KATHERINE MANSFIELD
“Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.”
CONSIDER HOW THE STORIES STUDIED EMBODY THE FOLLOWING ASPECTS OF BIOGRAPHY, COMMENTS ON THE WORK BY CRITICS AND THE LIFE-AND-WORK PHILOSOPHY OF MANSFIELD HERSELF:
1. Mansfield was a pensive, self-absorbed, somewhat awkward and overweight young girl. Having received little attention as a child from her cold and indifferent mother, she developed a close relationship with her maternal grandmother, a down-to-earth woman who figures largely in Mansfield's New Zealand stories. As an adolescent, Mansfield possessed a rebellious streak that clashed with her family's traditional values. She grew into an impassioned young woman who showed an interest in the then fledgling feminist movement and adopted a free and uninhibited view of human sexuality.
2. Writing to a school friend at the age of sixteen, Mansfield sets out the programme: ‘I’m so keen upon all women having a definite future – are not you? The idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting and it really is the attitude of a great many girls . . . It rather made me smile to read of your wishing you could create your fate—O how many times I have felt just the same. I just long for power over circumstances.’
3. The future figure of the artist can be heard sounding her characteristic notes. Here is an extract from an abandoned novel: “Live this life, Juliet. Did Chopin fear to satisfy the cravings of his nature, his natural desires? No, that is how he is so great. Why do you push away just that which you need —because of convention? Why do you dwarf your nature, spoil your life? . . . You are blind, and far worse, you are deaf to all that is worth living for.”
This is ‘vintage Mansfield’ in many ways—the frenzied exhortation to live, which is central to all Mansfield’s writing (the certainty that while frustrations abound, life should be lived vigorously and fully); the opposition of convention and nature; the terror of falseness; the elevation of the great artist as the model for living and, by extension; art as a means of being ‘real’; the notion that destiny is a function of desiring—to want something strongly enough is to legitimise the means of getting it.
4. John Middleton Murray wanted to champion writing and art that was un-English, experimental, full of ‘guts and bloodiness’. The journal, Rhythm had a slogan, taken from the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, set out the terms of engagement, ‘Before art can be human again it must learn to be brutal.’
5. ‘…The Woman at the Store’, a kind of colonial murder ballad in which the social isolation of rural life breeds despair and violence, contributed this much-quoted sentence to the dictionary of definitions a country keeps of itself: ‘There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw.’
6. The material insecurity of Katherine and John’s lives, mixed in with the volatility of their own natures, initiated a lifelong pattern of partings and reconciliations.
In one of the more notorious of these ‘flights’, Mansfield made a daring trip to visit her lover, Francis Carco, writer and ‘committed bohemian’, in the French war zone. A fictional version of this trip can be read in Mansfield’s story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, and Carco pops up again as the cynical narrator of ‘Je ne Parle pas Francais’.
7. For Mansfield, whose beloved younger brother, Leslie, was killed in the War, everything changed (after World War One): ‘I feel in the profoundest sense that nothing can ever be the same—that as artists, we are traitors if we feel otherwise: we have to take it into account and find new expressions, new moulds for our new thoughts and feelings.’
8. Mansfield entered the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau in France. Gurdjieff proposed that we had many ‘I’s’, not just one controlling ‘I’, a set of selves that could come into play at any time. Immediately, we see the appeal of this for Mansfield, whose work is filled with ambivalence about a permanent, fixed identity, and gestures always towards something more fluid and flexible and organic. It takes us right back to a letter she wrote in 1906, five years before she published her first book,: ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives—one is so very small—but that is the satisfaction of writing—one can impersonate so many people.’
9. The contemporary Mansfield is a figure of vivid contradiction—fiercely independent and pathetically needy, brilliantly bold and wretchedly repentant, terrifically ambitious and plagued by self-doubt. And these contradictions are most vitally present in all her thinking and writing about home, New Zealand. The despised place could also be the dream place. The empty place could be imaginatively rich. The unschooled land could teach the world. The undiscovered country could rise into view as Crescent Bay does in the famous opening of ‘At the Bay’ - the borderlessness of land and sea standing in for freedom and possibility: ‘Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was the beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall . . .’
10. “Here is a little summary of what I need — power, wealth, freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world…which hampers us cruelly.” K.M.
11. “Women are firmly held with the self-fashioned chains of slavery. Yes, self-fashioned, and must be self-removed.” K.M.
12. “In youth, most of us are, for various reasons, slaves.” K.M.
IT IS INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT TO CONSIDER HOW FEW AND TO WHAT DEGREE MANSFIELD’S CHARACTERS COME TO LIVE AS ROBUSTLY AS SHE HERSELF LIVED AND, MORE SO, THAT SHE PROPOUNDED AS THE WAY TO LIVE.
Make It New – Modernism & the Modern
The outbreak of war in 1914 is commonly seen as the catalyst and key event in the development of modernism, marking the end of the civilised ‘contract’ under which life had been lived. While the break is not so complete nor the timing quite so neat—there were movements across society and the arts prior to World War 1 which contributed to these changes—the War shook the European sensibility completely. The old certainties of religious faith, sexual propriety and social stability seemed less authoritative, just as the artistic means of representing these aspects of society were changing. Certain creative minds felt there had to be a new way to describe experience.
