonic clarity’ (Kundera 1990: 71). My argument is premised on the idea of Mansfield as a liberator, a pathfinder in a gendered and psycho-sexually blinkered culture, who seemed to know the price that she would pay if she substantially retained the distinctive feminist ontology of ‘The Aloe’ in her revisions. Mansfield resignedly anticipated the derision of the ‘Intellectuals’ who upon reading ‘Prelude’ would think it to be ‘a New Primer for Infant Readers’ (cited in O’Sullivan 1982: 16). Certainly her deletions bled the text of the commanding insights which today mark ‘The Aloe’ as a disjunctive text. Hankin is one scholar who has paid careful attention to the dangerous meanings which inhere in Mansfield’s conjoint ‘Aloe-Prelude’ text, even though she has been reliant upon Murry’s censored 1930 edition of ‘The Aloe’ for her confessional interpretation of ‘Prelude’. Hankin interprets the ‘aloe-as-ship’ image which strikes Linda as representing ‘the womb itself’, a pre-natal world which, in Hankin’s nihilistic reading, signifies Linda Burnell’s desire for existential extinction (she writes that ‘it is to the safety and nothingness of that world that Linda wishes to return’ [Hankin 1983: 129]). No longer viewing the aloe plant in its impenetrable and masculine terms of the previous evening, Hankin claims, Linda now dreams of it as ‘a feminine symbol, a ship’ (pp. 128–9) of passage, and probably of escape (‘for, she heard herself cry faster faster to those who were rowing’ [Mansfield 1982: 141]). What emerges from the strong lunar glow which encompasses this touching mother-daughter bond is a powerful sense of disconnection from, and disgust towards, male imperatives and psychic forces of desire in general, for in the closeted ambience of Victorian New Zealand the only legitimated female desire tends to result in the production of offspring. The lunar glow also recalls the frequent use of the White Goddess trope in Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), which Mansfield must surely have read. Given that ‘The Aloe’ is such a cleverly coded and covertly subversive fiction, it is imperative to examine the provenance and deployment of the aloe image itself,

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which in its function as central, unifying symbol, acts as the primary generator of the text’s complex meaning. ‘The Aloe’ (and its successor ‘Prelude’) argues for a conception of human freedom and irreducible self-essence that may provide the locus of alternate life-options. Here it is worth noting that the aloe may be construed as an immortality symbol, freed of conventional mortalityconnotations. This reading makes more sense of Linda’s intense self-investment in the aloe than Hankin’s womb interpretation. For although Hankin is correct to observe Linda’s ‘obsession with pregnancy’ in noting the ‘fat swelling’ of the aloe (Hankin 1983: 124), any insistence on the ‘maleness of the [aloe] tree’ (p. 128) has value only if one regards the aloe as the objectification of qualities of singularity and freedom normally only available to the male of the species. Fullbrook seems to alight on the fact that aloes possess medicinal powers when she suggests that Linda ‘gives the aloe her own meaning – one of female strength’ (Fullbrook 1986: 76). Certainly this accords with Oscar Wilde’s assertion that aloes (agaves) are reportedly ‘able to expel melancholy from the soul’ (Wilde 1985: 165). Its vigorous thrusting spike may, then, connote maleness (a kind of phallic strength, however short-lived), and so indeed it seems to Linda during her precious moment of satori – her epiphanous and psychically compelling instant of recognition – a moment which goes right to the heart of the disjunction between her husband and herself, and about which Woolf wrote eloquently in a different context: ‘The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully’ (Woolf 1977: 73). This explicit association of maleness with assumed psychological and spiritual potency is underscored in Mansfield’s scrapbook when it records the chilling dénouement of Linda’s own existential ambitions: ‘They cut down the stem when Linda is ill. She has been counting on the flowering of the Aloe’ (cited in Murry 1939: 39). This appalling outcome is prefigured to some degree when mother (Mrs Fairfield) and daughter (Linda) commune in the moonlit paradise garden. Fullbrook insists that both women are ‘deeply, unknowingly connected’ via nightmare images ‘which emphasise a common […] predator and the female as prey to things that “rush” and “swell”’ (Fullbrook 1986: 82). This mother and daughter are not necessarily in search of other sexual rhythms but, rather, a freedom to seek and enjoy wider sapiential insights and behaviours, for they talk in a strong, ‘dazzling’ lunar glow (Mansfield 1982: 139), which in itself suggests the transfer of female wisdom. They share the vision of the aloe as a ship – a means of journeying together (‘And [Linda] dreamed that she and her mother were caught up on the cold water and into the ship with the lifted oars and the budding mast [. . .] and they rowed far away’ [1982: 139]). Indeed, Linda explicitly conceives of her mother sitting in the aloe-boat ‘sunning’ herself in the ‘moonlight’. These images of cold water and lunar light prepare us for the revelation of aloe thorns: ‘at the sight of them her heart grew hard. She particularly liked the long sharp thorns’. These intimations of aggressive impulses are juxtaposed with an expressed desire to prevent people from coming near her ship ‘or to follow after’ (p. 141), and even if a ship with thorns seems an odd mixing of metaphors, the ship analogy repays further consideration. J. E. Cirlot

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notes that ‘the waters of the oceans are symbolic of the unconscious, [but] they also can allude to the dull roar of the outside world’ (Cirlot 1988: 295). Quite clearly, Linda Burnell wishes to sail away from the latter to reach a truer contact with her deeper self-needs, for she knows that her marriage to the wellintentioned but limited Stanley is endangering her life-project and that she is genuinely threatened by her current withdrawal from domestic duties. Claire Tomalin reminds us of the feminist tradition of London’s Queen’s College (where Mansfield studied from 1903 to 1906), and of the effects on Mansfield of observing her father’s benign attempts to shape his wife and daughters into the mould of late Victorian ladies: what she waspishly rejected as ‘The Suitable Appropriate Existence’, the ‘waste of life’ (cited in Tomalin 1987: 30). ‘The Aloe’ seems to constitute a tough-minded inquiry into the sources and dynamics of Mansfield’s mother’s crabbed emotional reactions, such as Linda Burnell’s sexophobia, her rejection of mothering and other-directed generativity (stereotypical maternal nurturance), which has fashioned an oppressive, psychically damaging paranoia in Linda Burnell against domestic entrapments of all kinds, so that, as Christine Hamelin has noted, a myriad of what Linda views as ‘alive objects’ (wallpaper poppies, a tassel fringe, medicine bottles and the aloe plant) ‘are frightening [to Linda], but also represent the unactualised possibilities of her life’ (Hamelin 1994: 157). Mansfield clearly shows us that Linda’s preference is for a protest against the rigours not only of heterosexuality and heteronormativity but of any physical expression of sexual desire. Some feminist critics might deem this extreme anhedonia (a lack of sexual-genital responsiveness) as neurotic, a standpoint best expressed in Erica Jong’s statement that ‘If Eros is life force, then censoring Eros is death’ (Jong 1993: 6). Mansfield, perhaps remarkably, presents Linda Burnell’s anhedonia in terms of a basic revulsion from genital or bodily sexuality – a stance which is astonishingly congruent with the politically recherché polemics of Camille Paglia, who has emphasized that ‘Nature is Pandemonium, an All Devils’ Day’ for homo sapiens (Paglia 1995: 56). Further, Paglia takes the realist position that sexuality ‘cannot always be understood by social models’ which orthodox feminists ‘insist on imposing on it’ (1995: 19). If these concepts are coupled with the conservative dimensions and figuration of New Zealand life in late Victorian/Edwardian times, we begin to understand the dire combination of forces which have afflicted Linda Burnell in ‘The Aloe’, where Mansfield’s gynocritique focuses on the aetiology of reproductive oppression and usefully widens out with many instances of Linda emancipating herself from Victorian delusions about ‘proper’ wifely behaviour, as, for instance, when she refuses to accept her mother’s strictures about pleasing the male and wickedly parodies concepts of robust womanly health (Mansfield 1982: 69) as the grateful ‘Angel in the House’. Passivity as protest: this formula is signalled by Linda’s mock-heroic litany of aggressive verbs and, more ominously, by the repeated loss of her wedding ring (p. 69). It is as though Linda deliberately both colludes in, and sends up, the plausibility structures of her culture by insisting on her own over-acted infantilization – as a weak, vulnerable (though hardly compliant) being needing special consideration.

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In my reading of Linda Burnell (of ‘The Aloe’), her ‘debility’ is singular and psychogenic in origin and, to a degree essentially unascertainable, is protestant and even adversarial in attitude and intention. Certainly Hankin’s interpretation, that Linda’s ‘desire to be free of the sexual role imposed by marriage [. . .] is essentially nihilistic’ (Hankin 1983: 130), both fundamentally misconstrues the primary, philosophical meaning of that term and, as such, grossly misrepresents the integrity of Linda’s protest at the crippling norms of her culture. For, far from embracing a philosophy of non-existence or nullity, Linda is groping towards a post-patriarchal mode of thinking. Logically this might actually include the right to refuse the physical expression of sexuality in the wider interests of a less sensation-fixated ego identity, for as Henry Miller reminds us: ‘Personal and boundless, [love] leads to deliverance from the tyranny of the ego. Sex is impersonal, and may not be identified with love. Sex can strengthen and deepen love or work destructively’ (Miller 1977: 98–9). In this context, the Linda Burnell whom Mansfield reveals to us is undergoing an internal conflict with the selfnegating and masochistic perversions of what Ernest Becker has labelled ‘the Agape motive’, which ensue for a woman if she ‘sacrifices her individual personality and gifts by making the man and his achievements her immortality-symbol’ (Becker 1973: 170). Linda’s decathexis connotes not a rampant dysfunctionalism but rather a necessary detachment, which prefigures the formation of new emotional investments, attachments and interests, probably centred on a deepening of her own neglected subjectivity or ‘womanself’. In short, Mansfield charts not the deepening course of an affective disorder (that is, a terminal depressive neurosis) but, rather, the psychic transition from a totalized mindset (one which was subject to a constricting and imposed conformity to dominant cultural imperatives) towards a totalistic (liberatory and expansive) one. The Burnell women are shown to be highly adept at the self-repression of troubling impulses and psychic energies (witness Kezia’s guilty state of surprise at the close of the narrative), but their ‘mastery’ of this problematic process exists on a diminishing scale that ebbs so fluidly that the mother and daughter (Linda and Kezia) seem more likely to attain a state of freedom than the sister-spinster aunt, Beryl Fairfield, who exists in a state of enslavement that is loosely paralleled by her mother’s. Earlier I disputed Fullbrook’s view of Linda’s incapacity to deal with her world. This is because, in my reading, Linda’s is a strategy of determined passive resistance. While Beryl is shown to pay for her falsity, Linda has certainly glimpsed a life beyond being what Luce Irigaray denotes as ‘An exemplary echo chamber’, in which women are deemed fit only to ‘echo the lofty souls of men’ and ‘to provide material support for their transcendent production’ (Irigaray and Speidel 1983: 109). Carol Christ writes that women embarking on personal transformation must first ask basic existential questions, and cites Mary Daly’s thesis that feminism: is not simply a political and social movement (though it most certainly is that), it is also a spiritual journey that begins in an experience of nothingness, a

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shattering of the conventional pieties that had supported the self, comparable to the mystic’s dark night of the soul. (cited in Christ 1980: 76) Here, at last, we may put some flesh upon Hankin’s peculiarly unsatisfying charge of nihilism on Linda’s part, for in Daly’s conceptualization of the issues, Stanley’s aggressive heteromasculinity (and accompanying hyper-insensitivity) must be matched equally by the deployment of gynergy: in Linda’s case, a covert gathering of force that will in time permit the healthy actualization of desire (in the most enlarged sense of psychic health and will to live). Mansfield’s nascently psychoanalytic, problematic textuality emboldens us to conduct a dream-work analysis on this text as a whole. It certainly invites critics to consider Linda Burnell’s dreams and daytime fantasies as revealing strong, and as yet unresolved, intra-psychic conflicts which have led her into a state of ordinary psychogenic disturbance (depression). Mansfield strongly implies that Linda suffers not from a psycho-pathology but, rather, from a culturally imposed psycho-neurosis common to the bourgeois – an incipient variety of anxietyhysteria, of which Carl Jung found many instances at the Burghölzli Hospital in Zurich. In this regard, our final glimpse of Linda may be especially significant, as Beryl reflects on her living entombment six miles from town: ‘What Linda really thinks about the whole affair, per usual I haven’t the slightest idea. She is as mysterious as ever’ (Mansfield 1982: 149). Jung has written eloquently about the ‘human meaning’ of all psychoses (Jung 1974: 131), suggesting that ‘A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis’ (1974: 148). Linda’s malady is a form of hypochondriasis verging on chronic invalidism, yet there are significant signs of hope – notably in the harmony (doubtless misperceived by others as disequilibrium) between her outer and inner experiences, a state of mental fluidity at her new rural demesne focused upon the aloe tree, which clearly possesses a more covert connotative and highly personal meaning (as a symbol of liberation for Linda). In fact, Linda’s reverie must lead us to view the aloe as the unifying symbol of the entire narrative. Her self-identification with the flinty plant (rooted in nature, ascending skywards and capable of an impressive flowering) recalls Lucien Lévy-Brühl’s notion of mystical participation, in which ‘an individual may have [. . .] an unconscious identity with some other person or object’ (Jung, 1978: 88–9) – wherein one’s ‘bush soul’ may be incarnated in a wild animal, tree, or other non-human object. The hope, in this reading, is that Linda’s mental participation with the aloe tree cues us to view it as a focus for her libido (here used in the Jungian sense of generalised psychic energy). If one ignores the tertiary meaning of libido (the Freudian referent: of inordinate desire and lust), its primary (desire, urge, inclination) and secondary (will, fancy) connotations have a marked application in the context of Linda’s attempted act of liberation or deliverance. I conclude that ‘The Aloe-Prelude’ is best read as a composite text, expressive of a radical focus on the needs of a mature woman trapped in a patriarchal

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culture (that entrapment being outwardly objectified by the marriage bond) as she struggles to find and cope with the necessary withdrawal to confront the constellation of nameless phobias that have come to haunt and disempower her. Given the story’s (colonial) New Zealand setting, renewed attention should be paid to Mansfield’s motifs of emergence (including, for instance, the transfiguring moonlight, given the significant point that Marama was the moon-goddess of the Ma¯ori, whose body periodically ‘wastes away but [. . .] is restored to new splendour when she bathes it in the water of life’ [Lurker 1984: 222]). It is hoped that such attention would confirm that Linda’s state of regression be seen neither as pathological nor as reflective of indefinite stasis, but rather in terms of re-charging the damaged psyche, what Fordham calls ‘the adaptation to one’s inner needs’: Regression therefore (contrary to some points of view) is just as normal a counterpole to progression as sleeping is to waking, so long as the libido is functioning in an unhindered manner, i.e. according to the law of enantiodromia, when it must eventually turn over into a progressive movement. Regression may mean, among other things, a return to a dream state after a period of concentrated and directed mental activity, or it may mean a return to an earlier stage of development; but these are not necessarily ‘wrong’, rather they can be looked on as restorative phases – ‘reculer pour mieux santer.’ (Fordham 1972: 18) Thus Linda finds in the dream of the aloe-ship an avenue of fantasised escape from her problematic existence and a means of fusion with the paternal Logos principle of consciousness which will forge a living synthesis, a union between the female (unconsciousness) and male (consciousness) principles in her psyche. This vision will thereby facilitate the construction of a mature, androgynous (sexually protean) self. (This pattern is strikingly paralleled in a more overtly biological sense by sister Beryl’s clearly bisexual impulses.) Mary Daly writes of the image of the Sacred Tree ‘which is the Goddess’, noting that it ‘can hardly be limited to a symbol for biological fertility’ (Daly 1978: 79). Of course, Linda’s valorization of the aloe tree also has the connotation of a healing life-symbol, and her sacred grove recalls Sir James Frazer’s observations concerning the archaic ‘conception of trees and plants as animated beings naturally [resulting] in treating them as male and female’ (Frazer 1993: 114). In these terms, the aloe is not a sheltering, maternal tree but, rather, an objectification of qualities normatively defined as ‘male’: as an emblem of stand-alone sufficiency in which Linda ends the puella stage of her psychic life (that is, the disintegration of consciousness) and is now ready to integrate the strategies of the conscious (which we may deem feminist) with the deeper urgings of the unconscious. In this way, ‘The Aloe/Prelude’ may be seen as a composite text, which offers images of appropriate and inappropriate mothering and which presents Linda Burnell not as a dysfunctional anhedonic female but, rather, as a ‘green spear’ thrusting its sealed bud through all her ‘years of darkness’, to flower for her

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particular moment of non-gendered human freedom on the nourishing matrix of Mother Earth. In this reading, Mansfield’s ‘The Aloe/Prelude’ is one of the truly great prophetic documents of human liberation and self-transformation in the canon of modernist literature, and a robust achievement for which Mansfield has, to date, received insufficient credit.

Bibliography Alpers, A. (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. New York: The Viking Press. Bachardy, D. and White, J. (eds) (1989), Where Joy Resides: A Christopher Isherwood Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Michael de Capua Books. Becker, E. (1973), The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press. Bell, A. (1990), A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary –Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press. Bertram, J. (1980), ‘Portrait of the artist in her time’, New Zealand Listener, 13 September, 84. Bradbury, M. and Corker, D. (1975 [1971]), ‘The American risorgimento: the coming of the new arts’, in M. Cunliffe (ed.), American Literature Since 1900. London: Sphere Books. Christ, C. (1980), Diving Deep and Surfacing: Woman Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Cirlot, J. (1988), A Dictionary of Symbols. London and New York: Routledge. Cunliffe, M. (ed) (1975 [1971]), American Literature Since 1900. London: Sphere. Daly, M. (1978), Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. Fordham, F. (1972 [1953]), An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Frazer, J. (1993 [1922]), The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Herefordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Fullbrook, K. (1986), Katherine Mansfield. Sussex: Harvester Press. Gordon, I. (1974), Undiscovered Country: The New Zealand Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Longman Group. Hamelin, C. (1994), ‘Gender mapping genre: studies in female kunstlerromane from Canada, Australia and New Zealand’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, Queen’s University, Canada). Hankin, C. (1983), Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Ihimaera, W. (1989), Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp. Auckland: Viking/Penguin. Irigaray, L. and Speidel, S. (1983), ‘Veiled lips’, Mississippi Review, 33, Winter/ Spring, 93–131. Jong, E. (1993), The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller. New York: Turtle Bay Press/Random House. Jung, C. (1974 [1963]), Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Aniela Jaffe (ed.), Richard and Clara Winston (trans.). London: Fontana. –(1978 [1964]), Man and His Symbols. London: Pan/Picador.

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Kaplan, S. J. (1991), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Kundera, M. (1990 [1988]), The Art of the Novel. Linda Asher (trans.). London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber. Lurker, M. (1987 [1984]), Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons, G. L. Campbell (trans.). London and New York: Routledge. McLaughlin, A. (1978), ‘“The same job”: The shared writing aims of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’, Modern Fiction Studies, 24 (3), 369–82. Mansfield, K. (1982 [1915]), The Aloe with Prelude, V. O’Sullivan (ed.). Wellington: Port Nicholson Press. –(2007), The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin. Marsh, N. (1966), Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography. London: Collins. Maugham, W. Somerset (1974 [1919]), The Moon and Sixpence. London: Pan. Meyers, J. (1978), Katherine Mansfield: A Life. London: Hamish Hamilton. Miller, H. (1977 [1940]), The World of Sex. London: Wyndham Publications. Murry, J. (ed.) (1939), The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield. London: Constable. O’Sullivan,V. (1981 [1974]), Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand. Auckland and Christchurch: Golden Press. –(1989), Finding the Pattern, Solving the Problem: Katherine Mansfield: the New Zealand European. Wellington: Victoria University Press. O’Sullivan,V. (ed.) (1982), Katherine Mansfield: The Aloe with Prelude. Wellington: Port Nicholson Press. Paglia, C. (1995 [1990]), Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art. London: Penguin. Rose, P. (1978), Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Stead, C. (1988 [1977]), The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shuttleworth, S. (1994), ‘A mother’s place is in the wrong’, New Scientist, 140, 38. Tomalin, C. (1987), Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. London: Viking. Wilde, O. (1985 [1890]), The Picture of Dorian Gray. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Woolf, V. (1977 [1929]), A Room of One’s Own. St Albans: Panther/Triad. –(1938a) Three Guineas. London: The Hogarth Press. –(1938b [1927]), To the Lighthouse. London: Dent.

Chapter 10

‘A City of One’s Own’: Women, Social Class and London in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories Ana Belén López Pérez

In a traditionally patriarchal society such as ours, women tend to be linked to the house and even enclosed there. In modern Western society, when we think of women in terms of space, it is the house and home which first come to mind. The other extreme is the city, a space typically associated with men, which is in the public eye and therefore perceived as a male domain. However, if we go beyond dichotomies and consider the evolution of Western cities, we can see that their industrialization provoked a change in relation to the individual, conditioned also by gender, class, race or culture. All of these factors interacted with the human being, causing a dual effect, which determined how bodies were placed in the city and how they gave shape to the city itself, as critics such as Elizabeth Grosz and Frank Tonkiss in their studies on space and the city have explained.1 Therefore, in general terms, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the state of affairs in Western cities, and specifically in London and Paris, was as follows. Urban spaces had expanded throughout the nineteenth century due to the arrival of a mass of people from rural areas in search of the better living conditions that industrial jobs were thought to offer. As Terry Eagleton affirms in relation to the cities in the novels of Charles Dickens (Eagleton 2005), this migration made cities very different from the more uniform villages. Thus, the modern city is a shifting and parcelled-out space with two clearly distinct areas: the centre, a place of consumption, and the periphery, the location for activities of manufacturing, business or commerce, and the place where the workers and the poorest people reside. In addition, the generic conception of space provides a broader vision of the city at that time. The process of industrialization gave women new job opportunities and new possibilities for acquiring knowledge, and the freedom to move around in certain public spaces. However, their removal from the family and their assigned private space meant exposure to new kinds of danger and control in the city, where men had always tried to assert their authority. In fact, women risked becoming ‘public’ in a very different sense from the socially and economically respectable ‘public man’, as when they were seen strolling in the streets of nineteenth– and early twentieth-century cities they could be taken for prostitutes.2 Moreover, men perceived the presence of women in what they

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considered to be their space as a threat, which is one of the reasons that places such as department stores were built in the cities; they were semi-private and protective places, indirectly aimed at controlling women. Thus, at the turn of the century, the presence of women in the city was undeniable. They were part of the crowds in the streets, theatres and parks, either as workers or as low-class women, as consumer bourgeois, as women involved in charity, and as spinsters, prostitutes, strikers or suffragettes. In addition, all of them were potential threats to the established social order in that space, particularly when they were en masse, for example, as strikers or suffragettes.3 Taking into account the implications of social class, other matters can be understood, because the relationship between women and the space of the city was conditioned by wealth and social status. Class meant that women could be positioned as marginal, in the case of shop assistants or factory workers, or more centrally, like the shoppers who moved inside the department stores or shops in the streets, something that only middle- or upper-class women could do. Social class and the status it confers was also essential for women who tried to occupy more typically masculine positions, such as those of artists, writers or even flâneurs, a figure associated with men until the end of the nineteenth century.4 This is the new social and political state of the cities that Katherine Mansfield encountered, aged 15, when she first came to Europe. Very soon, she recognized herself as a ‘lover of London Town’ (Scott 1997, 1: 54). After her first stay there, in comparison with her native New Zealand, she saw in the city many possibilities for her career as a writer: I ought to get to London to work & study. I have been writing a great deal here but I can’t do all that I know is in me [. . .] here there is really no scope for development – no intellectual society – no hope of finding any. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 42) However, her perspective on this space was not always consistent, even in writings which belonged to the same period; for instance, the city that once was a fertile and loving mother became, all of a sudden, a sterile and deathly place: London England seems to me almost another planet. […] That Life seems dead for me – buried surely. After my terrible sorrow London seemed to lose all her reality. I had thought of her as a gigantic Mother in whose womb were bred all the Great Ones of the earth, & then, suddenly she was barren, sterile – her body the burial ground of all who counted in the world. I could not have stayed there any longer. I’d rather be a frightened child lost in a funeral procession – yes, as bad as that – and come home – each day bitterly eager for your – and here I am. (Scott 1997, 1: 221–2) When Mansfield settled in London in 1908, her hostility towards this city increased. This was due to several factors. On the one hand, she found it a

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strange place for women: ‘that mysterious place, the City, where ladies feared to tread’ (Scott 1997, 2: 100). On the other, she recognized herself as a stranger, due to her foreign origin: ‘I am the little colonial walking in the London garden patch – allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger. [. . .] She is a stranger – an alien’ (Scott 1997, 2: 166). Moreover, many of her letters reflect her hatred of the city, especially some years later when she was ill and could only stay in urban places for short periods of time. Notably, however, her comments refer not only to London but also to the whole of England, or to cities in general. From 1920 to 1922, she wrote in this tone: ‘It is simply tragic to meet this reluctant painful England again’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 7); ‘I shall never live in England again. I recognise Englands admirable qualities, but we simply don’t get on’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 178); ‘How I have hated England! Never, never will I live there. Its a kind of negation to me and there is always a kind of silky web or net of complications spread to catch one’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 255); ‘cities are cursed places’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 194). Mansfield’s interest in the city is apparent in her earliest pieces of fiction and poems, in which London often acquires the classic category of a female character. Such is the case in ‘Vignettes’ (1907), in which the city is a powerful mother who has her own voice: It is at this hour and in this loneliness that London stretches out eager hands towards me, and in her eyes is the light of knowledge. ‘In my streets,’ she whispers, ‘there is the passing of many feet, there are lines of flaring lights, there are cafes full of men and women, there is the intoxicating madness of night music, a great glamour of darkness, a tremendous anticipation, and o’er all, the sound of laughter, half sad, half joyous, yet fearful, dying away in a strange shudder of satisfaction, and then swelling out into more laughter. (Mansfield 1988: 4) But in the poem ‘The Winter Fire’ (1908), written from the perspective of a lonely woman who is observing the street from her house, the city becomes potentially dangerous: ‘Suddenly, from the street, a burst of sound/ A barrel organ, turned and jarred & wheezed/ The drunken bestial, hiccoughing voice of London’ (Mansfield 1988: 20). Not only London, but also Paris and an unnamed New Zealand city (which is probably Wellington) appear in Mansfield’s short stories, and these cities play a part in the creation of male and female identities. In some, the city is the space of male work, where men go every day (‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’, ‘Marriage à la Mode’, ‘An Ideal Family’); it is where men shop with maximum freedom (‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’); it is, for men, the refuge from the domestic space, which some find oppressive (‘An Ideal Family’, ‘Marriage à la Mode’). Moreover, Paris is the complex meeting-place for artists, intellectuals and flâneurs (‘Je ne parle pas français’, ‘Feuille d’Album’). As a result, since the city is associated with men in a traditional way, it is often a source of conflict for women and threatens their identity, especially when they try to occupy the same positions as men. In

