‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’

This article examines the entanglement between masculinity crisis and traumatic memory as described in Katherine Mansfield's short story ‘The Fly’. By exploring the way Mansfield depicts the figure of the ‘boss’ in the story as symbolic of the stubborn resistance against the natural organic order of time, the article investigates how such a memory project of preservation fails with all its masculinist hubris. Drawing on Pierre Janet’s notions of traumatic memory and narrative memory and on Freud’stheory of traumatic repetition and castration, the article attempts to locate the politics of memory in Mansfield’s story alongside the politics of masculinity that perversely equates male hysteria with performance and prestige.

Mansfield’s Psychology of the Emotions

In one of Katherine Mansfield’s early stories, ‘In Summer’ (1908), a young fairy child named Phyllis sits upon a hillside and sobs, ‘Oh, I have never been so unhappy before. […] I have a curious pain somewhere.’1 It is an arresting and confusing moment. Phyllis, a child on the brink of adulthood, cannot name the unfamiliar and vaguely located pain. The nature of the pain is never clarified. It might be physical pain (for women’s specific pains are often spoken of in oblique terms) or emotional pain, which plays out in the body but cannot be said to happen in any particular place. To read Mansfield is to reckon with such ambiguously embodied feelings – life for her characters is the experience of obtrusive and often unarticulated emotions. In her most memorable characters we observe emotion in the body: Ma Parker tries desperately to hold back her ‘proper cry’ (2: 297), Bertha Young has uncontrollable urges ‘to run instead of walk’ in her moments of bliss (2: 142), and the anxious Kezia tiptoes out of ‘Prelude’ feeling ‘hot all over’ (2: 92)....

Apples and Pears: Symbolism and Influence in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’

This essay offers a parallel reading of two stories, ‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield and ‘The Apple Tree’ by Daphne du Maurier, revealing a hitherto unexamined yet fruitful area of research. Dramatic irony, organic unity and liminal spaces are identified and discussed in terms of how these are used to represent subconscious and conscious perceptions of reality. The plots incorporate symbols from well-known myths to suggest extreme mental states in narratives that invite the reader to occupy psychological spaces of delusion and fantasy. Material from previously unpublished letters reveals the extent to which Mansfield influenced du Maurier’s writing and this close analysis demonstrates how examining these writers in tandem provides a valuable mean of accessing their work in a new way. Du Maurier’s critical reputation is current undergoing a process of revision which echoes the way in which Mansfield has come to be increasingly regarded as one of the ‘high priestesses’ of modernism.

‘The Thing Needed’: Katherine Mansfield, Psychology and Relationships

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Creative Non-Fiction

This is an account of reading Katherine Mansfield's The Montana Stories whilst cataloguing the collection, and an investigation into the role of the archive in Mansfield's published and imagined afterlives. The essay concentrates on the deaths (both fictional and real) that loom large in all of Mansfield's work, but particularly in those stories composed in Switzerland, and suggests that the chronological arrangement of the Persephone edition amplifies the morbid and elliptical nature of library work, editorial interference, and Mansfield's uncanny endings.

Short Story

At first people thought Uncle Jack had been killed in a hit-and-run, mowed down crossing the road near the May Road dairy. That was what Lorenzo heard in the first delirious phone calls from his mother: Uncle Jack had been mown down, and it was a brutal, heartless and sadistic act, no doubt perpetrated by someone twenty-one and Chinese in a brand new car with a learner’s licence and no insurance....

Me or I? The Search for the Self in the Early Writings of Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield’s diaries and letters reveal a lifelong concern with notions of the self. In this paper, I examine two of Mansfield’s early stories, ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’ and ‘The Education of Audrey’, to explore how her enquiry into the construction of the self in fiction demonstrates some affinity with the psychological theories of William James and Sigmund Freud. Mansfield’s approach is intuitive, and this gives rise to contradiction as she experiments with the lexicon of the self and with the form and structure of her stories. Whilst Mansfield posed no ‘theory’ of the self in an academic sense, her fiction does however, illustrate her continuing attempts to puzzle out, and to accurately represent, the complex and mutable nature of the human psyche.

Katherine Mansfield and Vitalist Psychology

This essay argues that the vitalist psychology of William James and particularly Henri Bergson shaped Mansfield’s understanding of the mutability and multiplicity of the self. It suggests that Bergson’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of consciousness finds an echo in the distinctiveness of Mansfield’s characterisation, as she tracks the fluid interplay between different levels and intensities of consciousness. Drawing on the vitalist understanding of personality, it argues that Mansfield tracks the expression and transmission of emotion between characters in terms of affect and involuntary action, disclosing the porosity of the self and its openness to the unpredictability of human interactions. Delving further into Bergson’s account of consciousness, it suggests that Mansfield shares his understanding of the self as caught between a virtual past and a virtual future, transformed moment by moment under the pressure of a past which breaks through into the present and a future which is constitutively unknowable. For Mansfield as for a number of modernist writers, character is framed in terms of a situational self which is responsive to the changing environments in which it finds itself, and consciousness is rendered as endlessly productive of novelty, of that which cannot be predicted from the familiar and already known.

Feeling ‘Like a Work-Girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’

This essay argues that ‘The Garden Party’ confronts us with the uncanny intimacy and alienation created by class relations in the upper-middle-class household at the turn of the century. The consequences of protagonist Laura Sheridan’s desire and failure to transcend what she calls ‘absurd class distinctions’ (288) are well established in Mansfield criticism, and psychological readings of ‘The Garden Party’ often consider how the working class Other influences Laura’s developing subjectivity. In this essay, I draw upon similar psychological frameworks to examine how ‘The Garden Party’ deals with the idea of working-class selves – not just Others. I contend that, though it does not render the inner lives of its working-class characters, ‘The Garden Party’ still raises important questions about the selfhood of the Other, and the uncanny, sometimes abject, sense of the Other within one’s self.Through a series of uncanny parallels between middle and working-class life, ‘The Garden Party’ collapses the distance between Laura and the working class. As it does, it confronts us with questions about what it means to stare the working class Other in the face – as Laura stares into the swollen, grief-stricken face of Scott’s widow – and to realize that the Other is at the core of the self.

A Raft in the Sea of Loneliness: Katherine Mansfield’s Discovery of Cosmic Anatomy

M. B. Oxon’s Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego (1921) was a prominent feature of Katherine Mansfield's 'myth' right from its inception, in the years following her death, when John Middleton Murry orchestrated the publication of her uncollected writings. When Mansfield’s Journal appeared in 1927 the public came into contact with a little-known book that had changed the life of the author one year before her death. This article investigates the role Cosmic Anatomy played within the imagination of Mansfield, in relation to her late story production. It also sheds light on the personality of M. B. Oxon, whose real name was Lewis Alexander Richard Wallace, and notably his relationship with Mansfield's mentor, A.R. Orage. The chapter also investigates Wallace’s contribution to The New Age, the journal Orage edited and the 'alternative thinking' laboratory in which Cosmic Anatomy is rooted. While exploring the milieu with which Mansfield came into contact through Orage, ultimately leading her to Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, the chapter sheds light on Mansfield’s own quest for connection, also due to her condition as an invalid, which progressively deprived her of sensory contacts with the external world. The chapter is rounded up by an investigation into the role dreams and archetypal forms of symbolism play in Mansfield’s short stories within a holistic perception of things that translate into a narrative strategy of plurisignification.