Described as a conscious modernist, consider Mansfield’s stories with an awareness of these sorts of following modernist premises:
§ “The centre will not hold” William Carlos Williams
§ “God is dead” Nietzsche (he recommended you life your life ‘as literature’ and if you can pledge to ‘eternal recurrence’ — living your life exactly as you have over and over again — it was a ‘good life’.)
§ ‘Make it New’ Ezra Pound (Edward Hopper 1948. Nighthawks. The painting evokes the ineluctable, fundamental social isolation Mansfield perceived.)
Thematic Characteristics of Modernist art work
· Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
· Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
· Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future
· Disillusionment
· Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology
· Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes (WIKIPEDIA SUMMARY)
THAT IS…
§ All totalising narratives (meaning: all the networks of ideas, from mythology to science and religion that purport to have an explanation for life and death and everything in between) are fictions: stories we are told and tell ourselves to both comfort and reproduce the same social order and keep the same people in power.
§ Society is recognised as like a machine and the understanding that its activity as always improved and improving is a falsehood.
§ There is therefore nothing ‘natural’ and objectively ‘true’ about cultures and their beliefs. They are constructed to control and organise the time and space of society and history. Social conventions and propriety are at base ridiculous.
§ Men and women are each controlled by social conventions and traditional mores: their roles are defined by their community and maintained by the people and the institutions around them (their examples, their appreciation, applause, disgust, concern…).
GENERAL QUESTIONS
Prepare to respond to these questions:
1. Mansfield one wrote that she longed for ‘power over circumstances’. By looking at two or three of her female characters, write about the ways in which this longing is expressed. What are the obstacles to power? How successful are these characters in achieving power?2. Write about the child characters in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’. How does Mansfield use the children’s world to comment on the adult world? In what ways are these worlds similar and in what ways are they different? Pay close attention to the language surrounding the children and compare it to the adult sections.
3. Mansfield’s life was full of journeys, changes of address, sudden departures. Choose a story in which a physical journey is undertaken and write about what the journey means to the central character. What is at stake for the character? Is the journey a success? You should also look at the ways in which the language of the story conveys ideas of movement and change and risk.
4. Mansfield’s work is concerned primarily with the situation of women. Critics have therefore tended to pay her male characters less attention. Choose two or three male characters and write about the ways in which they are presented. How are their interior lives suggested? Look at the way the men relate to the women but also examine whether there are other things that define them as characters.
5. Mansfield became convinced that the plot of a story was less important than character and atmosphere. Choose a story which shows this. How does Mansfield go about creating the atmosphere? You might like to look at the ways Mansfield uses landscape and weather. How does she make us pay attention to ordinary lives when nothing much seems to be happening?
A. Especially from the female perspective, think through how the range of story/ies depict:
§ The experience of marriage
§ The experience of sexuality and sex
§ The experience of the natural world
§ The experience of the social world
§ The experience of selfhood/individuality
B. Which of these aspects of life is problematic, pleasing or otherwise to the characters?
C. What is the experience of the rural woman? What shapes this experience and their characters, taking into account the presence or absence of wider ‘society’, the character of the landscape, their treatment by men? Focus on ‘Woman at the Store’ and ‘Millie’.
Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. The daughter of a banker and born to a middle-class colonial family, Mansfield had a lonely and alienated childhood. Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine, in 1898 and 1899. She moved to London in 1902, where she attended Queen's College, London. A talented cellist, she was not at first attracted to literature, and after finishing her schooling in England, she returned to her New Zealand home in 1906. It was upon her return to New Zealand that Kathleen Beauchamp began writing short stories. Weary of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, Beauchamp returned to London two years later in 1908.
On her return to London in 1908, she quickly fell into the bohemian/bisexual way of life lived by many artists and writers of that era.[1] With little money, she met, married and left her first husband, George Bowden, all within just three weeks. Around this time, she became pregnant by a family friend from New Zealand (Garnet Trowell, a professional violinist) and her mother sent her to Bavaria.[2]
Katherine suffered a miscarriage in 1909, possibly brought on by lifting her trunk off the top of a wardrobe. Back in England, her work drew the attention of several publishing houses, and Beauchamp took on the pen-name Katherine Mansfield upon the publication of her first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, in 1911. She also contracted gonorrhoea around this time, an event that was to plague her with arthritic pain for the rest of her short life, as well as to make her view herself as a 'soiled' woman.
Discouraged by the volume's lack of success, Mansfield submitted a lightweight story to a new avant-garde magazine called Rhythm. The story was rejected by editor John Middleton Murry, who requested something darker. Mansfield responded with "The Woman at the Store," a tale of murder and mental illness that Murry called "the best story by far that had been sent to Rhythm." Mansfield moved in with Murry soon after its publication.
Her life and work were changed forever with the death of her brother, a soldier, during World War I. She was shocked and traumatised by the experience, so much so that her work began to take refuge in the nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand.[3] During these years, she also formed important professional friendships with writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf who later claimed that her writing was 'The only writing I have ever been jealous of'.