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this respect, social class proves to be one of the turning-points for Mansfield’s female characters as, through the perspective of class, they confront different problematic situations. In this discussion, the analysis of women in the city centres on two of Mansfield’s stories set in London. Their female protagonists differ in social position, but share the space where they live and walk: London. ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ is an early story, written in 1908, the year Mansfield arrived in London, while ‘A Cup of Tea’ is a mature one, written in 1922. ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ tells the story of a young woman who, after a long, tiring day at work in a ‘millinery establishment’ in the centre of London, travels back to the room where she lives on her own on the outskirts of the city and, once there, imagines an alternative life. The spatial perspective of this story, which has attracted little critical attention, provides new clues to its meaning and to the author’s understanding of the city.5 In the opening lines, Rosabel is at Oxford Circus, in the very heart of London. According to the narrator, she regrets not having had a good dinner to sustain her. Instead, by buying a bunch of violets, she has given priority to her spiritual hunger and neglected her physical needs: ‘for a scone and a boiled egg and a cup of cocoa at Lyons are not ample sufficiency after a hard day’s work in a millinery establishment’ (Mansfield 1981: 513).6 The fact that the protagonist is a lonely working girl thus intensifies the connections between social class, gender and space. As Rosabel is in Oxford Circus, she needs to catch a bus, the working-class means of transport, which will take her home by travelling through the city towards the outskirts, the proletarian residential area. This journey is particularly useful in showing how the urban space appears to the woman. In the first place, a hungry Rosabel sits in the bus next to another girl who is reading a novel, Anna Lombard (1901), the story of a woman who does not conform to conventional female sexuality, but who is finally ‘saved’ by a man who marries her. Anna Lombard was a best-seller by Anne Sophie Cory writing under the pseudonym of Victoria Cross, and it aroused much controversy at the time, since its protagonist is a ‘new woman’, a fashionable subject in late-nineteenth-century novels. It is not by chance that this novel is mentioned at this point in the story. The girl reading the book can be regarded as Rosabel’s alter ego since she appears to share her circumstances and longings. Both have no substantial means, for both travel by bus, and the reader’s book is ‘a cheap, paper-covered edition’ (p. 513). Although we do not know whether the girl who is reading is also a working girl, Rosalind’s identification with her indicates that she could be. Moreover, in spite of their relative independence thanks to their jobs, their curiosity about Anna Lombard suggests they share an aspiration to find a man who will provide them with a better standard of living. But the ‘new woman’ was also the female prototype of working educated women associated with the city, and both Rosabel and the girl on the bus seem to emulate this concern for education, at least as much as their own situations allow them to. Rosabel’s interest in reading is signalled not only by her ‘glanc[ing] at the book’ but also by her critical attitude to the way

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the girl reads: ‘so earnestly, mouthing the words in a way that Rosabel detested, licking her first finger and thumb each time she turned the page’ (p. 513). Later, in her room, reading appears to be Rosabel’s habit, although that day she did not need to read to go into an imaginary world: ‘It was just seven o’clock. If she pulled the blind up and put out the gas it was much more restful – Rosabel did not want to read’ (p. 514). From the start of Rosabel’s journey through London, she is depicted as a dreamer who does not see her milieu clearly and so fluctuates between dream and reality. There are several references to the imprecision of her vision. First, she transforms the city she is watching through the bus window into a fairy-tale space. However, her own cold wet body dispels that illusion: Rosabel looked out of the windows; the street was blurred and misty, but light striking on the panes turned their dullness to opal and silver, and the jewellers’ shops seen through this, were fairy palaces. Her feet were horribly wet, and she knew the bottom of her skirt and petticoat would be coated with black, greasy mud. (p. 513) Then, ‘She could not see very clearly’ (p. 513) the girl who is reading next to her. Afterwards, she sees the people around her ‘Through her half-closed eyes’ (p. 514). However, these people restore Rosabel to reality as soon as they appear as an actual mass. In fact, as soon as she realizes that all the individuals are uniform, undifferentiated and paralyzed, she tries to vindicate her individuality by despising their smell, which is probably not very different from her own: ‘There was a sickening smell of warm humanity – it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the bus – and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them’ (p. 513). Next, it is again through reading, but of a different kind, that the protagonist escapes from the mass which reduces her to a social category. This time, it is through another medium, characteristic of nineteenth-century industrial and capitalist society: the big advertising posters in the streets that people could see time and again, that were not only a way of selling products but also a form of ideological propaganda which reflected both social class and gender.7 In fact, advertising is an innovation that appeared in the nineteenth century at the same time as new urban spaces such as department stores, which were devised mainly to satisfy the wishes of new women consumers.8 Rosabel observes two such advertisements implicitly addressed to housewives, whose images were used in advertising and selling products. The first features a soap, which has the power to save women time and effort, and, the second, a tomato sauce: ‘How many times had she read these advertisements – “Sapolio Saves Time, Saves Labour” – “Heinz’s Tomato Sauce”’ (p. 513).9 Next to these two is another advertisement addressed to men, and Rosabel is very critical and even annoyed by it. The product is one with digestive properties, advertised as a dialogue between men

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who are all educated to university level: ‘the inane, annoying dialogue between doctor and judge concerning the superlative merits of “Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline”’ (p. 513).10 Ultimately, the advertisements displayed in the city streets remind Rosabel of the way in which society creates unequal opportunities for women and men, and they suggest her likely future as a traditional mother and housewife. The bus journey continues far from the city centre, until they reach the suburbs where Rosabel lives, which she again idealizes, comparing the area with Venice: Westbourne Grove looked as she had always imagined Venice to look at night, mysterious, dark, even the hansoms were like gondolas dodging up and down, and the lights training luridly – tongues of flame licking the wet street – magic fish swimming in the Grand Canal. (p. 514) The trip ends with the girl’s steep ascent to her room on the fourth floor, which removes her from the vision of Venice. This ascent is another distinctive spatial sign in the city: there is no lift in her building, by contrast to the city centre and its modern conveniences. Once again, the commodities of social class organize the space: Rosalind reflects, ‘Every house ought to have a lift, something simple and inexpensive, or else an electric staircase like the one at Earl’s Court – but four flights!’ (p. 514). The second part of ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ is situated in her room where, in a state of semi-consciousness caused by hunger, tiredness and cold, she sets out on an imaginary journey through an alternative city. In this journey, she cannot be herself and so she assumes the position of a customer, a girl of a privileged class, and, in her dream, she imagines herself with the customer’s male companion: ‘Suppose they changed places. Rosabel would drive home with him’ (p. 516). The man, who had flirted with Rosabel that morning and become, for her, a ‘dreamlover’, would take her to places in the city where she would satisfy her real needs; first, her spiritual needs, represented by buying flowers, and then the physical ones, by eating a delicious lunch of oysters, pigeons and creamed potatoes, with ‘champagne, of course’ and later taking tea.11 They would also go to places where poor people like Rosabel do not usually go: to the theatre and a dance. Rosabel’s dream has a happy ending, similar to that of a fairytale: she and the man would get married. This event is also anchored in space as their wedding would take place, in accordance with their social position, in St. George’s church, situated in Hanover Square in the very heart of London city. Rosabel and the protagonists of ‘The Little Governess’, ‘Pictures’ or ‘Life of Ma Parker’, are all lonely women who are forced to go out into this strange and hostile public space for lack of a safe home and economic means, although Rosabel is able to survive alone in the city thanks to her youth and optimism. Her imagination and reading of any kind are the only means of escape from those spaces that are delineated by gender roles and social signs and, in a way,

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she manages to overcome the barriers imposed on her by society, if only in her dreams. Mansfield also deals with cases of women in the city that are quite different from that of Rosabel, due mainly to their social position. The space occupied by affluent women whose economic welfare allows them to move around the city with more freedom than women of lower class, is more fluid and expansive, although sometimes, as in the case of Rosemary Fell, the protagonist of ‘A Cup of Tea’, this affluence makes the city of London too small. In fact, Rosemary’s purchasing power creates a spatial displacement from London where she lives, to Paris, where she often goes shopping and thus becomes a world consumer: ‘But if Rosemary wanted to shop she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street’ (p. 398). Moreover, she moves around London not by bus like Rosabel, or in a taxi like the middle-class protagonists of ‘Bliss’ or ‘Revelations’, but in her own car, driven by a chauffeur, and she commands the service of the shop-assistants: If she wanted to buy flowers, the car pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside the shop just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way [. . .]. The attendant bowed and put the lilac out of sight [. . .]. And she was followed to the car by a thin shop-girl staggering under an immense white paper armful that looked like a baby in long clothes . . . (p. 398) For Rosemary, the city becomes the space where she satisfies her whims and fancies, including those of a consumer who identifies consumption with a form of liberation. In the first place, she devotes her full attention to a little enamel box decorated with the romantic depiction of a traditional couple, where the figure of the man is bigger and less ornamented than the woman, and which is so expensive that even she considers the need to impose limits on her expenditure: ‘Twenty-eight guineas. Even if one is rich . . . She looked vague’ (p. 399). Later, as she leaves the shop, the city transforms itself in a way that makes her continue her search for something to satisfy her by overcoming those limitations: She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter afternoon. Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the house opposite. [. . .] There are moments, horrible moments in life, when one emerges from shelter and looks out, and it’s awful. One oughtn’t to give way to them. One ought to go home and have an extra-special tea. (p. 400) In this situation, provoked to some extent by her abandonment of the safety of home, Rosemary places herself in a fictitious space, like that which appears in the novels by the Russian writer Dostoevsky, which she reads. This makes her

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character different from Rosabel, who reads cheap English novels, and it situates Rosemary in an international literary realm. Caught up in this fantasy, she strays from the reality of her social position through an act of false compassion, by inviting a woman beggar to have tea in her own house: And suddenly it seemed to Rosemary such an adventure. It was like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky, this meeting in the dusk. Supposing she took the girl home? Supposing she did do one of those things she was always reading about or seeing on the stage, what would happen? It would be thrilling. (p. 401) Rosemary and the beggar woman occupy the space of the city in very different ways, due to their divergent social classes. Rosemary’s action, which she sees at first as an overcoming of class differences, a sisterhood of women, a reconciliation of the extremes that exist in the city, later undermines her safe existence within her own home. Therefore, as soon as Rosemary’s husband notices that the woman is very beautiful she becomes a threat for the protagonist and undermines the secure space of her house. Rosemary throws her out with just a few coins, a great deal less than the price of the enamel box. ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ and ‘A Cup of Tea’ are examples of the complex relationship that Mansfield herself had with the space of the city. The city space for the protagonists of these stories is a provisional one. However, it triggers their need to go beyond their everyday lives, and seek alternative roles and positions: Rosabel adopts the role of the young lady she served at the millinery shop, and Rosemary for a very short time sees herself as the saviour of a low-class woman whom she invites into her home. The city awakens their dreaming personalities, which are probably necessary for them to continue living their real lives. Both appear to be avoiding this reality, but for different reasons. On the one hand, Rosabel imagines a young man, a ‘dreamlover’, who takes her away from the real cold and hunger she suffers and from the city of buses, posters and malodorous people, who remind her of her own limited circumstances. Rosemary, on the other hand, expels the impecunious girl and the poverty she represents, as her invitation to her turns out not to be the diversion she was seeking. She chooses the easiest option: to be with her husband in a traditional arrangement, similar to that of the romantic couple painted on the lid of the box she liked so much. In the end, therefore, however pessimistic these dreams may appear, they represent the only way out of their traditional lives. The space of the city has offered a tantalizing introduction to different class and gender roles and shown these women a world of possibilities, which they might attain one day.12

Conclusion This chapter, by means of its title that refers to the famous essay by Virginia Woolf, began with Mansfield’s need, shared by other modernist women writers

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(Woolf and Dorothy Richardson among others), to have her own space. In spite of circumstances that conspired to keep these women on the periphery – being female was one factor, but Mansfield came also from a colony – they all chose the city, mainly London, as the space of modernism and as the space with which women could identify.13 Therefore, as Raymond Williams and Elizabeth Wilson have already observed in their studies on the city, contrary to male writers’ depiction of this place as one that is dangerous and threatening, women were much more positive than has traditionally been considered, seeing many possibilities for making it the space of their imagination and their fiction. In this respect, although this would be a topic for another essay, Katherine Mansfield and other women writers of the period, like their male contemporaries, transformed London into their own city.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

According to Grosz (1995: 103–10) the city is able to provide the order and organization that connects otherwise isolated bodies, but it also places individuals in certain roles that make the body acquire the category of subject. Tonkiss also points out how bodies interact with the space of the city, contributing to their mutual configuration, particularly in relation to sex and gender: ‘Setting gender and sexuality in the city is partly a question of putting bodies in space’ (Tonkiss 2005: 94). For an explanation of the linguistic distinction between ‘public man’ and ‘public woman’ see Linda Nochlin: ‘The very asymmetry of our idiomatic speech tells us as much. A “public man” [. . .] is an admirable person: politically active, socially engaged, known and respected. A “public woman”, on the other hand, is a phrase used traditionally for the lowest form of prostitute. Moreover, in the term “streetwalker”, even though no gender is indicated by the term in English, it is understood to be female in its negative connotations and is by no means identical with the French flâneur or “sophisticated male stroller through the city”.’ (Nochlin 2006: 172). Parsons (2000) analyses women en masse in the city as a potential danger, not only in relation to suffragettes or strikers, but also as shoppers, workers and spinsters. The earliest studies of the flâneur defend the Baudelairean figure as exclusively pertaining to men (Wolff 1990). Others accept the existence of a flâneuse (Wilson 1992; Friedberg 1993; Ferguson 1994; Parsons 2000), although her characteristics differ considerably from those of the male figure and in some cases relate to the prostitute (Tonkiss 2005). Kate Fullbrook is among the critics who have considered the importance of space in ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ arguing that Rosabel is expelled from space, conceived as a series of images, a spectator who is not really integrated with the world: ‘As she drags through London on her way home, the city is presented in two series of images, both representing the girl’s perceptions’ (Fullbrook 1986: 36). Valerie Shaw comments on how the story has ‘the “static” quality of a scene’, in which ‘meaning is derived almost entirely from the drab fixity of the girl’s surroundings’ (Shaw 1983: 152).

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8

9

10

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All quotations from Mansfield’s stories are taken from this edition (Mansfield 1981), and hereafter will be referenced only by page numbers in the text. On the importance of advertising in the space of the city, see Friedberg (1993) and Iskin (2006). On women as consumers, the appearance of department stores and their presence in literature, see Felski (1995). For a study of advertising in the nineteenth century and the images of women that appeared in adverts, see Loeb (1994). One of Loeb’s first images is that of an advertisement for Sinclair’s Soap, probably one that Mansfield herself would have noticed. In ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, an advertising slogan is associated with another make of soap, Sapolio. Mansfield wrote the story in New Zealand, two months before arriving back in England, so this must have been a case of unconscious memory. Thus, the change in the name of the brand does not seem important, but the slogan helps us to understand how these products were addressed to women: ‘saves money, saves time, saves labour, saves fuel’ (Loeb 1994: 17). Sinclair’s slogan adds: ‘The MAGIC CLEANSER; A boon to Rich and Poor Alike’ and ‘The Family Wash without the misery of a Steamy House’. The slogan in the advert was completely different from those advertising products for women: ‘One Ounce of Fact Outweighs a Ton of Theory’. An image of this advert is available from: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/Resources/ Lamplough2.jpg (accessed 31 December 2010). Eriksson (1997) analyses the male figures in 1970s novels by women writers, as an exploration of masculinity and the formation of female desire and sexual identity. Of the three categories – husbands, lovers and ‘dreamlovers’ – the ‘dreamlover’ is ‘an imaginary lover, any male character who figures in the protagonist’s fantasies. The term also connotes the female protagonist herself as enamoured of dreaming, that is, as a lover of dreams’ (Eriksson 1997: 92). This conclusion differs from Kaplan’s opinion that stories like ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ are just examples of ‘disappointment and fear’ (Kaplan 1991: 73, n.9). Some recent studies have also defended the private and domestic spaces as spaces of modernism. See Shiach (2005), Saith and Whitworth ((2007) or Gan (2009).

Bibliography D’Souza, A. and McDonough, T. (eds) (2006), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eagleton, T. (2005), The English Novel. Malden: Blackwell. Eriksson, H. (1997), Husbands, Lovers, and Dreamlovers. Masculinity and Female Desire in Women’s Novels of the 1970s. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Felski, R. (1995), The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ferguson, P. P. (1994), ‘The Flâneur on and off the streets of Paris’, in K. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 22–42. Friedberg, A. (1993), Window Shopping. Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fullbrook, K. (1986), Katherine Mansfield. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

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Gan, W. (2009), Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grosz, E. (1995), Space, Time and Perversion. New York: Routledge. Iskin, R. E. (2006), ‘The Flâneuse in French Fin-de-Siècle Posters: advertising images of modern women in Paris’, in A. D’Souza and T. McDonough (eds), pp. 113–28. Kaplan, S. J. (1991), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Loeb, L. A. (1994), Consuming Angels. Advertising and Victorian Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mansfield, K. (1981), The Collected Stories. London: Penguin. –(1988), Poems of Katherine Mansfield, V. O’Sullivan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nochlin, L. (2006), ‘Afterword’, in A. D’Souza and T. McDonough (eds), pp. 172–97. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 1 (1984), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008). Parsons, D. (2000), Streetwalking the Metropolis. Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saith, A. and Whitworth, M. (eds) (2007), Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, M. (ed.) (1997), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols. Canterbury: Lincoln University Press. Shaw, V. (1983), The Short Story. A Critical Introduction. London: Longman. Shiach, M. (2005), ‘Modernism, the city and the “domestic interior”’, Home Cultures, 2, (3), 251–67. Tonkiss, F. (2005), Space, the City and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vianello, V. and Caramazza, E. (2005), Gender, Space and Power. A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. London: Free Association Books. Williams, R. (1973), The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus. Wilson, E. (1992), The Sphinx in the City. Urban life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wolff, J. (1990), Feminine Sentences. Essays on Women & Culture. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 34–50.

Chapter 11

‘My Insides Are All Twisted Up’:1 When Distortion and the Grotesque became ‘the Same Job’ in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf Gerardo Rodríguez Salas and Isabel María Andrés Cuevas

‘We have got the same job’ There has been much speculation about the lines of literary influence between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, accompanied by an impassioned debate about who was the true modernist innovator.2 However, the point of departure for this study is the clearly delineated vision of patriarchy, which they shared. In one of her letters, and in relation to their writing, Mansfield confessed to Woolf: ‘We have got the same job, Virginia & it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1998: 327). And yet, Mansfield could not help but acknowledge a deep jealousy of her contemporary’s writing, as she admitted in one of her diary entries (Murry 1954: 158), a feeling that proved to be reciprocal when, after Mansfield’s death, Woolf confessed in her diary: When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. K wont read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer. More generously I felt, but though I can do this better than she could, where is she, who could do what I can’t! (Bell 1980: 226) Despite a note of condescension in these words, Woolf maintained a private rivalry with Mansfield, which, after the New Zealand writer’s death, gave way to appreciation and nostalgia.3 Indeed, her jealousy of Mansfield was so acute that Woolf depicted it in her novel Between the Acts in the relationship between the characters Isa Oliver (herself) and Mrs Manresa (Mansfield), a pun on ‘man raiser’ which highlights the vulgarity that, in Woolf’s opinion, was her adversary’s most distinctive trait.4

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From their first meeting in 1916, Mansfield and Woolf maintained an intense but wary relationship, in which jealousy alternated with a profound and affectionate admiration. Their rivalry naturally focused on the professional arena of their writing, where critics have observed a number of similarities. Hermione Lee notes how both authors were aware of ‘the problem of how solid narrative form could be broken up without losing deep feeling’ (Lee 1996: 386). And E. M. Forster described both Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ and Woolf’s The Voyage Out as the best works of their time (Trautmann 2003: 128). But above all, Mansfield and Woolf shared a desire to transgress the conventions of a suffocating patriarchal society, which they perceived as eminently obsolete and absurd. Although previous scholarship has discussed some of these shared links, their use of the grotesque, particularly in connection with ideas of femininity and maternity, has rarely been considered. Indeed, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, a carnivalesque microcosm can be discerned in the novels and short stories of two women who acutely perceived the truth of a distorted reality and expressed this in their common creation of a surreptitiously eccentric universe.5 The carnivalesque provides both writers with a suitable scenario in which to expose the lack of coherence of an anachronistic system in which cannibalizations, or incongruous hybridities and inversions, combine with a catalogue of gross, preposterous males. All this attests to the existence of a society in need of thorough renovation.6

Woolf: ‘The women broke into innumerable babies’ Conventional maternity is frequently a target in Woolf’s fiction, particularly in To the Lighthouse. Even though traditional scholarship has tended to view Mrs Ramsay as a saintly, almost virginal, portrayal of motherhood on the basis of biographical similarities with Woolf’s own mother, an alternative reading may detect a patently subversive purpose underlying the depiction of the novel’s central female character. Woolf distorts her otherwise reverential attitude to motherhood by suggesting a grotesque association between children and pigs in a particularly unsettling scene, in which a delicate description of the Ramsey children in bed is disrupted by the distressing intrusion of a pig’s skull. Hanging from the ceiling, the swine is literally superimposed over the children, who become subtly displaced by the floating presence of the animal: The children were not asleep. [. . .] There was James wide awake and Cam sitting bolt upright, and Mildred out of bed in her bare feet, and it was almost eleven and they were all talking. What was the matter? It was that horrid skull again. [. . .] What had possessed Edward to send them this horrid skull? [. . .] Then Cam must go to sleep (it had great horns said Cam –) must go to sleep and dream [. . .]. She could see the horns, Cam said, all over the room. It was true. Wherever they put the light (and James could not sleep without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere. [. . .]

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‘Well then,’ said Mrs Ramsay, ‘we will cover it up,’ and they all watched her go to the chest of drawers, and open the little drawers quickly one after another, and not seeing anything that would do, she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam’s [. . .]. Now, she whispered, crossing over to his bed, James must go to sleep too, for see, she said, the boar’s skull was still there; they had not touched it; [. . .] it was there quite unhurt. (Woolf 1996b: 124–5) By way of reassuring her children, Mrs Ramsay implicitly transfers her maternal care to this surrogate pig-child when she wraps the skull in her shawl. This scene violently distorts the traditional image of the female as child-bearer by substituting an absurd and incongruous version of the stereotype. The perverse image of the Madonna, in which the child has been superseded by the grotesque presence of a pig, corresponds to inherently transgressive circus imagery with which Woolf might have been familiar. Stallybrass and White, for example, highlight the subversive power of images based on the hybridization of human babies and pigs in modern circus acts, retrieving Paul Bouissac’s account of acts in which: (T)he ‘August’ [. . .] puts on ‘grotesque’ female clothes with huge artificial bosoms an enters carrying a ‘baby’ in a blanket [. . .]. When the baby cries [. . .], August picks it up and the audience suddenly discovers that the baby is actually a piglet. (Stallybrass and White 1986, p. 58) In Woolf’s later novel, The Years, her reversal of the traditional sacredness of maternity as depicted in To the Lighthouse is further disrupted by the inclusion of abnormal forms of childbirth. As with Mansfield’s stories, Woolf introduces an animalized version of childrearing, clearly dominated by a scatological dimension, whereby maternity results in the aberrant birth of multiple, vermin-like creatures. In this version, the child conforms to Elizabeth Grosz’s category of ‘corporeal rubbish’; that is, of ‘the incorporated-that-must-be-evacuated, indicating the incapacity of Western modern cultures to accept not only the mother but also [. . .] the materiality of the body’ (Ross 2003: 282). These are the covert implications of the descriptions of multiple births that recur in The Years. In one of these passages, Woolf ferociously mocks the utter absurdity of a Manichaean society in which ‘(t)he men shot, [. . .] the women – [North] looked at his aunt as if she might be breaking into young even there, on that chair – the women broke off into innumerable babies’ (Woolf 1998: 275). It is only through the transgression of what Woolf saw as an artificially polarized order, by means of the defamiliarization inherent in grotesque aesthetics, that this society’s foundations can be definitely eroded. Thus, during the party that takes place towards the end of the novel, a sudden method of delivery is suggested for Milly. In her representation as an

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aged woman giving birth, one which combines the two ontological extremes of life and death, Milly closely resembles the terracotta figurines described by Bakhtin in Rabelais. Certainly, these figures manifest a ‘grotesque conception of the body’ by ‘embodying the poles of the biocosmic cycle’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 25). Yet, according to Bakhtin, at the same time as manifesting a form of degradation, the images of these pregnant old women express vindication of resistance to an inert order of things, thus clamouring for the renewal and transformation of a life that is understood as an unfinished process. As Bakhtin puts it: ‘(t)here is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying, and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived, but as yet unformed’ (1984a: 25–6). This protest against the established patriarchal order is reinforced by the development of a new dimension in the depiction of Milly’s motherhood, apparent in its focus on the most bluntly scatological aspects involved in the act of childbirth. This can be read as correlating to the desacralized view of maternity that Mansfield promulgates in ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, as discussed later in this chapter. It is precisely in this association between the female and the lower stratum that Woolf transgresses the borders of sacred, ‘clean’ motherhood as a form of submission to the male. In this sense, such a subversive image of maternity chimes with Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject subject. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva uses the notion of abjection to describe the horror experienced by the child in its attempt to separate itself from the pre-Oedipal mother in the passage from the imaginary to the Symbolic Order. Kristeva defines the abject as ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). As Ross states: The abject belongs to the category of ‘corporeal rubbish’, of the incorporatedthat-must-be-evacuated, indicating the incapacity of Western modern cultures to accept not only the mother but also, as Elizabeth Grosz underlines, the materiality of the body, its limits and cycles, mortality, disease, corporeal fluids, excrement, and menstrual blood. (Ross 2003: 282) This incorporation of a scatological dimension into maternity, therefore, involves an abrupt disruption of the identity patterns created by a patriarchal apparatus, patterns which are thereby rendered useless and devoid of meaning. But unlike T. S. Eliot, who glimpsed the possibility of regeneration in reversing the hierarchies in which intellectual men were positioned,7 Woolf endows women with a primary role as agents of regeneration. Nevertheless, as she later demonstrated in Three Guineas, Woolf stresses that such regeneration is feasible, not through the perpetuation of male values of culture and intellect, but through the free-flowing reality of female existence. Although natural borders are transgressed in other ways, namely through the suggestion of ‘babies having other babies’ (Woolf 1998: 275), it is perhaps more interesting to note the carnivalesque excesses entailed by a birth that

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results in innumerable creatures. According to Bakhtin, everything in carnival transcends the limits of convention and logic and becomes exaggerated and disproportionate (Bakhtin 1984b: 124). Again, the borders of natural logic here are superseded by means of the multiplicity implicit in this childbirth. Moreover, a new form of multiple birth provides the basis for a grotesque characterization in The Years. In the following passage – one of ‘two enormous chunks’ (Woolf 1962: 302) cut from the final version of the novel – Celia Pargiter reads in the newspaper about the triplets born to the postman’s wife. As well as stressing this event as a form of abnormality, Woolf strives to highlight the grotesqueness entailed in the simultaneous coming into the world of ‘three red faces under a flannel hood’ (Woolf 1998: 372), while also signalling their potential to become Cambridge graduates, as later mocked in Three Guineas: Here then is your own letter. In that, after asking for an opinion about how to prevent war, you go on to suggest certain practical measures by which we can help you to prevent it. These are it appears that we should sign a manifesto, pledging ourselves ‘to protect culture and intellectual liberty’;8 that we should join a certain society, devoted to certain measures whose aim is to preserve peace; and, finally, that we should subscribe to that society which like the others is in need of funds. (Woolf 1996a: 283) So far it would appear that Woolf seems hopeful at the prospect of three newlyborn babies to ‘throw a shaft of light into the future’ by attaining the possibility of becoming Cambridge ‘hooded’ graduates. Nevertheless, a more consistent view arises when interpreting the irony entailed by the sharp reversal of the children’s destinies, who, since they are born as males, will later be ‘hooded’ with war helmets instead. Bearing this in mind, the three red faces – which suggest the violent rage of combat – become similarly emblematic of the redness of the carnival fool described by Bakhtin, very much in tune with the grotesque undertones of the scene.

Mansfield: ‘Her great big shadow with a grown-up baby’9 Curiously enough, similar images appear in Mansfield’s fiction. For example, in her short story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ (1911), the story of a foundling employed as the maid of a brutal German family, Mansfield cleverly deploys grotesque images to expose the artificiality of the maternal role for women. The eponymous child’s youth and vulnerability expose her to exploitation by her masters, who over-burden her with domestic tasks and the care of their four children. The crisis comes when the master of the house announces that his wife is expecting a new baby. The exhausted child-maid is horrified by the news and, when the day comes to an end, she asphyxiates the youngest child with the mother’s pillow.

