Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form 9780773567474

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface: Who's Been Reading Katherine Mansfield?
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
PART ONE: READING MANSFIELD
1 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation
PART TWO: READING AND WRITING
2 Reading Reading
3 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice
4 A Catalogue of Forms
5 Metaphors of Form
PART THREE: READING FOR FORM
6 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action
7 Overturns: Stories of Deferral
8 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"
9 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"
Notes
Works Cited
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Permissions

Citation preview

Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form

Although Katherine Mansfield's short stories have remained continuously in print and appear in all standard anthologies, they have attracted remarkably little critical attention. W.H. New rectifies this by presenting a detailed critical analysis of her short stories, establishing Mansfield as a modernist writer of great importance. Taking an innovative approach to criticism, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form demonstrates how Mansfield's stylistic practice both embodies and conveys her analysis of social and psychological trauma through a "metaphoric" use of literary form. New argues that the stories are neither simple vehicles for conveying emotional states nor neutral representations of moments in time but carefully crafted models, or correlatives, of social and psychological conditions of understanding. He elucidates a number of formal strategies, such as sequence, reversal, negation, repetition, deferral, and reconstruction, and then applies them to a wide range of Mansfield's stories, including such favorites as "Prelude," "The Voyage," "The Little Governess," and "Je ne parle pas français." Drawing on a range of writings in contemporary postcolonial, narratological, and gender theory, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form leads to a new appreciation of the implications of Mansfield's formal craft. The book, written in a lively and readily accessible style, is at once an exemplary demonstration of the intricate process of critical reading and an intelligent and innovative reassessment of Mansfield's literary significance. W.H. NEW is professor of English, University of British Columbia

This page intentionally left blank

Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form W.H. NEW

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1999 ISBN o-7735-1791-x Legal deposit first quarter 1999 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper Permissions given on page 213 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data New, W.H. (William Herbert), 1938Reading Mansfield and metaphors of form Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-7735-1791-x 1. Mansfield, Katherine, 1888-1923 - Style, I. Title. FR6025.A57Z84 1998 823 C98-900823-1 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City

Contents

Preface: Who's Been Reading Katherine Mansfield? vii Acknowledgments xvii A Note on Sources xix PART ONE

READING MANSFIELD

1 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation 3 PART T W O

READING AND WRITING

2 Reading Reading 31 3 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice 51 4 A Catalogue of Forms 66 5 Metaphors of Form 89 PART T H R E E

READING FOR FORM

6 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action 103 7 Overturns: Stories of Deferral 121 8 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude" 139 9 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape" 158

vi Contents Notes 177 Works Cited 195 Index 205 Permissions 213

Preface: Who's Been Reading Katherine Mansfield?

For approximately two decades at the beginning of the twentieth century the New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield was writing and publishing at the same time as the Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock. There is, so far as I know, no evidence that either writer knew the other's work - no mention in the journals or in the published letters - nor does any connection between the two writers seem likely. Leacock was a conservative economist and in his own day a highly popular international lecturer, the author of over fifty books by the time of his death in 1944, most now out of print; and while many of his witty glimpses of human behaviour still have the capacity to amuse and entertain, many others strike a contemporary reader as misogynist and banal. Katherine Mansfield, by contrast, was rebellious in her personal life and avant-garde as an artist; and while, in her own day, her few dozen prose works were often treated as though they were uncomplicated and sentimental, they none the less have remained continuously in print since her death in 1923, and they directly influenced the course of short story writing around the world. It may seem quixotic, then, to begin a book about Katherine Mansfield with a quotation from Leacock - especially a book about her writing strategies and about the reading strategies that her technical expertise invites. One of Leacock's anecdotes, however, recording the trials of speaking as a "colonial" in the "Mother Country," England, raises interesting questions about the relation between cultural status and critical expectation. These questions bear emphatically on the

viii Preface

reputation Katherine Mansfield acquired during her lifetime and on the ways in which her life and work have subsequently been read. Illuminating one of the contexts of both composition and criticism, they help to explain, in consequence, why Mansfield's work has so often been read for its political and emotional sensibilities and so seldom been read for the controlled effects of stylistic detail. It is this situation I wish to redress. Sketching the pressures he felt about lecturing in England, Leacock writes with double-edged irony: When any lecturer goes across to England from this side of the water there is naturally a tendency on the part of the chairman to play upon this fact. This is especially true in the case of a Canadian like myself. The chairman feels that the moment is fitting for one of those great imperial thoughts that bind the British Empire together. But sometimes the expression of the thought falls short of the full glory of the conception. Witness this (word for word) introduction that was used against me by a clerical gentleman in a quiet spot in the south of England. "Not so long ago, ladies and gentlemen," said the vicar, "we used to send out to Canada various classes of our community to help build up that country. We sent out our labourers, we sent out scholars and professors. Indeed, we even sent out our criminals. And now," with a wave of his hand towards me, "they are coming back." There was no laughter. An English audience is nothing if not literal; and they are as polite as they are literal. They understood that I was a reformed criminal, and as such they gave me a hearty burst of applause. (183-4)

He pillories here both his own Canadian deference and the illusion of sophistication that passes, he finds, for English authority. The indirect connection between this anecdote and Katherine Mansfield's career has to do with expectation, both colonial and imperial. For, despite their political and personal differences, the two writers did take with them, from their home countries to England, a remarkably similar attitude of mind. They expected sophistication (they had been educated to do so), but they found illusion. They hoped for recognition but found toleration. They anticipated success but ultimately had to construct it in their own way, out of the disparity between themselves and the Imperial Centre rather than by wholly embracing the set of English values they initially claimed as their own. Leacock's talent lay in controlling tone; he didn't craft character so much as he caricatured what he took to be pretension, using irony to expose foible and wit to critique social change. Mansfield's talent lay in her stylistic control: in the way she experimented with time,

ix

Preface

point of view, language choice, and durations of silence, to reveal, in the lives of her characters, the remarkable resonances of insight and regret, and to represent the moments of desire and debilitating pain that give life, as she understood it, meaning. Expectation is, of course, a kind of empire in its own right. And just as it often constructs a filter between a traveller and a destination, so it also stands, often invisibly, between a reader and a text. Because it is a barrier, moreover, it can distort the course of literary history. For when readers anticipate something other than that which a work of literature offers them, they sometimes dismiss the work as weak or irrelevant; but in such cases it can be their expectation that is problematic, not the work, for the expectation may in advance have framed what will be considered important and have consigned everything else to the margins. Entertainers such as Leacock and short story writers such as Mansfield have long occupied certain mainstream critical margins. This state of affairs has come about in part because the institutions of literature - the textbooks and the standard histories - have (at least until recently) educated readers to think of humour and short fiction as peripheral genres. They have equated distance from literary "centres" (London, Paris, New York) with inconsequentiality, used the powers of centricity to absorb whomever they found acceptable, and consigned all others, the denizens of distance, to cultural, "colonial" oblivion. They have also constructed versions of tradition in which women - including Mansfield, for all the attention she received - play peripheral roles. Reading Mansfield calls in consequence upon a process of unlearning as well as a process of learning: of unlearning the assumptions that stand in the way of acceptance of writer and genre; of learning the strategies that will open up instead the intricate consequentialities of text, intention, and form. In her life as, metaphorically, in her art, Mansfield chose to be an emigre; she left for imperial England in the early years of the twentieth century because she considered her native New Zealand to be crude and dull. When she found England also to be crude (though different in particulars), her life took some unpredictable directions. She was perpetually on the outside, looking on, often unhappy and possibly more often angry; yet she could transform her dislocations into her art. A sharp observer of the ways people both physically and imaginatively impinge on each other's space, she devised new forms of narrative in order to turn observations into revelations. Many readers, however, then began to interpret what they expected to find in her short stories rather than actually to read them. This process has substantially affected her reputation.1 To ask my title question,

x Preface

therefore - "Who's Been Reading Katherine Mansfield?" - is to ask not only who her readers have been but also what their readings have to do with what Mansfield actually wrote, and whether or not these readings perhaps have more to do with the way people are trained to read than with her words on the page. Canon and colony have as much to do with some reputations as does critical insight. To outline a few of the patterns that these readings and rereadings follow is, in consequence, to reflect on the complex link between expectation, literary history, and critical desire. All readers, obviously, interpret what they read through some sort of frame.2 This frame can have something to do with religion, politics,

or gender; it can be determined by the reason for reading in the first place (for escape, instruction, or appraisal, for example) and even by the circumstances in which one reads (at a desk, on the bus, in an easy chair); it frequently takes the form of some such appreciative statement as "I know what I like" (without necessarily examining why, or examining how the knowing and the liking are intricately connected to how one has been trained to know and like). Frames, broadly speaking, all derive from a reader's education in what to expect and value, and from the acquisition of a set of terms that become the criteria the reader uses to judge quality and justify opinion. Absolutes of evaluation, moreover, usually become a reader's critical criteria not because they mean anything but because they assert the presence of Taste: it's emotionally comfortable to feel aesthetically secure. In North America in the twentieth century, many readers have become familiar with literature (and hence shaped their sense of Taste) through long years of exposure to literary anthologies. These, according to one theory of education, will expose such readers to the Best that has been written and thought. But what is "Best"? Anthologies tend to confirm or deny literary reputations: by acts of inclusion and exclusion, by the structure anthologists impose on what they select, and by the nature, strategy, and accuracy of whatever editorial notes and questions they contrive as a pedagogical apparatus. Unhappily, while shaping taste, some anthologies simply perpetuate a particular shape of taste. They offer received opinion without taking into account the ways in which "received opinion" excludes groups and ideas from respectability while giving powerful approval to others; hence they sometimes limit options in the name of some such value as cultural stability. The current dissatisfaction with such notions as "greatness" - with a single "canon" of English literature, and with the control exercised by the study of the so-called "major" writers, styles, or forms - declares the uneasiness that many critics now feel towards a static notion of tradition.

xi Preface

These reflections bear directly on Katherine Mansfield. To demonstrate what I mean, I took from my shelves (more or less at random) some thirty anthologies that contain a Mansfield story to see what the choice and the notes suggest.3 The dates of publication range from 1949 to 1987; most of the books are American in origin; all but three are edited by men; most supply brief headnotes and a few study questions; most anthologize seven separate stories over and over (out of the more than eighty that Mansfield wrote4). These seven in fact - "The Garden Party," "The Man Without a Temperament/' "Marriage a la Mode," "The Fly," "The Doll's House," "Bliss," and "Miss Brill" - account for twenty-two of the thirty-five Mansfield appearances in the total thirty books. While thirty is merely a fraction of the number of anthologies on the market, the frequent selection of a problem- or conflict-centred narrative (rather than, for example, an impressionistic and intentionally fragmented sketch) says a great deal about the purpose these anthologies serve. That is, it says more about conventional methods of teaching stories than it does about Mansfield's fiction. The study questions in these books, while by no means uniform, also reiterate some recurrent concerns, repeatedly asking readers to find symbols, declare what motivates characters, appreciate what is variously called subtlety, delicacy, lyricism, or poetic technique, and demonstrate how detailed imagery is related to social theme, resulting in "artistically meaningful" narrative. Such questions speak a set of critical expectations. They assume, for example, that short fiction represents social relationships and that it reveals on analysis a particular meaning. Such expectations highlight not so much the language, the process of reading, or the context of narrative as the idea of solution, as though fiction were a puzzle that had validity only as long as it yielded an answer that could be identified with something in whatever world the reader accepts as real. I do not wish here to minimize Mansfield's psychological insights or social concerns, only to stress that her words need not be judged only in these terms and that a criticism that reads her stories this way in some measure constitutes a directive: that is, it designs how readers will read, and how they will consequently imagine the nature and function of short fiction. Headnotes, which appear in half of the anthologies I looked at, provide one further directive to their readers. These notes were intended to inform. Yet by selecting similar details as necessary information (and by perpetuating similar errors of fact as they did so), they also arrange the reader's expectations. Collectively, these books ask that fiction be read by means of a particular set of touchstones. To illustrate - though I admit in advance that I am being

xii Preface

unfair here -1 have prepared a composite biography of the Katherine Mansfield that these anthology headnotes, taken together, describe. I use the language of the anthologists themselves, though inevitably I emphasize the errors - which are distributed unevenly through the anthologies I cite - by arranging the details as I do. The result, however, shows the distortions that can result from the bizarre mixture of garbled fact and glib history: Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand (or in Thorndon, now a Wellington suburb), in 1888, to a colonial British industrial banker (and his wife, adds one anthologist alone). Her childhood was secure but not interesting, and she was educated at home; but in the magazine of the school she attended she published at age nine her first story, and then she went to study cello at Queen's College London, where life was sophisticated, and where she met D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, who encouraged her to write. The year was 1902, or else it was 1903, and she stayed for two, or else three, four, or five years till 1905, or else 1906. She enjoyed her college career, but then she graduated and reluctantly went back to New Zealand, which she found unhappy, dull, provincial, and a backwater of civilization, and which she consequently hated. Unable to adjust, she spent two years there, publishing her first stories and getting married for the first time. Then she returned to sophisticated Europe in 1908, or else 1909, with an allowance from her father, who cut her off without a penny. In sophisticated London in 1909 she settled permanently, got married again for the first time, had an illegitimate stillborn child while living in Germany, suffered poverty and general ill health, ceased to be a girl, found herself wretched and lonely, took to drugs, and (for the third time, apparently) began to publish her first stories. Although she was a tortured and sophisticated writer who gave up a cello career and turned to writing short vignettes, she was nevertheless amazed when an editor accepted them for publication, for she was really more important as a journal writer than as a story writer. Indeed, she was a fantasist who admired Chekhov, she came close to plagiarizing Chekhov, she wrote slice-of-life stories in a Chekhovian manner, she moved in a literary circle including D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and she found her most important human contact with the writer John Middleton Murry who published her stories. She began living with Murry in 1911, and he became her second husband when she married him in 1913, or else 1918. She published two more volumes of short stories in 1920 and 1922, and he published several more after her death. Fastidious in all she did, she was hysterical, having come to dislike England and being deeply influenced by her brother Leslie's death during the First World War. But she tried her hardest at all times, and wrote morbidly perverse stories while idealizing her childhood in her native country. A robust child, she had weak lungs and suffered

xiii Preface from ill health all her life, and she died suddenly - from tuberculosis - at the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau, France, in 1923.

Perhaps the flavour of this cobbled summary can best be exemplified by a statement I quote verbatim from the English writer Christopher Isherwood: "I myself felt a strong personal love for her at one time in my life, and it seems a little strange to me . . . that we never actually met."5 One problem for any contemporary reader, clearly, is that those who have been reading Katherine Mansfield have already been designing a writer that they can vaguely admire and then be free to dismiss. They have already accorded her her place in the canon of English literature, using unstated attitudes about gender, culture, language, and power to contain her at the margins. Buried in the anthologies' mix of mistakes and misapprehensions lies some verifiable information. She was born in 1888, and she did die of tuberculosis in 1923, though the word "suddenly" scarcely describes her lingering fight against the disease. Her birth name was Kathleen Beauchamp, though during her life she went by several other names as well: K. Bendall, Käthi Bowden, Julian Mark, Elizabeth Stanley, Boris Petrovsky, Matilda Berry, and Lili Heron. Beauchamp, of course, or Beau-champ, is anglicized in several of the stories she set in New Zealand into the family name "Fairfield." She attended Queen's College, London, from "after Easter" 1903 to "June" 1906 (Alpers, Life, 401-2); but the college, though a progressive school initially designed to educate young ladies to be governesses, was scarcely a college of the American state-school model implied by such anthology terms as "college career" and "graduation." D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley certainly did not attend it and did not meet Mansfield until several years later. The suggestion that Lawrence and Virginia Woolf were in the same literary circle would have surprised both writers, though Mansfield did know the two of them; indeed, it may have been Lawrence from whom she caught TB. But various other issues relevant to Mansfield's life and work go largely unexamined until feminist criticism began in the 1980s to investigate more sympathetically her life as a woman. I am referring, for example, to the state of medical treatment for women in the early years of this century, especially the treatment for venereal disease; and the state of women's education (what it was deemed necessary or unnecessary for women to know); and the implications of prevailing assumptions about empire and colony. By constructing Mansfield as they do, the anthology headnotes to which I have referred demonstrate three pervasive tendencies: they are inclined (1) to design

xiv

Preface

Mansfield's life as a series of dependencies on men (her father, brother, editor, two husbands, Lawrence, Gurdjieff, and Chekhov); (2) to accept, usually without question, the idea of European sophistication; and (3) to seek explanations primarily in health and gender for her "lyric" or "morbid" style. These tendencies suggest the normative frames by which as a writer she has been judged. They also lead back to the questions of canon, colony, and critical desire. It is not my intention in this book to develop an entirely new theory of narratology, one that would diagrammatically overdetermine how all fiction behaves; nor is it my aim to investigate the interconnections between feminist and postcolonial theory - either in the abstract or in the particular ways they apply to Mansfield - that might be taken as a paradigm describing all gendered writing in colonial space. These issues are important and, indeed, have been taken up by other commentators, many of whom I cite in the argument that follows. The contributions that Mansfield made to the emergence of Modernist discourse are likewise tangential to this study, though they are central to the work of Sydney Janet Kaplan, John Carswell, and Patricia Moran, for example. These three (like several other critics), concerning themselves severally with the connections between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Middleton Murry, Colette, and D.H. Lawrence, among others, have in consequence illuminated Mansfield's role in shaping a feminist Modernism, her concern with class and sexuality as well as with gender and social expectation, and her interest in the literary representation of time. I do take up questions involving time - and music - in my comments on stylistic choices, short story form, and narrative design. My emphasis, however, falls not on theories of narrative temporality but on writing and reading practice, and on the contexts that affect them. To demonstrate how questions of canon, colony, and critical desire have affected the critical reading of Katherine Mansfield, I begin this book by reviewing what a number of writers have said about her, examining the assumptions on which these critical positions depend. For text, as Mieke Bal has observed, is neither divorced from nor the conceptual opposite of context; rather, the two are critically related. "Formalism," that is, is "part of the semiotic enterprise that [contextualism] evokes" - not only because texts convey messages but also because a "text is by definition, as a semiotic object, receptionoriented" (9). Bal's deduction follows from a strategy of reading a text for the way it is arranged to reach a particular readership; I would argue that a readership also arranges its reading so as to realize its own interpretation of a text - meaning that, at any given

xv Preface

time, a text is not only reception-oriented but also reception-bound. These connections underscore the relation betwen the first part of this book and the next two. Given the tendency of some criticism to seek to justify (or to dismiss) Mansfield's fiction biographically or sociologically the second part of the book probes alternative strategies for "reading Mansfield/' paying special attention to questions of form. This second section examines the evidence (for formal analysis) offered by Mansfield's manuscript revisions; it also looks at the relation between her early practice and her formal experimentation, and suggests how reading Mansfield calls for a reconsideration of the function of formal design. The final section of the book then applies these reading strategies to selected individual stories, in the process moving the margins of critical expectation and questioning the empire of received opinion.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

The research for this project was aided in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I wish gratefully to acknowledge this support, and also to thank the librarians and staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, in Wellington, and the librarians and staff at the Newberry Library, Chicago, for their courteous assistance, and for their permission to print excerpts from Mansfield's unpublished manuscripts. I thank the owners of material in copyright for permission to quote illustrative passages, and my publisher and editors at McGillQueen's University Press, Philip Cercone, Joan McGilvray, and Susan Kent Davidson. I am grateful, too, to Margaret Scott, for her generous advice concerning Mansfield's handwriting, and to Gillian Boddy, Roger Robinson, and Vincent O'Sullivan for conversations about Mansfield's life and work and for patiently answering so many of my questions. I want also to express my appreciation to my colleagues at the University of British Columbia, especially Thomas E. Blom and Patricia Merivale, for their suggestions, and Gernot Wieland, who helped me to translate some German phrases; and my research assistants, Carol McConnell and Tamas Dobozy, who tracked down numerous hard-to-find articles. As always, special thanks go, with love, to Peggy New, who for many years has been reading Mansfield along with me and helping me to appreciate the language and the cadences of story-telling. Portions of the Preface and chapter I were delivered at McGill University as the McDonald-Currie Lecture in 1990, and as the 1990

xviii Acknowledgments

Brooks Lecture at the University of Queensland. In somewhat different form, chapters 3 and 9 appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and in Roger Robinson's Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin, and part of chapter 7 in A Talent(ed) Digger, a Festschrift for Anna Rutherford, edited by Hena Maes-Jelinek, Gordon Collier, and Geoffrey V. Davis. I am grateful for permission to recast them here.

