Abstract
In 1957, Elizabeth Bowen referred to Katherine Mansfield as ‘our missing contemporary’,1 and, with the notable exception of a few pioneering studies focused on her work, Mansfield has remained a relatively under-represented figure in modernist criticism. Although Sydney Janet Kaplan identified Mansfield’s role and influence as central to the origins of modernist fiction,2 it is only in more recent years that there has been a resurgence of critical interest in Mansfield’s life and writing, including her personal, fictional and poetic writing, as well as her role as editor and correspondent for several ‘little magazines’. Factors which seem to have contributed to her relative obscurity include her status as a ‘the little colonial’3 alongside her hybrid settler identity,4 her literary innovations and experimentation only with the short-story form, her precarious health and finances which necessitated a nomadic life, and her complex rendering of subjectivity, to name but a few. However, these are now key to productive new readings of her work in relation to gender-focused, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and economic perspectives.5
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Notes
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘A Living Writer’, in Jan Pilditch, ed., The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 71.
Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1991), particularly chapter 1.
As she described herself. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 2, p. 166. Hereafter referred to as Notebooks followed by volume and page number.
As Clare Hanson argues, ‘Mansfield’s identity […] was […] complicated, marked by shifting modalities of affiliation and estrangement from “New Zealand” and “English”’ identities’. ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Uncanniness’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 119. In ‘Longing and (Un)belonging in the Works of Mansfield’ Janet Wilson also argues for Mansfield’s ‘onotological state of “unbelonging”’ and her ‘double expatriation’, in Kimber and Wilson, pp. 175–88 (p. 176, p. 177). Elleke Boehmer similarly argues that Mansfield’s writing explores ‘sites of limin-ality and estrangement’, in ‘Mansfield as Colonial Modernist: Difference Within’, in Kimber and Wilson, pp. 57–71 (p. 62).
For example, see Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Kimber and Wilson; Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011);
Gerardo Rodriguez-Salas and Isabel Maria Andrés-Cuevas, The Aesthetic Construction of the Female Grotesque in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Interplay of Life and Literature (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011).
As Lyn Pykett and Elaine Showalter have persuasively argued. Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1995);
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Viking, 1990).
Bonnie Kime Scott suggests that a ‘crisis in gender identification […] underlies much modernist literature’. Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 2.
Sally Ledger argues that ‘gender was arguably the most destabilizing category’. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 22.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 191.
Marianne DeKoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’, in Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 174–93 (p. 180).
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, intro. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 25.
Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 4, p. 69. Hereafter referred to as Letters followed by volume and page number.
Patricia L. Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 63.
See also Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 117–21 for discussion of ‘Psychology’ and Mansfield’s interest in the questions psychoanalytical theory raises about identity, subjectivity and sexuality.
Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 107.
Janet Winston, ‘Reading Influences: Homoeroticism and Mentoring in Katherine Mansfield’s “Carnation” and Virginia Woolf’s “Moments of Being”: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’, in Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer, eds., Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings (London and New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 57–77 (pp. 63–4).
Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 25.
Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 18.
Letters, 2, p. 230. C. A. Hankin also discusses the motif of the ‘mirror face’ in Mansfield’s work in relation to ideas of split or multiple selves. C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983).
Kristeva quoted in Noëlle McAfee, Julia Kristeva (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 37.
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Carnation’, in Claire Tomalin, ed., The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Penguin, 1981), pp. 653–6 (p. 654). All further references to this story are to this edition, with page numbers cited in the text directly after the quotation. Winston argues that ‘“Carnation” revises Genesis, offering a fable of lesbian temptation and knowledge as a fall from sexual innocence’, referring also to the descriptions of M. Hugo as resonating with ‘the “sea serpents” and “winged creatures” in Genesis’. Winston, p. 62.
Mark Osteen, The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 4.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Selection from Essays and Lectures’, in Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 25.
See, for example, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981 [1975]), pp. 245–64.
Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ trans. and intro. Annette Kuhn, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7: 1, 1981 [1976], pp. 36–55.
As I discuss elsewhere in relation to Virginia Woolf. Kathryn Simpson, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
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Simpson, K. (2015). ‘Strange flower, half opened’: Katherine Mansfield and the Flowering of ‘the Self’. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_12
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