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One of the story’s concerns is a critique of the excessively onerous maternal and domestic responsibilities imposed upon women. Mansfield shows how, at the time she was writing, women were condemned to become mere objects of patriarchal forms of propagation, functioning as machines programmed for the production of new subjects to continue the regime. This maternal role is perceived as cyclical and repetitive, even unstoppable, and ultimately fatal in its impact. The wife–mother in the story, with four children and expecting a fifth, experiences extreme and uncontrolled fertility, and complains that: ‘My insides are all twisted up with having children too quickly’ (p. 750). A further repudiation of maternity is suggested by the repeated comparison of children with pigs throughout the story – a similar image to that used by Woolf – an analogy made either by direct association or implied by word selection and collocation. The story is full of porcine allusions: ‘Swine of a day – swine’s life’ (p. 745, emphasis added); ‘[the children’s] piggy clothes!’ (p. 746, emphasis added); ‘Old Frau Grathwohl came in with a fresh piece of pig’s flesh’ (p. 750, emphasis added). The children are also compared to other animals; for instance, after the maid kills the baby, she likens him to ‘a duck with its head off’ (p. 752). Furthermore, her resentment towards children emerges in the cruelty of her treatment of them and in the pejorative adjectives by which she describes them, such as ‘silly’ and ‘ugly’. The animalization of children corresponds with the representation of their existence, and of maternity in general, as a suffocating state for the individual: As she sat at supper the Man and the Frau seemed to swell to an immense size as she watched them, and then become smaller than dolls, with little voices that seemed to come from outside the window. Looking at the baby, it suddenly had two heads, and then no head. […] As she walked up and down she saw her great big shadow on the wall like a grown-up person with a grown-up baby. Whatever would it look like when she carried two babies so! (pp. 750–1) The first of these grotesque visions suggests the apparent authority of the married couple over the child. However, this power is revealed to be imaginary. Patriarchy uses parents as instruments to assure its reign through maternity, and this in turn is presented as an outlandish act that produces monsters instead of children. The second vision elaborates on the dark aspects of maternity that make it a ‘great big shadow’ for women, eclipsing them and preventing their escape. This image suggests an ineluctable cycle of life, whereby the girl is condemned to shadow other women in their procreative role. The dimensions of social maternity are therefore boundless. Mansfield’s criticism of the negative effects of maternity goes so far as to suggest that the traditional institution of marriage is allied to a biological role, and that both combine to imprison women in the castle of their own inheritance. ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, another story in her first collection,

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In a German Pension, illustrates this insight. The German couple, Frau and Herr Brechenmacher, are utterly committed to their daily routine until it is interrupted by the wedding of a young woman, Theresa, who is condemned by the community for having an illegitimate child. Mansfield’s depiction of the negative effects of marriage upon women, particularly in her descriptions of the new bride, Theresa, is sinister. The first portrait of the newly married couple is redolent with symbolism: At the head of the centre table sat the bride and bridegroom, she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her, who wore a suit of white clothes much too large for him. (p. 706) The image of a virgin, closely linked with that of the mother who conceives in absolute purity, is implied by the bride’s white dress, which contrasts ironically with the fact that Theresa already has an illegitimate child, a fact suggested by the coloured ribbons added to the white dress. This uncomfortable juxtaposition betrays the hypocrisy of the social system and its rigid conventions. In addition, the comparison of the bride with an iced cake and its division into little portions, points to the delicate and delimited role that she is forced to perform at the service of the man, as well as to the multiple requirements of female service that marriage entails. We cannot forget that the woman is seen as an object of desire, hence the banquet and public consumption of the cake, which image her. Yet Mansfield also suggests that patriarchy has a harmful effect not only on women but also on men, as the bridegroom’s clothes are ‘much too large for him’ (p. 706). Further on in the story, Theresa is described as ‘very still, with a little vacant smile on her lips, only her eyes shifting uneasily from side to side’ (p. 707). Her passivity, the ‘vacant smile’, and uneasy way of looking ‘from side to side’, all suggest that she is being prepared for a sacrifice rather than a joyful act of celebration. Ironically, then, one of the guests tells Theresa’s mother: ‘Cheer up, old woman, this isn’t Theresa’s funeral’, and the narrative voice adds: ‘He winked at the guests, who broke into loud laughter’ (p. 708). This commentary points to the sacrifice that the act of marriage requires: that is, the death-in-life of the bride. Her doom is compounded by the general indifference emanating from the guests, which covertly aims to silence women. It seems as though they all silently acknowledge the limitations of marriage, but accept them for the sake of tradition. In fact the women who attend the wedding recognize it as entailing a sacrifice of life: ‘Ah, every wife has her cross’ (p. 709), concludes one of the female guests. The final immolation of the bride is signalled by a symbolic act of gift-giving. Herr Brechenmacher offers the newly-weds a strange pot: [The bride] lifted the lid, peeped in, then shut it down with a little scream and sat biting her lips. The bridegroom wrenched the pot away from her and

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drew forth a baby’s bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls. As he dandled these treasures before Theresa the hot room seemed to heave and sway with laughter. (p. 709) This passage shows Theresa’s horror at the maternal role that is being imposed upon her, and the sterility that this act paradoxically involves, since the babies are not flesh and bone but china dolls without any sign of life like Theresa herself. Once again, we can hear the guests’ unanimous laughter as a sign of complicity with the daily sacrifice of women. Theresa is not the only a recipient of this patriarchal victimization through marriage; so is Frau Brechenmacher. When the guests laugh at Theresa’s reaction to the symbolic gift, Frau Brechenmacher finds them ‘strange’: ‘She imagined that all these people were laughing at her, more people than there were in the room even – all laughing at her because they were so much stronger than she was’ (pp. 709–10). This passage continues with a grotesque description of the scene, exaggerating the number of people present in the room. Frau Brechenmacher identifies herself with Theresa and feels that all women in her situation are helpless beings within an almighty system, represented not only by the guests at the party but by the whole world. The criticism of a patriarchal system that imprisons women within the constraints of biological reproduction and its direct association with the institution of marriage accumulates through the grotesque and carnivalesque images used by Mansfield in this story.

Conclusion In conclusion, it would seem that both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf were profoundly repulsed by the patriarchal tyranny that they perceived as dominating the socio-cultural milieu and, in response, undertook to wrestle strenuously with some of the ideological pillars on which this male-oriented society rested. Their attack focuses on maternity, inasmuch as it represents an instrument of female control and categorization at the hands of the patriarchal oligarchy. Thus, through strikingly similar images and allusions, the two writers dramatically subvert the conventionally sacred vision of maternity. Both move towards articulating an extreme of subversive distortion and the grotesque. These are complementary within the paradigm of the carnival, and constitute the boldest expression of the radical non-conformism that indissolubly linked them in their ‘same job’ of defiance against social conformity.

Notes 1 2

Mansfield (1981: 750). Woolf, along with James Joyce, is usually considered the greatest modernist

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innovator, although many critics argue that Mansfield was the truly innovative figure, who, in their opinion, led Woolf to her literary modernism. See Alpers (1980: 247, 251), Tomalin (1987: 198), Morrow (1993: 154), Gay (1994: 291–2), Moran (1996: 14) and Smith (1999: 3). Later Woolf states that: ‘If she’d lived, she’d have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more gifted – that wd. only have become more & more apparent’ (Bell 1980: 317). For a more detailed analysis of the rivalry between Oliver and Manresa in Woolf’s novel see Evelyn Haller (1992: 96–7) and Penny Gay (1994: 290). In the present study, the carnivalesque and the grotesque interact inasmuch as they are strategies of subversion and propose a destruction of conventional values with a view to a renewed and unrestricted order. Such is the case of the patently disagreeable Hirst or the secretly homosexual Terence in Woolf’s Voyage Out, or Mansfield’s male protagonists in ‘A Married Man’s Story’ or ‘A Birthday’. Eric Sigg discusses Eliot’s belief in human agency as a means of social and/or personal regeneration. For Eliot, the educated class played an important role in the achievement of social regeneration, exclusively achieved through their own self-sacrifice, along with their steady, long-life effort, aimed towards that desired transformation of society. In this regard, a working motto for Eliot, as retrieved by Sigg, was ‘all that begins in humility, ends in pride’ (Sigg 1994:15). Extract from a letter received from the London and National Society for Women’s Service, 1938 [quoted in Three Guineas, Woolf 1996a: 283, n.1]. All quotations from Mansfield’s stories are taken from this edition (Mansfield 1981), and hereafter will be referenced only by page numbers in the text.

Bibliography Alpers, A. (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984a), La Cultura Popular en la Edad Media y en el Renacimiento. El Contexto de François Rabelais, J. Forcat and C. Conroy (trans.). Madrid: Alianza. –(1984b), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, C. Emerson (trans.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bell, A. O. (ed.) (1980 [1978]), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press. Gay, P. (1994), ‘Bastards from the bush: Virginia Woolf and her antipodean relations’, in M. Hussey and V. Neverow (eds), pp. 289–95. Haller, E. (1992), ‘Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield: or, the case of the déclassé wild child’, in M. Hussey and V. Neverow (eds), pp. 96–104. Hussey, M. and Neverow, V. (eds) (1992), Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives. Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. New York: Pace University Press. Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. L. S. Roudiez (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Lee, H. (1996), Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage. Mansfield, K. (1981 [1945]), The Collected Stories. London: Penguin Books. Murry, J. M. (ed.) (1954), The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (definitive edition). London: Constable.

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Moran, P. L. (1996), Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia. Morrow, P. D. (1993), Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ross, C. (2003), ‘Redefinitions of abjection in contemporary performances of the female body’, in F. S. Connelly (ed.), Modern Art and the Grotesque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 281–90. Sigg, E. (1994), ‘T. S. Eliot as a product of America’, in A. D. Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 14–30. Smith, A. (1999), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stallybrass, P. and White, A. (1986), The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen. Tomalin, C. (1987), Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. London: Viking. Trautmann, J. (ed.) (2003), Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf. London: Pimlico. Woolf, L. (1962), Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–39. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1998 [1937]), The Years, J. Johnson (ed.). London: Penguin. –(1996a [1938]), Three Guineas, H. Lee (ed.). London: Vintage. –(1996b [1927]), To the Lighthouse. London: Penguin.

Chapter 12

‘On the Subject of Maleness’: The Different Worlds of Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence Susan Reid

Introduction While the personal friction between Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence has preoccupied their biographers, their intertextual sparring has been examined by only a few critics, whose observations range from claims that Lawrence based some of his characters on Mansfield – most notably Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love (1921) – to assertions that some of Mansfield’s stories responded directly to Lawrence’s ideas about love and sex (Cushman 1975: 35; Siegel 1991: 103). And yet, although they are frequently depicted as adversaries in what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe as a modernist ‘battle of the sexes’ conducted on the printed page (Gilbert and Gubar 1988: xii), a closer examination of their writings suggests that the battle-lines are less clearly drawn. Indeed, both writers were often ambivalent in their attitudes towards gendered identity; sharing what Mansfield identified as a ‘persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent’ (Scott 1997, 2: 204), while constantly questioning the basis of such selfhood. Concerned with the rejection of socially-constructed gender roles, their fictions frequently critique the separate spheres of women and men imposed by the obligations of child-bearing and economic endeavour. Paradoxically, though, they were then confronted with biological difference as an alternative basis for a gendered self or, failing that, with the possible collapse of any basis for gender identity. Their writings reflect this paradox, alternately insisting on the separate worlds of men and women or lapsing into androgyny. These tensions, inherent within notions of gender difference, have subsequently been interrogated by feminist thinkers; in particular by those who uphold Simone de Beauvoir’s condemnation of biological determinism as constraining to women and, more recently, by others who support Luce Irigaray’s defence of biological difference between the sexes as part of the basis for a separate female subjectivity and for balanced relationships between men and women. Irigaray’s idea of ‘a culture of two subjects’ (Irigaray 2004: vii) seems particularly relevant to the writings of Lawrence and Mansfield, since they repeatedly demonstrate that, without the recognition of some basis of difference, men and women

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remain doomed to the mutual misunderstanding and hostility of separate worlds. This situation is exemplified by the emotionally isolated protagonists of stories such as Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (1921), and Lawrence’s ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ (1914). But while Mansfield’s characters remain trapped, Lawrence often depicts the possibility of release from isolation – through the recognition of otherness. And so, when the younger daughter of the vicar experiences an awakening of the senses following her apprehension of otherness in her male lover, this enables both of them to be reborn into a new self and to discover a mutual bliss, which seems to anticipate ‘the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date’ envisaged by Irigaray’s ‘ethics of sexual difference’ (1993: 7).1 While Lawrence intended to overturn a Cartesian division of mind and body as the basis of Western thinking about identity and gendered roles, a concern which would also seem to inform Mansfield’s desire for a ‘continuous’ self (Scott 1997, 2: 204), Mansfield was more cautious in her claims for the physical aspects of being and for physical relationships. Nonetheless, some of the most powerful moments in the stories of both writers turn on an epiphanic revelation about the male body, which suggests at least the potential for release from the socially-constructed versions of self that both writers resisted through their recognition of different worlds. While Mansfield underlines the difficulties of breaking free of conventional gender roles in stories such as ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, Lawrence is often bolder in his depictions of alternatives, as in ‘Daughters of the Vicar’. However, as this chapter will argue, there are remarkable similarities in their perception and presentation of gender issues. Beginning, then, by addressing Mansfield’s oft-quoted objections to Lawrence’s writing ‘on the subject of maleness’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 330), this study compares their attitudes to sex and gender and the underlying question of essence, before comparing pairs of their stories, particularly the ‘Daughters’ stories which might be considered complementary in their attitudes towards gendered identity, as well as in their titles.

The essence of being male This enquiry begins with Mansfield’s letter to Sydney and Violet Schiff, dated 3 December 1921, in which she expresses her exasperation with Lawrence: ‘What did you think of Lawrence in the Dial? This last month isn’t anything like so good; in fact, when he gets on the subject of maleness I lose all patience’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 330). Lawrence’s article in the Dial is part of what became a longer piece of travel writing, entitled ‘Sea and Sardinia’ (1921), which serves as a reminder that he, like Mansfield, was a restless traveller, who spent much of his adult life far from home in order to search beyond the veil of domesticated social roles. Environment is an important factor in both writers’ representations of character (Rønning 1989: 130), but for Lawrence especially, new places helped him to shed conventional social identities. From

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the beginning of ‘Sea and Sardinia’, Lawrence emphasizes the necessity to travel ‘outside the circuit of civilization’ (Lawrence 1997: 3) and his own travels in the 1920s enabled him to explore new possibilities for masculinity, culminating in his creation of a male cult of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl in his Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926). In the Dial article, however, it is Lawrence’s celebration of the ‘manly’ virtues of the Sardinian peasant that would probably have irritated Mansfield: How fascinating it is, after the soft Italians, to see these limbs in their close knee-breeches, so definite, so manly, with the old fierceness in them still. One realizes, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christlike heroes and woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality-mongrels. The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone. (Lawrence 1921: 584–5) Mansfield frequently objected to the physicality of such types in Lawrence’s fiction, for example describing the characters in his novel The Lost Girl (1920) as ‘animals on the prowl. [. . .] They submit to the physical response and for the rest go veiled – blind – faceless – mindless. This is the doctrine of mindlessness’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 138). This is a type she specifically denounces in her depiction of Stanley Burnell in ‘Prelude’ (1918), who, in his wife’s imagination turns from being a beloved dog ‘that I’m so fond of in the daytime’ (Mansfield 2001: 53) into a sexual predator at night; a role also exemplified by Harry Kember in ‘At the Bay’ (1922), with his ‘bright, blind, terrifying smile’ (Mansfield 2001: 244) and attempted seduction of Beryl.2 If this is what lies behind the veil of domesticity, it seems that Mansfield wants none of it. Her nearest ideal of manhood, it is often argued, is Jonathan Trout, Stanley’s antithesis in ‘At the Bay’ (see, e.g. Boddy 1989: 90). Jonathan falls far short of conventional ideals of masculinity, dreaming of escape from the ‘jail’ of office and family life to the ‘vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored’, which by his own admission he is too weak to enter: ‘Weak . . . weak. No stamina. No anchor. No guiding principle, let us call it’ (pp. 236–7). However, while Jonathan appears to belong to a less ‘indomitable’ (Lawrence 1921: 585), more cerebral variation of manhood than Lawrence’s Sardinian peasant and exemplar of his so-called ‘dark men’, in some ways he resembles another type of Lawrentian masculinity represented by Rupert Birkin in Women in Love or Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) – both of whom are social outsiders, drawn away from civilization and from conventional manly virtues. If Jonathan seems more comfortable with Linda Burnell in the female world of the story than in a traditional male role, then he particularly resembles Mellors, who admits to Connie Chatterley that: ‘They used to say I had too much of the woman in me’ (Lawrence 2002: 276). Moreover, his yearning towards a ‘vast dangerous garden’ – a coded reference to repressed Victorian sexuality – suggests that Jonathan may only seem to lack the vitality and controversial sexuality of Lawrentian types. Indeed, the tension Jonathan experiences between

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domesticated and untamed manhood is shared by Lawrence’s male outsiders, who often betray an impulse towards the domestic; we are given occasional glimpses of the gamekeeper ensconced in his cosy cottage and his dream of a world in which people ‘sing and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on, and embroider their own emblems’ (p. 300). Mansfield, however, like many subsequent critics, perceived Lawrence to be obsessed by sex, famously writing from their shared retreat in Cornwall in 1916: ‘I shall never see sex in trees, sex in the running brooks, sex in stones & sex in everything’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 261). Accordingly, Kate Fullbrook asserts that: Katherine Mansfield’s interest in identity follows a different course. While questions of gender were of importance to her [. . .] she refused to privilege sexuality as the unifying principle of consciousness. [. . .] Instead, she conceived of self as multiple, shifting, non-consecutive, without essence, and perhaps unknowable. (Fullbrook 1986: 16–7) While it can be, and indeed has been, argued that for Lawrence, too, the self is ‘multiple, shifting, non-consecutive’ and ‘unknowable’, the controversial question of ‘essence’ remains, and has exasperated his feminist critics from Simone de Beauvoir onwards. As defined by de Beauvoir, essentialism is based on biological difference which ‘imprisons [woman] in her sex’, whereby ‘she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female’ (de Beauvoir 1988: 35). She cites Lawrence as a case study in reinforcing bourgeois values of female subordination, offering ‘once more the ideal of the “true woman” [. . .] that is, the woman who unreservedly accepts being defined as the Other’ (1988: 254). And yet for Lawrence, as he argues in the Dial, the fact that in ‘[t]he defiant, splendid split between the sexes’, each remains ‘the deadly unknown to the other’ (Lawrence 1921: 585–6), seems intended to establish an ethical relationship of difference. Rather than consigning woman to the negative role of other, of the ‘second sex’ as perceived by de Beauvoir, he gestures instead towards what Luce Irigaray might describe as ‘a culture of two subjects’ (Irigaray 2004: vii), which she deems necessary because: Man and woman cannot meet together in a same world, unless one of them renounces their own subjectivity. The encounter between them requires the existence of two different worlds in which they could enter into relation or into communication after recognizing that they are irreducible the one to the other. (Irigaray 2004: xii) The impossibility of man and woman meeting ‘in a same world’ and the requirement for separate worlds in order to enter into a balanced and mutually fulfilling relationship, immediately resonates with the emotional isolation of separate male and female spheres so often depicted in Mansfield’s stories, not least the

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Burnell stories discussed above. Moreover, Fullbrook also discerns in Mansfield an ‘attraction to a mystic notion of an essential self, discoverable only in moments of spiritual inspiration’, which she attributes to Mansfield’s ‘legacy from the symbolists’ (Fullbrook 1986: 17). However, this attraction contradicts her seeming refusal to privilege sexuality and would also seem to position Mansfield closer to Lawrence than is usually acknowledged and more perhaps than Mansfield herself might have recognized or liked. A closer examination of Lawrence’s position, therefore, might yield further insights into the complexity of Mansfield’s notion of an essential self. Not surprisingly, given her primary interest in Mansfield, Fullbrook, like many critics, overlooks the contradictions within Lawrence’s work. His writing is often divided between the frightening acknowledgement of a void at the centre of existence and a desire for an essence of being – it is at once modernist in outlook while yet simultaneously reaching back to the Victorian preoccupation with the Cartesian mind-body split and the desire to recover a lost wholeness. Again, this seems strikingly similar to Mansfield’s position in a story such as ‘Bliss’, in which Bertha Young yearns to rediscover her body (‘Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?’ [p. 92]) and experiences a tenuous awakening of desire for her husband (and ambiguously for Miss Fulton). Bertha experiences a moment of harmony symbolized by the pear tree, which finally only reinforces her isolation, because for Mansfield, as for Lawrence, essential being or selfhood would seem to represent a way of differing from the other, a way of establishing boundaries and separateness, both between and within sexes since, as Irigaray explains, there can be ‘no love of other without love of same’ (Irigaray 1993: 89). The problem then becomes a matter of establishing a relationship with the other, without dissolving the boundaries of self, which is difficult because, once again in Irigaray’s terms, this requires a ‘third term’ or ‘a relation to the divine, to death, to the social, to the cosmic’ (1993: 12). Such a relation preoccupies both writers, as encapsulated in Fullbrook’s identification of ‘a mystic notion of an essential self, discoverable only in moments of spiritual inspiration’ (Fullbrook 1986: 17). For all Lawrence’s apparent privileging of ‘sexuality as the unifying principle of consciousness’ (Fullbrook 1986: 17) and his frequent positioning of sexual union as the point of departure for moments of spiritual inspiration, this is not necessarily the case. For example, in his Study of Thomas Hardy (written in 1914, but published posthumously in 1936), Lawrence claims that: What we call the Truth is, in actual experience, that momentary state in living [when] the union between the male and female is consummated. This consummation may also be physical, between the male body and the female body. But it may be only spiritual, between the male and female spirit. (Lawrence 1985: 72) Lawrence’s impulse towards the purely spiritual is often overlooked by critics who, like Mansfield, focus instead on his apparent ‘doctrine of mindlessness’

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(O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 138). However, in Lawrence’s novels, physical consummation often leads to a transcendence of the body, which seems to undermine his apparent insistence on an essential self. Leo Bersani’s psychoanalytical study of ‘Lawrentian stillness’ detects ‘a profound tendency to get rid of sex altogether’, which jeopardizes plot and character and poses the threat that ‘Nearly identical versions of being would finally give way to a single version of being’ (Bersani 1969: 169, 179). The most notable example of this tendency is Rupert Birkin, who protests that: ‘[o]n the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half’ (Lawrence 1987: 199). Birkin’s ideal relationship is more abstract, more celestial: two stars in balance or two angels. For all Lawrence’s insistence on the body, and on healing the perceived rift between mind and body, his writing often threatens to leave the body behind and with it any basis for locating gender difference. Thus, the tension which Fullbrook perceives in Mansfield’s contradictory desires for the existence of both an essential self and its transcendence into something ‘shifting’ and ‘unknowable’ can also be identified in Lawrence’s writing. Sydney Janet Kaplan has discerned parallels between Mansfield’s thinking on gender and Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy, in which his image of the flower suggests the fusion of male and female, an image which Kaplan relates to ‘Mansfield’s use of the aloe in “Prelude”, where it seems to connote both the masculine and the feminine’ (Kaplan 1991: 107). Lawrence makes a similar claim that: ‘except in infinity, everything of life is male or female, distinct. But the consciousness, that is of both: and the flower that is of both’ (Lawrence 1985: 55). Elsewhere in the Study, however, Lawrence is less distinct, writing instead that: ‘everything that is, is either male or female or both’ (1985: 57), or that: ‘every man comprises male and female in his being, the male always struggling for predominance’ (1985: 94). The Study thus reveals a tendency towards androgyny more usually attributed to Mansfield and, above all, to Woolf, who also uses a flower image to suggest that her male and female characters in The Waves (1931) are united in a single consciousness. In Lawrence’s fiction, this tendency towards androgyny is generally overlooked, despite the recurrent difficulty his male characters experience in establishing a separate masculine identity, as they are often overwhelmed by the desire to merge with the female. This is a particular feature of his early novels, culminating in the extreme emotional dependence of Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow (1915), who, contrary to Birkin’s ideal of two angels, insists on a Platonic notion that ‘a married couple makes one angel’ (Lawrence 1989: 129). However, the inability of the male to exist independently of the female is also a feature of Mansfield’s stories, exemplified by the husband in ‘The Stranger’ (Dunbar 1997: 133), who wonders: ‘Would he always have this craving – this pang like hunger, somehow, to make Janey so much part of him that there wasn’t any of her to escape?’ (p. 361). The androgynous impulses in their work reinforce the impression that the two writers share an ambivalent attitude towards gender difference, an aspect of their writing which also aligns them with other modernist writers, whose

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work pointedly demonstrates a tendency to destabilize gender boundaries, as Joyce and Woolf scholars have recognized. Both Lawrence and Mansfield implicitly recognize that there may be no centre to human existence; that, in Nietzsche’s terms, ‘there is no “being” behind doing, acting, becoming’ (Nietzsche 1998: 29). Indeed, Mansfield directly explores this idea when she writes of life as performance or of the necessity of maintaining a mask, both as a person and a writer: ‘don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath – As terrible as you like – but a mask’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 318). While this is an uncomfortable truth that both their male and female characters confront, it seems particularly threatening for the men. Lawrence’s male characters in particular, from Cyril Beardsall in his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), to the lover of Lady Chatterley in his last, experience a persistent desire to evacuate the body, to become pure spirit and thereby to transcend gender. This would seem to be a legacy of Cartesian thought, which privileges the mind over the body, a seemingly male preoccupation according to feminist theorists such as de Beauvoir, who perceives that the Lawrentian male ‘is intent upon aims and ends, he incarnates transcendence; woman is absorbed in her sentiment, she is all inwardness; she is dedicated to immanence’ (de Beauvoir 1988: 249). However, a similar tendency may be perceived in female artists like Mansfield who, in Fullbrook’s terms, strive for ‘Art [. . .] beyond sex or gender’ (Fullbrook 1986: 24). Mansfield’s men are also often characterized by emptiness, notably the husband in ‘The Escape’, who ‘felt himself lying there, a hollow man’ (p. 201). In her stories, the body is often represented as a prison, an enclosure, or a ‘cage’ (p. 433), as in ‘A Married Man’s Story’, although here, as in ‘The Escape’, there is also a suggestion of transcendence. In the latter story, in particular, there is a moment of pure harmony with the external world: ‘Deep, deep, he sank into the silence, staring at the tree and waiting for the voice that came floating, falling, until he felt himself enfolded’ (p. 202). In Lawrence’s novels, too, the male characters often experience physical bliss only to transcend the body altogether, merging into a universal oneness which threatens to submerge individuality and difference. And so, Rupert Birkin finds that through physical union with Ursula Brangwen in Women in Love, ‘when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be, we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one’. Significantly, however, despite the emphasis on ‘oneness’ in this scene, Lawrence also introduces the concept of a ‘third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new One, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality’ (Lawrence 1987: 369). Lawrence thus seems to suggest Irigaray’s idea of a ‘third term’, which mediates between the separate worlds of man and woman: ‘What we need is to discover how two can be made which one day could become a one in that third which is love’ (Irigaray 1993: 12, 57). The body, consequently, becomes a particularly fraught notion for both writers. For Lawrence, who insisted on gender difference but rejected social

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construction as its basis, the body becomes a resistant focus for establishing a relationship of difference between men and women, while Mansfield, who also rejects a socially-constructed version of being, often seems to resist the physical and thereby to dissolve any basis for difference. As Naomi Schor observes in her study of the arguments for and against ‘essential difference’: One of the more awkward moments in Beauvoir comes in the closing pages of The Second Sex when she seeks to persuade the reader that woman’s liberation will not signify a total loss of difference between men and women, for the entire weight of what precedes militates against theorizing a positive difference, indeed against grounding difference since both the body and the social have both been disqualified as sites of any meaningful sexual difference. (Schor 1994: 48–9) But, for both writers, the body may sometimes act as a catalyst for a new way of living, the conduit for an awakening into a different world. Harry T. Moore has observed that many of Lawrence’s tales are versions of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ myth and a similar argument might be constructed for Mansfield, who wrote that: ‘The World to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 304). And while Keith Cushman observes that Mansfield’s stories are more likely to tell of a thwarted awakening (Cushman 1975: 35), this is also the outcome in Lawrence’s ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ and ‘The Princess’. Furthermore, the Sleeping Beauty figure in their stories may be male as well as female, which again suggests a blurring of gender roles. Several pivotal moments in their stories turn on a realization of the body, particularly the male body, as the following discussion of specific stories will explore.