A Note on Sources

Mansfield published three books of stories in her lifetime: In a German Pension (1911), Bliss and Other Stones (1920), The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922), as well as editions (with Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press and Richard Murry's Heron Press, respectively) of two separate stories, Prelude (1918) and Je ne parle pas francais (with no cedilla, dated 1919 and released in 1920). To these works must be added the numerous sketches, stories, poems, letters, critical notes, and journal entries that appeared in periodical form only or were left in manuscript when she died in 1923. After her death her husband, John Middleton Murry, assembled from this uncollected material several additional volumes, including The Doves' Nest and Other Stories (1923), Poems (1923), Something Childish and Other Stories (1924; entitled The Little Girl and Other Stories in its first American edition that same year), Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927; revised as a "Definitive Edition" in 1954), The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1928), The Aloe (1930), Novels & Novelists (1930), The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (1937), and The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield (1939). Several collections and selections of Mansfield's work have appeared since that time. The standard current edition of Mansfield's short fiction, despite the critiques (of selectivity and textual judgment) that have been brought against it, remains The Stones of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Antony Alpers (1984); it is this collection, unless otherwise specified, to which I refer in this book. Alpers draws on manuscript notes and first periodical publication to help establish acceptable texts of Mansfield's stories,

xx A Note on Sources

meaning that the stories as he prints them sometimes differ from the versions that appeared in earlier volume form (the versions over which Murry in most cases had control and that were subsequently reprinted in Mansfield collections edited by Dan Davin and others, and in anthologies printed before 1984). Alpers restores "Je ne parle pas français" (with a cedilla) to its original unexpurgated length, for example, and in the case of "Epilogue II: Violet" combines Mansfield's title ("Epilogue II") with Murry's ("Violet"); there are other changes still, which Alpers' text for the most part makes clear. Because Alpers' edition none the less omits a number of sketches and stories, I also refer in this book to several works that have either never been collected (e.g., "Study") or those that, since Murry's versions, have been reedited and separately printed (e.g., Vincent O'Sullivan's edition of The Aloe with Prelude, 1982; Margaret Scott's edition of "[London]," 1970; and the sketches collected by Jean Stone as Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, 1907-09,1977). David Dowling has collected Mansfield's Dramatic Sketches (1988); Clare Hanson her Critical Writings (1987); Vincent O'Sullivan her Poems (1988); and O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott her Collected Letters, of which four volumes (of a projected five) appeared between 1984 and 1996. While these recent publications constitute my main sources of citation, I also found several other, generally earlier editions to be useful in shaping the argument of Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form. These other editions range from Murry's compilations of the Scrapbook and Journal ("Definitive" edition) to C.K. Stead's 1977 Letters and Journals (which draws on Murry's versions) and Ian Gordon's 1978 rendition of Mansfield's 1908 travel diary, The Urewera Notebook (which challenges Murry). More detailed editions of Mansfield's journals and notebooks were separately prepared by Gillian Boddy (whose doctoral dissertation looks at the early journals only) and Margaret Scott (who updates and revises Gordon as well as Murry) in 1997; both of these compilations draw on the collections of Mansfield's manuscripts that are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington (for which there is a brief published catalogue) and the Newberry Library in Chicago. My own citations from the manuscripts, using these libraries' respective catalogue identification numbers, derive from my personal consultation of manuscript materials between 1988 and 1993. The standard descriptive bibliography of Mansfield's publications is that prepared by Brownlee Kirkpatrick in 1989. As this book parenthetically demonstrates, questions of biography and critical judgment are even more contentious than those involving text. My own focus falls primarily on textual matters. Readers

xxi A Note on Sources

who want further to assess the relative merits of the various biographies by Antony Alpers (in two separate volumes), Ida Baker, Sylvia Berkman, Gillian Boddy, John Carswell, Nora Crone, Cherry Hankin, Nariman Hormasji, Helen McNeish, Jeffrey Meyers, John Middleton Murry, Claire Tomalin, and others might wish to begin with the three articles on this subject by Liselotte Glage, Elizabeth Webby, and Lydia Wevers. Full bibliographic details for these articles, and for all other works to which I refer in Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form, appear in the list of Works Cited.

This page intentionally left blank

PART ONE

Reading Mansfield

This page intentionally left blank

1 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

In surveying critical assessments of Mansfield, I create categories simply by the act of saying that I wish to focus on five issues: imperialism, gender, plagiarism, textuality, and the process of rereading. Naming these topics produces conceptual "subheadings," which like headnotes in anthologies - will ideally crystallize in some way the issues and ideas that are to be raised in the commentaries they introduce. Paradoxically, headnotes and subheadings also compress and so sometimes oversimplify. They are themselves "frames," after all, resonating with all the problems that attend any process of filtering argument and information. No argument is free from assumptions (whether openly or merely indirectly and presumptively "ideological"), nor is any body of data. Organizing this chapter by means of five subheadings, I am attempting to set out openly a series of critical assumptions that have been brought to the reading of Katherine Mansfield; by tonally couching these subheadings as I do, I am at the same time trying to illustrate the limitations of categorical critical enclosures. When I refer, therefore, to the first topic as -L Lei's fence the family estate

- I am speaking of that complex knot of attitudes that does not question its norms, one that resists differences (and whatever possibilities or dangerous challenges differences might represent) by rereading them in the context of the received and familiar. Such as the u.s. college vocabulary brought to interpret the Queen's College system.

4 Reading Mansfield

Or the recurrent attempt to read the budding New Zealand colonial writer as English, or, failing that, Russian. The issue that concerns me here is the ease with which people are inclined to accept without question the peripheral status of colonies. Here I am particularly concerned with the status accorded to Mansfield's home country, which became an independent nation in 1907 but was still regarded abroad as unimportant long after that. The terms used in cultural dismissal, often unthinking, are sometimes comic, but they are no less political for that. "Comic" dismissals are the stuff of any ethnic joke - the sort of thing that is still to be heard as repartee ("Went to Australia," said the English traveller; "wanted to go to New Zealand too, but it was closed"). But ethnic humour is mostly concerned with power. The implications of the English dismissal of New Zealand are more apparent in the formulaic phrase that was used to round off the plot of a nineteenth-century poem by Arthur Hugh Clough, in which the reader, after following various characters for some time through their elaborate entanglements in Scotland, gets finally to the narrative solution that the poet designs: "They are married, and gone to New Zealand" ("The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," 92).J What the phrase indicates is that, for the English poet and his English audience, a departure to the ends of the earth was a tacit consignment to oblivion; not only did no one hear from such persons again, but no one had any need to hear from them again. Going to New Zealand was a sign of their irrelevance to the mainstream or (in literary terms) their unoriginality, their aspiration only to imitate the models of their homeland, hence their inability to affect the course of what was accepted as "art." The problem with categorizing Katherine Mansfield this way was that she was affecting art, even in England, regarded as the sophisticated centre - which meant for many readers that she had either to be explained away critically or else granted honorary English nationality in order to make her influence legitimate. Critical nationalisms in various other parts of the world behave in similar ways. But my focus here must remain on New Zealand. By the early years of the twentieth century New Zealand had acquired a curiously double public image - it was far enough away to be considered socially avant-garde, though (because it was far away) none of its social experiments had to be considered consequential. Encyclopedias of the time, for example, described New Zealand not as a place of culture or of fresh ideas (though it had already produced the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford as well as Mansfield) but as a straightforward source of butter, mutton, and wool. The French social scientist Andre Siegfried

5 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

did of course in 1904 see it as a cauldron of social experiment, a socialist utopia-in-the-making,2 and New Zealand tried to live comfortably with this image for many years, for the image overlapped positively (if nebulously) with the Utopian desires of the early Canterbury settlement. But this image of social innovation, however well or ill founded it might have been, was implicitly countered by a second and more romantic image: of New Zealand as a child-like land (daughter nation of the Empire), for whom Utopia (by association) was a lovely but child-z's/z dream. If childlike it could be admired for the innocence of its desires. But if childish, it did not have to be seriously regarded. By this paradigm, a place called "New Zealand" could be conceptualized as ideal; but a place called "Europe" nevertheless continued to represent sophistication, and sophistication remained the functional measure of adult success. In practice Europe valued what it deemed to be sophistication over what it praised as innocence - which is, of course, the cultural point of Mansfield's 1921 story "Marriage a la Mode." It is a story about one woman's inability ever to be an insider, even when she behaves like one. Her connection with innocence excludes her. This distinction further affects how, after her death, Mansfield's husband and editor, Middleton Murry, represented her. For whatever reason, Murry concocted an identity for Mansfield that sentimentalized his marriage to her; perhaps it satisfied some need within himself. But by sentimentalizing her in the process, he artificially constructed one of the contexts that shaped her reputation. His version of Mansfield certainly celebrated her importance (he manufactured ten books out of Mansfield's writings, and published them with Constable Press); curiously, it simultaneously lodged her at the edges of mainstream tradition and for a long time kept her there. I do not have to rehearse here all the things that are wrong with Murry's edition of Mansfield's Journal (first released in 1927, and republished by Constable as the enlarged "Definitive Edition" in 1954); the critic Ian Gordon has done that amply in an article on the "Editing of Mansfield," published in Landfall in 1959.3 Suffice it to say that Murry could not always read Mansfield's handwriting, that he misread some of it, and that he even joined together separate passages of the notes that he called her "journal"; he never visited New Zealand himself and showed little appreciation for it, choosing to reconfirm the version of New Zealand that called it a colonial backwater from which escape was necessary. One particular example of this misreading showed up when The Urewera Notebook - a diary Mansfield kept in 1907 when she went on a camping trip through the North Island of New Zealand before returning to London - was

6 Reading Mansfield

re-edited in 1978. Murry's version of Mansfield's visit to the sulphur spa of Rotorua was that she thought it a "little hell" and by extension couldn't wait to leave; in Ian Gordon's 1978 edition, she is referring to an excursion she made outside the town, to a "little hill" (67).4 The indeterminacies of editorial practice become further apparent, however, if one takes into account the subsequent re-editing of the notebooks that was undertaken separately in the 19805 and 19905 by Margaret Scott and Gillian Boddy. Margaret Scott restores the phrase "little hell" but then contextualizes it, observing that Mansfield was referring neither to her country nor to the town of Rotorua but to the boiling mud pools of Whakarewarewa. Mansfield, that is, clearly did not wholly scorn New Zealand; her diaries suggest she actually enjoyed the years back in her home country. But she did not sentimentally idealize her birthplace either. What becomes clear is that the determination to call her a contemporary sophisticate and the determination to call her a dreamer of a Utopian childhood are both imperial versions of her life; they are designs of categories by which she can be explained according to prevailing critical fashions. Christopher Isherwood, for example, chose initially to love the sentimental image that Murry concocted of Mansfield as the Perfect Wife and Tragic Saint; it was probably easier than dealing with the reality. The reality caused him to employ a different convention in order to describe her, and in Exhumations (1966) he wrote: Mansfield's life is so fascinating because - despite its surface tangle of moods, impetuous reactions and rash decisions - it presents a very simple symbolic pattern. This is a variant of the Garden of Eden theme. A childhood paradise is lost. An apple of knowledge is eaten, with bitter consequences. And then, under the curse and blessing of that knowledge, comes the attempt to regain the paradise. It is a deeply moving story but not really a tragic one, for it ends in sight of success. (65)5

But then Isherwood contrives to reverse himself, for he goes on to dismiss both the idea of paradise and the validity of Mansfield's success, finally settling on three adjectives to describe the woman he says he once loved: "clever," "false," and "embarrassingly sentimental" (171). Pointedly, this judgment at once denies her any real creative power and reconfirms his own position as critic, because it keeps sophistication at home in England in the present, and attributes naivete to the colony-child of the paradise-past. I do not wish to denigrate Isherwood's critical abilities, only to position them within the frame of a body of commentary that shapes how readers have been asked to read colonial writing, at least from

7 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

the vantage point of the Empire's presumed centre. As one might expect, definitions of "colonial" shift the moment one turns to the "colony" itself. Consider what the New Zealand poet Eileen Duggan had to say when she reviewed the American critic Ruth Mantz's biography of Mansfield in 1934. Duggan was at pains to defend her own society from too-easy dismissal and from too-easy acceptance of conventional wisdoms. So she isolates what Mantz did and did not understand about Mansfield's homeland: the book does a grave injustice to the Wellington of the nineties, in that it seems to acquiesce in the assumption that there was little culture here. We have never been a showy people and our isolation has given us a touch of conservatism in matters of literature, but few countries read more soundly. [Had] Katherine Mansfield ... met in London some of the readers whom she encountered in New Zealand [she] would have held them brilliant. (92)6

It is quite clear that New Zealand anthologies, unlike those I cited earlier, favour the stories with New Zealand settings - "At the Bay," "The Voyage," "Prelude," and "The Garden Party" (stressing the signs of setting that are markers of New Zealand in the last of these stories, and in all cases emphasizing childhood). One collection - Ian Gordon's Undiscovered Country (1974) - goes so far as to arrange all the stories about the Burnell and Sheridan families, and other stories with New Zealand settings, in a chronology of character development, drawing parallels between portraits of childhood and adolescence and Mansfield's own life. Many commentators, from G.S. Hubbell to Antony Alpers (Katherine Mansfield, 218), have further stressed how the Burnell family names derive directly from the Beauchamp family connections, and argued that Mansfield (or at least Kathleen Beauchamp) z's Kezia Burnell. But such an equation of course romanticizes the image of New Zealand children as well as this particular New Zealand childhood, implicitly reiterating the conventional (and essentially rural) New Zealand wisdom that that country is a "good place to grow up in" and feeding the stereotype of the idyll. That it also distorts both the process of artistic creation and the character of Mansfield's own fiction almost goes without saying. Except that this point needs saying. One can appreciate why Elizabeth Webby, reviewing the state of Mansfield studies in 1982, remarked, "No doubt the Mansfield centenary in 1988 will produce another slate of publications," and then acerbically added: "perhaps some of them will be about her work" (243). As though in echo, the New Zealand-born critic Andrew Gurr in 1984 confessionally recalled his own sensibilities when he embarked on a Mansfield

8 Reading Mansfield

project. First he felt that he knew her work better than any "foreign" critic because he and Mansfield shared the same national background. Then he added: "That was a mistake of simple ignorance ... I found soon enough how small were the helps that geography gives to criticism, and even knowledge of the pattern which a regional writer follows going into freedom and exile in the metropolis became dangerous, because the identified pattern too easily becomes a shaping mould" (67). It is this sense of the number and variety of shaping moulds that 1 have been stressing, emphasizing first how the critical pressure to make New Zealand at once provincial and idyllic functions to diminish its effective importance as a source of creative or critical expression. Repeatedly declaring its colonial status is a way of continuing attitudinally to fence the family estate; it means that the empire's image of itself and its own criteria for aesthetic assessment do not have to be queried. To stress that Mansfield's society is young, far away, and little is to deny it power. And in the case of Mansfield this capacity to dismiss was further seen to be confirmed if one could also say about her that 2 She's only a woman I have traced elsewhere the way in which literary and cultural establishments in New Zealand long had difficulty contending with Mansfield and her works. As an expatriate success she had demonstrated that her writings could not be ignored, but how were critics and readers to deal with them (and with her)? She was homegrown, but she was living overseas; she was internationally celebrated, but she had led what was perceived to be a scandalous life; she was there to be claimed as the representative New Zealand writer at a time when New Zealand nationalism was asking for one, but she was a woman, and the New Zealand national self-image was quite insistently male. Some sense of the dominant male images of society and relationships can be gauged from the popular New Zealand literature of the time, as, for example, the kind of stories written for such magazines as Red funnel.7 "The Fijian Girl and the Octopus" by "J.G.," for instance, is advertised in that magazine as a "true story," a claim that may or may not have been accepted by readers in 1905; readers today are more likely to look at the story-book patterns it uses, its social biases, and probably its Freudian overtones. It combines a monster of the deep, a fair maiden in distress, and a hero - the narrator, who is made into a hero when circumstances force him to

9 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

fight against unequal odds ("Unfortunately I had forgotten my sheath knife," he says). The language combines the exact with the conventional: "The little lassie was only wearing a liku ... For a moment I hardly knew what to do; but, lifting struggling girl and fish on my shoulders, made for the shore. Ugh! the great gnawing beak, the slimy, flabby thing against my neck and on my head, made my flesh creep." Such writing relies on an accumulation of adjectives, with enough native terms interspersed to suggest authenticity to those who are willing to overlook the unlikelihood of the whole scene. The point is that such writing was accepted as realistic; realism was deemed to be a manly art; realism and manliness were accepted as the characteristic New Zealand virtues. And along came Katherine Mansfield, to challenge both the conventions and the implications of such writing - and to win international recognition for doing so.8 Critics who reacted to this situation - which was perceived as a predicament - tended to do one of three things. They asserted that international critics were wrong, claimed that Katherine Mansfield was not a New Zealand writer after all, or insisted that she wasn't any good anyway. The poet A.R.D. Fairburn tried to rectify matters in 1928, but he phrased his argument ambivalently: "You must not expect power and virility from Katherine Mansfield's poems," he wrote, "though she is capable of sturdy realism" (69). "But let us thank the gods for giving us at least one writer of genius, even if she was a woman" (71). As late as 1951 the terms of a letter that a correspondent wrote to the New Zealand Listener indicate how these general attitudes to gender cross over into a judgment of words: Mansfield, according to the correspondent, is neither memorable, well written, true-to-life, or anything except "the apotheosis of the trivial, dabbling and dithering in minutiae of excruciating dullness" (5). This particular letter-writer (called "Oak Not Ash") remains anonymous, so far as I know, but his (or her) judgments of language have substantial precedent in critical commentary: the opinions of two somewhat better-known observers of the literary scene, T.S. Eliot and Andre Maurois, run along remarkably parallel lines. Just as an interest in children was assumed by some to be a womanly virtue - M.H. Holcroft, the longtime editor of the New Zealand Listener, observed in his memoirs that the reason so many New Zealand stories were about children is that they were written by women at the kitchen table (29) - so a particular kind of language attributed to women was deemed to be a measure of its irrelevance. It is a short step then to saying that women's language is trite, not making the distinction that a particular attitude to subject and

io Reading Mansfield

structure determines this connection. To couch the critical procedure in these terms is to realize that the covert subject here is empire all over again, and that such commentators seem fundamentally to be attempting to fence and preserve yet another (and this time gendered) inherited estate. The French novelist Andre Maurois's 1936 book Poets and Prophets telegraphs its concern in its introduction; the intention is "to examine certain English writers who ... have played an important part in the spiritual moulding of one or two generations/' the extended point being that "in Katherine Mansfield can be found a pure and feminine mysticism, which is perhaps the only realization of the miraculous synthesis of the intelligence and the senses" (ix, xiii). Maurois's Mansfield chapter begins with an allusion to Chekhov, then outlines her life and literary themes, then attempts to define Katherine Mansfield according to "feminine impressionism" (239). Maurois's impulse is to praise the "womanhood" (242) of Mansfield and her writing, but his desire for modern literature to be "mystical" and his explicit link between mystical understanding and what he calls "cross-sections of the feminine universe" (242) enclose the world of womanhood in stereotypes and familiar dualities. For example, he writes: "The world of Tchehov is a male world: the thoughts and the conversations of its inhabitants are filled with ideas and activities. The world of Katherine Mansfield is primarily a feminine world. The house, clothes, children, women's cares ... are the things that matter. With the household cares she likes to mingle the feelings of women, their judgments of people, their musings" (239). A series of acute insights into the workings of her prose is constrained, at such moments, by limited assumptions about connections between gender and role. A 1962 review by Brigid Brophy attempts a psychological analysis of Mansfield that is blunter than the assessment Maurois proffers but not significantly better because of that, for it relies on related assumptions about restricted relations between gender and language. Arguing that Mansfield developed "almost a formal conundrum" for herself by "identifying with a mother who did not want to have her in the first place" (256-7)9 she goes on to assert that Katherine's relationship with Middleton Murry explains her inconsistent prose style - that of the satirist turned sentimentalist. "With Murry's encouragement," she writes, "she tried to domesticate her fierceness under suburban cosiness and tweeness. One of the unseen presences at her Garden Party is undeniably a pottery gnome - with features very like Murry's" (258). "Accurately as she observed or remembered her fictional children," Brophy writes, "there is a frightening mawkishness

ii Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

about them and their babytalk - and her babytalk: her dear little this's and thats, ... her whole tendency to curl up beneath toadstools. It goes beyond the pathetic into the pathological: beyond the merely uninformed fantasies of a woman who has never had children into the compensatory fantasies of a woman whose unconscious impulse is towards child-murder" (258). Such comments provide a forceful antidote to the more typical acceptance of the child figures as idyllic - Brophy praises most highly the Katherine Mansfield who was, by the end of her life, honest about her own anger - but the more fundamental contrast involves the question of gender and language. Brophy criticizes one range of Mansfield's language for being mawkish. T.S. Eliot and H.E. Bates criticize the same register of language for being "feminine" (Isherwood, Exhumations, 69). When Eliot chastised Katherine Mansfield most outspokenly, he did so in private, in letters to Ezra Pound: "I must say," he wrote about Murry in 1920, "he is much more difficult to deal with when K.M. is about, and I have an impression that she terrorises him ... I believe her to be a dangerous WOMAN," adding more vitriolically still, in 1922, that "she is simply one of the most persistent and thickskinned toadies and one of the vulgarest women Lady R.[othermere] has ever met and is also a sentimental crank" (Letters, 389, 392).I0 Christopher Isherwood at least questions the Eliot-Bates premise, acknowledging that they use the word feminine in a derogatory sense to describe the kind of writing which is (to quote Mr Bates) "fluttering, gossipy, breathless" ... Mansfield was certainly apt to flutter. She often affects a breathless epistolary style, in which she appears to think she can make words take on deeper meanings by simply writing them in italics. And her coyness at its worst can make you hot with shame. But it must be objected at once that these are not exclusively feminine defects. There is plenty of breathless male gossiping in Henry Miller, and plenty of male coyness in Hemingway. (Exhumations, 69-70)

