Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and Imperialist Nostalgia

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence was among the period’s most passionate advocates of a nostalgic return to the primitive to revitalize modern civilization. In his roman-à-clef Women in Love, Lawrence envisioned Katherine Mansfield as a kindred spirit in this quest to reconnect with primal origins by using her as a model for the character Gudrun Brangwen, a sculptor whose strange little carvings are “full of primitive passion” and who, at one point, performs an impromptu vegetation dance (32, 157). Though other facets of Lawrence’s Mansfield portrait are hardly flattering, the linking of Gudrun/Mansfield to primitive rites and emotions bespeaks a perceived affinity with this fellow artist from the fringe. Mansfield’s early writings affirm that she initially embraced nostalgic primitivism, but by the time she met Lawrence in 1913, having been confronted with metropolitan prejudices casting her in the role of colonial-primitive, she was already rejecting this view. Scholars have examined Mansfield’s relationship with Lawrence, but neglected to factor in these writers’ different positions within a metropolitan literary culture obsessed with cultures and artifacts deemed primitive. Focusing on Mansfield’s Rhythm years (1912–1913), this chapter will argue that “the little savage from New Zealand” (as she was dubbed when she arrived in England) ultimately rejected the Lawrencian brand of primitivism, still under construction during this period.¹