The male body and the recognition of difference Lawrence’s story ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ – acclaimed by F. R. Leavis as a ‘masterpiece’, which also affirms Lawrence’s concern ‘with the relations between individual human beings’ rather than any preoccupation with sex (Leavis 1955: 257) – provides a useful point of departure for a consideration of both the problems and potential of an attempt to re-unite mind and body. The eponymous daughters, Mary and Louisa, are brought up by restrictive parents, who instil into Mary a strong devotion to duty which denies the life of the body. She marries a repulsive but intellectual man and rejoices that: ‘She had got rid of her body. She had sold a lower thing, her body, for a higher thing, her freedom from material things’ (Lawrence 1955: 56). Louisa, on the other hand, follows the way of the senses and seeks out a physical relationship. The parallels with George Eliot’s novels are unmistakable, as the sisters enact the conflict between mind and body experienced by Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860) or Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871–1872), demonstrating that Lawrence, like Mansfield, is preoccupied with nineteenth-century notions of a soul-matter

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split. However, the catalyst for Louisa’s awakening is her vision of Alfred’s male body: ‘There was this living centre. She had reached some goal in this beautiful, clear, male body’ (Lawrence 1955: 73). Importantly, too, this is a mutual awakening – ‘they began to wake up again as if from a long sleep’ – which creates ‘something’ between them: ‘They stood together in silence whilst the thing moved away a little’ (1955: 82). As in the scene from Women in Love discussed above, Lawrence’s lovers appear to achieve something similar to Luce Irigaray’s ‘third term’ (Irigaray 1993: 12) between two subjects, which balances self and other, inner and outer worlds, an equilibrium which seems more difficult for Mansfield’s characters. Lawrence’s story thus forms something of a contrast with Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (1921), in which the two daughters, Constantia and Josephine, have been repressed for so long by their dominant father that they can no longer remember how to experience desire. Indeed, Carol Siegel attributes Mansfield’s tale as a response to Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl (Siegel 1991: 103), which she had criticized as ‘the doctrine of mindlessness’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 138). Although Constantia starts to wonder ‘what was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to?’, she has ‘forgotten what it was . . .’, and her sister has ‘forgotten too’ (pp. 284, 285). Their enclosure and passivity is such that no-one can reach them and they cannot reach out; like Jonathan Trout in ‘At the Bay’, they lack the will to escape. In Lawrence’s stories, on the other hand, even in the most desperate circumstances, his characters are often able to effect change and to enter into different worlds. In ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’ (1922), for example, the hopeless situation following the death of her father precipitates Bertha’s attempt at suicide. Hauled out of a pond by a neighbourly doctor, she throws herself upon the saviour who has implicitly assumed some responsibility for her being and asks: ‘Do you love me then?’ (Lawrence 1955: 452). In this strange episode, Dr Fergusson, who had previously recognized her difference – ‘so intent and remote, it was like looking into another world’ (1955: 448) – is transformed by his recognition of her otherness: ‘He had crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind had shrivelled and become void’ (1955: 455). Mansfield’s characters, by contrast, seem so locked into their own isolation that they are often incapable of recognizing other worlds. As the husband in Mansfield’s ‘A Married Man’s Story’ reflects: ‘I did not consciously turn away from the world of human beings; I had never known it’ (Mansfield 2001: 437). As Gilbert and Gubar observe, however, there are moments when the women in Mansfield’s stories seem ‘mysteriously empowered by meditations on dead men’, for example: ‘After Laura in “The Garden-Party” has viewed the body of a young workman who “lay . . . fast asleep . . . wonderful, beautiful,” she exclaims to her brother that the experience “was simply marvellous”’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1988: 95). But as Laura tries to explain – ‘“Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life –”’ (Mansfield 2001: 261) – the potential for transformation seems to fall away through gaps in the syntax, as it does in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’. This episode in ‘The Garden Party’ (1921) takes Laura outside her

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social milieu, offering her an opportunity to recognize difference, but she seems to retreat back into the aesthetics of her own world, the enclosed world of her mother. A completely different note is struck in Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1914), which also deals with the death of a working man. When Elizabeth Bates confronts the dead body of her husband, she suddenly realizes how she had denied his otherness in life: ‘She looked at his naked body and was ashamed, as if she had denied it [. . .]. She had denied him what he was – she saw it now’ (Lawrence 1995: 198). This contrast deepens if we also consider Mansfield’s unfinished story, ‘Widowed’, in which the corpse of the husband is returned to the family home, but the widow ‘refrained from looking’ and ‘there was nothing to be seen of Jimmie; the sheet was pulled right over . . .’ (Mansfield 2001: 510). In Lawrence’s stories, then, it is sometimes possible to negotiate the gulf between individuals via the recognition of otherness, which has a physical, if not necessarily a sexual dimension. Mansfield’s characters, on the other hand, demonstrate time and again that they are isolated in their own world, where there can be no meeting with the other. A rare exception is the brief meeting of minds between Linda Burnell and Jonathan Trout in ‘At the Bay’, prompted not so much by Jonathan’s words as by Linda’s awareness of him physically: Linda was surprised. She had no idea that he was grey. And yet, as he stood up beside her and sighed and stretched, she saw him, for the first time, not resolute, not gallant, not careless, but touched already with age. (p. 239) Accordingly, it is sometimes asserted that Mansfield is a more pessimistic writer. For instance Carol Siegel maintains that: Although Lawrence and Mansfield both seem to believe in essential differences between men and women, their concepts of the structuring of these differences is not the same. To Lawrence, female and male are complementary, interdependent [. . .]. To Mansfield, sexual contact cannot involve real intercourse because she sees gender difference as opposition. (Siegel 1991: 111–2) However, Siegel seems not to grasp that both writers are ambiguous about difference because of the difficulty of grounding difference: if not in the social or the physical, where, if it all, does difference reside? In the stories of both writers, there are moments when the boundaries of the self dissolve, moments of transcendence, of forgetting self in order to discover self through the recognition of otherness. The impersonal element, which was so important to both writers, requires a transcendence of the human as a necessary part of the human condition and thus, for both Mansfield and Lawrence, epiphanies open into the universal.

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Conclusion In conclusion, then, both writers demonstrate the need to recognize the separate world of the other as the basis of relationship. This emerges particularly strongly in Mansfield’s non-fictional writing, for example, in her declaration to John Middleton Murry on 10 November 1922, towards the end of her life, that: ‘You are you. I am I. We can only lead our own lives together’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 320). In their acceptance of the subjectivity of the other, both Lawrence and Mansfield seem to anticipate Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference, which ‘requires the existence of two different worlds’ (Irigaray 2004: xii). Both writers were deeply conflicted between their desires to establish a separate self and to transcend the boundaries of self, although Mansfield, even more than Lawrence perhaps, emphasizes the importance of coming into self before approaching the other. But as Irigaray acknowledges: ‘The most difficult, and still unaccomplished, task lies in the way of differing from another human’ (2004: xi). It should hardly be surprising, then, that neither Lawrence nor Mansfield depict more than a few moments when such difference is accomplished. While their personal differences were never reconciled, in her final months Mansfield felt ‘nearer L. [Lawrence] than anyone else. All these last months I have thought as he does about many things’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 225), and Lawrence, on hearing of her death, admitted he ‘always knew a bond in my heart. Feel a fear where the bond is broken now’ (Boulton 1997: 251). But perhaps some of the difficulty between them, ‘on the subject of maleness’, was due to a third person in their relationship, a male who caused rivalry and disappointment (Kinkead-Weekes 1999: 126–7). Lawrence seems to have acknowledged this when he suggested that Katherine accompany him without her husband, John Middleton Murry, to his imaginary utopian other world of ‘Rananim’: We must find some way, next year, of getting out of the world; and if Jack doesn’t want to go, let him stay and write for the Nation. If we are self-sufficient, a few of us, what do we want with the world? (Boulton and Robertson 1984: 307) Although Mansfield was consistently sceptical about the practicalities of Lawrence’s plan, his words were strangely prophetic of her final years, mostly spent apart from Murry and away from the rest of the world, particularly in her last months at the Gurdjieff Institute. Her penultimate letter to Murry tells of a fervent desire ‘to be REAL’ and to find out ‘Who I am’, matters which cannot ‘be settled by the head alone’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 340–1) and which therefore brought her very close to Lawrence, in a shared quest for an essence of self.

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Notes 1

2

In a later work, Irigaray explains that ‘[s]exuate [or sexual] difference does not only result from biological or social elements but from another way of entering into relation with oneself, with the world, with the other(s)’ (Irigaray 2004: ix). Here she can be seen to complicate the rather reductive accusations of essentialism levelled at her by her critics, while usefully multiplying the notion of the ‘other’ beyond the male / female divide into a multiplicity of different worlds. All subsequent quotations from Mansfield’s stories are from this edition and only page numbers will be referenced in the text (Mansfield 2001).

Bibliography De Beauvoir, S. (1988 [1949]), The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (trans. and ed.). London: Picador. Bersani, L. (1969), A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Boddy, G. (1989), ‘Frau Brechenmacher and Stanley Burnell: Some background discussion on the treatment of the roles of men and women in the writing of Katherine Mansfield’, in P. Michel and M. Dupuis (eds), The Fine Instrument: Essays on Katherine Mansfield. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, pp. 80–94. Boulton, J. and Robertson, A. (eds) (1984), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 3, 1916–1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boulton, J. (ed.) (1997), The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cushman, K. (1975), ‘D. H. Lawrence at work: “The shadow in the rose garden”’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 8, 32–46. Donaldson, G. and Kalnins, M. (eds) (1999), D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dunbar, P. (1997), Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Fullbrook, K. (1986), Katherine Mansfield. Brighton: The Harvester Press. Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (1988), No Man’s Land. The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vol. 1: The War of the Words. Irigaray, L. (1993), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, C. Burke and G. Gill (trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. –(2004), Key Writings. London: Continuum. Kaplan, S. J. (1991), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Kinkead-Weekes, M. (1999), ‘Rage against the Murrys: “Inexplicable” or “psychopathic”?’, in G. Donaldson and M. Kalnins, pp. 116–34. Lawrence, D. H. (1921), ‘Sea and Sardinia. II Cagliari’, The Dial, LXXI, 583–92. –(1955), The Complete Short Stories, 3 vols. London: Heinemann, vol. 2. –(1985 [1936]). Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, B. Steele (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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–(1987 [1921]), Women in Love, D. Farmer, L. Vasey and J. Worthen (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –(1989 [1915]), The Rainbow, M. Kinkead-Weekes (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –(1995 [1914]), The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, J. Worthen (ed.). London: Penguin. –(1997 [1921]), ‘Sea and Sardinia’, in D. H. Lawrence and Italy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 1–205. –(2002 [1928]), Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, M. Squires (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leavis, F. R. (1955), D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mansfield, K. (2001), The Collected Stories. London: Penguin. Moore, H. and Roberts W. (1966), D. H. Lawrence and His World. New York: Viking. Nietzsche, F. (1998 [1887]), On the Genealogy of Morals, D. Smith (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 1 (1984), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008). Rønning, A. H. (1989), ‘Katherine Mansfield, British or New Zealander – The influence of setting on narrative structure and theme’, in P. Michel and M. Dupuis (eds), The Fine Instrument: Essays on Katherine Mansfield. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, pp. 126–33. Schor, N. (1994), The Essential Difference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Siegel, C. (1991), Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Scott, M. (ed.) (1997), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols. Canterbury and Wellington, NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, vol. 2.

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Chapter 13

The Mansfield Legacy Kathleen Jones

In almost every biography of Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry is portrayed as ‘the man who made Mansfield miserable’, and identified with the accused in Katherine’s poem ‘The New Husband’: Who’s your man to leave you be Ill and cold in a far country Who’s the husband – who’s the stone Could leave a child like you alone. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1993: 134) Like Ted Hughes, Murry has been vilified for his behaviour towards his wife – even accused of hastening her death by his neglect of her. But although Murry often behaved badly and failed to meet Mansfield’s needs on many occasions, this accusation takes no account of Mansfield’s demanding, unreasonable and sometimes inexcusable conduct towards him. There was bad behaviour and infidelity on both sides. The miracle is that they remained together at all. Murry is also seen as the self-regarding figure who was accused of grinding Mansfield’s bones to make his bread, by publishing work she had found substandard in order to make a living – publishing her ‘waste-paper basket’ in D. H. Lawrence’s words (Roberts et al. 1997: 503) – and laying bare her private life by putting her journals and letters before a tabloid-minded public. But this argument fails to address the fact that without Murry’s actions we would have lost some of Mansfield’s best writing, and she might well have been forgotten. And although he did make money from her copyrights, he inherited them legitimately, and his own income as one of the leading literary figures of his time always dwarfed hers. It is interesting that Iris Murdoch’s husband has recently come in for the same kind of criticism. The Murrys’ relationship has been looked at, for far too long, only from Mansfield’s point of view and with far too little understanding of the kind of person that Murry was. He kept a journal for much of his life and these notebooks, as well as his letters, are now readily available at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Together with his autobiography, Between Two Worlds, and the memoirs of his children, they give a very clear picture of Mansfield’s

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husband, his life with her, his handling of her legacy and his relationships with other women. They make very sad, though compulsive, reading. It is time for a re-assessment of a much more vulnerable individual than is usually portrayed. A new re-evaluation is also of critical importance, because Murry was an emotional and intuitive critic. His relationship with Mansfield, and his memory of it, affected his editorial judgement in the presentation and preservation of Mansfield’s work for posterity. It is also important to know what was happening in Murry’s life at particular times, because his emotional states of mind influenced his decisions and formed the background to the editing and publication process. He created a myth, and it is a myth we are still struggling with today. Most readers – and students – are familiar, not with the scholarly editions of her work that have been produced in the last 20 or 30 years, but with Murry’s editions of her stories, journals and letters – still in print – and most biographies have been written with reference to them. So what kind of a person was Murry when he met Mansfield? He was the son of a lower ranking civil servant, who also had an evening job working for the Penny Bank in order to earn enough money to fund the middle-class lifestyle he aspired to. Mr Murry senior was, unfortunately, a strict disciplinarian with a streak of brutality. His fun-loving wife was cowed into submission very early in their marriage, and the young Murry – who shared his mother’s gentle disposition – lived in fear of his father. On one occasion when he was grudgingly allowed to have a dog, he came home to find the puppy, badly beaten, cowering outside in the street. It refused to come home with him and he always believed that his father was to blame for its injuries. Murry told D. H. Lawrence, when they were discussing childhood influences, that he believed his father’s attitude towards him had blunted something essential in his emotional makeup that was irreparable. When Murry looked back on his childhood it was so awful that he could not even write about it in the first person: There was no sunlight in his memory at all [. . .] There was only gloom and grit and sordidness [. . .] Why had there been no relief from it all, not one lovely, calm, sunlit thing to look back upon? Why had he worked with terror in his soul at his grammar school when he had taken his scholarship? Why had he never a moment’s enjoyment of his own cleverness, even? Terror and darkness, terror and darkness. (Murry 1922: 227) Murry could best be described as emotionally illiterate. He simply did not know how to relate to anyone or empathize with their feelings, and was – as he confessed himself – needy and ‘love-seeking’. Ida Baker described him perfectly: ‘He needed the absorbed devotion of a patient, loving soul to stand by and help him resolve the tangled problems of his undeveloped personality, which struggled with a far more mature intellectual self’ (Baker ATL-MS-0035). His childlike quality was one of the things that attracted Mansfield to him – they often played at being children together.

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Books were always Murry’s escape mechanism. By the age of three, he had taught himself to read. His father insisted on enrolling him at primary school while other children of his age were still in the nursery. Murry discovered that he could win his father’s approval by academic achievement and from then on he was groomed for scholarship – winning a coveted place at Christ’s Hospital and then at Brasenose College, Oxford. But there was no room in his life for anything but study, and it set up a pattern that would recur throughout his life – whenever things became difficult or painful, Murry would shut the door of his room and bury his head in a book. By the time Murry met Mansfield, he had discovered a life beyond Oxford. During the summer vacation, he had a tutoring job that took him to France. He went to Paris and found the café life of the Left Bank. He met painters and novelists, philosophers and poets. He had his first love affair – with a girl he later abandoned, just as Dick Harmon abandons Mouse in ‘Je ne parle pas français’. After Murry’s sheltered adolescence, it was all a revelation. When he got back to Oxford he could not settle; he started an avant-garde little magazine called Rhythm – and Mansfield sent a story to it. They were introduced at Murry’s request by a mutual friend, at a dinner to celebrate publication of her first collection In a German Pension. Murry’s vulnerable persona, the sense that he was a damaged person, was always deeply attractive to women. Mansfield always said that she was the man in the relationship – he was the woman, which worked very well while she was healthy, but when she needed him, he was not there for her. He could not be – he simply did not have the resources. That was the tragedy of the situation. The inequalities in their relationship, and subsequently Mansfield’s failing health, meant that they spent a great deal of time apart. It became a relationship built on letters – a fiction created from absence and longing. Both Murry and Mansfield created a fictional ‘other’ who was everything they wanted, which was only sustainable while they were apart. When they were together they were continually confronted by how far the real Mansfield and the real Murry fell short of their expectations. After Mansfield died, only the fictional ‘other’ remained and Murry, in an agony of grief and guilt, made it his life’s work to keep her alive, not only in his mind, but also in ours. This obsession had a negative effect on his life. Mansfield was, like the fictional Rebecca, the third person in all his subsequent relationships, and it had tragic consequences for his wives and his children. But it is also important for us because what happened in the three marriages that followed Mansfield’s death informs our view of Murry’s relationship with her, as well as the editorial decisions he made about her work. When Mansfield died, the Copyright Act was only a decade old and its influence on an author’s estate relatively untried. The new Act gave Murry control of Mansfield’s published work for 50 years, but her unpublished work – by far the largest part of the gift – became Murry’s absolute property in perpetuity. There were at least 47 notebooks, as well as boxes of loose paper, a trunk full of unfinished manuscripts, and hundreds and hundreds of letters, all in the most illegible handwriting.

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Mansfield left ambiguous instructions for the disposition of her possessions. An early letter dated 9 September 1919, gives instructions about what to do if she dies: Any money I have is yours, of course. I expect there will be enough to bury me. I don’t want to be cremated and I don’t want a tombstone or anything like that. If it’s possible to choose a quiet place – please do. You know how I hate noise [. . .] All my MSS I simply leave to you [. . .] That’s all. But don’t let anybody mourn me. It can’t be helped. I think you ought to marry again and have children. If you do give your little girl the pearl ring. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1987: 355–6) Then there is the letter written on 7 August 1922, when death seemed much more imminent: All my manuscripts I leave entirely to you to do what you like with. Go through them one day, dear love, and destroy all you do not use. Please destroy all letters you do not wish to keep & all papers. You know my love of tidiness. Have a clean sweep, Bogey, and leave all fair – will you? [. . .] My small pearl ring – the ‘daisy’ one – I should like to wear [. . .] Monies of course are all yours. In fact, my dearest dear, I leave everything to you. (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 234–5) But Murry did not get this letter until after the funeral and the small pearl ring was disposed of in accordance with the previous instruction. In the will drawn up on 14 August 1922 at a hotel in Switzerland, Mansfield was much more particular: I give and bequeath unto John Middleton Murry all the money that I possess in my various banking accounts and any monies that may become due to me in connection with the sale of my books. All manuscripts notebooks papers letters I leave to John M. Murry likewise I should like him to publish as little as possible and to tear up and burn as much as possible he will understand that I desire to leave as few traces of my camping ground as possible. (Mansfield ATL-MS-7224–06) In leaving the whole of her literary estate to her husband without any clear legal provisos, Mansfield was probably unaware of the implications of this bequest – she had discussed her will with Ida Baker and did not receive any specialist legal advice. She trusted Murry’s editorial judgement and it seems certain that she did not intend him to publish her private papers: ‘destroy all letters you do not wish to keep & all papers’; ‘tear up and burn as much as possible’. Mansfield was a private, secretive person, and did not approve of the soul being laid bare to public gaze. Only a little earlier, on 22 May 1921, she had written to Ottoline Morrell about Chekhov’s journals, that it was

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‘unfair to hawk a man’s buttons and pins after he is dead’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 234). But what should Murry have done? This was a dilemma also confronted by Kafka’s executor, Max Brod, and more recently by the estate of Philip Larkin. We mourn the loss of Larkin’s diaries, burned by his friends, and we are very glad that Max Brod ignored Kafka’s instructions. Mansfield’s journals contain some of her best writing. She had once proposed to Methuen that she write a journal for publication. She often published little fragments from her notebooks in the New Age. Her instructions were in direct contradiction of Murry’s instincts as an editor and his emotions as a husband. Murry does not appear to have considered the sub-text of Mansfield’s will at all. Within a fortnight of her death, he was already planning an ambitious publishing schedule with Michael Sadleir of Constable. A volume of her uncollected stories, called The Dove’s Nest, was to be brought out immediately, followed a year later by limited editions of her poems and the re-publication of Prelude. In the next 12 months, a collection of her notebook entries called ‘journal and sketches’ was planned, to be followed by two volumes of her letters and another volume of uncollected short stories. Murry wanted to bring all these out while Mansfield’s reputation was ‘fresh’ in the public mind, but it took him until 1951 to finally transcribe and publish these selections. In the 18 months after Mansfield’s death, Murry also included some of her work in every issue of the Adelphi magazine – an influential literary periodical that he was editing. This brought Mansfield a good deal of publicity, but it also brought a lot of criticism and ridicule, since many of the readers had known a very different Mansfield to the perfumed ‘pad of rose-scented cotton wool’, in Lytton Strachey’s words (cited in Drabble 1973: 135), that Murry was portraying. The story of her early death from such a romantic and literary disease was also disseminated. In novels, plays and operas, there was already a cult of the young, female, tubercular victim. Mansfield had been scathing when she was alive about Murry being glad that she had tuberculosis rather than any other fatal disease, because of its literary pedigree. Murry did not set out deliberately to place her among those who – like the Brontës – had died young from ‘consumption’, but he was writing a book on Keats and the temptation to draw parallels was too strong to be resisted. All this editorial work was taking place against the backdrop of Murry’s second marriage. A year after Mansfield’s death, Murry married Violet le Maistre, a 22-year-old girl who also had ambitions as a writer. Violet was very young for her age – the product of a sheltered childhood – but she had read about Murry’s relationship with Mansfield and her tragic death in the pages of the Adelphi, and been impressed by the romance of it. In an uncanny echo of his meeting with Mansfield, Murry met Violet when she submitted some stories for the magazine. He liked her work, told her that she had promise and suggested that she read Chekhov. A few weeks later he invited her to dinner, ostensibly to meet his younger brother Richard, and it was then that she confessed to Murry that she had already fallen in love with him. Always susceptible, Murry succumbed to her

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adoration and gave her Mansfield’s pearl ring to symbolize their engagement. He had a strange belief that in some way Mansfield was being given back to him, writing on 19 May, 1924, the eve of his wedding: ‘Katherine’s incarnation was accomplished – not in Violet, not in me, but in both of us together, and in the child that will be born’ (Murry 1924, D & N, PCL). This delusion was to have tragic repercussions for the family. Their first home, in Dorset, was bought with royalties from Mansfield’s books. The furniture too was Mansfield’s, even down to the table napkins embroidered with her initials. Murry was in his study every day transcribing Mansfield’s notebooks and letters. Not surprisingly, Violet was unhappy. Her response to Murry’s obsession with his dead wife was to participate in his fantasy, subdue her own personality and make herself as much like her dead rival as possible. Murry’s brother Richard afterwards believed that Violet had been ‘possessed’ by Mansfield. Violet cut her hair, wrote short stories in the Chekhov style, and modelled herself on Mansfield so completely that even her handwriting seemed identical. When a baby daughter was born, this blurring of identities was so complete that Murry wrote ‘I [. . .] felt, quite simply, that Violet’s daughter was Katherine’s daughter, and I named her accordingly’ (Murry 1947, D & N, ATLMSX-4162). The young Katherine Middleton Murry was believed by both parents to be a kind of spiritual re-incarnation of her namesake. Rejected at birth by her mother, Murry’s daughter wrote later with some anger, that ‘the myth and the mysterious presence of Katherine Mansfield, determined the very landscape of the soul with which I was born’ (Murry 1986: 26). Shortly after the birth a year later of her second child, christened John Middleton Murry, Violet was diagnosed with tuberculosis by Dr James Young, the same doctor who had attended the dying Mansfield. Violet, on being informed she had advanced tuberculosis, told Murry in a hysterical outburst: ‘I’m so glad! I wanted you to love me as much as you loved Katherine – and how could you, without this?’ (Murry 1947, D & N, ATL-MSX-4162). At Dr Young’s insistence, Violet spent months in sanatoriums, without any visible effect. Doctors told Murry that Violet’s mental state almost certainly contributed to her demise. Murry’s diary entries concentrate mainly on his own sufferings. From the first diagnosis, he refused to believe that Violet would recover, fearing that he could not cope with the pain he knew he would have to endure, having already been through it with Mansfield. It was a cruel fate, to lose two wives within such a short time from the same cause. And Murry simply did not have the emotional resources to deal with it. Friends – Max and Dorothy Plowman – observing the negative effect that he had on Violet’s spirits, took her to live with them in London for the last painful weeks. Murry, who had been in an agony of sexual frustration, almost immediately went to bed with his house-keeper, Betty, who introduced him to the power of uninhibited sex for the first time in his life. Then – just as he had done with Mansfield when she was desperately ill – in a fit of guilt and contrition, Murry wrote in his diary that he felt obliged to confess his infidelity to Violet. The children had seen them together in the garden and he was afraid that

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one of them might say something to Violet on their next visit. Murry was too emotionally confused to step back and see the situation clearly. He remembered his affairs with Elizabeth Bibesco and Dorothy Brett while Mansfield had been in the final stages of tuberculosis. Mansfield had demanded truth, however brutal, but Violet was not Mansfield. Afterwards he never admitted whether he did or did not tell her. Violet was observed sobbing over a letter from her husband the day before she died. The letter he sent to her was destroyed by him immediately, though Violet’s friends firmly believed that it had contained his confession. Dorothy Plowman even went so far as to accuse him of killing her. Betty believed herself to be pregnant in the same week that Violet died and they were married six weeks after the funeral. It is difficult to understand how such an intelligent, and what others describe as ‘a gentle and caring man’, could have been so blind or so cruel. Murry’s third wife, Betty Cockbayne, was an uneducated farmer’s daughter given to outbursts of uncontrollable rage. Her family warned Murry what to expect, but he went ahead with the wedding. His marriage was as violent, destructive and punishing as his critics could have wished. It was during this period that Murry wrote to Stanford University in America about a young academic and librarian called Ruth Mantz, who had published a critical bibliography of Mansfield’s work. Would it be possible for her to help him with the transcription and editing of Mansfield’s papers? Murry was ploughing through her notebooks with the intention of publishing another selection, to be called The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield. Stanford obliged with a Travelling Fellowship. Having done so much work on Mansfield already, Mantz was very keen to write her biography, and Murry agreed. This – the first biography of Mansfield – was supposed to be a collaboration, and Murry’s name appeared on the book spine with hers; most of the work was Mantz’s, although the editorial hand was Murry’s. The blue pencil that he had wielded as Chief Censor at the War Office in 1918 was visible only to those who knew the wider story. Mantz initially found Murry charming and very helpful, willing to be teased about his editorial oversights – he said, ‘I always had a very bad memory’ – and to admit that his relationship with Mansfield had often been difficult. He told her that the only time they had been totally happy was at the Villa Pauline in Bandol. Otherwise Mantz recorded that ‘our conversations and working sessions were devoted only to the deciphering of KM’s handwriting, to collating and assessing the facts then available, and of course to agreeing on the data I had assembled during my research in New Zealand’. Mantz had already identified what she regarded as ‘the Mansfield Myth’, which she dated from the publication of The Dove’s Nest in 1923. In his introduction to this volume of stories, Murry had ‘developed the theme of “purity” at the expense of other qualities that had endeared Katherine to her few real friends’ (Mantz 1996: 129). Anne Estelle Rice remembered Mansfield getting drunk at a party and doing impressions of Hollywood stars, one of which involved sliding down an ironing board assisted by D. H. Lawrence. Virginia Woolf remembered a woman who ‘dressed like a tart and behaved like a bitch’ (Bell 1972: 37); a caustic, self-mocking woman who

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could recount wicked anecdotes about acquaintances that had Leonard Woolf weeping with laughter; a woman who despised maudlin sentiment and was not afraid to admit she had sometimes lived outside the tram-lines of respectable convention and who claimed to have gone ‘every sort of hog since she was seventeen’ (Nicolson 1976: 159). Despite her reservations, Mantz remained objective about Murry’s editorial intentions, maintaining that overall he ‘actually served Katherine well’. His motives for steeping ‘KM’s Journal in pathos and pain’ were admirable, since he wanted to catch the sympathy and imagination of a wider readership and thus bring her public acclaim, years before she might otherwise have been discovered. For readers and critics of the Journal, the pathos aroused a sympathetic and compassionate response. Mantz claimed that the ‘Mansfield Myth’ as portrayed in the Journal, attracted readers like a magnet (Mantz 1996: 129). But Mantz was critical of his arrangement of material from Mansfield’s notebooks. Murry’s editing of the Journal gave a false impression of Mansfield as a person and as a writer: ‘Certain of the diary jottings no doubt give an insight into the mood and manner of the workings of KM’s mind, but arranged as they are in the Journal the result is biographically inaccurate’. When Mantz challenged him about this, ‘Murry’s reaction was immediate and left no doubt that he knew what he was doing. He recoiled and said angrily, “There is no ‘myth’!”’ (Mantz 1996: 129). Murry’s introduction sets the tone of the biography – Mansfield’s work and life is discussed in the context of Blake, Keats and Jesus – his major preoccupations since her death. There is a reverence – a playing down of the grittier episodes in her life – Mansfield’s whole existence as a woman; her mistakes are admitted only to provide a dark contrast so that her art can be seen to blaze more fiercely. Her suffering too is seen as an ordeal that the great artist must transcend in order to purify her art. Mantz is permitted no independent view – Murry insists that the opinions expressed in the book are his. In the last chapter, a brief narrative of Mansfield’s life just after she met him is taken word for word from Murry’s account of it in his autobiography, Between Two Worlds. The book could have been very different. Mantz researched Mansfield’s life in New Zealand meticulously, interviewing family members (Mansfield’s father was still alive), and friends Murry had never met, and she quoted extensively from Mansfield’s juvenile journals, including excerpts from her early novel ‘Juliet’, charting her progress as a developing writer in a way that illuminates Mansfield’s later work. But then she talked to Ida Baker, S. S. Koteliansky, A. R. Orage, Beatrice Campbell and Anne Estelle Rice, and began to uncover a great deal that Murry had either not known or had wanted to suppress: the details of her love affair with Garnet Trowell and subsequent pregnancy, as well as her mysterious pregnancy when living at Clovelly Mansions with Ida. Mantz also talked to others and later told another biographer (Meyers 2000: 312) that Mansfield had become pregnant by Floryan Sobienowski, although there was a misunderstanding about the date, which Mantz allowed to pass without further comment.