But Isherwood's further assertion that Mansfield's work does not show "to any great degree" a "perception of the world [that is] conditioned by the fact that she is biologically female" (69) seems more suspect, perhaps especially because the argument he uses to "prove" his point assumes a good deal about perception and female biology: Mansfield, he says, "rather shrank from the recognition of herself as a woman - at any rate, an adult woman. Her view of the sexual relation is distasteful and pessimistic; and one feels that, much as she loves children, she would rather they belonged to someone else" (69). In other words, women prove their maturity by having children; men, in

12 Reading Mansfield

such a syllogism, presumably prove their maturity by siring children and "having" ideas; and Katherine Mansfield, while she "need fear no comparisons" (72) in Isherwood's terms, remains immature according to this syllogism because she fits neither category with any ease. The striking work of several current critics - Cherry Hankin, Kate Fullbrook, Sophie Tomlinson, Heather Murray, Sydney Janet Kaplan, Mary Burgan, Patricia Moran, and Vincent O'Sullivan,11 for example - departs from this presumptive judgment in numerous ways, one of which involves a re-estimation of Mansfield's sense of her own sexuality. For despite what some earlier commentary averred (and perhaps its will to sentimentalize grew out of a refusal to acknowledge the body), Mansfield wrote often - openly and directly - about physical desire and sexual power. As though to forestall the disembodying idealization of the feminine that Isherwood would later use to contain her, for example, she wrote to her friend Dorothy Brett in April 1921 that "physical love is such rare delight that its only to be taken in hand lightly and wantonly by both parties. Equally! Unless its a purely trade affair I imagine you want a lover to give yourself to. No woman wants less. And no man either, if he is worth loving. Im all for love & for people enjoying themselves, but its a pity when they enjoy themselves less than they might, that's my feeling. And I think any relation which is not fastidious is not worth having" (Collected Letters, 4:2078). In context she was critiquing the Canadian writer Frank "Toronto" Prewett, a marginal member of the Bloomsbury Group, but not until Hankin and Fullbrook did critics make much of such phrases. From then on, however, they became a focus, primarily of the degree to which innuendo, sexual references, and oblique images in Mansfield's writing convey identifiable attitudes to the body - especially to the female body. Indeed, several feminist critics have asserted categorically that the stories and journals express (if not overtly, then at least covertly) lesbian desire, and that this desire, thwarted, generates the tension that drives such stories as "Bliss." By this assessment, fulfilment - or the lack thereof - leads to anger, psychosocial hunger, resentment at the mother figure for continuing to speak but being unable to feed (Moran, 39), "self-loathing" (Moran, 4), and a series of fictional strategies to articulate such personal dislocation. Writing becomes (argues Moran, for example) "a form of impersonation" (17), a leap out of "feminine embodiment" into an identification with others, the subjects of her stories. In these stories, moreover, oral metaphors (of feeding, and fear of "oral impregnation," 108) encode a psychosocial disability: the inability to speak as a woman in a context defined by the "norm" of masculinity. Thus, "hysteria" (46) comes to represent a feminized version of an unreliable narrator, and eating

13 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

(and size) become "a peculiarly feminine mode of participating in the patriarchal economy" (103). Consumption (the word alluding to tuberculosis as well as to material intake) links the body with disease, Burgan's subject as well as Moran's. These critics thus counter one form of biographical criticism (that which reads sequence as causal) with another (that which reads psychosocial malaise as the consequence of gendered experience). Such argument radically redirects interpretation, largely by redefining the category "feminine" and turning it from an excluded into a resisting paradigm. It leaves fundamentally unresisted, nevertheless, the instability of the very fact of categorizing by gender itself. Yet among the most far-reaching differences that Kaplan, Tomlinson, and other feminist critics (many influenced by French feminist theory) have introduced into Mansfield criticism are those that involve attitudes towards language. Where the criticism to which I earlier alluded describes language as though it were a given, immutably representing a fixed set of social values, the commentaries of Tomlinson and others treat language as a structure of relationships, subject to authorial design as well as to social convention and the strategies of interpretation. Before considering further this question of how words relate to other words in Mansfield's work, however, I want to turn to my third paradigm of evaluation, 3 There has to be a reason for success

and recall at this point the name of Anton Chekhov, which has been running antiphonally through all my comments so far. For repeatedly, critics have made Chekhov into Mansfield's literary father. This apparent need to chart literary genealogy is a little puzzling. It expresses, apparently, a tacit resistance to the idea of originality, but it also demonstrates how critical procedures confirm expectations about the structure of social relations. That is, to say that Mansfield's stories are "Chekhovian" gives them a particular quality: it suggests impression, for example, instead of linear history. But it also names Mansfield by means of another, and so (to pre-empt a phrase Derek Walcott uses about living in the West Indies) makes her live perpetually "in simile."12 It categorizes her by reference to a male author of received standing, hence at once elevates her according to received critical conventions yet diminishes her to the degree that she remains in the shadow of the other figure. By such methods she is allowed success inasmuch as a category can be found for her; and her success is explained because of the familiarity of the figure or form to which she is thus linked.

14 Reading Mansfield

The gender politics of this process would lead commentary in one direction, the civil politics in another. While some critics have felt they have to distinguish Chekhov's maleness from Mansfield's "femininity" - in outlook and strategy of language - they have not always seen these categories except in hierarchical relation to each other. The terms "greater" and "lesser" are often implied in the distinction between male and female. Critics who sought a Russian master for Mansfield were likewise seeking a paradigm of authority. And if the standard nineteenth-century Masters of English or American prose tradition - however one translates such a phrase - did not provide clear models for Mansfield's accomplishment, the challenge for those who judged by means of the paradigms of received greatness was to explain the reasons for her success. Behind this perceived difficulty was a resistance to the idea that a departure from received categories of accomplishment could itself be meritorious, or that such difference might have some legitimate source in politics or gender. Being female made her "lesser"; being from New Zealand made her "colonial and provincial and naive": such was the conventional wisdom. Being female and from New Zealand had, of course, a great deal to do with her difference, aims, attitudes, motifs, and techniques - but if these could not initially be accepted as sources of innovation and strength, and if England and America provided no clear, approvable models for what she was doing, criticism turned to the European continent (seeking in the other major centre it respected for judgments about classic status) to explain her. Back it was to Chekhov. But this link, too, was subsequently to be turned against Mansfield. For when she fell out of favour - or at least, when Murry and Murry's sentimentalized Mansfield fell out of favour - the search for "influence" and the desire for explanation heatedly changed into a charge of plagiarism and an impulse to debunk. Aldous Huxley's cruel caricature of Murry in Point Counter Point in 1928, as the lapdog character Burlap, dewily devoted to his carefully crafted image of his dead wife, suggests the viciousness of the literary vivisection. Beatrice Hastings' dismissal of Mansfield in 1936, however, as a "'fiendish' ... pole-cat [who] ... 'twittered' her way out of a world she had fouled wherever she went" (The Old New Age - Orage and Others 1936], quoted by Alpers, Life, 397-8) smacks of a rival's compensatory overkill - though, to be fair, neither characterization is any more devastating than those that Mansfield herself wrote.13 As her stories, playlets, and diary epigrams demonstrate, Mansfield was a clever parodist, a caustic satirist of personal and public foible, and a constant experimenter with the formal techniques of irony. It was the "caustic" that some people identified with

15 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

"sophisticated," making the charge of "sentimentality" part of a complex critical volley, attacking what was perceived to be her point of vulnerability. The Chekhov connection provided an opening. Mansfield's letters and journals (as re-edited by Margaret Scott and Vincent O'Sullivan) make it clear, of course, that she read and admired Chekhov from at least as early as 1914; Murry (with S.S. Koteliansky) published a translation of some of Chekhov's stories in 1915, and Mansfield herself published English versions of some of Chekhov's letters in the Athenaeum in 1919. Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard was even on the Queen's College curriculum. But while Mansfield also read and was influenced by many other writers, from Theocritus and Oscar Wilde to D.H. Lawrence and Colette/4 they have been made out to be interesting but of little consequence. It has been Chekhov who has been repeatedly used to make and break her reputation. The first query (about an unconscious memory of Chekhov affecting Mansfield's composition) came in 1935, from Elisabeth Schneider, and the first sustained attack in 1951, in the Times Literary Supplement, when E.M. Almedingen declared that Mansfield's 1910 story "The Child-Who-Was-Tired," the first story she published in England, was a copy of Chekhov's 1888 story "Spat Khochetsia."15 Translated as "Sleepyhead," Chekhov's story was available in English translation by 1903, though there is no direct evidence that Mansfield read it then, and some parallels do exist between Mansfield's story and Chekhov's. His tells of a Moscow servant, scarcely out of childhood herself, who is ill used and overworked by the family she serves; overtired, but still required to rock the family's child off to sleep, she comes to perceive the baby as her antagonist, and finally, irrationally, she smothers it to death. In Mansfield's story, set in Germany, another nursemaid kills another child, for the same reasons and in the same way, though Mansfield limits the scope of the action to a single day and adds more children to the family, significantly naming one of them "Anton." Ronald Sutherland defended Mansfield in 1962, arguing that the story was less an example of plagiarism than a demonstration of her talent for artistic recreation;16 then in 1987 the whole story broke again, in one of the most engrossing of recent Mansfield studies, Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. For Tomalin, the need to explain has relatively little to do with Mansfield's literary stature, however, and much more to do with the psychology of her behaviour. The question of whether or not a specific act of identifiable plagiarism took place is therefore of less consequence to her than why the author should have tolerated even the appearance of plagiarism. Her answer - and

16 Reading Mansfield

a key issue here is that Tomalin clearly believes in identifiable reasons, concrete answers and explanations, just as Almedingen, earlier, clearly believed in the "fact" of literary theft - involves Mansfield's interrupted but ongoing relationship with a singularly unappealing character named Floryan Sobieniowski. The story Tomalin tells - and it has all the persuasiveness of documentary narrative, hiding the inevitable subjectivity of its arrangement - runs in summary as follows: Katherine met Floryan in 1909, in Germany, where she had gone after her short-lived first marriage and where she may or may not have had a miscarriage or abortion. They struck up a friendship. Floryan was a Polish emigre translator, no doubt familiar with the works of Chekhov, who possibly introduced Katherine to the German translation of the stories, which she would have been able to read fluently. Katherine was also writing stories at the time. The friendship developed. But one unanticipated outcome of the relationship was most probably the gonorrhea that Katherine acquired by the end of the year, a disease that was badly treated, which likely is the reason she was subsequently unable to bear children and which led indirectly to the ill health she suffered for the rest of her life. Under such circumstances, the Chekhov story might be seen to carry more than casual resonances for her. In any event, the friendship ceased, for at the end of 1910 Katherine turned abruptly from Floryan and returned to England. Early the next year she received the invitation to write a story for the fashionable journal The New Age, and she sent them "The Child-Who-Was-Tired." It established her reputation, and she collected it the following year in her first book, In a German Pension. Now why, asks Tomalin, would she not subsequently allow that book to be reprinted?17 Why, in 1912, did Katherine persuade Murry to name Floryan, who had tracked her down in London, the "Polish correspondent" for the magazine Rhythm (106)? Why did Murry shortly afterwards accuse Floryan, in a private letter, of being a liar and scoundrel who will "get us into trouble everywhere" (116)? Why in 1920 was Katherine so willing to pay a substantial amount of money to Floryan to retrieve some old letters from him (207-8)? Why, years after that, in 1927 and again in 1946, would Murry still be willing to write for Floryan a letter of recommendation to the Royal Literary Fund (208)? Tomalin's answer is that there was a small Chekhovian time bomb ticking away inside Mansfield's first book (94). The words plagiarism and blackmail spring readily to mind. Various critics have questioned this version of events, finding little hard evidence for any of the transactions Tomalin outlines. Indeed, the nature and use of "evidence" remains in question here. Laws

17 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

concerning theft of intellectual property might well raise the defence that the two writers separately drew on the same source, though Mansfield's acknowledged familiarity with Chekhov makes this strategy hard to sustain. A more diffuse but perhaps more telling critique derives from the notion of artistic fashion. In an age when formal imitation is admired and not treated as plagiarism, a themeand-variation treatment of another writer's work would probably be praised; in an age when such imitation is not admired, and an author still attempts it, the consequences are less certain. But as I have tried to demonstrate, the reasons for critical determinations of reputation are also mixed, and susceptible to covert desire. Objectivity is an illusion. The two authors I have just hypothesized - the ones writing imitations at two separate times - have not performed radically different exercises or created radically different kinds of composition. The difference lies in the perception of the act, and the confusion arises because the difference is expressed in terms involving quality. Bestowing quality, consequently, has also to be seen as an act of construction, a process, deriving from a set of political or ethical beliefs, a faith in familiarity, an attribution of value to a particular structure or order. In literature, of course, such structures take shape in words. The charge of plagiarism involves the similarity of sequences of verbal constructions. Questions of quality in literature therefore inevitably return to questions of language and the forms language takes (which again involve class, gender, social context, and time): that is, they return to a consideration of style. Ambiguity clouds this category of critical assessment as well. For style, as has already been demonstrated, is one feature for which Katherine Mansfield has been both praised and dismissed, usually by means of some such indeterminate phrase as her acute sense of detail, her sentimental drivel, her clever wit, her caustic irritability. But for those who want more precise commentary than such phrases admit, style opens to more tangible analysis; indeed, as everyone knows, 4 It's just a matter of putting one word in front of another

Reading Mansfield carefully, therefore, is also a question of reading the sequence of verbal structures, not just of seeking to know "what happens." The reader who seeks a narrative history from a Mansfield story is asking for the conventional English narrative form, which she does not provide. Reading for structural sequence, by contrast, opens the texts up to the social and psychological nuances of narrative revelation.

i8 Reading Mansfield

Many critics have argued for such close attention.18 But to illustrate within a limited space some of the strategies of this process, I would like, rather than to summarize an extensive but uneven body of critical exegesis and closed explication, to focus on one passage of a single short story. The story I have chosen is one of Mansfield's less well known and seldom anthologized, a story called "Revelations," which appeared in the Athenaeum of 11 June 1920 and was collected later that year as the second-last story in Bliss and Other Stones. Antony Alpers, who is one of the few critics to comment on the story at all, notes two features in it. One involves the ending, which (in Alpers' words, giving authority to a technique by a parallel example) "exhibits a characteristic which Mansfield shares to a significant extent ... with Nicolai Gogol: the frequent use of some form of evasion to terminate a personal crisis and reveal a character" (Stories, 563). The other feature hints at the author's determination to create a particular effect (though Alpers is being essentially annotative when he observes it), the point being that the manuscript's punctuation was much revised before the Athenaeum printing, and then revised again before the story appeared in book form. The question is, is that important? We know, from a much-quoted observation that Mansfield herself made in a 17 January 1921 letter to her brother-inlaw, Richard Murry, about the story called "Miss Brill," that she valued cadence in language and the specific arrangement of words: "It's a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details ... In Mz'ss 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, fit her on that day at that very moment" (Letters and Journals, ed. Stead, 213). For Mansfield the "story" inhered in how these arrangements achieved their effects, not in the sequential intricacies of plotted events or the determination of any single kernel called "meaning." Punctuation, of course, controls the cadences. To read "Revelations" effectively, then, calls for the reader not simply, as it were, to translate the words into familiar referents but to follow the effects of the structures of rhythm and arrangement. Here are the opening paragraphs: From eight o'clock in the morning until about half-past eleven Monica Tyrell suffered from her nerves, and suffered so terribly that these hours were agonizing, simply. It was not as though she could control them. "Perhaps if I were ten years younger ..." she would say. For now that she was thirtythree she had a queer little way of referring to her age on all occasions, of looking at her friends with grave, childish eyes and saying: "Yes, I remember

19 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation how twenty years ago ..." or of drawing Ralph's attention to the girls - real girls - with lovely youthful arms and throats and swift hesitating movements who sat near them in restaurants. "Perhaps if I were ten years younger ..." "Why don't you get Marie to sit outside your door and absolutely forbid anybody to come near your room until you ring your bell?" "Oh, if it were as simple as that!" She threw her little gloves down and pressed her eyelids with her fingers in the way he knew so well. "But in the first place I'd be so conscious of Marie sitting there, Marie shaking her finger at Rudd and Mrs Moon, Marie as a kind of cross between a wardress and a nurse for mental cases! And then, there's the post. One can't get over the fact that the post comes, and once it has come, who - who - could wait until eleven for the letters?" His eyes grew bright; he quickly, lightly clasped her. "My letters, darling?" "Perhaps," she drawled, softly, and she drew her hand over his reddish hair, smiling too, but thinking: "Heavens! What a stupid thing to say!" But this morning she had been awakened by one great slam of the front door. Bang. The flat shook. What was it? She jerked up in bed, clutching the eiderdown; her heart beat. What could it be? Then she heard voices in the passage. Marie knocked, and, as the door opened, with a sharp tearing rip out flew the blind and the curtains, stiffening, flapping, jerking. The tassel of the blind knocked - knocked against the window. "Eh-h, voila!" cried Marie, setting down the tray and running. "C'est le vent, Madame. C'est un vent insupportable." Up rolled the blind; the window went up with a jerk; a whitey-greyish light filled the room. Monica caught a glimpse of a huge pale sky and a cloud like a torn shirt dragging across before she hid her eyes with her sleeve. (Stories, 341-2)

This passage contains some of the forms of language for which Mansfield has been criticized, forms that could be read as hyperbolic sentiment or preciousness, that in isolation sound diminutive, childish, or affected - "whitey-greyish/' "so terribly ... simply," "queer little way" - and all the contrived pauses - represented on the page as dashes - and all the repetitions - and all the double adjectives: "grave, childish eyes," "swift hesitating movements," "lovely youthful arms." But of course to read such words in isolation is to miss the multiple effects of the texture of the arrangement, and texture is important, for it reveals the nuances of insight and possibly wilful blindness that feed and inhibit human relationships. Very little subsequently "happens" in the story. Monica and Ralph arrange to meet for lunch, after she first rejects his invitation. (Monica changes her mind and decides to leave the flat, the text says,

2O Reading Mansfield

partly because she found she "could not stand ... this ghostly, quiet, feminine interior," 343.) On the way to her appointment Monica stops at the hairdresser's, where George, who is usually attentive in his service to her, seems preoccupied with his own thoughts and the wind. As she leaves, he tells her that his young daughter has died. In her taxi afterwards Monica contemplates how effective it would be to send an all-white arrangement of flowers to the funeral, but then suppresses the thought when it transpires that the taxi has already arrived at the fashionable restaurant she is heading to. And that's that. A moment's reflection, however, suggests that this concern for effect and arrangement is all achieved by means of effects of arrangement, and that the story's method constitutes the substantive demonstration of what it has to say - all of which is signalled by the opening section. That first sentence, for example, which starts off as though it is rooted in specific, documentary fact, swiftly shifts into subjective approximations: "From eight o'clock in the morning until about halfpast eleven Monica Tyrell suffered from her nerves, and suffered so terribly that these hours were - agonizing, simply." The word "about" signals the first step away from ostensible objectivity; the repetition of "suffered" with the addition of the intensifier "so terribly" then takes the entire sentence out of its apparent third-person form and places it squarely within Monica's own consciousness: she's contriving an effect - and while she aspires to the grand gesture, her sentence ends lamely and inexactly. "Simple" is one thing her actions are not. The next sentence ("It was not as though she could control them"), negative in form, is defensive in intent, leading to the series of "Perhaps" references to her own age that invite Ralph to deny the reality of time (expressed by the modulations of verb form: "if I were," "she would say," "now that she was," "remember," "if I were") and confirm her importance and her youth. All is constructed within the text. Various contradictions give shape to this special desire for contradiction concerning age; but the repetitions that are constructed for effect also constitute the means by which effects are pierced so that "reality" (in some other form: the parenthetical "real girls") shows through. When Ralph, for example, responds to her, in a phrase that asks to be read earnestly, not sardonically - "Why don't you get Marie to sit outside your door and absolutely forbid anybody to come near" - he appears to have taken her opening statements at face value. By not selectively contradicting them, and by accepting the possibility of an "absolute" action, he shows himself to be deaf to her desire and blind to the relative force of her word "perhaps." When she then dismisses his suggestion as

21 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

too simple - and goes on to drawl "Perhaps" (this time the voice is sardonic) and to dismiss in silence the egocentricity of his own desire for ratification ("My letters, darling?") - the text reverses the force that the words "simply" and "perhaps" have so far had. The reader's sympathy seems to shift. But reversal then comes into its own as a narrative device, developing enigmatically out of what has initially read like simple recurrence or repetition. Thematically, the mention of hours, age, youth and perhaps the "grave" eyes and lovely "throats" - hints at temporality and vulnerability: vulnerability especially to the one absolute ("death") that they have so far avoided mentioning or facing. Textually, the story promptly directs the reader through the subsequent structures of form: the reverse directive "But"; the absolute "one great slam ... Bang"; the short, discrete sentences ("The flat shook. What was it? She jerked up in bed ...; her heart beat. What could it be?"); the inverted sentence pattern ("Up rolled the blind"). That an unidentifiable light should fill the room at this point - not white or grey but "whitey-greyish" - emblematically suggests the indeterminacy with which both the limp Ralph and the theatrical Monica live. Indeed, when Monica catches a glimpse of the world dragging outside her own room, she instantly hides her eyes from it. She holds her "sleeve" up against a "torn shirt" of a cloud. And the temptation is to read at once for "meaning," to ask this to be a political comment on privilege and class barriers or on the packaging of gender that denies the realities of experience. It is enough for the moment, however, to recognize how the sentence form emphasizes the temporality of the relation between event and reaction. Monica catches a glimpse before she hides her eyes. What happens after is left undeclared. For the story does not close by resolving the tension absolutely. Indeed, accustomed to the privilege of her packaged life, Monica does not change; again and again, it seems, she will catch and glimpse and hide her eyes, dramatizing reality until it no longer has to be dealt with. The story's technique, however, has established that repetitions are not simple re-enactments. They do more than repeat; they modulate as contexts change, and so function as the complex (and inevitable) agents of revelation. The determination of some readers to admire only plot lets a story such as "Revelations" lie unremarked; perhaps some quasi-automatic judgments of language get in the way of appreciating how formal structure is itself an embodiment of narrative. Or perhaps overt subject, character type, or other reasons explain why one story rather than another appeals. Antony Alpers finds "Revelations" "weak" (Life, 316); furthermore, he says, "it set Virginia [Woolf]'s