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Worst of all, Mantz found a medical report from a Dr Bouchage, which referred to Dr Sorapure’s diagnosis and mentioned the word gonorrhoea. Murry was horrified by Mantz’s discoveries – particularly the latter – not just for the sake of Mansfield’s reputation, but partly because he knew (and some of his friends knew) that he had had gonorrhoea just before they met. Murry did not believe that he had infected her – he preferred to think she had caught the disease during her affair with Francis Carco, or with someone else before they met. There was a great deal that could not be said. A compromise was reached. Mantz would write about Mansfield’s youth, stopping the narrative at the point where she and Murry met and began to live together. The image of a woman ‘pure and withouten stain’ was still one that he wanted to project to the world. The biography ended when their relationship began, with the explanation that: ‘The rest of Katherine Mansfield’s life – a bare eleven years – is written by her own hand in her Journal and her Letters’. Anything else, asserts the final page of the biography, in one of the most blatant of literary lies, ‘will add little that is essential to the picture of herself’ (Mantz and Murry 1933: 349). Readers would have to wait until Alpers’s first biography in the 1950s before the full story of Mansfield’s life could be told. Whether there was any disagreement between Murry and Mantz was carefully concealed. But it would have been an unequal struggle. She was young and had not yet established her reputation: he was one of the leading ‘men of letters’ in the English-speaking world. He also had possession of most of the relevant manuscript material. Murry quite literally ‘owned’ Mansfield’s reputation. Mantz went back to America and continued to write her account of the second part of Mansfield’s life, called ‘The Garsington Gate’, presumably hoping to be able to publish it at some point in the future. She never did. Murry rarely mentioned her. And when his friend F. A. Lea wrote Murry’s biography in 1959, shortly after his death, although Lea talks in detail about the writing of Between Two Worlds and this particular period in Murry’s life, he never mentions either Mantz or the biography. Nor is it listed among Murry’s publications (both individual and collaborative) in the bibliography. In contrast to Murry’s relationship with his housekeeper (now his wife) Betty, Mansfield seemed even more of an icon; their marriage even more of an ideal. Violet had been erased from Murry’s life and he made no attempt to keep her memory alive for their children. Her unscattered ashes remained in a brown paper parcel in Murry’s office cupboard. The children later recalled that Mansfield was infinitely more real to them than their own mother. Murry was still writing in his journal of Mansfield’s ownership of them: The difference between the life with my children that I dreamed of before they were born and the reality, is a masterpiece of irony. To think of the little pictures Katherine drew in the margin of one of her letters of ‘our children’, and then to think of the last ten years! And yet, in spite of all, my children are ‘our children’. (Murry 1941, D & N, ATL-MSX-4155)

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Murry’s third wife Betty subjected ‘Katherine’s children’ and their father to a barrage of abuse. She was jealous of the ghost of Mansfield, and Murry’s retreat into his study to commune with the dead drove her to create scenes that left witnesses shaken and appalled. The young Katherine and John were physically and emotionally abused by a stepmother who seemed to hate them. They also had to stand by and watch her battering the father they adored, who was powerless to stop her or to protect his children. It was a repeat of Murry’s childhood experiences and in the dark recesses of his psyche it was also a punishment he felt he deserved. During this period, Murry was working on an account of his childhood and the early years of his relationship with Mansfield, which he published in 1935 and dedicated to Betty. He called it Between Two Worlds, taking its apt title from Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’: ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born’. He also continued with the transcription of Mansfield’s journals and letters and his decision to publish many of the latter was regarded either as an act of great courage or as an exercise in masochism. His friends and family decided that he was scourging himself for his behaviour towards Mansfield when she was alive. At the time he wrote: I still shrink from any [journal entries or letters] in which she is disillusioned in me – no matter how familiar they are. I still go sick in the belly with apprehension of them [. . .] even though I know that in a day or two it will all be over, as though it had not been. God! How terrible are one’s failures in love. They haunt the secretest places of one’s soul for years and years – for ever. (Murry 1948, D & N, ATL-MSX-4155) In 1941, Murry left Betty to live with the woman who would eventually become his fourth wife – Mary Gamble. Many found their relationship incomprehensible, since Mary was approaching 40, extremely plain and rather shy. But they defied convention to live together for 15 years before they were legally able to marry. Like Mansfield, Mary was a strong, independent woman with her own income. Like Mansfield, she also had a female companion (Ruth Baker) whose presence Murry had to tolerate. As with Mansfield and Ida, this friendship was also ambiguous, and Mary wrote of the ‘unkind and unimaginative remarks’ (Murry 1959: 103) she had suffered when she and Ruth began to live together. Close friends, as well as Murry’s children, believed Mary to be bi-sexual. There were many other links to the past in their relationship. Mansfield’s doctor, who had also attended Violet, was Mary’s doctor. Max Plowman, the friend who had taken Violet in just before her death, was also one of Mary’s best friends. Far from being jealous of Mansfield and Murry’s devotion to her, Mary was actually grateful for Mansfield’s influence on him. She wrote: Last night I came across these words of K.M. ‘At the end Truth is the only thing worth having; it is more thrilling than love, more joyful, and more

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passionate’. And as I read them I remembered how much John and I owed to Katherine. [. . .] Oh Katherine, I never knew you, but so often I feel eternal gratitude for what you were. (Murry 1959: 37) Mansfield’s writings became Mary’s bible in her struggle to understand her husband. Murry claimed to have finally achieved domestic happiness with Mary. He wrote in a letter that, ‘Never [. . .] has any woman given me such total and entire happiness as you have done’. He credited this not to his fourth wife’s absolute devotion to his needs but to the influence of his first wives: ‘I can see Katherine and Violet lifting their eyebrows at one another when I write this: but they do it in a laughing, gay kind of way; and they quite agree. They say to one another: “But we taught him how to love”’ (Murry 1959: 65). Murry repeatedly compared his marriage to Mary to his relationship with Mansfield. On their wedding day in 1954, he made a long entry in his diary comparing the two, very different events: The memory of my wedding to Katherine is a memory of the anguish, not the happiness of love. Yet today it seems that my wedding day is overflowing with happiness [. . .] it is extraordinary. Yet I firmly believe this happiness has grown out of that anguish. (Murry 1959: 167) The second volume of Mansfield’s letters was brought out in 1951, and in 1954 Murry published what he called the ‘Definitive’ edition of Mansfield’s journal; a conflation of the Journal and the Scrapbook, in which he was forced to admit the chaotic nature of the material they were extracted from. But it also marked the end of his monopoly of Mansfield material. A young biographer called Antony Alpers had been researching Mansfield’s life since 1947, and in 1953 published his own biography of Mansfield. Although much was still concealed, Alpers had gone wider and dug deeper than anyone else and Murry knew it was only a matter of time before a great many things were made public. Alpers’s experience of Murry was that of most others: he was charming, polite, appeared helpful, answered difficult questions and seemed to allow unlimited access to Mansfield’s material. But this was a mask that enabled Murry to conceal a great deal. On 6 August 1948, Alpers wrote of his exasperation and contempt in a letter to Mansfield’s friend, J. D. Fergusson: I hope to have the guts when the time comes to say what I think about him. Meanwhile there is some awkwardness. He is quite naturally distant, knowing that the job takes me into the presence of many people who dislike him. I wish you were here to tell me how to handle it. (Alpers 1948, MS-604-FA)

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Alpers never gained access at this time to Mansfield’s unpublished letters and journals – the excuse being that Murry was in the process of preparing his own editions; nor did Alpers ever see Murry’s own letters and diaries, and he was never told anything more than he asked directly. Alpers had to wait until Murry’s death to write a more complete biography. It was to his wife, Mary, that Murry handed down the task of keeping the Mansfield torch alight when he died in 1957. By then, his former life with Mansfield had begun to seem more and more like an idyll. He had even re-visited the villa they had occupied in Bandol, accompanied by Mary, a few months before his final heart attack. Shortly before he died, he wrote: I ask myself: “have I kept faith with my darling?” And I feel deep in my soul a great joy, because I know that I have. And then I feel strangely that I am in touch with her [. . .] it is as though she gazed into my soul. (Murry 1953, D & N, ATL-MSX-4160) He had also begun to look back on what he himself had achieved, admitting that he had ‘moments of resentment and a sense of injustice’ that his own work was no longer read, while Mansfield’s was more popular than ever. His friends questioned whether he should have spent so much time promoting Mansfield’s reputation at the expense of his own writing. Just before he died he acknowledged that ‘I have made of Love all of my religion [. . .] To search for [. . .] the reconciliation of Heart, Mind, Emotion and Intellect – I have sacrificed whatever talent for art I possessed’ (Murry 1953, D & N, ATL-MSX-4160). Murry was still talking about Mansfield as he lay in his hospital bed. Katherine, he said, would understand that he was ready for death. She would have given him permission to go when others – particularly Mary – were begging him not to leave. That Mansfield’s presence should have been so strongly felt at his bedside is not surprising, given that he had spent 13 turbulent years with the ‘living’ Mansfield, and 34 with the legend he had created. It was his most enduring personal relationship.

Bibliography Bell, Q. (1972), Virginia Woolf, 2 vols. London: Hogarth Press, vol. 2. Drabble, M. (1973), ‘The new woman of the twenties: Fifty years on’, Harpers and Queen, June 1973, p. 135. Mantz, R. E. (1996), ‘Katherine Mansfield: Tormentor and tormented’, in J. Pilditch (ed.), The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Mantz, R. E. and Murry, J. M. (1933), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. London: Constable. Meyers, J. (2000), ‘The quest for Katherine Mansfield’, World and I, 15 Jan., 312. Murry, J. M. (1922), The Things We Are. London: Constable.

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–(1935), Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography of John Middleton Murry. London: Jonathan Cape. Murry, K. M. (1986), Beloved Quixote. London: Souvenir Press. Murry, M. M. (1959), To Keep Faith. London: Constable. Nicolson, N. (ed.) (1975–1982), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, vol. 2 (1984). O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 2 (1987), vol. 3 (1993), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008). Roberts, W., Boulton, J. T., and Mansfield, E. (eds) (1997), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 4 (1987).

Manuscript references ATL – Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand. FA – Fergusson Archive, Perth, United Kingdom PCL – Private Collection D & N – Diaries and Notebooks of John Middleton Murry Alpers, A., Autograph Letter, 6 August 1948, MS-604, FA. Baker, I., ‘Katherine Mansfield; Memoirs of L.M.’, MS-GROUP-0035, ATL. Mansfield, K., Last Will and Testament, MS-PAPERS-7224–06, ATL. Murry, J. M., Diaries and Notebooks, 1924, PCL. –Diaries and Notebooks, 1941, MS-GROUP-0411, ATL-MSX-4155. –Diaries and Notebooks, 1947, MS-GROUP-0411, ATL-MSX-4162. –Diaries and Notebooks, 1948, MS-GROUP-0411, ATL-MSX-4155. –Diaries and Notebooks, 1953, MS-GROUP-0411, ATL-MSX-4160.

Chapter 14

‘My Many Selves’: A Reassessment of Katherine Mansfield’s Journal Valérie Baisnée

Katherine Mansfield’s Journal has been surrounded by controversy ever since its first publication in 1927, four years after her death. As a number of critics have noted, the attention paid to the Journal, as well as her letters, has overshadowed the rest of Mansfield’s legacy.1 Jan Pilditch, for example, notes: The publication of the Journal and the Letters had made public a large body of intimate detail about Mansfield which distracted critics from Mansfield’s work for some thirty years after her death, and led them to an engagement with sensitivity, passion, courage, and other like qualities. In the first decade after her death the Mansfield legend had become a cult. (Pilditch 1987: xxv) The Journal became a screen that obscured readings of Mansfield’s short stories and later filtered them, encouraging critics to read them as confessional narratives. There is therefore a tendency in contemporary readings of Mansfield to leave her personal writings to one side. Feminist critics in particular are unwilling to focus on the life and personal experience of women writers, since this practice would seem to reinforce the prejudice that all ‘female’ writings are confessional. Kate Fullbrook, however, does not dismiss Mansfield’s personal writings, but rather stresses their importance: Mansfield’s Journal and Letters contain a coherent account of the ideas on which her fictional practice is based, and in focusing on this material other aspects of the writing necessarily have been neglected. But it would be unjust to her writing to leave its extraordinary variousness unnoticed. (Fullbrook 1986: 29) One way to overcome the difficulty of reading these autobiographies as confessional is to attempt a reassessment of Mansfield’s Journal within the tradition of diary-writing, which established itself as a literary genre at the end of the nineteenth century, and which is now the subject of considerable critical attention. Focusing on the notion of genre enables new inquiries, makes use of different

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critical tools, and brings to the fore previously neglected aspects of the text. Thus, we can wonder whether the notebooks are a place where Mansfield freely experiments with writing or whether they belong to a genre with its own implicit ‘laws’ about self-writing. For as Jacques Derrida remarks: ‘As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind’ (Derrida 1980: 203). This study will examine the particularities of Mansfield’s diary practice, and analyze her response and resistance to new discourses about the self that came about with the renewed interest in self-writing at the turn of the century. It is now well-established that the three ‘journals’ of Mansfield edited by John Middleton Murry (in 1927, 1939 and 1954) are all biographical fictions; they are artefacts assembled from the fragments of several notebooks. The Journal of Katherine Mansfield does not exist. Rather, her diary practice is spread over 46 notebooks of different sizes and formats, as well as on loose sheets of paper. However, as Gillian Boddy acknowledges: Murry himself took pains to point out that the Journal and The Scrapbook were not two carefully kept books, as such, but had been compiled by him from a number of sources such as diaries, notebooks, story outlines, letters, jottings and fragments of all kinds. (Boddy 1988: 101) And the fate of Mansfield’s notebooks after her death is not unusual. It is rare for any edition of a private journal to be absolutely faithful to the original: as Philippe Lejeune notes, almost no diary has been published as it was written (Lejeune 1998: 332). This is often a matter of practicality, since an editor is always compelled to make certain choices about the material in order to make it readable. In Mansfield’s case, since the editor also happened to be her husband, the selection of material was censored as well. In its neutrality and completeness, Margaret Scott’s two-volume edition of Mansfield’s notebooks, published in 1997, most faithfully reproduces the heterogeneous and discontinuous nature of the diaries, and highlights aspects of Mansfield’s practice that were obscured by the previous editions. Even before engaging with the text, the photographic representation of the 46 notebooks on the cover reminds us how different a diary is from a published book. Each diary is a unique object. The medium of the diary, therefore, becomes part of the message, as it evinces the writer’s conception of, and commitment to, lifewriting. Lejeune claims that most diarists use note- or exercise books to compose their diaries, and views this as a way for writers to smooth their disjointed and irregular writing (Lejeune 2005: 74). Whatever the gaps or omissions, a bound copy will facilitate reading by gathering together the writer’s fragmented thoughts. Thus, the choice of exercise books as opposed to loose pages reveals a greater commitment to diary-keeping, and a desire to keep it ‘reader-friendly’. In Mansfield’s case, the extreme variety of the medium, from loose pages to

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exercise books, reveals a conflict between a desire for continuity and orderliness on the one hand, and for the intrusion of disorder or discontinuity on the other. In addition, a form of compulsive writing also surfaces on the pages, with notes written on the backs of pages, upside down or in the margins, as the Scott edition faithfully indicates. According to Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach to language, this suggests that Mansfield introduces the semiotic into the symbolic (Kristeva 1974: 22). Her handwriting, which Boddy describes as ‘at times neat, controlled, at others large, erratic, scrawling across the page in feverish haste’ (Boddy 1988: 101), also suggests the presence of strongly repressed desires. This impression is further enhanced by her use of foreign languages, especially French, a sign both of her homelessness in language and a desire to escape from the stereotypes of diary-writing. Simonet-Tenant argues that: Choosing to include foreign languages, adopting a certain flow of writing that can be either wildly uncontrolled or restrained, and using secret codes, allow the diarist to inscribe her flamboyant individuality and an intentional private language within the regular daily writing marked by stereotypes. (Simonet-Tenant 2004: 38, my translation) The way that time is recorded is also symptomatic of the tension between the submission to the ‘Law’ of the genre and transgression against it. Time is indeed essential to the definition of the journal. Ever since diary-writing was recognized as a genre, critics have attempted to define the essential features that make a text a diary. While there is no consensus about all its characteristics, most critics agree that dating is essential to diary practice. Dissatisfied with most definitions, Lejeune opts for a minimal description, according to which the diary is nothing but ‘a series of dated traces’ (Lejeune 2005: 80). Yet, as Simons notes, many of Mansfield’s entries were originally undated, and only later dated by Murry: Many of the dates we find in the final published version of the Journal are in fact not Katherine’s but Murry’s, based on his careful detective work and his attempt to construct some sort of order out of the fragments and uncollated memoranda she left behind. (Simons 1990: 150) On the other hand, Mansfield sometimes used pre-dated commercial diaries, for example in 1915 and 1922. In these, the entries are short and repetitive, as if the format of the diary somewhat constricted her writing. The recording of historical time, it seems, was not always essential for Mansfield. It was crucial, on the contrary, to capture those ‘glimpses of life’ that existed almost outside recorded time. She found them in the rain or in the waves, for example. In an undated fragment she writes: And yet one has these ‘glimpses’ before which all that one ever has written . . . all that one ever has read, pales . . . The waves, as I drove home this

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afternoon – and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell . . . What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment [. . .] the whole life of the soul is contained. (Scott 1997, 2: 209) But on a practical level, rootlessness and displacement may also explain her casualness with historical time. Mansfield moved a great deal during her lifetime, and real or imagined places rather than time left a mark on her life-writing. Writing from France, New Zealand or Britain meant more for her than following a calendar. Mansfield’s notebooks thus reveal an equivocal attitude towards the rituals of diary-keeping, as if the regularity of writing a diary somehow limits the scope of her art. As Maurice Blanchot observes, the apparent freedom of diary writing hides a submission to the calendar. The regularity it offers may be reassuring, but it also takes the edge off the writing act: Writing one’s diary is like putting oneself under the protection of ordinary days, and putting writing under this protection as well. It is also protecting oneself against writing by submitting to it as a pleasant regularity that one promises oneself not to disturb. (Blanchot 1959: 224, my translation) Yet, keeping a diary regularly was a discipline that Mansfield tried to adhere to. At the start of her 1915 diary, a calendar diary, she writes: ‘What a vile little diary. But I am determined to keep it this year’ (Scott 1997, 2: 1). She is aware of her own carelessness in keeping a diary, which implies that she wished to conform to the dominant models of journal-writing even if she was not able to do so. On 19 May 1919, she notes: ‘I wish I had some idea of how old this notebook is’ (p. 154). The reasons for Mansfield’s ambivalent and sometimes careless attitude to diary-keeping can also be linked to new developments in the genre, for perceptions of the diary among both readers and writers changed at the turn of the twentieth century as new models of self-writing started to emerge. The diary arrived as a literary genre in the nineteenth century when journals began to be published and read for themselves. In France, the main writers of the time released their journals during the second half of the nineteenth century. The years 1887–1888 represent a turning point in the history of the genre, with the publication of the journals of Constant and Stendhal, and the personal writings of Baudelaire. These established diaries in their modern form.2 For Pierre Pachet: a new period began; from that time, the diary established itself as a literary genre, making it impossible for a writer to keep one in total innocence. Writers had to know that if their work were to have any value, a diary would be expected. (Pachet 2001: 178, my translation)

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From then on, writers wavered between the fear of discovery, of intrusion into their privacy, and the new possibilities opened up by the publication of their diaries. The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, a young Russian-French artist who died of tuberculosis at the age of 24 in 1884, exemplifies the double bind in which diarists are caught. Her preface addresses the apparent contradiction between the new popularity of the diary and the private nature of the document: If I die young, I will allow my Diary to be published. That will, at least, be interesting. But since I mention publicity, the idea that my Diary will be read might have spoiled, even destroyed the merit of such a book? Well, no, it hasn’t. First, I wrote it for a long time without thinking of being read, and then, it is only because I hope to be read that I am absolutely sincere. (Bashkirtseff 1887: 3) Bashkirtseff overcomes the contradiction between privacy and publicity by making sincerity the ultimate law of the genre. Telling the ‘truth’ is no longer simply a matter of conscience, but the very justification of a genre’s authenticity. It has become essential for diarists to claim that they are telling the ‘truth’ as they are not only writing for themselves, but also for a future audience. The fact that the diary is now seen as a possible act of communication implies that it should conform to one of the four categories that govern communication as defined by the linguist Paul Grice. One of these, the category of quality, contains a super-maxim: ‘Try to make your contribution one that is true’ (Grice 1989: 27). Bashkirtseff’s Diary was hugely influential, and contributed to the growing popularity of the genre. According to Judy Simons, ‘Bashkirtseff’s diary with its startling, candid tone and its unabashed personal confidences, had caused a literary sensation, and had started something of a vogue for intimate confessional reminiscences among well-bred young women with imaginative aspirations’ (Simons 1990: 1). A young Mansfield read it in 1907, as mentioned in one of her notebooks (Scott 1997, 1: 108). At that time, Mansfield’s diary displays the same emphatic opinions and violent feelings as those of Marie Bashkirtseff. The questions of truth and sincerity, privacy and publicity also arise occasionally, evincing Mansfield’s awareness of this ultimate law of the genre, which nevertheless her own diary practice defies at times. As with most writers during their lifetime, Mansfield does not contemplate the publication of her diary and thus she writes in May 1921: ‘Queer this habit of mine of being garrulous. And I don’t mean that any eye but mine should read this. This is – really private’ (Scott 1997, 2: 280). Yet, she is aware of the tendency for diaries to be published after the death of their authors, and the fear of disclosure puts a rein on her self-writing: ‘If one wasn’t so afraid – why should I be – these aren’t going to be read by Bloomsbury et Cie – I’d say we had a child – a love child & it’s dead’ (p. 182). With death approaching, as Mansfield feels increasingly unwell, she declares putting an end to all confessional writing. In May 1921, she again notes:

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One thing I am determined upon. And that is to leave no sign. There was a time – it is not so long ago – when I should have written all that has happened since I left France. But now I deliberately choose to tell no living soul. I keep silence as Mother kept silence. (p. 280) Mansfield increasingly distrusts self-disclosure. Unlike Bashkirtseff, she resists the idea of the diary as a place for confession, and even challenges the very possibility of sincerity. Mansfield’s most quoted diary entry is the one in which she refers to the multiplicity of her selves: ‘True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well, really, that’s what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves’ (p. 204). This fragment has been seen as reflecting on the modernity, even postmodernity, of her concept of the self. Outlining the development of the modernist concepts of subjectivity, Sydney Janet Kaplan remarks that ‘such issues have become increasingly complicated since their original articulation by the major modernists because of the dominating influence of poststructuralist theory’ (Kaplan 1991: 179). In Mansfield’s case though, the discussion of subjectivity occurs in the context of self-writing, and its first signification is the challenge it poses to the law of the genre of diary-writing. For Mansfield, self-knowledge is not taken for granted, whereas most nineteenth-century diarists consider it as one of the avowed reasons for self-writing. It seems that for Mansfield, as for later theorists of the self, the very act of talking about oneself creates alterity. As Laura Marcus explains, life-writing introduces ‘alterity into the self by the act of objectification which engenders it’ (Marcus 1998: 203). Language provides a model for this split of the self, with the division between the ‘I’ of the enunciation, which refers to nothing but itself, and the ‘I’ of the utterance, which is the object of the discourse. Mansfield’s ‘lies’ (Martinson 2003: 54), therefore, should not be seen as a consequence of duplicity, but as her realization that it is impossible for a subject to coincide with a single image of herself. That is why autobiographical writing is an unreliable source of knowledge about authors: however honest they claim to be, they are merely projecting an image of themselves. Using the metaphor of a hotel owner, Mansfield posits the self as capable of observing its other different selves, but without the key to decode them: ‘there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests’ (Scott 1997, 2: 204). The metaphor of the key suggests that Mansfield sees herself not as a stranger, but as an enigma to herself. In the context of lifewriting, the image is a variation on the traditional topos of life as a role in a play whose text is written by someone unknown to us. And yet, the idea of a multiplicity of selves does not preclude Mansfield’s belief in a unique self. In the paragraph which follows her reference to ‘hundreds of selves’, quoted above, she perceives the true self as something that has been lost, so that the unity of the self can only be apprehended retrospectively, in its historicity (Scott 1997, 2: 204). It is the accumulation of our own experiences that

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creates identity. The self will reveal itself at the end of a long process through a life narrative that will connect the two aspects of identity that Ricœur (1991) calls ‘ipse identity’ and ‘idem identity’. ‘Idem identity’ or sameness is related to the permanent and continuing nature of identity, as in fixed roles and categories; ‘ipse identity’ is the sense of self that we develop about our being. Both identities have a temporal dimension. The dialectics of these two identities define who we are, and they can only be apprehended through a narrative, making identity a narrative concept. Ricœur argues that real life is too elusive to be apprehended by an act of consciousness, so that we need fiction to organize it retrospectively. In this perspective, keeping a diary fails to provide self-knowledge: it is written daily, without any retrospective distance, whereas the truth of the self can reveal itself only in time. Towards the end of her life, as her illness progressed, Mansfield came under the influence of holistic philosophies, which suggested a more traditional conception of the self. She became convinced that curing her body could not be achieved if her mind was not healed as well: ‘Nothing of any worth can come from a disunited being’, she writes in February 1922 (Scott 1997, 2: 322). The entries in her diary at this time even take on religious overtones: ‘I must heal my Self’, she notes for instance (p. 324). The self becomes something sacred, written with a capital S. Here the disunity of the self does not refer to the multiplicity of selves, but to the classical divide between mind and body. However, despite her renewed belief in a unitary self, she still doubts that her diary will help to find it: ‘After supper I must start my journal & keep it day by day – a record of my progress towards spiritual health . . . But can I be honest? If I lie it’s no use’ (p. 252). Using a diary as a means of discovering self-knowledge seems at best inefficient and at worst dangerous. Not only does the genre exercise a constraint on self-expression by submitting the subject to a time-frame and to a certain form of writing, but it also implies a conception of the self to which Mansfield cannot adhere. She realizes that a journal is no more than a fiction. In October 1920, in a letter to Murry, she writes: The Journal – I have absolutely given up. I dare not keep a journal. I should always be trying to tell the truth. As a matter of fact I dare not tell the truth. I feel I must not. The only way to exist is to go on and try and lose oneself – to get as far as possible away from this moment. (Stead 1977: 183) For Mansfield, a diary cannot provide a space of freedom where a woman can pour out emotions that have no other outlet, as described by Simons (1990: 3–4). When she discusses her often difficult relationship with Murry, she realizes that everything she writes can be contradicted and rewritten several times later, without getting any closer to a ‘truth’. In July 1920, for example, she learned that her friend Dorothy Brett had invited Murry to share her rooms at Thurlow Road. The first notebook entry on this subject, written at the time, is