22 Reading Mansfield

teeth on edge" (316). There is, of course, nothing wrong with a wellcrafted story in which plot is of crucial importance; it just happens that Mansfield herself was resisting that particular way of patterning and so enclosing reality.19 She was not the only writer using form to break away from the paradigm of narrative history - Woolf, of course, was another. But as I have been trying to demonstrate, the fact that she was breaking away - and the several reasons for her doing so: aesthetic, social, psychological, biographical - have led to the continuing need to try to explain her contribution to the art of short fiction in the twentieth century.20 When I call my fifth and final category of readings 5 There's a story in here somewhere

I am trying to find a way not only of describing this process of redefining story or of relocating where narrative is to be found and how the term "narrative" is itself to be understood, but also of dealing with one further criterion of evaluation: the question of influence. If Mansfield is so important, runs this argument in bare-bones form, whom has she influenced? Or, in a variant, personalizing version of the same question, why should she be of interest to me? How does her story, in other words, become mine? I have alluded to this process already when referring to the many autobiographical accounts of Mansfield: Ida Baker's ambivalent memoir, Beatrice Hastings' image of the polecat, Middleton Murry's sentimentalization (and the subsequent dismissals of Murry and of Mansfield as Murry had reconstructed her). Virginia Woolf brought a touch of perspective to this process when in 1920 she wrote in her diary, "Everyone's book is out - Katherine's, Murry's, Eliot's. None have I read so far. I was happy to hear K. abused the other night. Now why? Partly some obscure feeling that she advertises herself; or Murry does it for her; & then how bad the Athenaeum stories are, yet in my heart I must think her good, since I'm glad to hear her abused" (12 December 1920, Diary, 78-9). A year later the same sentiment resurfaced: "I have been dabbling in K.M.'s stories, & have to rinse my mind - in Dryden? Still, if she were not so clever she couldnt be so disagreeable" (15 September 1921, Diary, 138).21 They were friends, of a sort. It was just that class biases, as Woolf made clear in a letter to Dorothy Brett, long after Mansfield had died, stood irrevocably between them (Letters, 366). There is an open subjectivity about what Woolf says that contrasts instructively with the ostensible objectivity of many critical absolutes - and returns this discussion to the question of influence. In one of

23 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

those anthologies to which I referred in the Preface, Marvin Magalaner and Edmund Volpe write: Unlike Joyce, Chekhov, Lawrence, or Fitzgerald, Katherine Mansfield excelled in only one literary art, the short story. Within her narrow realm, however, and in the few productive years which life allowed her, she perfected a talent that places her in the front ranks of practitioners of the short story art. Exquisite and precise in her dress, her appearance, and almost everything she did, she labored hard to carve out a niche for herself in one small section of the gallery devoted to short fiction. Her domain is the Chekhovian moment of truth, the Joycean revelation, without the propagandistic flavor of the first writer or the intellectual intensity of the second ... Katherine Mansfield cannot be said to have invented a technique, founded a school, or developed the short story art so completely that no writer who came after was able to improve upon her contribution. Yet so distinctive is her prose that no reader familiar with her stories is likely to mistake their authorship. Her trademark is a subdued feminine excitement, a sprightliness of verbal manner, sometimes almost an hysteria, that permeates her wispy strands of language. (37)

I have tried already to place several of the threads of such observations in social and critical context: the expectations of a woman writer, for example (and the priority given to what she wore), or the judgment by selective comparison, or the paradigm of sources, or the attitude to style. Where does she fit in the canon, and should she be there at all if she's hysterical, wispy, and lacking in intellectual intensity? But it might be the definition of the canon that is the real problem. Implicit in this entire paragraph is the question: who were her followers? The absence of an answer suggests that some of the people who had been reading Katherine Mansfield lay outside the reading margins of the critic, either by culture, by gender, or by time. The failure to mention Virginia Woolf's name, for example, seems obvious. The failure to mention the Canadian writer Raymond Knister, who wrote an extended commentary on Mansfield's importance to him, indicates also not so much that Canada and Canadian writing were dismissed in Magalaner's United States but that they weren't thought of at all as a territory in which art might happen or artistic influence be observed. That several contemporary writers, however, have openly claimed Mansfield as a kind of literary ancestor suggests that what she was attempting to do in the 19105 began at last to reach receptive ears some sixty years later. To name these writers and their works is to indicate not simply that Mansfield is still being read in the 19905 but that she is now

24 Reading Mansfield

being reread, read anew, found afresh by a generation of writers for whom she represents a personal alternative of some sort. I am referring, for example, to Mavis Gallant, with her story "The Moslem Wife"; Bill Manhire, with a book called The Brain of Katherine Mansfield; Alma De Groen, with a play called The Rivers of China; Witi Ihimaera, with a story sequence called Dear Miss Mansfield; and Douglas Dunn, with a collection of poems called Elegies. These names are by no means uniformly familiar. One writer is Canadian, living in France; three are New Zealanders, one living in Australia; one is Scots. All are contemporary. But in transforming Mansfield into an emblem they exemplify how writers have been coming to read and reassess what she accomplished many years ago, in ways that free them from the versions of Mansfield that criticism has constructed in the meantime in the name of judgment. Manhire's 1988 The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, for example, is a children's book written for adults, a make-your-own-adventure book full of narrative (and explicitly cultural) options. Manhire writes of a place where caution is sometimes praised as wisdom and sometimes repudiated as a dismal fear of risk; where elves and ores are scarcely to be differentiated from truck-drivers and land-survey crews; and where the Goddess Minerva is one icon and a jar marked "The Brain of Katherine Mansfield" - which sits apart on a separate shelf and looks rather like a container of black jelly beans - is another. The tenor of the book is probably apparent from this summary already. Earlier I referred to criticism that dismissed Mansfield too easily, without looking at what she wrote. Manhire's book is critical of the dessicating adulation of Mansfield that also substitutes for reading her. His socially satiric opening salvo makes his tone clearer still: You are just an ordinary New Zealander. You have strength, intelligence and luck, though you are not particularly good at languages. Your family and friends like you, and there is one special friend who really thinks you're swell. Yours is a well-rounded personality; your horoscope is usually good; your school report says "satisfactory." But somehow you are restless. Your life is missing challenge and excitement. You want to make things happen. Go to 2. (i)

Constructed out of the prevailing cliches of national identity, the social premise here echoes all those biographical generalizations about Mansfield's own flight from provincialism. It provides a way of reading both individual behaviour and literary history, and the book takes a series of comic and not necessarily logical turns as it

25 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

works out numerous narrative possibilities. It is an adventure. But as the adventure acerbically demonstrates, New Zealand society (like other societies) does not reward or punish consistently those who transgress its rules - which suggests that arbitrariness is as potent a force in culture (and cultural history) as any absolute value attached to manners or courage or (by implication) talent. The other four writers I have mentioned probe the consequences of arbitrariness in more openly serious terms. Witi Ihimaera's stories in Dear Miss Mansfield take fourteen Mansfield narratives and run variations on them from a modern Maori perspective, pursuing the social consequences of Mansfield's stories and of the willingness of readers to accept Mansfield's stories as social reality, or even to accept what they represent as the New Zealand social reality.22 In Ihimaera's story "The Washerwoman's Children" a character named Mrs Justice Fairfax-Lawson returns to the school where she used to be known as Our Else - echoing Mansfield's "The Doll's House" - and has to overcome her memories of petty discrimination in order that she might speak to the children of a new generation about tolerance. In a multi-part story called "Country Life" a young girl named Miranda discovers that access to the prime minister and the advent of rural electrification remove a lot of the beautiful mysteries of her childhood, making life before power a "prelude" to which she cannot return. In "The Boy with the Camera" an infrared photograph records the murder that in Mansfield's parallel "The Woman at the Store" is little more than a narrative suspicion. In all, the perspective tends to shift from the "central" characters that Mansfield draws to those on the margins of her narratives, whether social or verbal. Technology and access to the social system alter the opportunities the characters are given; but Ihimaera does not uniformly admire change, and his book questions the degree to which an accommodation to pakeha (i.e., European) society also involves a surrender to pakeha values and patriarchal authority. In Ihimaera's opening novella, "Maata," the central figure is a young Maori man named Mahaki. This man is fascinated by Katherine Mansfield and by the identity of the mysterious Maata Mahupuku, who was once so important in Mansfield's real life and whose existence led to her own early story called "Maata." Ihimaera's character Mahaki is married to a pakeha woman named Susan; they have a child. The question might be asked if their crosscultural marriage can last, making the marriage function directly as a metaphor about the society in which they live. But Mahaki learns through his pursuit of Maata and Mansfield to ask a different kind of question: if, in a matrilineal society like that of the Maori, it is the

26 Reading Mansfield

mothers who tell the genealogy to their children, who will tell this man's child of his Maori heritage? Or will the child be able in the future to claim only a pakeha world? Mahaki's interest in Mansfield parallels Ihimaera's own: the book is subtitled "a tribute." It claims a particular kinship with pakeha culture; but it also insists on the validity of a continuing Maori voice within New Zealand, a voice expressed in part here in the book's documentation of ceremony and custom, and in part in the narrative strategies it adopts, its commitment to alternative perspectives and to the possibility of rewriting the nature of tradition. Gallant's story ("The Moslem Wife") and Dunn's poem ("On Rereading Katherine Mansfield's Bliss and Other Stories")23 deal with suppressed histories and the ego of memory, and Gallant in particular emphasizes how social power and versions of historical truth are linked with a control over language. In some respects these two works constitute critical footnotes to earlier comments on the stylistics of tense in Katherine Mansfield and the temptations of biographical reading. To turn, however, to Alma De Groen's 1987 play The Rivers of China is to show how yet another writer uses an allusion to Mansfield24 in order to probe contemporary connections among language, gender, value, and power. In one of its two intertwined series of dramatic scenes The Rivers of China recreates the last days of Mansfield's life, presenting her as she was dying of tuberculosis, embarking on her last trip abroad, and receiving treatment at Gurdjieff's Fontainebleau Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Early on, the character named Mansfield quarrels with the character named Murry. Murry tells her to rest, and she shouts at him that she doesn't need rest, she needs life: "I feel like a beetle shut in a book. If I rest any more 111 be dead! You may as well write my obituary ... If you haven't already" (9). Acerbically, she dismisses one man, only, however, to place her faith in another, and that becomes the basis for the playwright's inquiry. Punctuating the Fontainebleau narrative, a second series of scenes in the play takes place in Australia in the movable present. It envisages a time when a female dystopia has taken over from the old patriarchy but is doing some of the worst things that the patriarchy ever did, reversing the previous rules in a simple mechanical dualism. In this brave new world men hold subservient roles, men's history has disappeared, men's poetry may no longer be quoted, men's art - and capacity for producing art - is deemed not to exist. At this juncture a doctor (female, by definition, in the play) is faced with a new patient, a man who has attempted suicide. She attempts to piece him back together; dissatisfied with the prevailing social system, however, she also attempts to reshape

27 Canon, Colony, and Critical Expectation

his soul, and through hypnosis she induces in him the creative energies of a female artist, namely Katherine Mansfield. The two narratives then begin to interconnect. Like any artist-figure, Dr Rahel cannot control the results of art, and in this case the Man she is treating acquires Katherine's disease along with Katherine's imagination. In an analytic counterpoint Katherine and the Man, characters from two long-divided generations, begin antiphonally to question their reliance on old stereotypes of power. For the two of them, separately, the system under which they live has promised them life, but they both have begun to realize that the authority entrenched in the system would control how each could live. They share a distrust of system, particularly of any system that would limit their options by limiting their language. In love more with living than with life, the two of them therefore resist the pressures of authority; embracing change, they begin therefore all over again to die. The character named Gurdjieff, in the play, tells Katherine that there are many Mansfields and that she has to surrender the masks in order to find the one whole soul. Indeed, there are many Mansfields. But it transpires that he is talking only about his version of wholeness, and his version of her. Taking her from Murry, he now requires her to follow his rules; in other words, he requires his presence in her identity so that she will remain indebted to and dependent on him. She resists this limitation, at the end, and the play closes with a monologue in which Katherine, dying, is still asserting the imagination's ability to counter the effects of received absolutes and inflexible conventions: Shall I be able to express, one day, my love of work - my desire to be a better writer - my longing to take greater pains. And the passion I feel. It takes the place of religion - it is my religion. Oh, God! The sky is filled with the sun, and the sun is like music. The sky is full of music. Music comes streaming down these great beams. The wind touches the trees, shakes little jets of music. The shape of every flower is like a sound. My hands open like five petals ... Cold. Still. The gale last night has blown nearly all the snow off the trees; only big, frozen-looking lumps remain. In the wood where the snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire. I want to remember how the light fades from a room - and one fades with it, is expunged, sitting still, knees together, hands in pockets ... I would like to hear Jack saying "We'll have the north meadow mowed tomorrow," on a late evening in summer, when our shadows were like a pair of scissors, and we could just see the rabbits in the dark. (55)

28 Reading Mansfield

This is a rereading of Mansfield, of course, just as Ihimaera's stories involving Mansfield are. They are also a way of turning fiction, figure, and person into sub/versions, icons of protest against the power of any prevailing system to presume in its right to speak for all. But that reiterates what has been my point all along in this chapter. For the writers who have made Katherine Mansfield their own who have found their own story somehow in one of the many faces that belonged to her, without trying to erase or reconcile the disparities25 - are all aware of the pressures of cultural margins. They write from those margins - against a misleading notion of centre, against the canons of taste and judgment and history and power that deny them consequence. And they write in part because they are sensitive to the difficulty of retaining their own voice, not just because of the presence of a dominant power but also in order actively to resist the empire of convenience and convention.

PART TWO

Reading and Writing

This page intentionally left blank

2 Reading Reading

My comments so far have referred repeatedly to the idea and character of imitation. Coded positively - as in the discussion of Ihimaera and De Groen - the term "imitation" allows for the creative refashioning of a narrative line or formal pattern that a previous writer has already developed. Coded negatively - as in the discussion of Mansfield's ostensible plagiarism and the rejection of some specific forms of criticism that equate aesthetic value with the appearance of conformity to the established models of received centres - "imitation" implies covert theft, political presumptuousness, or is made simply synonymous with "imitativeness." (The concrete interpretive adjectives that express the "centre's" values will vary with place and time: male / imperial / European / realist / romantic / sentimental.) "Imitativeness" in turn equates with lack of creativity, inventive weakness, paucity of imagination - a vocabulary that is merely a pace or two away from aesthetic dismissals (using such terms as "hackneyed phrase," "trite expression," formal or structural "cliche"). When criticism chooses one coding - one vocabulary - over another, it appears to be appealing to absolute standards, as though a single, easily determinable line divided the options in question. Yet as I have argued already, each of these choices derives from what is (broadly speaking) a political position, even in the process of espousing a set of seemingly neutral or unexceptionable aesthetic criteria. The politics of this position is frequently unstated, often not even recognized. Trusting in the efficacy of words, many traditional critics conventionally draw on a traditional terminology, trusting that new

32 Reading and Writing

contexts will endow the terms with new meaning, or else endow the new contexts with old authority. Many critical theories, in reaction resisting the pretend verbal neutrality of conventional terms (though just as conventionally, even if in a different register of speech) - reach for abstractions in the name of exactness, often only to achieve obscurity in the guise of intelligence. For both groups terminology is at once the medium of expression and the field of contention. How to code "imitation" thus becomes not merely an aesthetic determination but a question about critical perspective - and about perspectives on "perspective." "Criticism" in this sense does not merely "read"; it also "reads reading," probing the assumptions that an interpretive or evaluative vocabulary (intentionally perhaps, or sometimes accidentally) trails along with it. Because authors of fiction, like critics (though in different ways), "read" the world and its many languages of expression, their "fictions" also open to the examination of their choices of model, mode, and word: that is, their strategies of form or organization. Differentiating between the by-and-large positive and the by-and-large negative versions of "imitation" consequently asks that the bias of the reader's subject be weighed against the subjective bias of the reader; it leads to a further distinction - between assumption and evidence. Not all writers provide the same "evidence" to the range of readers who read their works; not all reader-critics accept as "evidence" (of skill, organization, intelligence, morality, or technique, for example) whatever it is that a given writer provides - which helps to explain the critical divergence that marks estimations of Katherine Mansfield's stories. My own concern with the significance of form (word choice, structural pattern, model paradigm) declares my assumption that the effect of any literary work is substantially dependent on the sequence of words that constructs it, and that (while many organizational choices might come unbidden) a writer's deliberate decision to alter a set of words or to leave them alone will reveal what he or she considers to be "artistry," a judgment that the reader might readily agree with or one that awaits a reader (and perhaps a time) more in tune with the "evidence" that the writer's choices will inevitably provide. "Readings" of Mansfield illustrate this process. Those critics who looked in Mansfield's stories for "Englishness," for a 19205 version of "femininity," or for "plot" - signs of their own assumptions about value - were seeking artistic attributes that Mansfield herself rejected. It is possible, of course, to reject her rejection and to insist on the validity of the critical determinations; alternatively, a subsequent critic and reader might decide that in this case

33 Reading Reading

the critical determinations are simply invalid. Mansfield's version of artistry involved ways of matching her words - the sequences and rhythms of verbal structures - to her perceptions of human behaviour. For her the "artistry" lay in the formal design, not (strictly speaking) in the narrative design, the inventiveness of events. To judge her work by its superficial likeness to another's or its supposed failure of narrative dynamic is to miss the evidence that her texts provide of an inventive control over form. IMITATION AND

OTHER FORMS OF

RECOGNITION

To suggest that Mansfield either stole from Chekhov, or else merely modelled her stories on his, presents too limited a set of alternatives; these options nevertheless furnish a ready example of the two answers to which two critical questions lead: one coding "imitation" negatively, the other positively. The charge of plagiarism that has recurrently been levied against Mansfield for the apparent similarity between "The Child-Who-Was-Tired" and Chekhov's "Sleepyhead" is based on parallels of plot outline, incident, and the rough sequence of events - in other words, on aspects of organization that derive from the narrative itself. This critical foregrounding of narrative, however, emphasizes precisely the compositional feature that Mansfield herself dismissed as peripheral to the short story form. Worth reiterating here is her aversion to what, in a letter to Dorothy Brett, she called "plottiness" (Letters & Journals, 239). Hence it is clear in this case that the determination of "plagiarism" lies in the eye and mind of the critic, and further, that it is a phenomenon acutely associated with so-called "realistic" fiction. When Shakespeare is said to "borrow" or "adapt" his plots from Holinshed's Chronicles, or when Sir Thomas Wyatt's "translations" from Petrarch are treated as "original" English poems, or when George Sandys and Alexander Pope and John Dryden all "rework" the tales of Ovid, then a positively coded vocabulary is found in order to appreciate their textual differences, their formal skills, rather than a negatively coded way of attacking their respective exercises in (creative) imitation. But the covert, perhaps even sublimated equation between "narrative plot" and "life" - both notions being accessible through the word "story" - has led some modern critics to insist on the individuality of lives (and, consequently, of accomplishments in fiction) and to resist placing value on narrative similarity, even though they might at the same time acknowledge the permissibility and even the value of what have come to be known as the most

34 Reading and Writing

obvious forms of "intertextuality": citation, quotation, use of epigraph, allusion. Turning to Mansfield's own aesthetic criteria would, by contrast, emphasize precisely the features of formal difference or innovation that an overemphasis on plot undervalues. Examining the formal variations between "The Child-Who-Was-Tired" and "Sleepyhead," moreover, reveals that Mansfield's departures from Chekhov's methodology cumulatively construct a story with a quite separate focus and effect. The Chekhov text I use is the English translation by R.E.C. Long, first published in 1903, in The Black Monk and Other Stories; "Sleepyhead" - called "Sleepy" in some versions - was also translated by Constance Garnett a few years later, by Robert Payne in 1963, and by Patrick Miles and Harvey Pilcher in 1982, among others. Comments on variations in translation and on the validity and aesthetics of particular lexical choices and translation strategies in this and other stories appear in Lauren G. Leighton's "Chekhov in English." Leighton criticizes Long's overliteral reliance on Russian syntax and his consequent failure to capture Chekhov's "clarity" (297). Leighton further emphasizes that Long's translation now seems dated because of his use of the "strongly marked British lexical choices of his time" (292), but observes also that in adhering to Chekhov's use of the present tense - in contrast to Payne, who moves the story into the past imperfect - Long captures the immediacy of Chekhov's rendering of events. The lexical choices Leighton criticizes involve Chekhov's stories "Women" and "The Kiss" particularly, where, for example, the word "landowners" is translated as "local country gentlemen" and where peasants drink at the local "drink-shop" (293); Chekhov seems, in this translation, to have written with the British Home Counties in view. In Long's version of "Sleepyhead" parallel lexical choices "translate" the mercantile extensions of the Russian feudal system that Chekhov portrays into something loosely resembling the British class structure. Long's attempts to find a vocabulary appropriate to his own place and time, however, do stress the social politics of Chekhov's story. Varka, the thirteen-year-old fatherless nursemaid who is the central figure, is constrained by economics to be "servant" to her "masters" - shopkeepers who treat her as a "slave" (the "master" is a bootmaker). As their behaviour towards her indicates, she becomes their possession, something for them to abuse both physically and verbally. Clearly, the narrative invites the reader to sympathize with Varka as an individual, but the story primarily criticizes the social system that tolerates (perhaps even encourages) the mercantile assumption of property rights over persons.

35 Reading Reading

While the economic realities of Long's Edwardian England differed in many specific respects (lexicon included) from Chekhov's imperial Russia, the general concern for the implications of property could well be translated from the one society to the other. And without distorting Chekhov, Long's version of "Sleepyhead" could well have been subtitled "How Society Victimizes the Weak." The fact that Varka is small, a child, and without protective parents demonstrates her weakness; size and family relationships are metonyms for social position, and consequently for the possession or absence of power. Gender, however, while not extraneous to Chekhov's story, is attendant upon social role; it is not central-. Varka is a nursemaid because nursemaids are female in this society. In Mansfield's "The Child-Who-Was-Tired," by contrast, social role is attendant upon gender. The fact that her eponymous character is female illuminates a quite different kind of social politics, whether in the Germany of the setting or the implied England that might be read into the malefemale relationships; property is not irrelevant to Mansfield's story, but it is the femaleness here that emphasizes the way in which individuality is diminished by state and circumstance - or the ways in which it can even be suppressed because of assumptions concerning gender. Consequently, despite the superficial similarity in the trope involving Authority/Tired Young Nursemaid/Smothered Baby, the two stories differ markedly in the way they function. The texts of the two stories not only express these differences in social focus but also, using two separate methods to construct or present character, delineate differing versions of identity or individuality within the respective social frames. Chekhov's use of the present tense suggests an immediacy of occurrence within a persistent (if not precisely "stable") social structure; the omniscient third-person perspective that governs the story's narration furthermore reinforces the authority of any kind of consistent "narrating system" - verbal or political - over the subject being narrated. Mansfield's technique - an early version of the free indirect discourse she was later to use more extensively - mixes systems, using past indefinite tense forms to suggest the perceived present and a mix of first- and third-person constructions to characterize the unstable sense of identity of the "child-whowas-tired." Mansfield's child is at once the narrator of and the observed subject in her own story, yet paradoxically she is without a workable authority over either the telling or the subject being told. The mix of narrative forms highlights the slippage that Mansfield recurrently articulates between social assumptions about language and the realities of social opportunity - the realities, that is, permitted by social organizations, of which language turns out to be one.

36 Reading and Writing The opening passages of the two stories provide an opportunity to examine these differences in more detail: MANSFIELD TEXT

She was beginning to walk along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all, when a hand gripped her shoulder, shook her, slapped her ear. "Oh, oh, don't stop me," cried the Child-Who-Was-Tired. "Let me go." "Get up, you good-for-nothing brat," said a voice; "get up and light the oven or I'll shake every bone out of your body." With an immense effort she opened her eyes, and saw the Frau standing by, the baby bundled under one arm. The three other children who shared the same bed with the Child-Who-Was-Tired, accustomed to brawls, slept on peacefully. In a corner of the room the Man was fastening his braces. "What do you mean by sleeping like this the whole night through - like a sack of potatoes? You've let the baby wet his bed twice." "There, that's enough." (22) CHEKHOV TEXT

Night. Nursemaid Varka, aged thirteen, rocks the cradle where baby lies, and murmurs almost inaudibly: "Bayu, bayushki, bayu! Nurse will sing a song to you! ..." In front of the ikon burns a green lamp; across the room from wall to wall stretches a cord on which hang baby-clothes and a great pair of black trousers. On the ceiling above the lamp shines a great green spot, and the babyclothes and trousers cast long shadows on the stove, on the cradle, on Varka ... When the lamp flickers, the spot and shadows move as if from a draught. It is stifling. There is a smell of soup and boots. The child cries. It has long been hoarse and weak from crying, but still it cries, and who can say when it will be comforted. And Varka wants to sleep. ("Sleepyhead," 179) Subsequently, in Chekhov's story, Varka nods off to sleep while attempting to rock the baby, and the shopkeeper and his wife keep waking her, interrupting, imperiously and imperatively, her presenttense dreams of her father's death - he died because he did not get medical attention soon enough - and of the muddy road down which he was ultimately taken to hospital. Even to her mistress the child is an "it" ("Take it ... It is crying. The evil eye is upon it!'" she says, 184), and the following day brings no relief from the petit

37 Reading Reading

bourgeois commands: '"prepare ... run and buy ... go ... clean ... rock"' (186-7). At the end Varka thinks: "The enemy is the child" (187); laughing, she smothers the baby and then falls asleep "as soundly" (188) as the baby itself. This closing comparison underlines the degree to which she and the baby have both been victimized; they are the products of the way the shopkeepers live, and they are both made dead (sleeping as soundly as each other) by the skewed values of the world in which they have been made to exist. Several features of the story's opening prefigure this conclusion: the way Varka is denied effective speech (she is "almost inaudible"); the association of the ikon with the baby clothes and the trousers, turning the laundry items into emblems of the poles of authority between which Varka is pulled; the fact that they cast their shadows over Varka and the room she must live in; the stifling atmosphere; and the smell of the soup and boots, expressed as an indistinguishable unit, the promise of sustenance being permeated by the odour that arises from the shopkeeper's trade. The main emphasis in this passage falls on imagery; indeed, the whole scene functions as a setpiece image, one that communicates Varka's emotional as well as her physical environment and that, inferentially, permits no options. Varka is enclosed in a metaphoric room, constrained by circumstance and denied freedom - even, as it turns out, by the one act of which she proves capable. Neither action nor inaction leads her out of the room, and she ends up as dead to the world as the baby she kills. In some of her stories Katherine Mansfield adopted a similar technique (the scene in "Prelude," for example, where the split between ordered and wild gardens epitomizes the world of divided opportunites that Kezia Burnell must learn to negotiate), but in "The ChildWho-Was-Tired" she makes far greater use of the nuance of reported dialogue. It is not that the story is without imagery: far from it. The opening image of the little white road fenced in by black trees amply suggests the pressures that the Child-Who-Was-Tired sublimates in dream; that the road should lead "nowhere" and have "nobody" on it (22), however, rapidly directs the reader's attention away from the thing imagined to the relation between the thing and the person doing the imagining. The little white road does not exist as an objective, external fact; it is constituted as the subjective arena within which "nobody" may roam apparently aimlessly, going "nowhere." Far from expressing an existential trauma for the Child, the idea of "nowhere" initially suggests release from the life she currently leads as servant and nursemaid to an egoistic German family: release from their constant demands for action, their insistence on an immediate response to orders, their enjoyment of satisfaction as an end in itself.

38 Reading and Writing

The family acts as though its goals precluded all other definitions of the purpose of life; the use of the word "nobody" hints from the very beginning that in fact they do, but as the repetition of "nowhere" and "nobody" at the end of the story (28) indicates, they do so with several ironic twists. There has been action in the story (the scoldings, the exhausted service to "duty" - variously defined - and the smothering of the baby) but no progress. "Nobody" and "nowhere" turn out not to represent absences of person and direction but to constitute influential (though not fulfilling) identities. They are pronouns, in other words - substitute or replacement identities - and in practice here they do not so much declare the power of agency as they articulate the power of the angle of perceived relationship.1 On this distinction rest the social tensions that Katherine Mansfield's version of the "smothering baby story" exposes. The opening passage of the story clearly uses nouns as well as pronouns, and clearly constructs sentences in which these nouns function as agents or effective objects, but consider which nouns they are: a voice, the Frau, the same bed, the Man, the baby, the master, the loaf, the oven, the door, among others (22-3). The sexuality of the series suggests the overwhelming power of physicality in this house; there is no sign of tenderness here, and the mock Annunciation enacted by "the voice" attaches rights to power rather than the other way round. The "pink bolster," the pillow that the Frau uses as a "comforter," later becomes the means to smother the baby.2 And when the narrative reveals that the Frau is pregnant again, with a fifth child - it will be yet another for the Child-Who-Was-Tired to serve, and she starts to visualize the current baby as monstrous, one "with two heads, and then no head" (27) - it becomes apparent not only that Mansfield is departing radically from Chekhov but also that she is more concerned with exposing the sexual victimization of women than criticizing the economic clout of the petit bourgeoisie. Blame, however, does not fall solely on "the Man" or on men in general; it falls on the willingness to victimize, and on the ways by which this willingness is trained into people. That "the Man" sees his wife, children, and servant as possessions is one sign of this assumption of superiority and power. That "the Frau" (her identity tied up in her marriage status, a recurrent theme of the stories collected in In a German Pension) regards the bearing of children as an inevitable duty is another. But when the couple together inevitably train their children to be "accustomed to brawls" (22), and when the Frau goes on to presume authority over the Child-Who-Was-Tired, other edges of Mansfield's critique begin to show. The Frau at one point in the story beats each of her children "severely" - "with a bundle of twigs" - "expending a final burst of energy on the Child-

39 Reading Reading

Who-Was-Tired, then returned to bed, with a comfortable sense of her maternal duties in good working order for the day" (24). Violence begets violence here; the Frau exerts "male" authority, taking "comfort" in fixed ideas of duty and order, giving these principles precedence over nurture. When, later in the day, "the Man took the Frau's share of pudding as well as his own" (26), the image of consumption reiterates the loss of female separateness. Then when a female friend, Old Mother Grathwohl (from gerate ivohl [in an older spelling, gerathe wohl], meaning "turn out well," an imperative admonition of the sort that old women give to children), comes in to gossip and notices the Child-Who-Was-Tired for the first time, the Frau responds with lowered voice: "don't you know her? She's the free-born one - daughter of the waitress at the railway station. They found her mother trying to squeeze her head in the wash-hand jug, and the child's half silly" (27). The gossip further articulates assumptions of superiority. "Free-born" is of course an ironic euphemism; the very "freedom" alluded to here (a freedom of relationship) denies the legal sanction of marriage and hence is disapproved in a community that sanctions the authority of order and defines "duty" as subservience to this authority. But valuing the authority of the existing order is precisely the attitude that denies women any other kind of freedom. Drawing lines, the Frau and Mother Grathwohl are not free, though neither of them recognizes why or admits to exercising mock power as a way of coping with limitation. The waitress cannot stay free of gossip or social sanction; nor can her daughter maintain the "freedom" she was born with, or to. She can only become a "nobody," an object in other people's eyes and a third-person object in their vocabulary: the Child-Who-Was-Tired. One of the problems the Child faces is that she comes to take on this identity to herself, too. She loses her freedom when she becomes - like the oven she lights and the baby she serves - an "it," when she can no longer think of herself as "I." This division within herself affects the manner of the story's narration; by continually shifting perspective, and by indicating these shifts through the recurrent use of pronouns, Mansfield draws attention to the loss of subjectivity in her title character. The Child-Who-WasTired surrenders authority to the vocabulary of those around her who hold effective power, and apparently in consequence begins to narrate herself as "she." "She was just beginning": so opens the story. But then a sequence of other pronouns begins: a hand gripped her ... don't stop me, cried the Child ...

40 Reading and Writing Get up, you good-for-nothing, said a voice ... she opened her eyes to see the Frau ... What do you mean ... You've let the baby wet ... She did not answer ... Don't guzzle it yourself or I'll know ... I'm sleepy, nodded the Child ... That's why I'm not awake ...

In these exchanges, and the environment they create, "you" does not convey a close connection; it proves distancing instead. It preserves (for the Frau and the Man, who use the word at rather than to the Child) their own sense of superiority. It also (whenever they deem fit) transfers to other persons any sense of blame for the things that go wrong. The Child-Who-Was-Tired takes on the distancing. At first she protests against her inanimate opponent, the voice; in dream she tries to protect the me that she wants to be free and the I that she dimly knows is metaphorically as well as physically "not awake." But she cannot maintain this sense of separate self in this estranging, controlling environment. Instead, she becomes "she," the ChildWho-Was-Tired: a physical body, an object, which behaves like an automaton and is only the walking shell from which the person - the / - is gradually absented. By contrast, both the Frau and the Man possess a dominant I, and in expressing this identity, they exert waking power over the Child. The Man, moreover, claims authority over the Frau, too, in these circumstances proving more powerful as "He" than the Frau is as "I," revealing yet again the gender hierarchy of the time. A "she" functions as an object; a "he" functions as a force of authority. Mansfield, of course, is criticizing this social disparity both in itself and for what it does to women. The Frau's arrogance, justified in the name of "duty," and the Child's slow and forced withdrawal from "reality" alike declare a desperation in the face of bounded possibilities. When it transpires that the baby in the family is also male and is crying because he's "cutting his eye teeth" (23), the pun therefore seems both serious and deliberate; the boy baby is already assuming and asserting a dominance over the female Child, whose means of contending with her burden lead her apparently irrevocably away from identity and towards nothingness. Subjectivity, however, remains one of Mansfield's recurrent themes. How to express it in language continued to be a substantive technical challenge; how women might subjectively express themselves in society, moreover - questioning convention without necessarily transgressing value, and questioning values without necessarily spurning security - occupied both her subsequent fiction and her (frequently public) private life. To what was a woman educated, her

41 Reading Reading

stories ask. How did the language of education and convention restrict possibilities even in the act of apparently enfranchising women or extending invitations to them to participate in what had heretofore been a man's world? It was not enough, as in Chekhov's "Sleepyhead," just to blame social circumstance for the pathos or tragedy of a young girl's behaviour. Sentimentality was anathema to Mansfield, especially when she found it in her own writing. "The Child-Who-Was-Tired" demonstrates that she understood that language was not merely a neutral vehicle to convey story but a form of pressure in its own right. It constructed realities and it shaped and limited conceptions of the self. While "Sleepyhead" shows that she clearly learned from Chekhov, the text of "The Child-Who-WasTired" shows that she was also prepared to reinterpret the social relationships Chekhov drew - the relationships he criticized, but took as givens. She was prepared to reinterpret them according to her understanding of the public language to which women had access - and the difference between this public language and the private language of their individual desires - and thus to construct a quite different kind of story. SKETCHING FOR FORM

From this standpoint "The Child-Who-Was-Tired" is not only the story that brought Mansfield to the attention of editors and other readers in England but also the one that first demonstrated readily her interest in the relation between gender and language. It was not, however, her first publication to be concerned with the power of verbal form. From early on Mansfield experimented with the shapes of expression, contriving emotional and attitudinal effects through the arrangements of words. Sketches of mood, person, and event, these experiments are uniform in neither quality nor intent, but their very existence testifies to the author's interest in language as a medium to be deliberately moulded rather than as a neutral vehicle to carry message or plot. Yet critical interest in these sketches, published between 1898 and 1909, was essentially non-existent until Sydney Janet Kaplan's commentary in 1991. Those critics who did mention the early sketches tended to dismiss them as juvenile, sentimental, or formally peripheral. When they were acknowledged, it was mostly for their biographical possibilities ("Enna Blake," the "Maata" fragments) or for the links between motifs they use and motifs in the later, more famous stories: the recurrent references to violets, to watching from windows, and to ways of hiding the eyes or silencing the mouth; the

42 Reading and Writing

parallels between the narrator in "Silhouettes" and Beryl in "At the Bay/' or between the landscape in "In the Botanical Gardens" and Kezia's garden in "Prelude," or between the title figure in "About Pat" and the figure of the same name in later stories. When the anonymously published 1908 story "Almost a Tragedy" was attributed to Mansfield in 1987, the use of the name "Constantia" (repeated in "The Daughters of the Late Colonel") was one of the features declared as evidence of Mansfield's authorship. Kaplan, by contrast, valuably looks at the influence of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater on the young Katherine Mansfield and on the ways in which an aesthetics of artifice, as demonstrated in her early sketches, began to redesign observation into modernist experience. As Brownlee Kirkpatrick's A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (1989) amply indicates, even selections and collections of Mansfield's stories consistently slighted these early works. Rather than include them all, they either excluded them entirely or (as Antony Alpers' self-styled "Definitive" collection of her stories does) selected those that are most narrative in form ("Enna Blake," "The Education of Audrey," "The Tiredness of Rosabel") or those that focus on character type ("About Pat"). Sometimes a narrative tendency is enough to reclaim them, as in the case of "In a Cafe," which is less concerned with happenings than with the language that contrives the illusion of happenings, but which can be read as though it focused on events. But the sketches of mood and attitude, those that first appeared in 1907 and 1908 in the magazines Triad (Dunedin) and The Native Companion (Melbourne) - unless separately singled out, as in Jean Stone's 1977 bibliographically useful collection of four sketches and a poem, Katherine Mansfield, Publications in Australia, 1907-09 - simply get overlooked. These sketches contribute importantly to a study of Mansfield's interest in story form, however, for they show her experimenting with strategies of verbal construction - strategies of comparing and describing, of evoking time and moment, of establishing the presence or absence of human relationships - and honing her interest in the revelatory power of point of view. The list of writers whom Mansfield had been reading in these early years of her career suggests the range of influences that might be traced in her work. Besides Chekhov and the sketch writers of colonial New Zealand and Australia, they include fin de siecle impressionists, both male and female (including "George Egerton" [the Australian-born Irish short story writer Mary Chavelita Dunne]), devotees of artistic independence such as Oscar Wilde, and a range of social realists. While she clearly disputed some realists' claims to be objectively representing reality, she also did not divide literary

43 Reading Reading

form into binary categories, with "realism" on one side and "artifice" on the other; hence, as someone concerned with the effects of verbal arrangement, she also remained concerned with "reality" - but with the reality of sensibility, meaning that she had to find or devise ways not so much of portraying figures operating within society, or of analysing and explaining the social forces that construct society and affect individuals, but of representing the feelings and attitudes of individual persons. At the same time she wanted to convey the social context for or the social representativeness of these identifable attitudes and feelings, and hence to illuminate the frame or context as well as to comprehend behaviour. Language provided the medium. External description, dialogue, symbolic imagery, plot: these became trial structures on which to hang possibilities. By 1910 she was working with the language of character types, in the series of sketches that became In a German Pension (1911) but also with the fabular paradigms of "A Fairy Story." In 1911 she was publishing satiric dialogues and deceptive documentaries, such as "The Festival of the Coronation" and "Being a Truthful Adventure." In 1912 she was still, with "The Woman at the Store," experimenting with plot, a direction she scarcely ever took again. Throughout she is concerned with the effects of phrasing, and the stories rapidly (if not consistently) show the writer learning the suggestiveness of nuance, the restrictions of conventional form, and the limits of wit. Because the earliest sketches manifest openly this concern for phrasing, they provide a ready example of the preliminary ways that Mansfield acquired the craft of prose, and a glimpse of words in the process of becoming writing. The five works that provide this "language laboratory" include her four 1907 sketches - "Vignettes," "Silhouettes," "In a Cafe," and "In the Botanical Gardens," all from The Native Companion and reprinted by Jean Stone - and "Study: The Death of a Rose" (Triad, 1908). The last of these, just over 230 words long, is the shortest and least aesthetically satisfying. While it is tempting to read the sketch as a parody of adolescent romance, to do so would be to belittle its likely intent, to underestimate its artifice, and to ignore its deliberate flouting of the current colonial conventions regarding the nature of women, the place of the physical, and the role of art. Fascinated by sensation, "Study" expresses the shifting attitudes of a person who watches a rose die; the rose itself is glimpsed, but the focus falls on the observer, whose subjective reactions are communicated through a sequence of images and a set of deliberate rhetorical devices. The effect relies on images of solitude and darkness (and their association with death), of light and flame (and their association with transience,

44 Reading and Writing

contrasting with darkness, the "shadowed pool," 35), and of perfume, breath, kisses, wounds, music, and the mouth (and their association with sexuality). The further association between sex and death is itself conventional, and when the author strives here to extend the cluster of metaphors to suggest the end of innocence and perhaps even the Fall of Man (or at least the decay of society), the sketch runs aground on portentousness. The technique falls short of the aspiration; but the transparent artifice already reveals Mansfield using the arrangements of words - the structures themselves - to convey attitudes and to characterize behaviour. In this instance, the structures she chose simply do not bear the weight they were asked to; the alliteration ("to sit in solitude, in semi-darkness," "the perfection of the perfumed petals," "your dainty, delicate Death"), the repeated exclamation "Oh," the attempt to grant extra significance to "Death," "Man," and the "Rose" by means of capital letters: none of these is adequate to the task. Here the techniques call such attention to themselves that they cannot characterize sensitivity without at the same time appearing to mock it, which seems to go against the declared intention (though the twenty-year-old Mansfield may well have been posturing). Luxuriating in adjectives and adverbs, the passage also tries to characterize behaviour more through lists of external attributes than through the single well-chosen word. Spelling out the contrast on which the sketch's effect is supposed to lie, the two central sentences illustrate: Yesterday it was beautiful with a certain serene, tearful, virginal beauty; it was strong and wholesome, and the scent was fresh and invigorating. To-day it is heavy and languid with the loves of a thousand strange Things, who, lured by the gold of my candlelight, came in the Purple Hours, and kissed it hotly on the mouth, and sucked it into their beautiful lips with tearing, passionate desire. (35, my emphasis)

There is a distinction to be drawn here between message and manner. Mansfield remained interested throughout her life in the dichotomy this passage draws, a contrast between idealized but constrained sexual identities (female virginity, male strength and wholesomeness, both associated with nature: the "fresh and invigorating") and the physical realities of sexual passion. But she subsequently used the register of speech that she employs in "Study" to characterize the mindset of people stuck in infantile behaviour (as represented by Henry in "Something Childish but Very Natural," for example) or people led by their education or the limits of society to confuse desire with romance (Beryl, in "At the Bay").