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purely emotional, registering Mansfield’s shock and disgust: ‘How disgustingly indecent. I am simply disgusted to my very soul!’. A few months later, her feelings shift to indifference: ‘I’ve read this over today (8.XII.1920). And now I wouldn’t mind a straw if he went & lived at Thurlow Road’. Six months later, she still has not recovered from the shock, but once again she tries to erase all emotional reaction from her diary: ‘Neither stupid nor strange. We both failed’ (Scott 1997, 2: 221). Similarly, the notebook pages devoted to the memory of her dead brother are sublimated into art. As a number of critics have noted, this tragedy in 1915 is a turning-point in her life as well as in her writing. Her dead brother, Leslie Beauchamp, becomes the invisible companion to her writing, and the recipient of her diary: ‘It is the idea [. . .] that I do not write alone. That every word I write & every place I visit I carry you with me’ (p. 59). Thus Mansfield’s notebooks remain orientated towards her writing as a whole. With art, she escapes from the law of the genre of diary-writing, and loses her fear of disclosure. In terms of work her motto seems to be: ‘But far better write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all’ (p. 337). Personal writing, on the contrary, has to be restrained. She does not hesitate to keep what she calls her ‘bad writing’ for use as a counter-model. Commenting on the draft for a story, ‘The New Baby’, she notes: ‘You ought to keep this my girl, just as a warning to show what an arch-wallower you can be!’ (p. 283). Her ‘huge complaining diaries’, on the other hand, have to be destroyed. With time, Mansfield increasingly writes about her work, and the progress of her tuberculosis that affects it, but it is obvious that her earlier notebooks are also used as her draft book as well. Her first biographer, Antony Alpers, notices that while staying in Cornwall with the Lawrences in 1916, she did not produce any work, and did not write anything in her diary either (Alpers 1982: 200). Creativity and diary-keeping coincide. Her daily experiences, her ‘glimpses’, and at the end of her life, her suffering, are all used to create what she calls ‘a world in this world’ (Scott 1997, 2: 267). Painful sensations, for example, may be useful for characterization. In January 1922, she notes: ‘Lumbago. It is a very queer thing. So sudden, so painful. I must remember it when I write about an old man’ (p. 319). With time, the diary becomes less and less personal, as everything becomes a pretext for symbolization rather than self-discovery. The aesthetization of her life also gives her a sort of symbolic power over her illness. As Lahire explains: Rather than being a means to look back on their lives, notebooks and literary writings are used by writers to transform their experience into written traces, and to take over the world to create their own world with words. As some of them say, it is a way to avoid being ‘under the control of the world,’ and to gain a kind of symbolic power over it. When life gets written, it is somehow reduplicated by language, in other words, translated again, reappropriated and controlled by words. (Lahire 2006: 507, my translation)

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Mansfield’s diary is fundamentally an ‘open’ work: acting as a draft for her short stories, poems, reviews and letters. It is thus in keeping with the programme she assigned for her writing: ‘No novels, no problem stories, nothing that is not simple, open’ (Scott 1997, 2: 33). Following Derrida’s discussion of the notion of genre, we could say that Mansfield’s diaries participate in the genre of the journal without belonging to it. Indeed, Derrida has uncovered a paradox in genre assignation: as soon as the mark of the genre marks off that genre, it marks itself from the genre. If ‘sincerity’ marks a text as belonging to the diary, drawing attention to its ‘sincerity’ means speaking from outside the genre, that is, from another discourse. So genres are always fluid, non-totalizing structures. As such, diaries do not possess fixed characteristics, and are open to experimentation. Yet Mansfield was very negative about her art, even when flattering reviews of her stories started to come out, and she complained regularly that she was not working enough. Simons notes: ‘Ironically, perhaps, some of Mansfield’s most forceful attacks on her own idleness occur at moments of her greatest productivity’ (Simons 1990: 165). As her work developed a religious aspect, she also grew more critical, using terms such as ‘sinful’ or ‘guilt’. She could no longer be the judge of her art on a daily basis. Mansfield had reached the limit of diary-writing. Not only did the diary prove an imperfect tool for self-awareness, it did not help the writer to monitor her progress in her craft.

Conclusion In summary, then, Mansfield’s approach to diary-writing is characterized by ambivalence. The variety of her notebooks and of her ways of recording experience bear witness to the conflicts she experienced between the therapeutic relief that self-disclosure sometimes offers, the fear of public disclosure brought about by the new publicity that the genre attracted in the early twentieth century, and her distrust of self-knowledge. As a result, Mansfield’s diary practice moves from ‘garrulousness’ to silence, to use her own terms (Scott 1997, 2: 280), and between discipline and chaos, preservation and destruction. These tensions, common to diary-writers, are extreme in Mansfield whose ever-changing position on diarywriting reveals wider conflicts between art and life than in most other diaries. Self-writing can illuminate as well as obscure a writer’s life. Diaries are made of gaps, omissions, distortions. In the end, a diary is no more than a text, that is, according to Derrida, a ‘corpus of traces’ (Derrida 2003: 244).

Notes 1 2

See Pilditch (1987), Nathan (1993) and Fullbrook (1986), among others. Ferdinand Brunetière notices the fashion for what he calls ‘Personal Literature’ as early as 1888: ‘For some time, we have been hearing of nothing but Memoirs, Journals and Letters’ (Brunetière 1889: 212, my translation).

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Bibliography Alpers, A. (1982), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Bashkirtseff, M. (1997 [1887]), I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, P. H. and K. Kernberger (trans.). San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. Blanchot, M. (1959), Le livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard. Boddy, G. (1988), Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer. Ringwood, Australia and Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brunetière, F. (1889 [1888]), Questions de critique. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Derrida, J. (1980), ‘The law of genre’, Glyph, 7, 202–32. –(2003), Parages. Paris: Galilée. Fullbrook, K. (1986), Katherine Mansfield. Brighton: Harvester Press. Grice, P. (1989), Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, S. J. (1991), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kristeva, J. (1974), La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lahire, B. (2006), La condition littéraire: La double vie des écrivains. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Lejeune, P. (1998), Les Brouillons de soi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. –(2005), Signes de vie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Marcus, L. (1998), Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Martinson, D. (2003), In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Nathan, R. (1993), Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International. Pachet, P. (1990), Les baromètres de l’âme: naissance du journal intime. Paris: Hatier. Pilditch, J. (ed.) (1987), The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ricœur, P. (1991), Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Scott, M. (ed.) (1997), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols. Canterbury, New Zealand: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates. Stead, C. K. (ed.) (1977), The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection. London: Penguin Books. Simonet-Tenant, F. (2004), Le journal intime: genre littéraire et écriture ordinaire. Paris: Téraèdre. Simons, J. (1990), Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf. London: Macmillan.

Chapter 15

‘Blue with Cold’: Coldness in the Works of Katherine Mansfield1 Janka Kašcˇáková

In June 1909, during her ill-fated stay in Bavaria, Mansfield wrote to Garnet Trowell: ‘Some day when I am asked – “Mother, where was I born,” and I answer – “In Bavaria, dear,” I shall feel again I think this coldness – physical, mental – heart coldness – hand coldness – soul coldness’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 92). From that time on, it seems that ‘this coldness’ of both body and soul became not only an unwelcome companion but a confirmed enemy she was constantly running away from. One facet of this coldness was social in origin, since the attitude of her fellow artists was often marked by prejudice, rejection or malice. Another aspect was the coldness and dampness of the weather, which thwarted her plans, driving her away from her friends, preventing her from leading a normal life by binding her to her bed helpless and frozen, when she wanted to work. Cold, dampness and chilly weather are constant presences in her notebooks and diaries, and among the last words she ever wrote were lists of Russian vocabulary, revealing much about the conditions in the old Prieuré in winter, as well as about the austere way of life she deliberately chose to lead.2 Little, if any, critical attention has been directed towards the important role played by the physical coldness of weather, body, rooms or different objects in Mansfield’s writing, and how she uses coldness in order to comment on human attitudes and conduct. Mansfield is very flexible and resourceful when employing it for her purposes: in many cases, the presence of coldness is so subtle that it can easily be overlooked, while in others it plays a crucial role and creates a powerful background to the whole story. Coldness is virtually always presented as parallel to a lack of affection and understanding from people, sometimes combined with or echoing cruelty, violence and hostility. It suggests, reveals or accentuates the flaws in human character and behaviour, surfacing in the relationships of husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, or in an individual’s attitude towards society or of society’s towards the individual. This study, therefore, explores the use of coldness and its different roles in Mansfield’s short stories. As the themes that physical coldness represents – loneliness, abandonment, hostility or alienation – are central to Mansfield’s writing, it is apparent that this is an important leitmotif in her work.

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One group of stories, in which reference to physical coldness reinforces our understanding of a personal situation, deals with marginal members of society: lonely, unmarried, middle-aged women. Examples of these discussed below are: ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, ‘Miss Brill’, ‘Pictures’, and ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’. Constantia and Josephine in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ have been motherless since childhood and enclosed by their heartless bully of a father in an existence devoid of human warmth and understanding. They are unmarried because, as they themselves realize, they were so isolated that the only men they ever met were clergymen. The closest they ever came to even an illusion of romance was when a young man injudiciously left a message for one of them on a jug of hot water outside their bedroom; but all the writing had evaporated by the time they found it. Their life consists of constant drill and repetition, so much so that when the Colonel finally dies, they are unable to free themselves from his influence and live independent lives. When they finally muster sufficient courage to enter his room to settle his affairs, they also undertake a renewed engagement with his previous relationship with them: ‘It was the coldness which made it so awful. Or the whiteness – which? [. . .] [S]he almost expected a snowflake to fall. Josephine felt a queer tingling in her nose, as if her nose was freezing’ (Mansfield 2002: 237).3 The first two sentences refer not only to the room, but to the overall situation of the sisters’ existence as well. Thus they pose a substantial question: was it the ‘coldness’, that is, the lack of affection and warmth from their father that made ‘it [their life] so awful’? Or was it the ‘whiteness’, that is, the emptiness, friendlessness, or sterility of their lives: the absence of husbands, children, families? The room itself is not warmed by any pleasant memories, not even by relief that the bully is dead. In fact, the Colonel remains everywhere: He was in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and neck-ties, or in the next with his shirts and pyjamas, or in the lowest of all with his suits. He was watching there, hidden away – just behind the door-handle – ready to spring. (p. 238) When the sisters ‘boldly’ and fancifully lock the imaginary monster in the wardrobe nothing happens: ‘Only the room seemed quieter than ever, and bigger flakes of cold air fell on Josephine’s shoulders and knees. She began to shiver’ (pp. 238–9). The quiet and cold seem much worse than their father’s presence when alive, since they suggest the unchangeability of their situation: it is less a problem that their father is in all the drawers and wardrobes of his room, than that he is in every corner of their minds, and will always be there, even when they leave the room, preventing them from growing up and living happy adult lives. In the story’s final scene, the sisters are tempted by the sun to shake free, to leave their cage: ‘On the Indian carpet there fell a square of sunlight, pale red; it came and went and came – and stayed, deepened – until it shone almost golden’ (p. 247). As the light penetrates the room, it invites them to think about their

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lives: ‘The sunlight pressed through the windows, thieved its way in, flashed its light over the furniture and the photographs’ (p. 247). For a fleeting moment, the sisters are on the verge of freeing themselves; but the drill, the habit, the oppression draws them back. They miss their opportunity, forget what they wanted to say to each other, and the warm sun hides itself behind the cloud; the coldness has taken over forever. Miss Brill’s situation is of a different kind and, in some respects, even more pitiful. Well past her youth, she lives alone in a foreign country, and earns her living as a companion to old people. Her social contacts are almost non-existent. The person she works for sleeps while she reads the newspaper to him ‘four afternoons a week’ (p. 228), and when she says she ‘always looked forward to the conversation’ (p. 226), she does not mean conversing with people, but listening in to other people’s conversations in the park. Nobody seems to care for her and she seems to care for nobody, not even her client: ‘If he’d been dead she mightn’t have noticed for weeks; she wouldn’t have minded’ (p. 228). The shabbiness, loneliness and social rejection that she observes in other people she fails to recognize in herself: ‘there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even – even cupboards!’ (p. 226). She takes a walk every Sunday and observes little pieces of the lives of others and pretends to be a part of a theatrical scenario. On the particular Sunday when the story takes place, ‘Although it was so brilliantly fine – the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques’ (p. 225), the faint chill ‘like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip’ (p. 225) makes Miss Brill decide on her fur. It is obvious from the story that this stuffed, dead (one might say ‘cold’) animal is her only friend, her only source of (imaginary) warmth. The first sentence and the juxtaposition of brilliant weather (‘like white wine’) and faint chill (‘iced water’) reflect Miss Brill’s attitude to life as it is later unveiled in the story. The brilliance and the white wine are her illusion of life, the life she constructs in her mind as a self-defence against the reality, the iced water. But towards the end of the story, she has not ‘sipped’ from the glass, it was literally splashed in her face when she overheard the conversation of two young people: ‘Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?’ (p. 228). ‘Pictures’, collected in Bliss, constitutes an interesting example because it can be compared with a very similar story, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, from the much earlier volume In a German Pension. Both stories feature lonely women who, lacking sufficient financial means, are forced to consider prostitution. But while Viola, in ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, young and still hopeful for herself and her lover, does not yield to a potential ‘customer’ when the opportunity presents itself, Ada in the later story is middle-aged and has tried everything before finally succumbing to the ‘very stout gentleman wearing a very small hat that floated on the top of his head like a little yacht’ (p. 200). Differences between these two stories are significant and serve as an example of transition

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from a simple sketch to a complex story. It so happens that a noteworthy shift is marked by the use of temperature and weather. There is no reference to any feeling of coldness at the beginning of ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, although Viola pokes ‘at the little dusty stove’ when her landlady arrives; and when the unknown gentleman knocks on her door, she opens it with a ‘face and hair dripping, with her petticoat bodice unbuttoned’ (Mansfield 2002: 94). Poking at the dusty stove seems to be just a pretext, the same as the only direct allusion to coldness in the text: ‘I must go downstairs and fetch some wood. “Brr! the cold!”’ (p. 98). In the first case Viola is trying to avoid a direct encounter with the landlady and pretends she is occupied with something else. In the second, it seems to be rather a matter of small talk than real necessity. In stark contrast, Ada Moss, a middle-aged contralto singer who is about to be evicted from her lodgings because of her inability to pay the rent, contemplates her lack of warmth at the very beginning of the story: ‘Oh, dear,’ thought Miss Moss, ‘I am cold. I wonder why it is that I always wake up so cold in the mornings now. My knees and feet and my back – especially my back; it’s like a sheet of ice. And I always was such a one for being warm in the old days. It’s not as if I was skinny – I’m just the same full figure as I used to be. No, it’s because I don’t have a good hot dinner in the evenings.’ (p. 193) When she roams the city in search of a job to pay her rent and get some food, it is not only young girls in cafés and offices who look down on her; the last straw occurs with the absurd questionnaire that asks if she could ‘aviate – high-dive – drive a car – buck-jump – shoot’ (p. 199). After this she feels as if even the wind, in this case personified, is laughing at her: ‘There was a high, cold wind blowing; it tugged at her, slapped her face, jeered; it knew she could not answer them’ (p. 199). Yet when she subsequently breaks down and weeps, the cold wind suddenly and surprisingly becomes her ally: ‘And my nose will soon get cool in the air’ (p. 199). Although the use of cold in a positive way is not common in Mansfield’s writing, it is nevertheless interesting. Here it suggests the shift of Ada Moss’s thinking and marks a breaking-point in her life. She has given up hope of finding human understanding and warmth, stops crying and boldly goes on, embracing life in the cold, not expecting miracles and compassion any more. This story thus forms a link with another group of stories in which the cold also plays an important role in emphasizing the loneliness, up-rootedness and vulnerability of women who travel. ‘His Sister’s Keeper’, ‘The Little Governess’ and an unfinished fragment, ‘There is no answer’, all feature extensive references to coldness. ‘There is no answer’ is remarkable for its intense elaboration on the very cold weather and the feelings of the young traveller exposed to it. It begins: Certainly it was cold, very cold. When she opened her lips and drew in a breath she could taste the cold air on her tongue, like a piece of ice. But

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though she shivered so and held her muff tightly pressed against her to stop the strange uneasy trembling in her stomach she was glad of the cold. It made her feel, in those first strange moments, less strange and less alone; it allowed her to pretend in those first really rather terrifying moments that she was a tiny part of the life of the town, that she could, as it were, join in the game without all the other children stopping to stare and to point at the entirely new little girl. (Scott 2002: 205) This unfinished story is only a fragment, a mere beginning with little indication of how it might develop, and so does not allow for extended interpretation; yet, the heroine’s unusual approach to cold is intriguing. She is in a strange town, having arrived in the morning without any luggage. She is utterly alone and, as such, paradoxically welcomes the cold, since it is the only thing that she shares with the residents. The role of the cold, therefore, seems positive; such is the terrible irony of her situation. She must feel truly lonely and abandoned to welcome the cold as the only element which connects her with the unknown people of the town, making her feel one of them. Although trying to find something positive in every situation might be preferable to pining and suffering nervous strain, nevertheless, her attitude is akin to rejoicing over a catastrophe. When the eponymous heroine of ‘The Little Governess’ is in England or on the steamer, everything seems to be all right; what is more, the short paragraph describing her boat journey gives a general impression of cosiness and warmth: the stewardess ‘tucked up her feet’ and ‘sat down by the stove’ with ‘a long piece of knitting on her lap’ and the little governess finally ‘yielded to the warm rocking’ of the boat (p. 47). Yet as soon as she is about to depart the safety of her country ‘a cold strange wind flew under her hat’ (p. 47), a foreboding of the misfortunes she will inadvertently bring upon herself. She is inexperienced, frightened and unable to appropriately apply the sage advice of the lady from the ‘Governess Bureau’ to ‘mistrust people at first rather than trust them, and [. . .] to suspect people of evil intentions rather than the good ones’ (p. 47). Boarding the train in France she falls prey to an insolent porter who imposes his services on her and she, half-thinking him to be a robber, decides to punish him for ‘playing a trick’ (p. 48) on her by paying him much less than his usual fee. The porter does indeed fall into the category of those who should be suspected of evil intentions, and he avenges himself on her by removing the sign ‘Dames Seules’ from the window of her compartment and ushering in an old man. In this second case, the little governess fails to follow the lady’s advice and naïvely takes him for what he pretends to be – a grandfather-like figure – not for what he really is: an old pervert waiting his chance. Once in Munich she is ushered into a room which she mentally assesses: ‘Ugh! what an ugly, cold room – what enormous furniture!’. It is difficult to determine whether it is only the temperature that displeases, or the general appearance of the typical impersonal hotel room in an unknown country. Here

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the little governess takes the final step towards her doom. She treats the waiter with what is described as ‘frigid English simplicity’, and what she believes to be an assertive and mature attitude. Yet the waiter, like the porter before him, misinterprets it as cold and arrogant behaviour. She does not tip him, then cannot understand why he is still there staring at her, and she sends him away. When she ‘repeats icily’ (p. 55) what she does not realize is an impolite dismissal, she moves towards the denouement that had begun with the porter and which the insulted and vengeful waiter now completes. Her reputation in the eyes of her pre-arranged employer is ruined, and she is left alone in a foreign country without any friends or means of return. Yet not all the journeys of single women are depicted in the same way. With the different anticipations, prospects and purposes of her heroines, Mansfield’s narrative tools change accordingly. ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ also features a young woman travelling alone, but her journey is an exciting adventure. There is no trace of a pale or frightened woman shivering at the cold railway station; quite the contrary. The heroine wakes up and cheerfully ‘jump[s] out of [her] pyjamas and into a basin of cold water like any English lady in any French novel’ (p. 60). When she finally reaches her destination and passes through the checkpoint into a war-zone forbidden to women, she will enjoy several days of love with her ‘little corporal’. One evening, just before the conclusion of the story, the lovers are outside when a seemingly trivial conversation occurs: ‘You are cold,’ whispered the little corporal. ‘You are cold, ma fille.’ ‘No, really not.’ ‘But you are trembling.’ ‘Yes, but I’m not cold.’ (p. 72) This dialogue reveals that the presence of a fellow being – a lover, a friend with whom to share an experience – prevents one from feeling cold, and that true coldness is not so much a question of body as of mind. And although trembling can usually be interpreted as a sign of physical coldness, it can also mean the complete opposite: one can tremble from emotion, passion, even desire. The question remains whether the corporal misreads this symptom, either because of his superficiality or because he does not want to acknowledge her true feelings. Degrees of cold and the perception of symptoms which might be associated with cold, based on the physical or psychic comfort or unease of the character, are also depicted in ‘A Cup of Tea’. At the beginning of the story, the reader is told only that it was ‘one winter afternoon’ (p. 362). No other reference is made to the temperature or (dis)comfort of the story’s protagonist, Rosemary, a rich woman who can afford to buy and wear the best clothes to keep the cold out. She is in pursuit of her favourite pastime – shopping – and for that reason as well probably does not pay much attention to the weather. Unlike her poorlydressed or badly-fed counterparts in other Mansfield stories, Rosemary notices

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the cold and the weather only casually, as a subject of fashionable conversation or in a special situation. And such a situation arises when she walks out of the shop where she had left behind the little expensive box she wanted very much. Suddenly the description of weather becomes more precise: She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter afternoon. Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something. And people hurried hidden under their hateful umbrellas. Rosemary felt a strange pang. She pressed her muff against her breast; she wished she had the little box, too, to cling to. (p. 363) This paragraph sets the scene for the arrival of the unknown beggar, whose appearance seems all the more pitiful after the emphasis on the greyness, darkness and bad weather. Yet this description also discloses much about Rosemary herself. If it is presenting her perception of the surrounding conditions, which seems to be the case, then she is projecting her own previously unacknowledged sense of loss or loneliness onto the objects around her – an example perhaps of T. S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’. The street lights and the lights of houses are ‘sad’, ‘as if regretting something’, and people’s umbrellas are ‘hateful’ (p. 363). Rosemary presses her muff against her breast as though she suddenly felt cold and wishes she had the small box, as if it had the ability to warm her. She is quite right. Had she bought the box, she would feel excited and happy and her perception of her surroundings would no doubt be somewhat different. The story later reveals that this paragraph precisely describes her character: spoiled and egotistical, she judges and treats things and people around her according to her mood and desires, projecting onto them her own thoughts and attitudes. The coldness, sadness, regret and hate are in fact inside her and function as filters, altering her vision of things, when she is unhappy or dissatisfied. Mansfield often uses this technique to emphasize that her characters’ vision of the world around them is highly subjective and what they see is affected by their moods as well as their personal traits. Mansfield also uses coldness in other stories to illustrate the lives of characters within the context of a family. As Pamela Dunbar points out: To Mansfield the family unit is basically a site of conflict and tension, threatened both by the individual’s unwillingness or inability to conform to the role assigned them within it, and by the dark complexity of the individual consciousness and of family members’ relationships with each other. (Dunbar 1997: xii) These family relationships are often marked by misunderstanding and alienation, and Mansfield again skilfully employs cold as her leitmotif to

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express this, since cold can express a range of sensations, both physical and emotional. ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’ belongs to those stories in which the weather and temperature can easily pass unnoticed, with seemingly only incidental relevance. There are only two sentences referring to the cold, yet those are among the most important in the story. On her way to the village wedding, the little Frau Brechenmacher has to ‘cling’ to the ‘fences’ (p. 4) instead of to her ill-bred husband in order not to fall on the frozen ground, which is ‘slippery as an ice pond’ (p. 4). This journey, which is both sad and comical, can be paralleled with her life: it is not stable, but slippery; and she does not have the kind of husband she can cling to, only fences (other people, objects) along the way. Fences also symbolize the separation, the wall that exists between the husband and wife, which means they can never really understand one another. On the way back ‘a cold rush of wind’ (p. 8) blows her hood from her face (one might say it uncovers the mask she wears in public), making her remember her own wedding night, her husband’s behaviour, and the sexual violence she has been subjected to since then. ‘A Married Man’s Story’ is probably the chilliest of Mansfield’s stories, not only because it is unfinished, sinister and opaque – the reader can only guess at how it might end – but because of the extreme cold-heartedness and manipulative cold-bloodedness of the narrator, emphasized by frequent references to the physical cold in which he seems to revel. The dining room is ‘cold’, it is raining outside and the narrator says he ‘like[s] to think of that cold drenched window behind the blind’ (p. 323). The husband is well aware that his wife is unhappy and cannot stand the domestic situation, yet rather than do anything to help resolve matters, he sadistically dissects the situation for himself: What is happening now? Oh, I know just as surely as if I’d gone to see – she is standing in the middle of the kitchen, facing the rainy window. Her head is bent, with one finger she is tracing something – nothing – on the table. It is cold in the kitchen; the gas jumps; the tap drips; it’s a forlorn picture. And nobody is going to come behind her, to take her in his arms, to kiss her soft hair, to lead her to the fire and to rub her hands warm again. (p. 325) All this he evidently used to do in the past, before something broke and changed in their marriage. The eerie atmosphere is emphasized by the fact that the reader is kept in suspense about the reason for this alienation, as well as by the narrator’s strange flashbacks to his childhood. His wife returns to the room, clearly to make a last attempt at conversation and see whether he has changed his mind. She asks an intriguing question: ‘You are not cold?’ (p. 327). Although apparently enquiring about his physical comfort, the question might also apply to his heart – as if she really wanted to know whether he intended to continue behaving so coldly and cruelly. This

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reading can also be supported by the unusual syntax of the question. The wife has either started the sentence as a statement and only later decided she would make it a question, or she wanted to say something else, but at the last moment could not or dared not express it. Either way, she receives no answer and her husband, the narrator, keeps imagining how she feels ‘lying in her cold bed’ (p. 328). The husband’s interior monologues are soaked in malice, yet entirely calm and unemotional, as if betraying his (latent) madness. Whatever happened in the marriage and whoever is responsible, if indeed the tale is not a hallucination of a sick mind, the wife is being punished and tortured by coldness and slighting, which could lead to something even worse, perhaps a cold-blooded murder, as suggested by the husband’s earlier memory of the alleged murder of the narrator’s mother. In the New Zealand stories featuring the Burnell family, the weather conditions are naturally much less disagreeable than in most of the European stories. Yet this does not prevent the characters from displaying a variety of coldness comparable with their European counterparts. The best, and probably most discussed, example is Linda Burnell who, contrary to all the conventional beliefs about motherhood, does not love her children. Contemplating her life in ‘At the Bay’, Linda comes to the conclusion that child-bearing left her weak and broken: ‘It was as though a cold breath had chilled her through and through on each of those awful journeys; she had no warmth left to give them’ (p. 296). It is significant that Mansfield uses the word ‘journey’ for childbirth. Firstly, the verb ‘travel’ has the same root as the French word ‘travail’, which means both work and labour (and encompassing childbirth), and which in medieval French also carried the meaning of suffering and torture. Secondly, as in Mansfield’s story ‘At Lehmann’s’, it was common at that time to refer to childbirth as a ‘journey to Rome’ (Mansfield 2003: 52, 79). For Mansfield, however, the word is more than just a euphemistic means of revealing something uncomfortable about society. Like most other journeys in Mansfield’s stories, childbirth is also dangerous and disagreeable, and her heroine is ‘chilled through’ by it. Although Linda Burnell differs in many respects from Mansfield’s other characters, and at first sight seems diametrically opposed to, for example, the little governess, nevertheless they share the experience of loneliness and coldness on an unwanted journey which must necessarily be undertaken alone. Linda’s sister Beryl is equally cold and sometimes cruel towards the children, venting her frustration with her unsatisfactory personal life mostly upon Kezia and the servant, whom she addresses ‘in a voice of ice’ (p. 103). Like her sister, Beryl is often associated with moonlight, a conventional symbol of femininity, which in their case suggests coldness.4 Moonlight is in fact just a reflection of sunlight, shining less brightly and unable to provide warmth. In ‘At the Bay’, she enjoys the company of an unconventional friend, Mrs. Harry Kember, who spends her time ‘in the full glare of the sun’ (p. 292), although this does not seem to warm her. She is described as ‘Parched, withered, cold’ (p. 292). When her husband, a notorious womanizer, calls Beryl a ‘cold little devil’ (p. 314),