45 Reading Reading

The sketches published in 1907, however, show related experiments with adjectival constructions and sexual imagery. "Silhouettes," for example, finds the world of the "forbidden" (Stone, 32) to be at once "fearful" and "fascinating" (33), and the persona of the sketch subjectively declares her herself: "I, leaning out of my window, alone, peering into the gloom, am seized by a passionate desire for everything that is hidden and forbidden. I want the night to come, and kiss me with her hot mouth, and lead me through an amethyst twilight to the place of the white gardenia" (33). Passive, but drawn to the languid, the persona uses contrasting adjectives to express the psychosexual tensions that punctuate her life; she lives in the dark, is attracted by the golden, and yet leans from her window and longs for the night. The verbal structure of the sketch intensifies this dilemma through imagery, analogy, and transferred epithets. When the persona is first drawn to the languid, for example, "a delicate flower melody fills [her] brain" (32); but at the end all she hears is "a dull heavy sound of clocks striking far away" (33) - temporal reality violently intruding on (and apparently suppressing) the power of imaginative re-creation. "Vignettes," too, opens with a transferred epithet: "Away beyond the line of dark houses there is a sound like the call of the sea after a storm - passionate, solemn, strong. I lean far out of my window in the warm, still night air. Down below, in the Mews, the little lamp is singing a silent song" (Stone, 25). The alliteration, the number of adjectives, the images of window and night: once again the sketch form seems to be being used to contend with the competing attractions of isolation and passionate connection. But "Vignettes" is more complicated than either "Silhouettes" or "Study." The image of the tower (the persona of "Vignettes" lives in one ["I lean from my window in the tower," 27], and from her window the persona of "Silhouettes" sees "the great hills tower," 32) introduces the fairy-tale paradigm of Rapunzel, with the difference that the lover's gender is sometimes made explicitly female.3 The use of similes adds a further complexity to the textual form here, for it establishes a life being lived through likeness rather than in itself. Reality, here, does not come from within; rather, it exists "out there" somewhere - the word "vague" recurs in these sketches, not inconsequentially - and the inner life that is struggling to express itself is thwarted in advance by the apparent belief that such a life can only be lived in approximation of a reality defined and shaped elsewhere. In many respects this technical impasse reiterates in language the colonial dilemma that Mansfield (female and a New Zealander) faced in London; but in more general terms it declares any marginalized position: similarity

46 Reading and Writing

substitutes for identity, at least in the mind of those who accept the prevailing definitions of centre and margin. Imitation likewise is deemed possible, so far as established critics are concerned, but not "genuine" creative power. This distinction between centre and margin is binary; it allows no other options. That the pressure to choose between inadequate and unworkable options should therefore prove unsatisfactory (a recurrent Mansfield theme, most obvious later in "Marriage a la Mode") is scarcely surprising. That the motif should appear in these early sketches, however - in, say, the distinction between "the orthodox banality of carpet bedding" (42) and "the strength of savagery" (43), opposing landscape images in "In the Botanical Garden" - not only suggests its intellectual importance to Mansfield but also hints at the function of the sketch form itself. The subjective sketch provided a kind of metaphorical pathway between traditional English historical narrative and equally conventional colonial documentary. As a result, it formally dramatized not external behaviour so much as the state of mind that develops when the pressure to choose and the character of the available choices counteract each other, interfering with both creativity and self-reliance. One way of combating a limited choice, or set of choices, is to be satirical. Open criticism, verging sometimes on contempt, may be construed as a victory over both provincialism and maudlin sentimentality. But as Mansfield came to recognize, "smart" satire has its own limitations. Although she donned the mask of cleverness for a while (writing for The New Age in 1911, under the influence of other displaced colonials, A.L. Orage and Beatrice Hastings, all of them writing away their social displacement in London by pretending to intellectual superiority4), she found its implicit claim upon superiority to be both end-stopped and spurious. It was end-stopped because it contrived fixed vantage-points from which to judge the world - a world envisaged as "other" - and it was spurious because it was clear that the very envisaging of such a world derived at least in part from the subjective imagination of the viewer/judge/recorder. At its best satire could expose social ills and posit solutions to them. At its worst the technique could lead to ego-bound cruelty, self-congratulatory trendiness, and literary flippancy. In between merely lay a morass of technical indecisiveness. The endings of both "In a Cafe" and "Vignettes" - and this methodology focuses attention on the character of story endings: their epigrammatic phrasing, their twist of perspective, their aspirations to gnomic and general truths - illustrate Mansfield's early attempts at a satiric perspective and her recognition of the dilemma she wrote herself into.

47 Reading Reading "In a Cafe/' for example, records a brittle conversation between a man and a woman who both are putting on sophisticated airs: cleverness appeals to them; marriage (they say) is beneath them; honesty takes second place to appearances. Yet it becomes clear that the woman is none the less expecting to be proposed to, and in the midst of all the clever talk the man is moved by circumstances and asks her for her violets as a keepsake. The moment he leaves the cafe, however, he casts the violets aside, the cold weather taking precedence over the warm glow of feeling; and a few moments later, when the woman leaves, she not only sees the violets and interprets events accurately, but she also turns white-lipped, with anger or regret or both, and then, laughing, kicks the flowers aside. The sketch could have ended there, but after a line of ellipses it concludes differently: "Thus is the High Torch of Tragedy kindled at the little spark of Sentiment, and the good God pity the bearer" (41). For its part, "Vignettes" is a three-part linked set of impressions, the first suggesting the appeal of London to one who is somehow held apart from it, the second suggesting the romance of being involved with a real person or a "dream figure" (27) who is of the city, the third recording the dreamy memories of one who claims to have experienced such a romance. Then the third part concludes: "To-day, at the other end of the world, I have suffered, and she, doubtless, has bought herself a new hat at the February sales. Sic transit gloria mundi"(^i). Both sketches show signs of reaching past observed detail for some sort of high significance, and at the same time of being contemptuous of any claim upon significance. In particular, any hint of sentimentality is rigorously rejected. The problem is that, in order to rise above the sentimentality of the situations she has drawn, Mansfield in these concluding passages steps out of the role of subjective participant-observer and takes on that of omniscient judge. What seems like an obvious flaw in the organic construction of narrative, however, interestingly illuminates Mansfield's developing command of her craft. These conclusions do not simply judge the characters or the circumstances; they also judge the language of the story-telling. They are literary critiques, in other words - moralizing about behaviour, to be sure, but at the same time functioning reflexively to comment on the efficacy and sometimes the formulaic character of particular combinations of words. By 1915 - in one of her notes to herself, from which John Middleton Murry edited the separate volumes he called The Journal (1927) and The Scrapbook (1939) - Mansfield was commenting directly on this issue, quoting Leon Shestov to the effect that "In the future,

48 Reading and Writing

probably, writers will convince themselves and the public that any kind of artificial completion is absolutely superfluous" and adding "Tchehov said so" (Scrapbook, 21). As late as 1922, reading Chekhov's last letters (from June of 1904), she asked herself, "Who reads between the lines here?" and answered "I at least" (Scrapbook, 242). Such comments reveal her aspirations towards an indirect art of narrative, an indirection that the early acerbity precluded. Yet there are other features of the 1907 sketches that demonstrate verbal and structural features she would go on to hone: the management of verb form, cumulative paradigms, and fragmentation. "Vignettes" provides examples. The recurrent phrasing - "I lean far out of my window" (25), "I lean out of my window" (26), "I lean from my window" (27), "I have drawn the curtains across the window" (28) - devises effects through cumulative repetition; while the slight variations suggest some illusory changes taking place, the echoes suggest an insistent repetitiveness in the lives being revealed on these pages. Through the form, consequently, a reader can appreciate the nagging and unresolved tension between desire (romance, illusion, dream) and likelihood (reality, behaviour, circumstance). Despite the artificial conclusion, moreover, the tripartite structure constitutes an attempt to convey not a single authoritative perspective on these tensions but a multiple series of glimpses. The effect depends upon the glimpse, upon an appreciation of the momentariness of observation and the great disparities that separate moments from each other. Reading incompleteness and reading the gaps between the lines: the crafting of the sketch invites these strategies of response. And there is evidence of conscious craft. In a draft version of "Vignettes," later edited by Margaret Scott as "[London]" for the Turnbull Library Record, Mansfield depended more heavily on adjectives and capital letters to stress effects, and she did not introduce a division between paragraphs that she later separated into parts i and 2. Paring the style, altering the paragraphing and the punctuation, cutting whole sentences, she moved in the published version away from unnecessary adornment; adding the section break, she broke the continuity and yet heightened the impression of an intervening passage of time. The second section of the sketch ventures imaginatively into the London streets that beckon in the first; the third then shifts perspective again, in distance and time and following upon a "London" experience. But a reader only interprets these changes of perspective, creates this coherence of design, by "reading the gaps." Each separate part uses the present tense; each focuses inwardly upon itself; none makes a deliberate gesture towards the others.

49 Reading Reading

With the handling of verbs Mansfield underlined how relations between observed and observer alter, isolating further the subjectivity of the moment's comprehension. As in "Study" and "In the Botanical Garden," the verbs in "Vignettes" fall into three loose categories: variant forms of the verb to be, forms of the verb to seem, and active verbs (both transitive and intransitive). Singling out the verbs in part i produces what looks at first like an unprepossessing list: eleven versions of there is, it is, or there are; seventeen active verbs, all different, including six in interrogative and imperative form but excluding the several participles that construct activity as sound; and one seem. Yet the orchestration of these verbs proves an interesting guide to the mindset that is the sketch's indirect subject. With rare exceptions the active verbs attribute dynamism to London, the people in the cafes, the events on the street; the narrator - except when "I lean far out of my window," gaining brief access to the street, apparently - is excluded from activity, prevented from participating in time, and denied control over events. For her there is only existence, the given, the world of There is. Although a brief appreciation of the relations between the men and women in the cafes produces the single seem ("The lights seem stronger," 26), this momentary connection still does not involve the narrator directly in the activity. All she can do by the end of part i is imitate, record the imperative message she hears, but not take part. A parallel analysis of the verbal structures of parts 2 and 3 illustrates changes but no progress, which is the point. The persona of part 2, caught up by the possibility inherent in if clauses, imagines her way into active verbs, but the recognition that she is imagining ("he is a dream figure," 27) reconstructs stasis, involves her in verbless sentence fragments, and finally makes her the object of action ("a wave of memories ... enwraps my heart," 28) rather than the initiator. The persona of part 3 is more caught up by seeming, by the limitations memory constructs; this time the imagination will take her out of the present (but present perfect tense) only into the past - but the activity of the past was an illusion, a lie, undermining the narrator's faith in seeming and, in the present, still denying her power. All the narrator is permitted at the end is a perfected intransitive condition ("I have suffered"), not even necessarily wisdom; directional activity ("she, doubtless, has bought herself a new hat," 31) is still granted to the other, power remaining in London, far away. As these comments suggest, "Vignettes" obviously lends itself to a quick psychological analysis of the young writer, back with her family in New Zealand after attending Queen's College, longing to return to England, "life," and "art." But any strictly biographical

5O Reading and Writing

reading limits the parameters of interpretation. A closer reading of the language of this and the other early sketches illuminates ways in which the young Mansfield was imitating forms in order to learn how to use form functionally, shaping sequences and rhythms in order to escape the strictures of short story convention, engaging with words in order to innovate with words, to make the shapes of language themselves carry her art. A closer look at her manuscript practice provides further evidence of the details of this process of technical revision, and of its implications.

3 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice

David Marr's absorbing 1991 biography of the Australian novelist, Patrick White: A Life, refers seven times to Katherine Mansfield, a fact that is itself instructive, for White did not consistently admire Mansfield's writings. But they fascinated him. A revealing mention occurs in a letter White wrote in 196! to his editor, Marshall Best, while visiting Wellington and after Antony Alpers had given him the chance to look at Mansfield's manuscript letters and notebooks. "Letters are the devil," he wrote to Best. "I always hope that any I have written have been destroyed ... Katherine Mansfield is a good example of the letter-writer traduced ... her original letters and notebooks ... have lingered on to accuse her as a monster of sensibility and egotism. I would prefer to remember her by her stories, although I confess to being tremendously intrigued by the private, sometimes automatic outpourings" (Marr, 376). Within the decade White would reread the stories and find them "overpolished," but later still, in 1975, working on his novel The Twyborn Affair and writing from the south of France to his cousin Peggy Garland, he turned again to Mansfield's letters and diaries, declaring that (despite their sometimes painful self-consciousness) they "do jump at one ... At their best they're as perfect in their imagery as early morning" (Marr, 567). No reader of the biography can escape the obvious irony that it is White's surviving letters that reveal these intrigues and estimations. An even more interesting feature of these comments, however, is the implied tension between two sets of criteria, those of biographical and aesthetic critical judgment, each set itself divided. On the one

52 Reading and Writing

hand, White is fascinated with and yet attacks the creative "monstrosity" of privacy and ego; on the other, he admires the "perfect image" and yet resists what he calls "overpolishing." I do not attempt here to resolve this tension, but rather to examine further the character of Mansfield's manuscript notebooks, to suggest why they lead commentators so frequently to biographical generalizations (Alpers, for example, or Cherry Hankin), and what they can also offer to the reader who is less compelled by the life than by the specifics of language choice. The diaries that White had access to in France in 1975 were, of course, the volumes (the book entitled Scmpbook, for example, and the so-called "Definitive Edition" of the Journal) that Middleton Murry had prepared for publication in the three decades following Mansfield's death in 1923. As more recent biographies have made amply clear, Murry had his own agenda for the version of Mansfield he wished to have the diaries record. He selected and paraphrased sections; he omitted unflattering references to himself; and, as he could not in any event read his wife's handwriting very consistently, he was sometimes inventive in what he had the notebooks say. Fundamentally, moreover, he distorted the public impression of how Mansfield wrote, for by selecting and arranging various bits of writing as though they had been initially shaped as separate diaries, fiction manuscripts, letters, and commentaries, he contrived an illusion of a compartmentalized mind. Contrary to the implications of Murry's editorial practice, Mansfield did not keep one notebook for fiction, another for personal observations, a third for correspondence, and so on. For her, writing was a continuous act. All writing was influenced by all other writing; the difference was that the forms it took, in her estimation, did not always tell the truth. The challenge was to find the right form. From childhood on Mansfield kept a journal, writing - in pencil and with a series of different fountain pens, about which she sometimes complained - on a range of stationery, from day-diaries to 4" x 6" black-bound booklets to what were called "u.s. style" scribblers (Turnbull qMs [1284]), variously printed with plain, lined, and cross-hatched pages. (Surviving copies of these booklets are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and the Newberry Library in Chicago.) Sometimes she would begin at both ends and write towards the middle, sometimes start at various points throughout, sometimes turn the booklet upside down. Annual diaries, repeatedly begun in self-declared earnest, with full daily comments, always peter out in February, with only occasional (and often cryptic) notations marking other days in the year. This series of notebooks

53 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice

contains, all mixed together, stories and fragments of stories, revisions, drafts of letters, comments on her reading, judgments of people and books, expense records, doodles, lists (a recurrent organizational strategy), brief critiques of her own composition, assorted self-assessments, and various forms of literary exercise, from descriptions to technical analyses. She repeatedly chastised herself for not writing every day, or for not being able to transfer on to the page the sensations she conceptualized in her head, or for being too preoccupied with herself and thus permitting ego and temper and jealousy to get in the way of identifying with her characters and scenes. (By way of example, a 1920 diary note about her strained relationship with Middleton Murry reads: "I thought of Jack contained in the little house against which I leaned - within reach - within call. I remembered there was a time when this thought was a distraction. Oh it might have been a sweet distraction - but there it was! It took away from my power to work ... I, as it were, made him my short story. But that time belongs to the Past ... He has passed beyond it" Turnbull qMs[i269].) At once she imagined herself, in her role as writer, as a sort of conduit through which experience might flow and as the deliberate chooser of words and shaper of nuance. This double sense of role was perhaps what led Patrick White to be so ambivalently intrigued and annoyed; it certainly emphasizes a split in critical reactions to Mansfield, which in a variety of ways duplicate the extremes of White's impatience and fascination: critical reactions both to Mansfield the person and to Mansfield the writer, beings sometimes equated with and sometimes differentiated from each other. In her later years, debilitated by tuberculosis, Mansfield sometimes complained about being ill and then complained about complaining, chastising herself for using illness as an excuse not to write. Like it or not, however, the external world repeatedly impinged on the act of creativity. The modern reader gets some sense of the conditions of writing from the fact that her notebooks so often break off with some such phrase as "I am so cold!" Such phrases also suggest why critics have primarily used the notebooks as a kind of repository of biographical information; the asides, the complaints, the conditions, the impatience, the absorptions, the aspirations, and the delighted responses to people and places and books: all have been rendered as revelations of personality, as indeed they can be, with justification. It has been possible, too, to read some of the manuscript preoccupations - the recurrent motif of dead babies, for example, and the recurrent effort to construct fairy-tales of happy childhood - for the psychological insights they provide into the adult writer's motivations. But to read these passages for their referential or revelatory

54 Reading and Writing

information only is to read past the shape they take as though form, or the writer's concern for form, were not in itself important. For Mansfield, however, the act of writing (and I am conscious of the ambiguity in this phrase) always involved language choices. The notebook practice - the analytical comments, the doodles, the lists of ideas, the trial sentences, the revisions, the pleasure in what seems an effective style, the impatient marginal glosses that candidly dismiss stylistic failures - this practising indicates, in addition to states of mind, a passionate commitment to the possibility that specific arrangements of words could engender particular effects. For the language-centred critic, therefore, the notebooks constitute a kind of active guide to the process of reading Mansfield's texts. They provide examples of what Richard Wendorf (writing about Alexander Pope) calls "the poetics of abandonment" (47); they demonstrate scenes and sentences in the throes of construction - of words underway; and they provide instances of theorizing about the possible effects of particular verbal arrangements: all of which emphasize the importance of reading any Mansfield text for how it says in order to appreciate - however one interprets this phrase what it has to say. While manuscripts do not exist for all the published stories, nor do all the journal entries clearly relate to published works (many are fragmentary, vignettes and stories abandoned in mid-draft), the available materials (over sixty notebooks) give a clear sense of Mansfield's characteristic manuscript practice. In some cases the author altered phrasing as she composed in the first place; sometimes she went back over a first draft, changing words, modifying phrasing, inserting or deleting whole passages (a change of ink or pen often distinguishes the later of these two sets of modifications). She then recopied this first draft as a fair copy, making the handwriting clear - and I should pause at this point to sympathize with John Middleton Murry, who often had difficulty reading it; as Margaret Scott observed about Mansfield's handwriting in "Summer Idylle" (the manuscript that she herself found most difficult to decipher): "To the uninitiated it looks like the seismological chart of an unstable region" ("Unpublished," 128). At the fair-copy stage Mansfield often added or changed punctuation (first drafts were sometimes cavalier with commas), though she seldom modified phrasing further. From here she went on to one (or sometimes two, as, for example, with a vignette called "Westminster Cathedral") typed versions of the story; these were the texts submitted to publishers, which were then modified only by editorial intervention (often Murry's, as with his successful effort to suppress the original ending of "Je ne parle pas frangais").

55 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice

Romantic versions of Mansfield at work sometimes envisage a writer who wrote at white heat, producing creative masterpieces while scarcely blotting a word. It's a nice notion. But it is a version of reality that conveniently overlooks the dailiness of this writer's life - the humdrum interruptions of ordinary living, and the extremes of sentimentality and anger she sometimes indulged - and it is a version of creativity that the journals amply dispute. While it is true that one later story "The Daughters of the Late Colonel/' was written quickly with remarkably few changes, it would be a mistake to see this particular achievement as typical. It would also be misleading to think that the fluency implied by her later stories had nothing to do with the amount of writing recorded over twenty years in her notebooks. To illustrate Mansfield's writing practice further, therefore, I should like to single out three kinds of manuscript commentary and revision: those that emphasize figure and performance, those that alter lexicon and syntax, and those that deal with agency and other larger strategies of arrangement. FIGURE AND PERFORMANCE

I draw attention to figure and performance together because Mansfield (as I have argued elsewhere in relation to "At the Bay" [Dreams, 137, 211-20]) repeatedly used space to affect rhythm. Among the published stories, for example, narratives such as "At the Bay" proceed segmentally the spatial divisions working both to pace the forward movement of recorded external action and to underline the duration and revelation of intervening experience. Similar forms of such constructed fragmentation occur in many of the journal entries. But of further interest in the journals are the drawings or doodles, which might at first glance seem only the irrelevant wanderings of a tired hand, pauses in creation or signs that creativity is sometimes a resistant muse. In the manuscript of "The Aloe," for example (Turnbull, qMs [1253]), close to the point where Linda is walking with her mother, Mrs Fairfield, contemplating and rejecting suicide, and the mother says to her daughter Linda, "Are you cold, child are you trembling? Yes, your hands are cold" (Aloe, 145), a note on the opposite page expresses Mansfield's anxiety about being able to write at all. The next sentence then counters, "What I have done seems to me to be awfully, impossibly good compared to the STUFF I wrote yesterday." Resolving then "to write a letter from Beryll [sic] to Nan Fry," the manuscript note dissolves into drawings of treble clefs, two cello players, a violinist, a performer at a concert grand, a cello, a singer holding sheet music, and a line of music for a bass instrument. And then one more sentence: "This is all too laborious!"

56 Reading and Writing

Drawings elsewhere (in "Mouse/' an early version of "Je ne parle pas franc.ais," Turnbull qMs [1259]) show crocuses and wine glasses; and in materials recorded in Newberry MS group 44, several other visual designs ornament the written work. For example, the titlepage of "The Garden-Party," dated 9-14.1921, begins with a line of ten shrubs or flowering plants (Micro MS 251, reel i, item 18); a page of "Young Country" is covered in stick-figure drawings of dancers (Micro MS 251, reel 2, item i, notebook 2); and both a fair-copy version of "Je ne parle pas frangais" (reel i, item 26) and the manuscript of "A Married Man's Story" (reel 2, item 4, notebook 5) use treble clefs as narrative division-markers. One way of responding to all these designs is to dismiss them as indications that Mansfield's creative talents did not extend to the visual arts; another is to think of them as concrete images, parallel to or evocative of literary metaphor; a third is to take account of the repeated subjects: music and the seasonal cycle of nature - in other words, rhythmic movement. It is perhaps important to remember that Mansfield was an accomplished cellist before she became known as a writer. But what seems more important is the suggestion in these visual images that she intended language, too, to be performed. The scenes she was writing take their referential meaning from their depiction of characters and events, but achieve their effects (and hence suggest the consequences of meaning) at least in part through the conscious choice of prose rhythm. Music and spring, in this context, can be heard not as static symbols but rather as signs of the active playing of relationships in time. Further evidence of the relation between rhythm and "meaning" shows up in a list of what Mansfield called "Stories for my new book," dated 27.x.i92i (Turnbull qMs [1277], reproduced in Manuscripts in the Alexander Turnbull Library, 42). Of the eight stories in this list (they were to alternate between London and New Zealand settings), only some were completed, including "The Doll's House," here referred to as "At Karori"; and six appeared posthumously, with a number of other works, in Murry's edition of The Dove's Nest and Other Stories in 1923. One of the uncompleted works, here called "Mr Maude," is described both by its subject and by a metrically scored motif: "Husband & wife play duets and a one a two a three a one a two three one!" The significance of this technical paradigm is that it uses rhythmic phrasing to identify an effect - perhaps the relationship between husband and wife - that the story was to achieve. It is not the only instance of the technique in Mansfield's work. An early fair copy of a story called "This Flower," for example (Turnbull qMs [1264]), contains this passage:

57 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice Roy had been really too right about the kind of man the doctor was. He gave her a strange quiet leering look, and taking off the stethoscope with shaking fingers he folded it into his bag that looked somehow like a broken red canvas shoe. "Dont you worry, my dear," he said, huskily, "111 see you through." Odious little toad to have asked a favour of. She sprang to her feet & picking up her purple cloth jacket went over to the mirror. There was a soft knock at the door, and Roy, he really did look pale, smiling his half-smile, came in and asked the doctor what he had to say. "Well!" said the doctor, taking up his hat, holding it against his chest and beating a tatoo [sic] on it "all Ive got to say is that Mrs hm - Madam wants a bit of a rest. Shes a bit run down. Her hearts a bit strained. Nothing else wrong." In the street a barrel organ struck up something, gay, laughing, mocking, gushing, with little trills, shakes, jumbles of notes. Thats all I got to say to say Thats all Ive got to say it mocked. It sounded too near; she wouldn't have been surprised if the doctor were turning the hands. (11-13)

The technique turns up again in published form in "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," when the daughters, Josephine and Constantia, run to give an organ-grinder sixpence to keep him quiet, only to remember that their father is now dead and can't actually complain any more at the noise outside his window: The organ-grinder might play there all day and the stick would not thump. It never will thump again, It never will thump again,

played the barrel-organ. What was Constantia thinking? She had such a strange smile; she looked different. She couldn't be going to cry. "Jug, Jug," said Constantia softly, pressing her hands together. "Do you know what day it is? It's Saturday. It's a week to-day, a whole week." A week since father died, A week since father died,

cried the barrel-organ. And Josephine, too, forgot to be practical and sensible; she smiled faintly, strangely. 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. (Stories, 400)

58 Reading and Writing

The point is not just that "Daughters" finally uses a scene that had been conceptualized in the journals much earlier, but also that the musicality of the prose - the rhythm of arrangement and the crafting of sound sequence - constitutes at least one dimension of the story's substance. The sound of the reverberating barrel organ suggests heartbeat and life (a connection made more explicit in the earlier "This Flower"); in both passages it is also associated with colour responses, which suggests further a narrative interest in the effects of synesthesia. For Mansfield form is meaning, rhythm is form, and rhythm (or meaning) is a process in time, a form that does not need to be plotted in order that a story be told but that can convey narrative because it can be both enacted and visualized by the way words can score the space of the page. LEXICON AND

SYNTAX

The second category of manuscript revision involves lexicon and syntax, those changes that derive directly from word-choice and sentence-structure rearrangement or displacement. Clearly these changes, too, have an impact on cadence, but the effects generally go beyond aural or kinesthetic association. Diction directs interpretation, and grammar directs relationship. That Mansfield was conscious of grammar and the function of grammatical choices is perhaps not something one needs to argue, but evidence is supplied by her notebook comments on reading Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, especially those concerning act in, scene v: tawny ... slimy ... - and the adjectives seem part of the nouns when Shakespeare uses them. They grace them so beautifully attend and adorn so modestly and yet with such skill. It so often happens with lesser writers that we are more conscious of the servants than we are of the masters, and quite tese forget that their office is to serve, to enlarge, to amplify the power of the master. "Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in my ears That long time have been barren." Good lines! And another example of the choice of the place of words. I suppose it was instinctive. But fruitful seems to be just where it ought to be to be resolved (musically speaking) by the word "barren." One reads fruitful expecting barren almost from the "sound" sense. (Turnbull qMs [1280], p 2; an edited version appears in Critical Writings, 122, where Shakespeare's

59 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice word slimy is mistranscribed from Mansfield's manuscript journal entry as shiny.)

The musical vocabulary here reads grammar as a harmonic progression, but it also openly declares an insistent belief in the singular power of word choice. Each word, in this conception of language, invites particular associations, both semantically and syntactically, by how it resonates and how it is placed. Sometimes Mansfield's revisions reveal relatively simple semantic substitutions. The word "masculine" in a 1904 song-cycle called "Little Fern Fronds" is changed to "gaunt" (Turnbull qMs [1240]); the adjective "tired" is changed to "weary," to describe the faces of primroses in an early vignette called "My Potplants" (Turnbull qMs [1241]); the word "oily" replaces "gleaming" to characterize the spinach-green paint on the doll's house in "The Doll's House" (Turnbull qMs [1277]); the adjective "shining" replaces "white" to describe faces in "A Suburban Fairy Tale" (Turnbull MS Papers 4011, folder 6). In a slightly more complex move, in the last of these manuscripts, a whole clause ("Then a change happened") is crossed out and replaced by the single adverb "Suddenly." A description of the Villa Isola Bella in Menton changes when the verb "flared" is substituted for "grew" in the phrase "deep purple grew" - hence "deep purple flared" (Turnbull qMs [1268]). Nouns, too, often undergo substitutions: in "The Dove's Nest," for example, the phrase "burning brightness" turns into "burning light" (Newberry MS Group 44, Micro MS 251, reel i, item 13); and in "The Fly" the word "boss" replaces the first draft version "manager" to describe one of the central characters (Newberry MS Group 22, Micro MS 251, reel i, item 16, pp 2, 3). The general effect of such changes is to intensify connotative value, establish greater referential precision, clarify action, and speed up the pace. Abstractions disappear in favour of concrete images: as Mansfield wrote about her own intent for the style of "At the Bay" and "The Garden Party," she wanted the "simple" to replace the "wispy" (Turnbull qMs [1278]). And wandering passages (as some of the longer and more dramatic crossings-out demonstrate) are wholly, summarily cut. The specific effect of changes, however, can be both to reveal nuance and to transform social implications. The word "boss," for example - deriving from "baas," the Dutch word for "master" found its first English-language home (in its sense of "superintendent" or "head") in nineteenth-century America, the word "master" itself apparently being considered unworthy of use, unacceptable in the new republic because of the connotations of social slavery it now

60 Reading and Writing

carried. By the 19203 the word "boss" had also become current in England, but only in working-class slang, functioning there as a subversive or resistant voice (perhaps reimported from the United States to Europe for that purpose, or perhaps absorbed as fashionable from the lexicon of the First World War). For the term to appear in "The Fly," then, written in 1922, suggests a specificity of social discourse, not a casual semantic alteration; it implies class categories in action, and potentially an undercutting of the social power ostensibly enjoyed by the story's erstwhile "manager." But the term "boss" also carries metaphoric possibilities here, especially if its other etymological roots are taken into account. As a medieval word deriving from the French "boce," or "bump," the word "boss" (as in the modern "emboss") refers to a prominence or protuberance, one that is sometimes hollow. And the phonologically associated term "boss-eyed" (meaning "crooked" or "one-sided") derives from an English dialect usage meaning "make a mess of" or "bungle." Hence, with a couple of single-term revisions Mansfield added an allusive complexity to this story, hinting at qualities of personality, motivations for behaviour, and limitations of sympathy and vision. Sometimes it took several drafts to get a single sentence right, and sometimes even then no story would develop beyond it. The opening sections of such abandoned stories as "Late Summer," "All Serene," "Our Hilda," and "Love-lies-bleeding" all provide examples. The last of these "wants rewriting," Mansfield wrote in her journal, putting a circle round this observation, because "Its all over the garden wall," and on the next page a second draft begins. The first version opens: At half past two the servant girl stamped along the narrow passage from the kitchen to the dining room, thrust her head in at the door and shouted in her loud, impudent voice: - "Well, I'm off, Mrs Eichenbaum. I'll be here tomorrow, Mrs Eichenbaum." Muffi waited until she heard the servant's steps crunch down the gravel path, heard the gate creak and slam, listened until those steps died away quite, and silence, like a watchful spider began to spin its silent web over the little house .. Everything changed.

The parallel passage from the second draft maintains the same phrasing where the sound sequence serves the author's purpose, but it also adds a conjunction to change the rhythm (and the sense of consequentiality) at the end of the paragraph; it alters verbs and nouns to heighten the impersonality of the setting; and it alters word source and speech idiom to heighten the impersonality of the relationship:

61 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice At half past two the servant girl stamped along the narrow passage from the kitchen to the dining room, thrust her head-in at the door and shouted in her loud, impudent voice: - "Alors, je vais, Madame. A demain, Madame!" Muffi waited until she heard the front door slam, until she heard the servant's steps ring and clatter down the stone stairs, listened until those steps died away quite, and silence, like a watchful spider began to spin its silent web all over the little flat. And everything changed. (Newberry MS Group 44, MS Papers 4268, folder i, item 36)

One further example consists of the five drafts of the opening sentences of a late story called "The New Baby." The first version dates from September 1921 and begins this way: VERSION i It is late night, very dark, very still. Not a star to be seen. And now it has come on to rain. What happiness it is to listen to rain at night; joyful relief, ease, a lapping round and hushing and tenderness all are mingled together in the sound of the fast-falling rain, God looking down upon the rainy earth, sees how faint are these lights in little windows - how easily put out, ... (Turnbull qMs [1275])

At the top of the page of this version Mansfield wrote to herself in the second person: "You ought to keep this my girl, just as a warning to show what an arch-wallower you can be!" A year later she returned to the story and began again: VERSION 2 At half past ten the yacht steamed into the sound, slowed down. "Hullo!" said someone, "we've stopped!" For a moment, and it seemed like a long moment, everybody was silent. The crying of little waves sounded from the distant beach; the soft moist breath of the night wind came flowing over the dark sea. And looking up at the sky one fancied that the bright-burning moon had stopped too and was waiting to see what was going to happen. (This is the version printed in Murry's Scrapbook, 206-7.) VERSION 3 At half-past ten the yacht steamed into the Sound, slowed down ... "Hullo!" said some one, "we've stopped!" For a moment, and it seemed like a long moment, everybody was silent. They heard the crying of little waves sounded from the distant beach, - the soft, moist breath of the large wind came flowing gently from the boundless over the dark sea. And, looking up at the sky one fancied that even those merrily-burning stars were telling one another that the yacht had anchored for the night.

62 Reading and Writing VERSION 4 At half past ten the yacht steamed into the Sound, slowed down "Hullo!" said some one, "we've stopped!" For a moment, and it seemed like a long moment, everybody was silent. They heard the crying of little waves on the distant beach, they felt the moist, soft breath of the night large wind breathing so gently from the boundless sea. And looking up at the sky it seemed one fancied that even those merrily-burning stars accepted the fact that they were anchored for the night. (This revision is dated Feb 26, 1922.) VERSION 5 As the little steamer rounded the point and came into the next bay they noticed the flag was flying from Putnam's Pier that meant there were passengers to bring off. The captain swore. They were half an hour late already and he couldn't bear not to be up to time, [five illegible crossed-out words] But as they came in the little Putnam's flag, cherry red against the green bush on this brilliant morning, jigged gaily, independently carelessly to show it didnt at care a flick for what the Captain felt. And the Captains feelings. (Newberry MS Group 44, MS Papers 4268, folder i, item 40)

The middle modifications mostly involve punctuation and pacing (though it might be interesting to speculate on why a number of stories involve the half-hour rather than the hour). Subsequent modifications experiment with different word choices - will it be a night wind or a large wind, a dark sea or a boundless sea? - and then even larger syntactic units start to change: is it the yacht that is anchored, or the stars? But the fourth rewrite indicates that sometimes it is neither the tempo nor the word choice that is not working to the author's satisfaction but the general conceptual strategy, which leads to the third category of revision. STRATEGIES OF ARRANGEMENT

Among the changes in agency or strategy that Mansfield's notebooks demonstrate are the alteration of narrative mode and sign (as in "The New Baby/' which shifts from night to morning, yacht to steamer, evocative description to recorded event), the alteration of narrative perspective (as when the point of view in "The New Baby" shifts from the abstract "one" to the concrete, if still nameless, "they"), and the alteration of tense (as in "See-saw," which shifted from past to present at the recopying stage [Newberry MS Group 44, Micro 251, reel i, item II. 16], emphasizing immediacy and perhaps indeterminacy in place of completed and finite action).

63 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice

The reasons for such large changes are neither uniform nor simple, but some sense of the motivations for revision can be gleaned from the succession of self-reflexive critiques that are to be found in the notebooks and manuscript pages. These range from single words to extended meditations: "Enough" (Turnbull qMs [1241]), a word that suspends a story draft with a double line scored across the page; "Nonsense" (Turnbull qMs [1242]), a word written after Mansfield crossed through a sentence that read "Dragging her into the room and over to the light, her pale face full of a frail peace"; "No good" and "revise" (Turnbull MS Papers 4006, folder 6), words written in a notebook containing "Pic-Nic" and "Dame Seule"; "Too vague. Too much in the air Un-telling," "facile," "pompous," "underdeveloped," "thoroughly bad," "inadmissible" (Turnbull qMs [1262]), comments on her own reviews for the Athenaeum; "Everything I think of seems false" (Turnbull qMs [1270]), a notebook comment on liars, full of implied impatience with Murry; "This story won't do. It is a silly story." (Turnbull qMs [1272]), a note appended to a draft of a story about another "Boss" (which Murry, in Scrapbook, 227-31, entitled "The Office Boy"); and this note on the need to read as well as to write: "If there is a book to be read: no matter how bad that book is, I will read it. Was it always so with me? I don't remember. Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anyday, than nothing at all" (Turnbull qMs [1284]). While many of Mansfield's diary entries are directed expressions of anger and many others chide herself for not being a good enough writer and for procrastinating (by using diary notes and letters as substitutions for writing stories), it is important to point to the moments of pleasure and verbal laughter in the notebooks, too - the neologisms, the bilingual puns ("Daisy! Daisy! giv me your onze heures, do!" Turnbull qMs [1266]), and even the mordant limericks about her own physical condition (Turnbull qMs [1267]). It is also important to remember that Mansfield often delighted in her surroundings and sometimes found satisfaction in her own work, particularly in getting the voice right (something she worked on especially in "At the Bay" and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel") and in succeeding at a technique she admired in Chekhov, selectivity of scene and image, about which she wrote in her diary of January 1922: Tchehov made a mistake in thinking that if he had had more time he would have written more fully [...] The truth is one can get only so much into a story; there is always a sacrifice. One has to leave out what one knows and

64 Reading and Writing longs to use. Why? I havent any idea but there it is. Its always a kind of race to get in as much as one can before it disappears. (Turnbull qMs [1282]; Critical Writings, 124)

Repeatedly her comments on writing distinguish between action and pretence, on the part of the writer and also in the language the writer chooses to arrange and employ. Which writer, Mansfield asks, can really see, and which one merely pretends to see? A sharp critique of E.M. Forster's Howard's End, for example, declares: its not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the tea pot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this tea pot. Is it not beautifully warm! Yes, but there aint going to be no tea. And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered I think it must have been the umbrella. (Turnbull qMs [1257]; printed in Critical Writings, 28.)

Two passages from her 1921-22 notebooks examine further this relation between conscious design (agency, or authorial intentionality) and verbal effect (which involves the impact on the reader). A combined entry for 16 October and 21 November 1921 explicitly sets out the tension between the real writer and the actor; perhaps it's the same distinction Patrick White observed - or sensed - in the Mansfield lines he read, between the demands of the ego and the perfection of the early morning: But the late evening is the time of times - then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light. To be simple enough as one would be simple before God ... Nov. 2ist Since then I have only written The Doll house. A bad spell has been on me. I have begun 2 stories but then I told them and they felt betrayed. It is absolutely fatal to give way to this temptation ... Today I began to write, seriously, "The Weak Heart" ... a story which fascinates me deeply. What I feel it needs so peculiarly is a very subtle variation of "tense" from the present to the past & back again - and softness, lightness, and the feeling that all is in bud, with a play of humour over the character of Ronnie, and the feeling of the Thorndon Baths, the wet, moist, oozy ... no, I know how it must be done. May I be found worthy to do it! Lord make me crystal clear for Thy light to shine through the book - (Turnbull qMs [1278])

The entry for 2 May 1922 includes another observation, one about life, language, and literary organization; it demonstrates clearly the

65 In the Act of Writing: Manuscript Practice way these notebooks reveal Mansfield in the act of writing - the way they emphasize the writer's own sense of the craft of short story composition: I must begin writing for Clement Shorter today. 12 "spasms" of 2000 words each. I thought of the Burnells but - no, I don't think so ... Much better the Sheridans - the three girls and the brother and the Father and Mother and so on, ending with a long description of Meg's wedding to Keith Fenwick. Well, there's the first flown out the nest. The sisters Bead who come to stay. The white sheet on the floor when the wedding dress is tried on ... Yes, Ive got the details all right. But the point is - where shall I begin? (Turnbull qMs [1278]; Kobler, 114-15, using Murry's edition of the Journal, identifies the story in question as "The Dove's Nest.") To this observation should be added the passing comment about short narrative form that Mansfield made in a 1920 Athenaeum review of Elizabeth Robins' The Mills of the Gods: Suppose we put it in the form of a riddle: "I am neither a short story, nor a sketch, nor an impression, nor a tale. I am written in prose ... I may be only one page long, but ... there is no reason why I should not be thirty. I have a special quality ... In fact I am often given away in the first sentence. I seem almost to stand or fall by it. It is to me what the first phrase of the song is to the singer." ... What am I? It does not appear ... that the question has ever troubled Miss Elizabeth Robins ... Experience, confidence, and a workmanlike style - the author has all three, and they go far to disguise the hollowness beneath the surface, but the hollowness is there ... How is it that the author can bear to waste her time over these false situations ... the great-hearted, fearless, rude, swearing, murdering toughs who frequent the Golden Sand Gambling Hell at Nome ... [and the] little golden-haired innocent child ... whom they adopt and send to Europe to finish her studies ... Oh, Miss Robins! We are very, very weary of this kind of tale ... (Critical Writings, 99-100) But these observations, taken together, also hint at Mansfield's own role in challenging the formal character of twentieth-century prose. By drawing attention more to the manner of story-telling than to the fixed messages - the conflict and closure - of conventional plots, the manuscript notes announce Mansfield's own critical commitment to language: not as a neutral carrier of determinate propositions but as a deliberate design and a conscious field of revelation.