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he is condemning her resistance to his attempted seduction, but ironically also provides an apt description of her general behaviour. Although Stanley Burnell is warm and loving to his wife, his coldness is displayed in his reserve towards his brother-in-law, for the simple reason that he is different. Jonathan Trout is poetic, almost effeminate in his ways; he talks about dreams instead of business and, unlike the successful Stanley, hates his job and considers it a cage. Their differences are emphasized when they meet during their morning swim at the bay and Stanley, who approaches even swimming in a businesslike way, finds Jonathan’s presence disturbing, while Jonathan relaxes and enjoys his swim, dreaming of being able to live ‘carelessly, recklessly, spending oneself’ (p. 284). Water is natural for Jonathan, it is his element (isn’t he after all ‘a trout’?), symbolizing his artistic creativity, but also his leanings towards less masculine occupations. But due to the stereotypical role assigned to him by society, he cannot stay in his element, but must leave it and assume his masculine role as family provider. Once he is out of the water he ‘turns blue with cold’ (p. 285) and aches all over. The outside world, the reality of his everyday life, is painful and chilling because it is not natural for him, as it is for Stanley; and he knows that there is no way out of the life imposed on him by tradition. Another facet of coldness in marital relationships is the sexual coldness which is represented in the person of Bertha Young in ‘Bliss’ (although, as some critics claim, only seemingly).5 The contrast of cold and warmth is one of the crucial elements of this complex story, helping to build what Armine Mortimer defines as Lacanian chicane – ‘false clues or snares’ necessary for its surprising conclusion (Mortimer 1994: 47). From the very beginning, the words chosen to describe Bertha generate an intense atmosphere of warmth and light. She felt as though she’d ‘suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun [. . .] sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe’ (p. 174). In spite of the fact that it is dusky and chilly in the dining-room, she throws aside her coat and feels the cold air on her arms; and the sparkling light is still warm inside her. The mirror is cold, but she is not: she is still ‘radiant’. The fruits she buys – ‘to bring the carpet up to the table’ (p. 175) – are also of warm colours. She goes to the nursery, plays with and kisses her warm baby. While she contemplates her life she feels the ‘fire in her bosom’ (p. 178). In spite of all this, she openly acknowledges that her physical relationship with her husband leaves her cold. In contrast with Bertha, her friend – her ‘find’ – Pearl, is depicted as reserved and mysterious. Bertha’s husband Harry pokes fun at her and calls her dullish and ‘“cold like all blonde women, with a touch, perhaps, of anemia of the brain”’ (p. 177). And this is not the only ‘medical’ diagnosis he gives; when his wife wonders what hides behind Pearl’s mysterious smile, he responds with an odd mixture of character traits that are rude yet telling: ‘He made a point of catching Bertha’s heels with replies of that kind . . . “liver frozen, my dear girl,” or “pure flatulence,” or “kidney disease,” . . . and so on’ (p. 177). While ‘pure flatulence’ is really only an impertinent joke, revealing Harry’s primitivism,6

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his references to ‘liver frozen’ and ‘kidney disease’ are worth a more detailed look, especially at the organs involved. At some point in the history of Western civilization, both were understood symbolically, and considered as the seat of the temperament or emotions (in the case of the kidneys)7 or of love and lust (the liver).8 Harry Young wants Bertha to believe that he hates Pearl, and that he considers her incapable of strong emotion or physical desire, suggesting that she is frigid, and furthermore (with reference to the ‘anaemia of brain’), also stupid. It is part of the bold game of diversion he plays with his naïve wife. Everything around Pearl, even her name, seems to be cold, languid, mysterious, opaque. Yet, as Bertha accidentally finds out, it is the seemingly cold Pearl who is in fact fervent enough to be her husband’s lover. When considered from a different angle both Harry and Pearl, although sexually far from cold, display remarkably cold calculation and manipulation of the naïve Bertha, particularly in their impudence in conducting an affair and playing different roles under her very nose. A completely different example of the male-female relationship is presented in ‘A Dill Pickle’. The two characters meet six years after they had broken up and enter into a relatively trivial discussion about many different things, mostly remembering their past. Thus the bygone relationship of two former lovers slowly unfolds in front of the reader by means of several small, seemingly insignificant details. One is a conventional conversation about cold which turns out to be much more than that. When the male character remembers: ‘Ah no, you hate the cold’ (p. 135), and his female companion responds with what he already knows and has heard before, ‘Loathe it’ (p. 135), and starts to continue, he cuts in – which, as stated, was a habit of his she always disliked – preventing her from completing her sentence. The interrupted sentence: ‘And the worst of it is that the older one grows the colder’ (p. 135) is very significant. It not only refers to the low temperature and human thermoregulation, which usually decline with age; it equally notably hints at his egotism, his ‘obtuseness’, and inability to understand her, which, had she stayed with him, would, over time, have become even more marked. As demonstrated so far, in the vast majority of situations, Mansfield presents cold as something negative, or only seemingly positive; yet there are occasions when this is not exactly the case. Even in a story which deals with sorrow and pain caused by loss, the omnipresent cold does not necessarily have to be linked with a negative outcome. In ‘The Voyage’, it is a very cold night when little Fenella leaves her home after the death of her mother and travels with her grandmother to live in her grandparents’ house. At first, the cold is not mentioned explicitly, yet it emanates from everywhere: Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by; a few women all muffled scurried along; and one tiny boy, only his little black arms and legs showing out of a white woolly shawl, was jerked along angrily between his father and mother; he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream. (p. 315)

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Father’s moustache when he kisses her good-bye is ‘cold’ and ‘wet’ and little Fenella is trembling. Grandma’s ‘white waxen cheeks were blue with cold, her chin trembled, and she had to keep wiping her eyes and her little pink nose’ (p. 321). Although Fenella and her Grandma tremble for different reasons than the main character in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, all these tremblings may have something in common – as being caused by and representing feelings rather than the sensation of simple coldness. It is hard to know whether Fenella’s trembling is caused by cold, grief, fear or anxiety, or perhaps even anticipation of something new – her life with her grandparents. Since it is only Grandma’s chin that is trembling, it has obviously little to do with cold weather and is in fact a sure sign that she is fighting off tears of emotion. In the European stories, the coldness of the weather often goes hand in hand with egotism, disregard for others, cruelty or loneliness. But in this story, coldness is instead linked to sorrow and pain from loss, and although Fenella feels it, she is well sheltered from it by her Grandma. When the girl finally reaches her grandparents’ house, the first things she notices are flowers: ‘Grandma’s delicate white picotees were so heavy with dew that they were fallen, but their sweet smell was part of the cold morning’ (pp. 321–2). Just as the dew causes the flower to droop for a while, yet does not prevent its fragrant scent and from straightening when the sun dries the petals, so the sorrow weighs heavily on Fenella, but the love and care of her grandparents promise her relief. In this image, cold is joined with freshness and sweetness; it foreshadows her new life. And although her ‘little nose is as cold as a button’ (p. 322) when she embraces her grandfather, it is evident that her life will not be cold and lonely at all. The little girl is well taken care of and loved; it is a sign of affection and goodwill that she is taken to live with her grandparents after the loss of her mother. For reasons of space, it has not been possible to present and analyze all the instances of coldness in Mansfield’s stories, although a number of important categories have been suggested. Even with these few examples, we can observe how skilfully and variously she deploys the cold for different purposes. Coldness – spiritual, physical ‘heart coldness, hand coldness, soul coldness’ – runs through her whole oeuvre and plays a comparable role to that of a leitmotif in music, which was so dear to her. It becomes a very effective tool, used carefully and in very subtle ways, emerging here and there, underlining and illustrating the motivations and actions of the characters, and disappearing well before it can become repetitive or a cliché. Mansfield manages to make it a natural part of her texts, helping to increase the multi-layered richness of her stories, for coldness – whether real or projected – is often paradoxical: it can be both friend and foe, as it seems to have been for Mansfield herself. Katherine Mansfield’s long journey with coldness that started with her stay in Bavaria was concluded in another, yet completely different kind of cold place. The clue to understanding this difference lies in a part of the letter quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Apart from the physical, she emphasizes the spiritual, ‘soul’ coldness that characterized her stay in the Bavarian pension: a coldness probably enhanced by the unsympathetic crowd she later satirized in her first

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collection, In a German Pension, yet in essence caused by the cruel attitude of her mother, the parents of her lover, Garnet Trowell, and the lover himself, following the revelation that she had become pregnant out of wedlock. The place she chose for the last months of her life was cold too: an old monastery transformed into the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, run by Gurdjieff, a mystic admired by some and damned by most, including Mansfield’s husband Murry. Yet there is no question of ‘soul coldness’ here, a place where she received more warmth and satisfaction than she believed she had ever before experienced. Here, too, she finally stopped running away from both coldness and death – which in her case meant the same thing – and learnt to enjoy the last moments in spite of them, or even embracing them.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the help and very useful suggestions of Angela Smith, Janet Wilson, Susan Reid and Kathleen Dubs at various stages of this paper. For an interesting account of Mansfield’s stay at Fontainebleau see Lappin (2002). Unless stated otherwise, subsequent references to Mansfield’s short stories are from this edition (Mansfield, 2002) and only page references will be cited in the text. It seems paradoxical that the mother of these two women, who, although she ‘bathed in cold water winter and summer’ (p. 96), is the model of maternal love and probably the most beautiful character in all of Mansfield’s stories. However, here the cold water does not hint at spiritual coldness. It is the natural state of water which indicates that she feels comfortable in her feminine role and, unlike any other character, as Nora Séllei has pointed out: ‘wherever she appears [. . .] establishes a perfect, pairing, symmetrical and harmonious world, natural for her, naturally arising out of the essence and wholeness of her existence’ (Séllei 1996: p.121). See, for example, Neaman (1986). For the discussion on Harry Young see Dilworth (1998). For a detailed discussion of the role and symbolism of kidneys see Eknoyan (2005). See for example Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act II, Scene I.) (1982: 58), where Pistol claims that Sir John loves Ford’s wife, ‘with liver burning hot’, which seems to refer to lust rather than some purely spiritual longing.

Bibliography Dilworth, T. (1998), ‘Monkey business: Darwin, displacement, and literary form in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 35 (2), 141–52. Dunbar, P. (1997), Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Eknoyan, G. (2005), ‘The kidneys in the Bible: What happened?’, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 16 (12), 3464–71. Lappin, L. (2002), ‘Ghosts of Fontainebleau’, The Southwest Review, 87 (1), 29–48. Mansfield, K. (2002), Selected Stories, A. Smith (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. –(2003), In a German Pension. London: Hesperus Press. Mortimer, A. K. (1994), ‘Fortifications of desire: Reading the second story in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”’, Narrative, 2 (1), 41–52. Neaman, J. S. (1986), ‘Allusion, image, and associative pattern: The answers in Mansfield’s “Bliss”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 32 (2), 242–54. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 1 (1984). Scott, M. (ed.) (2002), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 Vols. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Séllei, N. (1996), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Shakespeare, W. (1982), The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare. London: Chancellor Press.

Chapter 16

Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie Melinda Harvey

When I write about ducks I swear I am a white duck with a round eye, floating in a pond fringed with yellow blobs and taking an occasional dart at the other duck with the round eye, which floats upside down beneath me. In fact this whole process of becoming the duck [. . .] is so thrilling that I can hardly breathe, only to think about it. For although that is as far as most people can get, it is really only the ‘prelude’. There follows the moment when you are more duck, more apple and more Natasha than any of these objects could ever possibly be, and so you create them anew. (Mansfield, cited in O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 330) Katherine Mansfield’s interest in the faunal is overt – she wrote stories entitled ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, ‘A Man and His Dog’, ‘The Dove’s Nest’, ‘The Fly’ and ‘The Canary’; she named characters as Herr Rat, Mr Reginald Peacock, Hennie, the Trout boys and Mouse. Yet Mansfield’s menagerie has long been overlooked by critics. This essay aims to elevate the animal to a level of presence and attention in Mansfield criticism comparable to that which it enjoys in her writings. But it will also make the larger claim that Mansfield’s writings can be seen as contributing to an invisible, haphazard and often unnoticed undercurrent in literature through the centuries: the critique of anthropocentrism and the pursuit of an animal-centred discourse. Humans have been trying to define their relationship with animals since the time of the early Greeks. Philosophy has tended to emphasize the contradistinctions between humans and animals. At the heart of the writings on animals, from Aristotle to Heidegger, lies roughly the same notion: that humans and animals are two different species separated by language and reason. That rational thought is the sole preserve of human beings allows Aristotle to see animals as means to human ends. For Heidegger, humans comport themselves self-consciously and are ‘world-forming’, but animals merely ‘behave’ and are ‘poor in world’ (Atterton and Calarco, 2004: 194–5). John Simons has said that the ‘history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the struggle between humans and non-humans’ (Simons 2002: 7). There is a strain of literature, however, that has treated the human-animal relation as more of an open question. Certain fictions – in particular the writings of Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville and, more recently, J. M. Coetzee – have

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unsettled philosophy’s apparently clear-cut division between the human and the animal. Literature’s interest in the animal intensifies in modernist literature, which emerges at a time when the project of making the animal disappear – thanks particularly to the machine and the metropolis – was coming to completion (Berger 2007: 255). Jacques Derrida, one of the few philosophical mavericks so far as the animal is concerned, agrees. He goes so far as to say that it is the interest in the animal that makes literature different from philosophy: For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There, you have a hypothesis: it [thinking concerning the animal] is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. That is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking. (Derrida 2002: 377) My interest in Mansfield’s ‘zoopoetics’ (2002: 374), springs from a nostalgic fascination for the animal discernible in the work of some of her contemporaries in Europe and America: Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Marianne Moore, amongst others. All of these artists refuse to participate in making the animal disappear, with the effect of making animals enter the human consciousness, principally as object or product – as clothes, shoes, jewellery, meat. These writers write to remind us of the power and grandeur of animals, to acknowledge their experiences and to rethink, recast and rebuild the human relationship with animals that they see coming dangerously close to its end. Mansfield’s concern for the animal might be seen as an extension of her oft-noted interest in alterity, an interest that seems to have come from her own experiences as ‘other’ – as a woman, a colonial, a valetudinarian and a writer (Scholtmeijer 1995). Arguably, the animal is the most ‘other’ of othernesses. Theorists such as Carol Adams and Peter Singer have noted that speciesism is analogous to racism and sexism, that there are close links between the treatment of animals and the exploitation and oppression of some of the more marginalized groups in history (Adams 1990; Singer 1975). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that friends and acquaintances often linked Mansfield to the animal in their accounts of her. The most infamous, of course, is Virginia Woolf’s description of Mansfield – which she attributes to Leonard Woolf as well – on first meeting her at dinner at her home in Richmond: ‘We could both wish that ones [sic] first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a – well – civet cat that had taken to street walking’ (Bell 1977: 58). Notwithstanding the implied snobbery, this comparison does speak to some truth about Mansfield and her familiarity with the feral, with life on the boundaries of civilized society. Her transition from childhood to adulthood was a transition from domestication and what she called a ‘Suitable Appropriate Existence’ (cited in Alpers 1980: 44) to a rather more tenuous, semi-wild and endangered life on the borderlands of solvency, propriety and wellness. There were other animal comparisons made regarding Mansfield: Beatrice Hastings, for instance, said that A. R. Orage referred to her privately as ‘the

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marmoset’ (Carswell 1978: 75). Gilbert Cannan had given Mansfield and Murry the nickname the ‘Two Tigers’ back in the days of Rhythm, which, Murry reveals in his autobiography Between Two Worlds, was the origin of their nicknames for each other, ‘Tig’ and ‘Wig’: Wig, he says, was ‘my name for Katherine till the end of her life’ (Murry 1935: 243). Dorothy Brett addressed Mansfield as Tig in some of her letters (Brett 1922: MS). These animal evocations carry over into the realm of fictional representations of Mansfield: Gudrun Brangwen, the Mansfield figure in Women in Love, is described as ‘a restless bird [. . .] a bird of paradise’ (Lawrence 1978: 150). Early in the novel she is cast as the maker of ‘unconscious’, ‘subtle’ and ‘strange’ carvings of ‘animals and birds’ – models that Rupert Birkin, Lawrence’s alter ego in the novel, adjudges ‘marvellously good’ (Lawrence 1978: 150–1). Mansfield herself was fond of assuming and ascribing animal monikers. Her letters, especially in the later years of her life, are full of animal sign-offs. A letter to Murry from 21 October 1920 is autographed ‘Souris. X X X’. In the next letter, also to Murry, dated 22 October 1920, she asks: ‘Do you like my new name. Its [sic] very important to know’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 78–9).1 Enemies were likened to animals: at the height of Murry’s liaison with Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, Mansfield wrote in her journal on 27 December 1920: ‘She made me think of a gull, with an absolutely insatiable appetite for bread’ (Murry 1954: 233). As far as her close associates were concerned, Ida Baker was sometimes ‘albatross’ (Boddy 1988: 145) (although never to her face), and her brother-in-law, Richard Murry, was ‘Little Bear’ in a letter dated 17 February 1921, which reimagines the Richard, John and Katherine triangle as the three bears: The Big Bear has written to say that he has seen the Little Bear’s drawings & he’s persuaded hes the real thing & hes made very Great and Important Progress. If you were here Tiny Bear would have to give you a small hug for that or a piece of wild honey out of a hollow tree. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 182) Murry – Big Bear here – is addressed by a variety of names from ‘Worm’ to ‘Liony dear’ in the letters (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 56, 125). In fact, Mansfield and Murry together constructed for themselves a rather elaborate faunal world that was part real, part imaginary. The ‘Two Tigers’ shared stuffed animals – a white bear makes an appearance and gives a wave in a letter dated 27 December 1915 (1984: 234) – and kept cats. Charles Chaplin came first. And he, rather to the surprise of the two humans involved, gave birth to two kittens in 1919, Athenaeum and Wingley. The letters are full of hugs, kisses and items of news that one or other correspondent urges should be passed on to these cats. For example, this communiqué to Wingley via Murry in a letter from Mansfield dated 15 October 1919: ‘P.S. – A huge fawn-coloured rat just ran over the verandah. Tell Wing’ (1993: 254). In another letter – this time dated 4 October 1920 – Mansfield, knowing a friend of Murry’s, Herbert Milne, was staying with him in Hampstead, writes: ‘Please give my love to Milne. He sounds so nice in the house. I wonder

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what Wing thinks of the clarinet’ (1996: 58). This question is reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne’s famous comment in his essay from 1850, ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’, which is one of the most important statements in animal theory: ‘When I play with my cat, who knows whether she has not more game with me than I with her?’ (de Montaigne 1991: 505). In thinking of the animal as a correspondent, and as a subjectivity that can be assumed to experience music but not in precisely the same way as humans, Mansfield makes a rather unusual pet-owner, here acknowledging Wingley to have a kind of sovereignty. But what is perhaps even more interesting is the rather elaborate imaginary private zoo Mansfield and Murry conjured up for themselves. Although they lived for a brief time in London houses nicknamed ‘The Ark’ and ‘The Elephant’, they dreamed of a country cottage they called ‘The Heron’, to be named after Mansfield’s beloved brother, Leslie Heron Beauchamp. ‘The Heron’ was less bricks and mortar than an animal farm. Mansfield once insisted it should have ‘bees, a cow, fowls, 2 turkeys, some indian runner ducks, a goat, and perhaps one thoroughly striking beast like a unicorn or a dragon’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1993: 231). A later letter has Mansfield imagining ‘The Heron’ in a more ancient pastoral mode: ‘This time we decide to live in the land with our flocks and our herds our manservant & our maidservant & our two sacred cats’ (1993: 120). Both the magical beasts and the farm animals signal that, despite the energy spent concocting ‘The Heron’, Mansfield understood it was an idyll. Pets are animals designed for convenience, and acquiring and maintaining pets benefits primarily their owners (Tuan 1984). ‘The Heron’ and its animals – like the reallife cats, Charles Chaplin, Athy and Wing – were convenient because they worked as intermediaries and served to shore up a relationship that had no permanent domicile, that endured borrowed flats, rented rooms, holiday villas and foreign hotels and long periods of geographical estrangement. I have talked of Mansfield’s interest in the animal as a corollary of her identification with the underdog. I have also noted Mansfield’s personal investment in animals, real and imagined, as vehicles for intimacy. But I suggest that the prevalence of animal images and lives in Mansfield’s stories can be interpreted as primarily a consequence of her theory of literature – her deep-held convictions regarding its impulses and imperatives. Mansfield’s letters and notebooks make it clear that her creative principle was an investigation of ‘Life’ (always capitalized). In a letter dated 10 December 1920 to Murry’s younger brother Richard, an aspiring painter, Mansfield wrote: I am dead certain that there is no separating Art & Life. And no artist can afford to leave out Life. If we mean to work we must go straight to Life for our nourishment. There’s no substitute. But I am violent on this subjeck. (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 148) There is a stress laid here – and elsewhere – on inclusiveness. ‘Life’ does not simply pertain to human life. Mansfield’s sense of ‘Life’ is clearly anti-anthropocentric,

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and not only includes fauna but nature as a whole – and, even more mystically, objects. In her notebooks, for example, Mansfield admires in the stories of Chekhov the fact that ‘rain patter[s] on the roof all night long’ and is not made ‘analogous to a state of mind’ (Murry 1930: 51). This note warns us that in Mansfield’s stories we read at our peril the natural world as pathetic fallacy, and suggests a less prudish interpretation of her attitude to D. H. Lawrence’s writing, expressed in a letter to Beatrice Campbell on 4 May 1916: ‘I shall never see sex in trees, sex in running brooks, sex in stones and sex in everything’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 261). For Mansfield, animals are seldom merely emblems of human meaning, but rather co-actors, moving and doing in their world, of which humans are a part. Many of Mansfield’s references to animals in her stories operate in this vein – they signify nothing in terms of human life except that ‘Life’ – bigger than the human – is like that. Towards the end of ‘The Garden Party’, when Laura is sent on her way with a basket of leftovers to take to the family of Scott, a carter, who had been killed that morning, we are told ‘[a] big dog ran by like a shadow’ (Mansfield 1981: 258). Why are we given this detail? It is difficult to point to a reason other than dogs do that, happen to run by us when we are off on an errand. ‘The Fly’ can also be read in this way. Thus far, the big question for critics has been this: what does the fly signify? To read the fly anthropocentrically is exceedingly tempting, and critics have seen the fly as a symbol for everybody and everything – for Woodifield, the boss’s son, the boss, Mansfield and mortality itself. But it is possible that the fly in this story provides a trompe l’oeil effect, just as it was used in fifteenth-century paintings. Steven Connor tells us that in art, flies are ‘embodiments of the accident, of what just happens to happen, as synecdoches of the untransfigured quotidian’ and as such ‘their principal signification is as the opposite of art’ (Connor 2007) – which I take to be ‘Life’. The boss has asked for half-an-hour alone. He feels unsettled after Woodifield’s mention of his son’s grave in Belgium. But a fly is there. There is nowhere a human being can be without the possibility of a fly being there. And life is like that. This inclusiveness is taken to an extreme in ‘Prelude’, which is bursting with animal sights and sounds – birds, starlings, mynahs, goldfinches, linnets, fantails, kingfishers and tuis in a single paragraph alone (Mansfield 1981: 24) and ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, in which human and bird dialogue runs side by side (1981: 290–4). The animals in these stories purport nothing more – or, rather, nothing less – than that the world is a biosphere, in which humans and animals live full and parallel lives. Mansfield makes multiple statements about the importance of dropping or desubstantializing human subjectivity in the act of writing in order to get ‘Life’ right. In a letter to Sydney Schiff from mid-February 1921 she says: ‘The artist [. . .] must submit – give himself so utterly to Life that no personal quâ personal self remains’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 181). In her notebooks, Mansfield asserts that the proper subject of the artist ‘is the unlikeness to what we accept as reality’ (Scott 1997: 267). When Mansfield feels like she is seeing ‘Life’ she likens herself to wildlife. In an early notebook, she writes: ‘The views

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out of the windows, all the pattern that was – weaving. Nobody saw it, I felt, as I did. My mind was just like a squirrel’ (Mansfield, cited in Carswell 1978: 54). When Mansfield feels like she is getting ‘Life’ wrong, she likens her stories to domesticated animals. Famously, Mansfield complained that her stories seem to her like ‘birds bred in cages’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 346). To Murry, she once confessed that she thought herself the writerly equivalent of a captive bird: ‘It’s so wearisome, so – I don’t know – like ashes, to hear myself recite my one recitation – a bird with one song, “How the Fowler Trapped Me”. Perhaps that’s what all birds in cages sing’ (1993: 312). The story ‘The Fly’ could be read as a metadiscourse on the way ink kills ‘Life’ and that representing the animal as it is in itself is a doomed enterprise. It is something Mansfield struggled with – the way writing altered things observable and real. In a letter to Murry dated 31 October 1920 she wrote: ‘As I write I falsify slightly. I can’t help it; its all so difficult. The whole thing was so much deeper and more difficult than Ive described it – subtler – less conscious & more conscious if you know what I mean’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 92). The real mystery of this story is not what the fly signifies but rather what the fly is doing diving into the inkpot in the first place, especially considering flies are attracted to light, not dark. This essay is called ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie’, yet it would seem ‘menagerie’ is rather the wrong word. Certainly, Lord Montezuma, Henry I and Catherine de Médici – who set the standards as far as menageries go – would be rather underwhelmed by Mansfield’s collection of animals, for it contains no specimens of the rare, exotic or curious kind. Domesticated animals frequent Mansfield’s stories. There are cats in ‘Pictures,’ ‘Feuille d’Album’ and ‘The Man Without a Temperament’, and there are dogs in ‘A Dill Pickle’, ‘The Young Girl’, ‘A Birthday’ and ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’. The Trout boys’ mongrel dog, Snooker, in ‘Prelude’ endures treatment that oscillates between care and cruelty. We are told the Trout boys ‘spent half their time combing and brushing Snooker and dosing him with various awful mixtures concocted by Pip, and kept secretly by him in a broken jug covered with an old kettle lid’ (Mansfield 1981: p. 41). But more fascinating is the preponderance of creatures neither domesticated nor wild. Mansfield’s animals tend to be of a type that humans over time have considered to be small enough to be ignored, innocuous enough to remain uncaged, or unsavoury enough to avoid being eaten: the sparrow, the dove, the duck, birds of all kind; the wasp, the mosquito, the bee, the fly, winged insects of all kind. We might, after John Simons, call these animals ‘non-socialised’; their relationships with humans ‘take place outside any form of social contract or agreed ways of behaviour’ (Simons 2002: 7). Mansfield’s eye for the diminutive, unostentatious animal is evident in the life-writings, especially in the letters written from the Villa Isola Bella in Menton which are full of mentions of ‘migratory birds’, ‘tiny cicadas’ and ‘moustiques and moucherons [. . .] in full blast’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 37). In a letter to Murry from 27 September 1920, after a long description of a lizard eating an ant and two wasps fighting over a leaf, given in microscopic detail, she signs herself, rather jubiliantly, ‘Fabretta’,

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after Jean Henri Fabre, we can only assume, the French entomologist who died in 1915 (1993: p.54). This interest in the insect and the bird carries over into stories, too. In ‘Pictures’, for example, some sparrows offer Miss Moss some animal compassion as if to make up for the human world, which lacks it: ‘Look at the sparrows. Cheep. Cheep. How close they come’ (Mansfield 1981: 127). In Lawrence’s portrait of Mansfield as Gudrun in Women in Love, we see that he recognized this fascination with diminutive animality very early on, Ursula says to Hermione: Isn’t it queer that she [Gudrun] always likes little things? She must always work small things, that one can put between one’s hands, birds and tiny animals. She likes to look through the wrong end of the opera glasses, and see the world that way – why is it, do you think? (Lawrence 1978: 88) It is easy to point to some quick answers as to why Mansfield’s attention tended toward winged animals. Firstly, there is the visual likeness of wings and lungs, the link between birds and souls in religious iconography, and bird song and art in poetic imagery, and the very physiological connection between flapping and breathing in insects. As Ruskin tells us in The Queen of the Air: the insect’s flight and breath are co-ordinated [. . .] [W]ings are actually forcing pumps, of which the stroke compels the thoracic respiration; and that it thus breathes and flies simultaneously by the action of the same muscles, so that respiration is carried on most vigorously by flying. (Ruskin cited in Connor 2006: 25) Moreover, mosquitoes, flies and the like were associated, especially in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with the spread of diseases like tuberculosis. Then there is the association between childhood and flying in Freudian psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes: ‘it is the “romping” of childhood that is repeated in these dreams of flying, falling, growing giddy, and the like, but its feeling of pleasure’ (Freud 1953: 209). For Toby Zinman, however, the bird represents ‘the victim: small, frail and equipped with the means of escape, yet ultimately and inevitably defeated’ (Zinman 1978: 548). Certainly, Mansfield did associate her illness with avian life – this comes to us from her Journal: The man who occupies the next room has got the same disease as I have. When I wake up in the night I hear him turn over. Then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence, I cough. And he coughs again. And it goes on for a long time like that. Until it seems to me that we are two cocks who exchange calls by the first light of dawn, calling each other from farms hidden in the distance. (Murry 1927: 87)

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A more significant reason for Mansfield’s interest in birds and insects is her affinity with a strain of modernist writers who wrote with an awareness of the fact that the animal-in-itself was disappearing from everyday human life. In small winged animals, Mansfield has found perhaps the last animals on earth who remain uncoopted, who observe unobserved, who can live life without dependency or fear of human beings. They are the survivors of the human war on animals. They continue to live parallel lives to ours. They are domestic but they are not domesticated. They cannot be trained and they remain almost entirely intractable to human will and purpose. They are co-tenants in the world with us. They manage to exist on the interstices of our rooms, our houses, our gardens, our human affairs. These fragile animals – useless and unthreatening to us, at best pleasant, at worst mildly annoying – are free. They offer our final glimpse of the animal-in-itself. Mansfield’s stories refuse to partition the animal off from the human world, and this essay, in like fashion, refuses to carry on the parenthetical treatment of the animal in Mansfield criticism by reducing the stories’ biospheres to zoospheres. Mansfield’s world is a modern one. As her stories often observe her middle class characters, it has very nearly bifurcated the animal world from the human and diminished it accordingly. For example, Mrs Norman Knight’s ‘orange coat with a procession of black monkeys round the hem and the fronts’ in ‘Bliss’ attracts astonished stares on a public train. To the woman sitting beside her, Mrs Norman Knight snaps, ‘Haven’t you ever seen a monkey before?’ (Mansfield 1981: 97). It is also possible to read Mansfield’s stories as a safehouse for endangered species human and animal – creatures like Miss Brill, who is marked as animal other by the ermine toque she wears around her neck, as well as the birds and insects that go under the radar of our senses in everyday life. In Mansfield’s stories they are preserved and acknowledged. It seems entirely appropriate that Mansfield spent her last days the Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau in a fur coat on a built-for-purpose balcony above the cow-byre, which she called her ‘heavenly arbour’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 327) surrounded by whitewashed walls decorated with flowers, little birds, butterflies and a spreading tree with animals on the branches.

Notes 1

All further punctuation and grammar errors are as found in Mansfield’s writing, and will not be suffixed with [sic].

Bibliography Adams, C. J. (1990), The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. Alpers, A. (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. London: Jonathan Cape.

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Atterton, P. and Calarco, M. (eds) (2004), Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought. London: Continuum. Bell, A. O. (ed.) (1977–1985), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols. London: Hogarth, vol. 1 (1977). Berger, J. (2007), ‘Why look at animals?’, in L. Kalof and A. Fitzgerald (eds), The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings. New York: Berg, pp. 251–61. Boddy, Gillian (1988), Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin. Brett, D. (1922), Letter to Katherine Mansfield, 29 January 1922. MS, Harry Ransom Center, Austin Texas. Carswell, J. (1978), Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky, 1906–1957. London: Faber. Connor, S. (2006), Fly. London: Reaktion Books. –(2007), ‘Flysight’. Available from: http://www.stevenconnor.com/flysight/ (accessed 28 February 2010). De Montaigne, M. (1991 [1576]), ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’, in M. A. Screech (trans.), The Complete Essays. London: Penguin, pp. 489–683. Derrida, J. (2002), ‘The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)’, D. Wills (trans.). Critical Inquiry, 28 (2), Winter, 369–418. Freud, S. (1953), The Interpretation of Dreams, J. Strachey (trans.). London: Hogarth. Lawrence, D. H. (1978 [1921]), Women in Love. London: Penguin. Mansfield, K. (1981), The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin. Murry, J. M. (1935), Between Two Worlds. London: Jonathan Cape. Murry, J. M. (ed.) (1927), Journal of Katherine Mansfield. London: Constable. –(ed.) (1930), Novels and Novelists by Katherine Mansfield. London: Constable. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984 – 2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 1 (1984), vol. 3 (1993), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008). Ruskin, J. (1890), The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm. London: George Allen. Scholtmeijer, M. (1995), ‘The power of otherness: Animals in women’s fiction’, in C. J. Adams and J. Donovan (eds), Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 231–62. Scott, M. (ed.) (1997), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Simons, J. (2002), Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Singer, P. (1975), Animal Liberation. New York: Avon Books. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1984), Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zinman, T. S. (1978), ‘The snail under the leaf: Katherine Mansfield’s imagery’, Modern Fiction Studies, 24, 457–64.

Index Adams, Carol 203 ‘affects’ 5, 89–98 passim, 107 alienation 7, 53, 60–1, 73, 77, 95, 107, 109, 180–1, 188, 194–5 see also isolation Alpers, Antony 2–3, 8, 16, 24–5, 42, 50, 116, 118, 120, 173, 175–6, 185, 203 alterity 7, 183, 203 see also ‘otherness’ America 3, 15–16, 18, 24, 27, 116, 171, 173, 203 Andreyev, Leonid Nicholaievich 22 androgyny 125, 149, 154 animal themes 7, 99n 10, 103, 106, 108, 124, 140–1, 144, 151, 190, 202–9 passim see also anthropocentrism; zoomorphism, zoopoetics anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism 7, 106, 202, 205–6 see also animal themes; zoomorphism, zoopoetics Antliff, Mark 30 Aristotle 202 Art and Letters 46 Athenaeum 43, 46, 50, 204 authenticity 8, 53–61 passim, 62n 1, 90, 94–5, 117, 182 see also reality and realism Baisnée, Valerie 5, 178 Baker, Ida [also ‘LM’ and ‘Moore, Lesley’] 5, 20, 24, 26, 45, 90, 166, 168, 172, 174, 204 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 142–3 Bandol 8, 116, 171, 176 Banks, Dorothy ‘Georges’ 16, 21 Barrett, William 55 Bashkirtseff, Marie 182–3 Bavaria 2, 7, 19, 188, 199

Bayley, John 165 Beauchamp family 21, 117 Beauchamp, Harold and Annie 5, 18, 21, 119–20, 122, 172, 183, 200 Beauchamp, Jeanne 24 Beauchamp, Leslie Heron 21, 35, 45, 53, 115–16, 157, 185, 205 Beauvoir, Simone de 62, 78, 149, 152, 155–6 Becker, Ernest 123 Bergson, Henri 4–5, 13, 17, 25, 30–40 passim Bersani, Leo 154 Besnault–Levita, Anne 5, 9, 89–90 Between Two Worlds: The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry 4, 44, 165, 172–4, 204 Bibesco, Princess Elizabeth 171, 204 Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield, A (1989, Kirkpatrick, B. J.) 3 Blanchot, Maurice 181 Blue Review 25–6, 32, 37–9 Boddy, Gillian 151, 179–80, 204 Boyd, William 2 Brady, E. J. 42–3 Brett, Dorothy 4, 7, 14, 49–50, 171, 184, 204 Brodzky, Horace 26 Brontë, Charlotte 120 Brooke, Rupert 2, 16, 26 Brooker, Peter 13, 16, 18 Brown, Dennis 92 Burgan, Mary 95–6 Butler, Judith 78–80, 82, 84–5, 98n 1 Campbell, Beatrice 6, 172, 206 Cannan, Gilbert 16, 26, 204 Carco, Francis 3, 15–17, 21–2, 24, 173 Carroll, Lewis 104–8, 110n 5

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Catalano, Joseph 54–5 Chabaud, Auguste 17 Chan, Winnie 42–3 Chekhov, Anton 2, 4, 19, 21, 168–70, 206 Christ, Carol 123–4 Cirlot, J. E. 121–2 ‘Claudien’ 17 Colette, 21 Connor, Steven, 206, 208 ‘corruption’ 7, 94, 101, 106, 109–10, 110n 2 Cory, Anne Sophie [pseud: ‘Victoria Cross’] 131 Cracow [Krakow] 20, 23–5 Criterion, The 3 ‘Cross, Victoria’ see Cory, A. S. Crowley, Aleister 20, 22, 28n 10 cubism 17–18, 115 Cuevas, María Andrés 2, 139 Cushman, Keith 149, 156 Daly, Mary 123–5 Daly, Salaryn 45, 47, 53 Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1989, Ihimaera, W.) 115–16 Debussy, Claude 17 de la Mare, Walter 16 Derain, André 15–18 Derème, Tristan 16–17, 20, 22 Derrida, Jacques 79, 84–5, 179, 186, 203 Dial, The 150–2 Dismorr, Jessica 4, 15 ‘double’ effects 49, 56–7, 62n 7, 70, 73, 75, 83–4, 86, 88, 89–98 passim, 101–2, 106, 108, 132, 144, 154–5, 182, 197, 207 Druet, Eugene 18–19 Dunbar, Pamela 89–90, 105, 154, 194 Eagleton, Terry 128 Egoist, The 24 Eliot, George 156 Eliot, T. S. 1, 3, 46, 142, 147n 7, 194 England 2, 18–19, 26–7, 28n 2, 30, 43, 115–16, 129–30, 181, 192 epiphany 45, 67, 71, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 121, 150, 158 existentialism 8, 53, 55–7, 62n 1, 114, 120–1, 123

Fabre, Jean Henri 207–8 Fauvism and Fauvists 4, 13, 17, 21, 25 feminism and feminist criticism 1, 8, 78–9, 95–6, 115–26 passim, 140, 149–59 passim, 178 Fergusson, John Duncan 4–5, 14–15, 18, 32, 37, 175 Fine Pen: A Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, A (2001, Gong, S.) 3 Fordham, Frieda 125 Forster, E. M. 140 France 2, 3, 13–14, 16–17, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 28n 2, 167, 180–1, 183, 192 Frazer, Sir James 125 French, Vera 24 Freud, Sigmund 96, 124, 208 Friesz, Othon 19, 21 Fullbrook, Kate 117–18, 121, 123, 136n 5, 152–5, 178, 186 Garsington 1, 173 Gaudier–Brzeska, Henri 4, 21 Gauguin Paul 17 Gilbert, Sandra 149, 157 Goncharova, Natalia 15, 24 Goodyear, Frederick 6 Gordon, Ian 117 Gray, Nancy 8, 78 Grice, Paul 182 Gris, Juan 18 Grosz, Elizabeth 128, 136n 1, 141–2 grotesque 2, 34, 68–9, 89, 103–6, 109, 121–2, 139–46 passim, 147n 5, 151,172 Gubar, Susan 149, 157 Gurdjieff Institute 27, 53, 159, 200, 209 Hanfstaegl, Franz: London gallery 17–18; publisher 17 Hankin, Cherry 104, 119–21, 123–4 Harding, Bruce 8–9, 115 Harvey, Melinda 7, 9, 202 Hastings, Beatrice 203 Heidegger, Martin 54, 62n 1–5, 202 Hemmingway, Ernest 203 Heppenstall, Rayner 5 Herbin, Auguste 17, 19 Hughes, Ted 165 Hulme, T. E. 30

Index Ihimaera, Witi 115–16 impressionism 67, 75, 76n 1, 102 Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, see Gurdjieff Institute Irigaray, Luce 123, 149–50, 152–3, 155, 157, 159, 160n 1 Isherwood. Christopher 115 isolation 25, 53, 71, 150, 152–3, 157 see also alienation Jones, Kathleen 6, 9, 62n 2, 165 Joyce, James 1–2, 146–7n 2, 155 Jung, Carl 124 Kafka, Franz 7, 169, 203 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Heinrich 16–18, 28n 4 Kaplan, Sydney Janet 1, 15, 117, 137n 12, 154 183 Kascáková, Janka 6, 188 Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (2001, Wood, J.) 3 Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (2000, Smith, A.) 14–15, 21, 25, 32 Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (2010, McDonnell, J.) 51n 1 Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991, Kaplan, S. J.) 1 Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999, Smith, A.) 2 Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand (1974, O’Sullivan, V.) 119 Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008, Kimber, G.) 3 Kimber, Gerri 3, 13, 28n 2 Kokot, Joanna 7, 67 Kristeva, Julia 142, 180 Kubasiewicz, Miroslawa 8, 53 Kundera, Milan 120 Lahire, Bernard 185 Larionov, Michael 25 Lawrence, D. H. 1, 16, 26, 166, 203 relationship with KM 2, 6–7, 45, 110n 1, 149–59 passim, 165, 171, 185, 203–4, 206, 208 see also Murry, J. M. Lawson, Henry 17 Leavis, F. R. 116, 156

213

Lee, Hermione 140 Lejeune, Philippe 179–80 Lévy–Brühl, Lucien 124 Lewis, Wyndham 2–3, 42 ‘LM’ (abbrev of ‘Moore, Lesley’) see Baker, Ida Lockhart, Bruce 20, 28n 9 London 2–3, 6, 13–14, 17, 21, 25, 27, 83, 115, 118, 122, 128–36 passim, 170, 182, 184–5, 204–5 London Mercury, The 3, 46, 50 López Pérez, Ana Bélen 6, 128 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’ 1, 5 Lykiardopoulos, Michael 3, 20, 22 Manguin, Henri 17–18 Mansfield: A Novel (Stead, C. K., 2004) 1 Mansfield, Katherine [KM] art, cinema and musical influences 4, 7, 13–15, 23–5, 27, 34, 37–8, 56, 68, 75, 76n–77n 4–11, 87, 96, 101–3, 110n 4, 116–17, 199, 205 books published Bliss and Other Stories (1920) 8, 46, 190; Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984–2008, 5 vols, [eds] O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M) see O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M.; Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, The (1923) 26, 169, 171; Garden Party and Other Stories, The (1922; 1997 [ed] Sage, l.) 47, 50; In a German Pension (1911) 18, 145, 167, 190, 200; Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927–54, 3 vols, [ed] Murry, J. M.) 5, 53, 78, 117, 166, 169, 172–3, 174–6, 178–86 passim, 204, 206, 208; Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, The (1997, 2vols, [ed] Scott, M.) see Scott, M.; Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry (1951, [ed] Murry, J. M.) 186; Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection, The (1977, [ed] Stead, C. K.) see Stead C. K.; Letters of Katherine Mansfield, The (1928–9, 2 vols [ed] Murry, J. M.) 165–76 passim, 178–9; Poems by Katherine Mansfield (1923, 1930 [ed] Murry, J. M.) 26–7; Prelude

214

Index

(1918; 2005 [ed] Boyd, W.) 2, 4, 169; Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield, The (1923, [ed] Murry, J. M.) 121, 171, 175, 179 ‘edited’ texts 4, 8, 120, 165–76 passim, 178–9 (see also Murry, J. M.) illnesses 53, 167–71, 173, 182, 184–5, 188, 208 innovation 1–2, 30, 32, 39–40, 42–51 passim, 139, 146n 2 poems ‘Awakening River, The’ 17; fragment from Notebooks (Scott, M.) 95; ‘Jangling Memory’ 25; ‘New Husband, The’ 165; ‘Opal Dream Cave, The’ 25; ‘Sea, The’ 25; ’Sea Child, The’ 18, 25, 39; ‘Sea Song’ 26; ‘There was a Child Once’ 26; ‘To God the Father’ 13, 22–5; ‘To Stanislaw Wyspiansky’ 19, 23–5; ‘Very Early Spring’ 17, 39; ‘Winter Fire’ 130 pregnancy 2, 7, 19, 172, 188, 200 pseudonyms and nicknames ‘Heron, Lili’ 21, 39; ‘Petrovsky, Boris’ 17, 20–1, 22, 25–7, 39; ‘Tig’ 7, 204, ‘Tiger, The’ 21, 204; ‘Two Tigers’ (with JMM) 7, 204; ‘Wig’ 7, 204 Rhythm connections 3, 4, 13–27 passim, 30–40 passim, 43–4 stories and prose ‘A Cup of Tea’ 6, 131, 134–5, 193–4; ‘Aloe, The’ 7–8, 115–26 passim; ‘Andreas and Anna Binzer’ 21; ‘At the Bay’ 2, 4, 6–7, 21, 46–7, 56, 60–1, 71, 89–92, 96, 101–10 passim, 116, 130, 151–2, 157–8, 196–7; ‘Birthday, A’ 147n 6, 207; ‘Black Cap, The’ 92; ‘Bliss” 1, 6, 8, 58–9, 61, 71, 73, 76n 8, 82–3, 90–1, 93, 134, 153, 197–8, 209; ‘By Moonlight’ 20; ‘Canary, The’ 5, 89, 92, 97, 202; ‘Child-Who-Was-Tired, The’ 2, 142–4; ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel, The’ 6, 46, 59, 61, 71–2, 74, 76n 4, 87, 93, 150, 157, 189–90; ‘Dill Pickle, A’ 76n 10, 92, 198, 207; ‘Doll’s House, The’ 56, 101–2; ‘Early Spring’ 20; Epilogue: Pension Seguin’ 37–9; ‘Epilogue II’ 38–9; ‘Epilogue III: Bains Turcs’ 38–9; ‘Escape, The’ 71, 90, 96–7, 155; ‘Feuille

d’Album’ 77n 11, 130, 207; ‘Following After, The’ 20; ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’ 144–6, 195; ‘Garden Party, The’ 4, 8, 46–7, 60, 71, 73, 76n 7, 81–2, 91–2, 94, 157, 206; ‘Her First Ball’ 46, 73, 76n 7; ‘His Sister’s Keeper’ 191; ‘Honeymoon’ 96; ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ 21, 30, 34, 37–40; ‘Ideal Family, An’ 46, 130; ‘Indiscreet Journey, An’ 7, 193, 199; ‘Je ne parle pas française’ 5, 8, 57–8, 76n 10, 94, 97, 130, 167; ‘Juliet’ (ms) 172; ‘Lady’s Maid, The’ 92; ‘Late at Night’, 92; ‘Life of Ma Parker’ 76n 4, 94, 97, 133; ‘Little Girl, The’ 21, 38, 104–7; ‘Little Governess, The’ 6–7, 133, 191–3, 196; ‘Man and His Dog, A’ 202; ‘Man Without a Temperament, The’ 76n 10, 207; ‘Marriage à la Mode’ 46, 72–3, 130; ‘Married Man’s Story, A’ 97, 147n 6, 155, 157, 195–6; ‘Meaning of Rhythm, The’ (with JMM) 19, 44; ‘Millie’ 25, 38, 59, 61; ‘Miss Brill’ 73, 84–6, 90–1, 97, 110n 4, 189–90, 209; ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’ 46–50, 202, 206–7; ‘Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day’ 72, 202; ‘New Dresses 21, 38; ‘Ole Underwood’ 25, 38; ‘Pictures’ 4, 133, 189–90, 207–8; ‘Prelude’ 2, 5, 7–8, 21, 44–6, 50, 56, 60–1, 67–8, 71, 73–5, 89, 92, 93–4, 101–10 passim, 115–26 passim, 130, 140, 151, 154, 202, 206–7; ‘Psychology’ 71–3, 76, 84, 86, 92–4; ‘Revelations’ 71–4, 76n 9, 134; ‘Seriousness in Art’ (with JMM 19–20, 44; ‘Singing Lesson, The’ 46, 73; ‘Sixpence’ 46, 50; ‘Spring in a Dream’ 21, 39; ‘Stranger, The’ 46, 154; ‘Sun and Moon’ 7, 105–6, 109; ‘Sunday Lunch’ 21; ‘Tales of a Courtyard’ 20, 39; ‘Swing of the Pendulum, The’ 189–91; ‘There is no answer’ 191–2; ‘This Flower, 83; ‘Tiredness of Rosabel, The’ 6, 84, 131–6, 136n 5, 137n 12; ‘Two Tuppenny Ones, Please’ 92; ‘Vignettes’ 130; ‘Voyage, The’ 46–7, 105, 198–9; ‘Widowed’ 158; ‘Woman

Index at the Store, The’ 4, 17, 25–6, 30, 32, 34, 37–40; ‘Young Girl, The’ 207 see also Lawrence, D. H. see also Murry, J. M. see also Woolf, V. Mantz, Ruth 171–3 Marcus, Laura 183 Marquet, Albert 18–19 Marsh, Edward 18 Marsh, Ngaio 118 Maugham, W. Somerset 118 McDonnell, Jenny 3–4, 17, 20–2, 26, 42, 46 Melville, Herman 7, 202 Menton 207 Merleau–Ponty, Maurice 5, 90, 92–3, 95, 98n 6–7 Meschonnic, Henri 90, 97–8 Meyers, Jeffrey 21, 24, 117, 172 Miller, Henry 123 Milne, Herbert 204 Mitchell, J. Lawrence 1 Monet, Claude 102 Montaigne, Michel de 205 Moore, Harry T. 156 ‘Moore, Lesley’ (‘LM’) see Baker, Ida Morrell, Lady Ottoline 2, 47, 168 Morris, Guy 3 Munich 17–18, 192 Murdoch, Iris 165 Murry, John Middleton [JMM] bankruptcy 18 ‘editorializing’ of KM’s life and works 2, 5–6, 8, 26–7, 116–17, 120, 165–6, 168–76, 179–80 relationship with Lawrence, D. H. 6, 16, 26, 45, 159, 165–6 relationship with KM 3, 5, 19–21, 25–7, 43, 45, 118, 159, 165–76 passim, 184, 200, 204–5 Rhythm, editorial policies 3–4, 13–27 passim, 32, 40n 2, 44 Murry, Richard 169–70, 204–5 Nakano, Eiko 5, 30 Nancy, Jean–Luc 90, 97 Nation & the Athenaeum, The 46 Nation, The 159 Native Companion, The 42

215

New Age, The 24, 27, 28n 14, 30, 43, 45, 169 ‘New Thelema’ 6 New, W. H. 38 New York 17–18 New York Times, The 25 New Zealand 3, 13, 17, 21, 25, 27, 34, 38–40, 41n 6, 42, 101–4, 108, 115–26 passim, 129–30, 136, 139, 171–2, 181, 196, 203 Nietzsche, Frederick, 155 Noguchi, Yone 24 O’Connor, Frank 2, 42 Orage, A, R. 27–8, 30, 43, 172, 203 Orton, William 21, 26 O’Sullivan, Vincent 8, 17, 26–7, 53–4, 116, 118–20 see also O’Sullivan, V. and Scott M. O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. 1, 4–6, 14–15, 24, 42, 47, 50–1, 90, 129–30, 139, 150–2, 154–9, 165, 168–9, 188, 202, 204–7, 209 ‘otherness’ 15, 65, 78, 106–7, 149–59 passim, 167, 183, 203, 209 see also alterity Pachet, Pierre 181 Paglia, Camille 122 Paris 3–4, 13–20 passim, 57, 118, 128, 130 134, 167 Park, Julian 3, 16, 18, 24 Parkin–Gounelas, Ruth 96 ‘patriarchy’ 59, 61–2, 71–2, 74–5, 78–9, 87, 104–7, 115–26 passim, 128, 133, 139–46 passim, 154, 157, 166–7, 189–90 Pellerin, Jean 17 Picasso, Pablo 4, 15–17, 20, 22 Pinker, Eric 51 Pinker, James Brand, 4, 46 Poland 3, 19, 24–5, 27 Polunin, Vladimir 26 post–impressionism 13–14, 17 Pound, Ezra 4 Proust, Marcel 2, 115 Pushkin, Alexander and Natalia 25 Queen’s College, London 122

216

Index

‘Rananim’ 6, 159 reality and realism 7, 32, 37, 40, 53–61 passim, 67–75 passim, 76n 1, 77, 79, 84, 104–5, 108–10, 116, 122, 129, 132, 135, 140, 142, 155–6, 173,190, 197, 206–7 see also authenticity Reid, Susan 6, 27, 149 Rhythm 3–5, 13–27 passim, 28n 3–4, 30–40 passim, 40n 2–3, 43–4, 46, 167, 204 Rhythmists 14–15, 21 Richardson, Dorothy 8, 79, 136 Rice, Anne Estelle 15–16, 28n 10, 171–2 Ricœur, Paul 184 Robinson, Roger 42 Rodin, Auguste 18 Rose, Phyllis 119 Ross, Christine 141–2 Rothermere, Lady 3 Rousseau, Henri 24 Ruskin, John 208 Russell, Bertrand 32, 40 Russian literary impact 3–4, 17–27 passim, 28n 7, 39, 134, 182, 188 Sadler [also Sadleir], Michael, 8, 14, 18, 46, 50, 169 Sagot, Clovis 17, 19 Salas, Gerardo Rodríguez 2, 139 Sand, George 21 Sartre, Jean–Paul 54 Schiff, Sydney and Violet, 150, 206 Schor, Naomi 156 Scott, Bonnie Kime 1 Scott, Margaret 5, 7, 45, 47, 95, 129–30, 149–50, 178–86 passim, 192, 206 see also O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. Segonzac, André Dunoyer– 17 Shuttleworth, Sally 119 Siegel, Carol 149, 157–8 Signature, The 44 Simonet-Tenant, Françoise 180 Simons, John 202, 207 Simons, Judy 180, 182, 184, 186 Singer, Peter 203 Sketch, The 46 Smith, Angela 2, 14–15, 21, 25, 32

Sobienowski, Floryan 3, 15, 19–21, 24–5, 172 Soulhat, Delphine 7, 9, 101 Sphere, The 3, 46–7, 49–50 Squire, J. C. 3 Stallybrass, P. and White, A. 141 Stead, C. K. 1, 91, 93–5, 109, 116, 184 Stein, Gertrude 115–6 Storyteller, The 46 Strachey, Lytton 20, 169 Swift, Stephen 18 ‘Thelema’ 6 Times Literary Supplement, The [TLS] 45 Tomalin, Claire 122 Tonkiss, Frank 128, 136n 1, 4 Trowell, Garnet 7, 172, 188, 200 Van Gogh 14–15, 17 Venice 133 ‘voice’ 5, 19, 38, 54, 58, 65, 70, 73, 81, 89–98 passim, 116, 130, 145 Vollard, Ambroise 17–18 Waugh, Arthur 4 Wellington 53, 117–18, 130 Westminster Gazette, The 24, 46, 50 Wilde, Oscar 16, 121 Wilkomirski, Casimir 21 Williams, Raymond 136 Wilson, Elizabeth 136 Woods, Joanna 34, 39 Woolf, Leonard 45–6, 116, 172, 203 Woolf, Virginia 1–2, 4, 7–8, 67, 78–81, 84, 118, 121, 135–6, 154–6 relationship with KM 1–2, 42, 45–6, 116, 118–19, 139–146 passim, 146–7n 2, 147, 3,4,6, 171–2, 203 Wyspianski, Stanislaw 15, 23–5 Zinman, Toby 208 zoomorphism 7, 106–7, 209 see also animal themes; anthropomorphism, zoopoetics zoopoetics 203