4 A Catalogue of Forms

What follows is a quick outline of some of the "shapes of language" that Mansfield used in her stories. The categories are a guide to style and its relation to effects, but not a set of rules. Neither rigid nor "complete," the outline offers a way of commenting on a variety of verbal forms rather than a fixed determination of the possibilities inherent in literary structure. It does assert, however, that the choice of verbal form - the language of literary structure - is inevitably a strategy of communication. (Part 3 of this book examines in more detail the way that several specific structures work in particular stories.) The word strategy, moreover, implies a deliberate intent to shape reactions and responses. If it were not already clear - from her early experiments with form, her imitations, her manuscript revisions, and her direct comments on words and effects - that Mansfield relied on the arrangements of words to convey the relationships she identified with "story," then almost any page of her later stories would provide the necessary evidence. Cataloguing some of these arrangements is simply a way, in general terms, of demonstrating the range of her practice. The five categories I use draw attention to two kinds of choice: that which involves the single word (lexicon, grammatical part of speech) and that which involves the word in relationship (syntax, position, associative possibilities). In some cases, even this distinction collapses and the categories overlap (there are associative possibilities in any single word in the lexicon, for instance), but it is clearly possible to treat a given example from two or more points of view (to

67 A Catalogue of Forms

emphasize a word in isolation, to emphasize its associative potential). Literary effects derive from the strategies of combination. GRAMMATICAL

STRUCTURES

By "grammatical structures" I refer to the particular parts of speech that are used within given stories and to the reasons for their having been selected or emphasized. It is clear that parts of speech perform a range of functions - nouns name, verbs convey state or action, adjectives describe, conjunctions connect - but individual parts of speech seldom function in isolation. Stylistic effects depend on the character of various combinations: on what is present, sometimes in number, and what is occasionally absent. The plethora of adjectives in the early sketches, for example, suggests an effortful attempt on the part of the author to characterize not merely appearances but also some inner essence, as though an inchoate "meaning" could be grasped by assembling a descriptive series of external attributes; if the sketches don't quite work, the fault lies as much with the number of adjectives as with the seeming inexactness of word choice, for increasing the adjectives tended to produce a self-reflexive parody rather than the desired tonal effect. The number of pronouns in "The Child-Who-Was-Tired," by contrast, seems more controlled; here the pronouns orchestrate attitudes: they function as noun-avoidances as well as noun-substitutes. The grammar conveys theme. Mansfield's stories provide numerous examples of such deliberate grammatical decisions. The number of adverbs in use in the 1911-12 stories, for instance - "The Modern Soul," "The Advanced Lady," "The Swing of the Pendulum": cheerfully, flippantly, lazily, heartily, quietly, savagely, audibly, gently, impatiently, rapturously, sympathetically, questioningly (66-88) - suggests a conscious effort to convey aspect and tonality, but the perception here is still external to the action. By the time of "Her First Ball," written for the Sphere in 1921, Mansfield was using tense and verbal aspect itself in order to characterize the modulation of sensibility. "Her First Ball" hinges on the differences between expectation, participation, and memory, differences (attitudinal as well as temporal) that are revealed through the passing connection between Leila, at her first dance, and a fat man who has been dancing intermittently for thirty years. She, who at first lives all in the future (in expectation of pleasure still to come), is horrified when the fat man tells her of memories she cannot share and of an aged future she has not yet imagined, but she comes by the end of the story to live entirely in the present. At last participating in the dance with a young man who

68 Reading and Writing

also enjoys the moment, she has already suppressed the horror and confined the fat man to forgotten history. But this passage reveals multiple ironies - the transitoriness of the present in which she "entirely" lives, the inevitability of the history that she seems to have forgotten, the implications of change in a life that has already changed between the beginning of the story and the end. The reader's recognition of these ironies derives in part from a sensitivity to the verbs and to the way the verbs, the adverbs, and the temporal conjunctions combine. The story's first sentence reads: "Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say" (426); the last two sentences read: "And when her next partner bumped her into the fat man and he said, 'Pardon/ she smiled at him more radiantly than ever. She didn't even recognize him again" (431). The repetition of "when" focuses attention on time, but the functional difference between "exactly" and "And" suggests a perceptual difference between fixity and continuity. Yet there is a paradox here: the fixity is not free from time, nor is the continuity free from conclusion. By forgetting the beginning (using the conditional mode: "would have found it hard to say"), Leila is made already to participate in the passing history that the insensitive fat man will refer to - or has already referred to (told after the fact, the story none the less appears to unroll through the passing present). And though Leila appears at the end to be involved in the dancing moment so absolutely as to have forgotten the past, the tension between the indefinite verbs (smiled, didn't recognize) and the comparative adverbs (more radiantly, even, again) plays off her newly fixed or at least seemingly fixed perception against the continuities of time that imply "the ends of man" as well as the mutability of the human condition. "At 'Lehmann's,'" a story first published in July 1910 in The New Age and collected in In a German Pension (1911), further exemplifies how the choice of nouns, verbs, and adverbs shapes fictional effect. The functions that these grammatical units serve - to name, denote action and state, and characterize modality - and the interrelationships among them suggest that the story deals in part with the relation between naming, knowing, and doing. It reveals ways in which "factual" information is related to authority; knowing the "right" names, and knowing how to read circumstances in the "right" ways sanctioned by convention, grant control over the ability to act. Those who do not "know" become victims. But nouns and verbs are also selected here for their power as images, contrast being a working principle of organization, and the contrasts implied by the denotations attached to choices of vocabulary reinforce the contrast embodied in the choice of grammatical form.

69 A Catalogue of Forms

Because some of the strategies are so transparent, they make ready examples, but the openness does not always guarantee effectiveness. At the centre of "At 'Lehmann's,'" for example, appear contiguous sentences reading "'Has it cornel' But he had gone" (41, my italics). To read the juxtaposition as a dense evocation of the theme of life and death would be to distort; the passage more likely expresses a little stylistic joke, of a sort that Mansfield was not above indulging in. (In "The Advanced Lady," also printed in In a German Pension, appears a punning reference to the "'cure guests', who were giving their digestions a quiet airing in pension gardens," who "asked if we were going for a walk, and cried, 'Herr Gott - happy journey' with immense ill-concealed relish when we mentioned Schlingen [= gobbling]," 75, my italics.) The first two paragraphs of "At 'Lehmann's,'" however, not only set up contrasts between verb choices but also use these to direct contrasts in prose rhythms that in turn suggest contrasts between youth and age, girlhood and womanhood, sexlessness and sensuality: Certainly Sabina did not find life slow. She was on the trot from early morning until late at night. At five o'clock she tumbled out of bed, buttoned on her clothes, wearing a long-sleeved alpaca pinafore over her black frock, and groped her way downstairs into the kitchen. Anna, the cook, had grown so fat during the summer that she adored her bed because she did not have to wear her corsets there, but could spread as much as she liked, roll about under the great mattress, calling upon Jesus and Holy Mary and Blessed Anthony himself that her life was not fit for a pig in a cellar. (37)

This opening is full of ironies, for the story that it introduces concerns the awakening of sexual feelings in Sabina and of her resistance to a young man who crudely asks her towards the end if she is a child or merely playing at being one (42); meanwhile a parallel motif concerns the pregnancy of the wife in the household in which Sabina works, the naivete of Sabina about sexual relations, and the birth of the baby. Fat/thin, baby/adult, man/woman, slow/fast, up/ down - even blessed-pink-dimple/dirty-sausage-pimple (37) - the contrasts embodied in the expression of these motifs convey both the hint of sexuality (as threat/as pleasure) and the tensions of irony. "Certainly," the adverb that begins the story, certainly does not set up certainty - the "not" is more functional - but if life is not slow, does that mean it should, for Sabina, be "fast"? The verbs complicate any answer to this question, for they resonate more than at first appears: tumbled, buttoned, groped, adored, spread, roll about. At

70

Reading and Writing

the beginning of the story these verbs perform a simple denotative function; they communicate the rhythms of movement of an energetic young girl and a tired woman. The moment they are allowed a sexual connotation, however, their function alters, changing the world in which these women move from a protected room into a place where they are constantly reminded of the consequences of sexuality. And so the story progresses towards further revelations, along the way associating "play" both with innocent childhood and with sexual discovery, and associating sexuality with food. Pregnancy looks "unappetising" (38) to Sabina; she also thinks about birth while "corking the bottle" (39) for the young man. And ignorance misleads. For his part, the young man has names for things, giving him verbal power: he "calls" and he "commands" (39), abilities that lead him to presume more than he should. But Sabina has inadequate knowledge, which leaves her susceptible to others' orders and to her own misapprehensions. In particular, she "longed to ask questions, yet, being ashamed of her ignorance, was silent" (38). Shame and silence, recurrent Mansfield tropes, are related also to her "spatial strategies," but here it is important to observe both how they affect behaviour and how the verb choice alters when they are named. Sabina, actively longing, becomes passively ashamed (a social disease) because of not knowing and not feeling free to ask; and in this case she is consequently reduced to a state: "was silent." That the end of the story should be punctuated by the wail of the newborn baby and a single shriek from Sabina might suggest new birth, or new awareness, for both. That neither Sabina nor the baby should have language, however, signals no end yet for the kind of silence that limits and inhibits expression. The birth into a socially constructed innocence and the abrupt and even accidental "rebirth" out of it have in common, the story implicitly argues, the vulnerability of the uninformed to the presumptions, the constraints, and the consequent judgments of social convention. SYNTACTICAL

STRUCTURES

Choosing words involves exactness, appropriateness, the effect of sound and effectiveness of sense. Choosing syntactical arrangements further affects rhythm, but it also involves notions of complexity and accuracy. While the term "syntactical structures" simply refers to grammatical units in formal combination - phrases, clauses, sentences, sentence fragments, parallel units, doublets, and the like - the formalization of some combinations has resulted in rules of usage.

71 A Catalogue of Forms

Using or breaking a language's syntactic rules, consequently, is something of a declaration. But context has an effect on rules of structure as well as on individual words. Syntactical "accuracy" declares a verbal facility or sometimes a slavish adherence to convention, just as "inaccuracy" can variously suggest a lack of control, an inarticulateness, or sometimes a deliberate rejection of authority. Whatever the case - as any questioner or commander knows, from experience if not from nature - the shape that sentences take affects meaning. Interrogative, imperative, and declarative forms anticipate different responses; long and short sentences achieve different effects depending on the sentences that surround them, from expressing complexity and simplicity, respectively, to expressing obscurity and naivete. Paratactic or compound structures - those using and ... and ... and - suggest orality, balance, and sometimes childishness, whereas hypotactic structures - those that require clausal subordination - construct layers of (often complex) hierarchical relationship among the associated ideas being conveyed. As with sentences, so with paragraphs; as with paragraphs, so with longer prose structures: shape and effect go hand in hand. The analysis of longer structures occupies the latter part of this book. Here, a few examples of shorter units must suffice to illustrate the principle of structural planning. A few sentences, each of them the opening of a story, will first of all illustrate differences: 1 "Who is he?" I said. "And why does he sit always alone, with his back to us, too?'" "The Baron" (1910: 31) 2 "Do you think we might ask her to come with us," said Fraulein Elsa, retying her pink sash ribbon before my mirror. "The Advanced Lady" (1911: 73) 3 "You got three-quarters of an hour," said the porter. "You got an hour mostly. Put it in the cloak-room, lady." "The Journey to Bruges" (1911: 92) 4 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-andseek in it. "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped" (1912: 117) 5 Down the windy hill stalked Ole Underwood. "Ole Underwood" (1913: 131)

72 Reading and Writing 6 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 beach and where was the sea. "At the Bay" (1922: 441) 7 It is evening. Supper is over. We have left the small, cold dining room; we have come back to the sitting room where there is a fire. All is as usual. "A Married Man's Story" (written 1921: 476) 8 Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at - nothing - at nothing, simply. "Bliss" (1918: 305) 9 And then, after six years, she saw him again. "A Dill Pickle" (1917: 271) 10 And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it. "The Garden Party" (1922: 487)

The differences among these sentences demonstrate a variety of Mansfield's organizational techniques, techniques that, in all, involve length, overall shape, internal pattern, and recurrent or broken patterns. These patterns are not mechanical determiners of meaning - a phrase does not produce an automatic response - but they do direct reading. As with vocabulary choices, these syntactic arrangements reveal a writer deliberately using formal design to arrange particular effects. Examples i and 2, for instance, both use questions to begin stories, but the effects are not the same, even though in both the questions are "said" rather than "asked" - a guide to tonal utterance if not to structure - and even though the handling of pronouns in the two examples suggests that the relation between narrator and observed subject will figure in both stories. Example i, with its double question, its interrupted flow (the phrase marked off by commas), and its emphatic close (rather than the rising tone normally associated with questions), combines the voice of curiosity with the voice of umbrage. The speaker wishes to have been noticed but has been

73 A Catalogue of Forms

metaphorically cast in the shade and is annoyed. Example 2, by contrast, lingering after the question in a telling descriptive detail, suggests that the speaker lacks confidence in herself; the falling cadence of the question suggests she expects a negative answer, while the detail of retying the sash - before someone else's mirror - reinforces the effect of uncertainty. The two stories are not as a consequence equivalent to the themes of resentment and uncertainty, but these motifs do figure in the stories, from the beginning, and are conveyed in the first instance by the configuration of sentence form. Examples 3 and 4 show how structure can be used to convey perspectives on class, gender, and age, and to suggest the character of at least some of the relationships that derive from these social attributes. Example 3 combines class and gender. The (male) porter encountering the (female) passenger reveals his class through his grammatical solecisms. He reveals his sense of superiority over the (young, and hence seemingly vulnerable) woman by the imperative sentence forms he employs to tell her what to do. The sobriquet "lady" adds a further twist to the relationship, however; by saying "lady" - not "miss" (as might be expected), nor "Ma'am" (which might imply deference to a woman older than this passenger), nor a dialect "dear" or "luv" (which would be ageless, in the historical context represented in this story) - he nevertheless admits his recognition of her "quality." In some sense, these sentences suggest, it is this stubborn recognition that he wants to deny, his sense of class that he wants to suppress, class resentment that leads him into his presumptuous imperative mode. (The "lady," of course, who narrates the story, adds another dimension of irony by controlling the porter within her narration, as she controls other portraits of presumptuousness, thus effectively deflecting the others' exercise of power.) Example 4, by contrast (with "Pearl" and "early," "sunshiny," and two "littles"), seems a somewhat saccharine declarative passage - unless it is read as a deliberate construction of childlike sensibilities, evoking the way the child's eye registers sensory details in a grand unsorted series. But that hierarchies exist that the child might not be aware of is something these sentences also convey; the seven prepositional phrases, in such a short compass, suggest a series of interlinked contingencies. To use the leading metaphor of the story, there will be "boxes within boxes," hinting that the story ought not to be taken at face value and that the illusory notion "the truth of a story" - in this case involving the so-called kidnapping of Pearl Button - depends on how far past appearances one reads the clues. Examples 5 and 6 demonstrate different attempts to break with standard (subject-verb-object) English sentence pattern. Example 5

74 Reading and Writing

uses a simple inversion of order (predicate-verb-subject), signalling a potential if not a necessary reversal of some sort; that Ole Underwood's story should be largely an exercise in retrieving memories thus fulfils expectations. Example 6, more complex, opens with a fragment and then goes on to a series of cumulative and seemingly appreciative observations of the natural world, observations that begin with short sentences, then increase in length with a climactic parallel series. The fragmentariness of observation is thus structurally hinted at - a theme that "At the Bay" develops - but so is another motif. The line of negations that runs through this passage - not yet, hidden, smothered, could not see, gone, no, nothing - a line continued in the sentences that follow, suggests the danger of reading the (metaphorical) landscape too sanguinely. The world has to be read also for what it does not say but for what nevertheless is there to be understood. "At the Bay" takes this landscape metaphor and reads the world of women for what it (often silently, and effectively) says, and for what the world of men does not say, even when it thinks it effectively says it all. Out of the inverse comes the story's subject. With examples 7 and 8 differences in sentence length become apparent and functional. Example 7, devising simple clauses, reiterating the verb "is" and concocting an illusion of unassailable fact, reveals the force of arranging a series of deliberately short sentences. The flat utterances of example 7 also, however, set up the mask of acceptability that the "married man," who is the narrator, wants accepted; it is a disguise for a number of kinds of violence that permeate his life and the lives of the people near him and that threaten the "usual" character of a life he would like not to analyse too accurately or closely. Yet he nevertheless reveals a great deal about himself, in part by pretending to simple truths - including a simple boredom - and by declaring the static character of the marriage that his own actions do not help to enliven. Example 8 depends on being longer. The sentence might seem to convey an opposite character: dynamic, full of lively verbs, the single sentence seems wholly enlivened by Bertha's energy. Yet even here the sentence is shaped to undercut this illusion. The verbs are mainly in the infinitive form - concepts more than actions - and the sentence closes with "nothing, simply," as though (whatever freedom Bertha might dream of in the present moment) her expressed desires at least will be shown to be insubstantial. Beginning with "although," moreover, the sentence is from the start concessional, in this instance to age. Age, in and of itself, might well have a bearing on the narrative that follows, the phrasing suggests, but it further suggests that at some point concession certainly will. Bertha will be making concessions to reality - or to a reality, of a sort that

75 A Catalogue of Forms

she has not yet recognized or has suppressed. The concession in turn (the story's unmarked title opens possibilities) will modify whatever she currently understands by "bliss." Examples 9 and 10 demonstrate another strategy - stories that commence with "And," beginning in medias res. For all their initial similarity examples 9 and 10 again display radically different kinds of development. Example 9 focuses on "then," on sequence - and then interrupts the sequence, suggesting the consequences of interruption. The function of the form of this opening becomes apparent when the narrative proceeds, for the story's effect subsequently hinges on whether an egotistical man will continue to interrupt his woman friend or whether she, after some years apart, has acquired the selfrespect to interrupt him. Example 10 deals in perception more than in sequence, though the opening ("And after all") hints that perceptions can change with time. More particularly it suggests the way a life perceived in absolutes (all, ideal, perfect) is still subject to circumstance. It is not just that weather (real or metaphoric) is unpredictable but that the absolute structures here are qualified in the midst of being expressed: what is a "more perfect" day except an absolute made relative? To conclude the sentence with a conditional clause, moreover - an "if" clause, resonant with uncertainty - undermines the declarations of certainty with which the sentence begins. The form of the sentence sets up tensions. And in this story as in others, setting and theme individualize the tension, glimpsing in passing the troubled moments of a particular life. PLACEMENT STRATEGIES

Conventional textbooks that describe "short story form" (as though there were a single standard) liken short narratives to a scalene triangle, with a baseline, a long "rising action," a high point or "climax," and an acute-angled rapid return to the baseline, called a "closing action" or "denouement." Clearly this diagrammatic representation assumes several things about narrative design, including the necessity of climax and the inevitability of closure. But even the most casual reading through twentieth-century short story collections will suggest that a baseline is relative, that closure is not inevitable, that climax is sometimes less consequential than anticlimax, and that a "high point" is sometimes absent. Not all characters come to an "epiphany" or moment of recognition; indeed, many writers deliberately avoid such a recognition scene, rejecting the implication that people always comprehend experience in a single flash of insight.

76 Reading and Writing

{Catherine Mansfield, as her sketches, satires, and later stories show, belongs to the group of writers early in the twentieth century who were beginning to question the scalene design of nineteenth-century plotted narrative.1 Some readers complained that nothing seemed to "happen" in the new works, but their unhappiness stemmed from their failure (or reluctance) to follow the language; they still sought meaning in "action" rather than in verbal form, and "satisfaction" in at least an apparent resolution to whatever conflict was being represented. Such an expectation clearly declared a set of moral and political as well as aesthetic expectations. Because the actions of the world did not readily fulfil these wants, plotted fiction, like history told in narrative form, had begun to provide a substitute arena for those who placed their faith in moral and political tidiness. For the most part Mansfield resisted plot. By doing so she resisted the temptations of closure, but embracing indeterminacy led to other narrative difficulties in its place. In particular, the question of placement created problems: what came first in a story that refused to be plot-centred? And what came last? If plots led to completed action (which is a perception, obviously, a paradigm of practice rather than an absolute), then how did a "plotless" story, avoiding "completion," end? Mansfield's practice reveals several strategies, ranging from tonal modulation to caustic nudge, but for the sake of discussion I wish to concentrate on five kinds of ending: the "take," the fragment, the image, the recorded declaration, and the apparent cessation of activity. i. By "take" I refer to the several occasions (most often in early stories, especially the Pension satires) when the first-person persona steps into the narrative at the end with a comment addressed more or less directly at the reader. "The Sister of the Baroness," for example, closes with the phrase "Tableau grandissimo!" (52), which invites the reader to observe (along with the narrator) a set of unstated reactions (to a revelation that a presumed "sister" was really a servant) and therefore to share the narrator's superior judgment of the circumstances of the story. When "The Modern Soul" closes with the phrase "I wondered" (73) or "Being a Truthful Adventure" closes with the longer (but still reactive) phrase "'Oh, a very different light indeed,' I answered, shaking my head at the familiar guide book emerging from Guy's pocket" (102), the narrative method invites a similar sharing of the persona's greater wisdom. As an avoidance of closure, this technique succeeds only in so far as it refuses to resolve the dilemmas of the observed characters, but it tends in practice to substitute an alternative form of closure by assuming the security of the persona/narrator's point of view.

77 A Catalogue of Forms

2. The technique of fragmentation questions this security. If things cannot be resolved, or even completed for a duration, then they simply stop, and even if they appear to declare a grand truth, the fragmentation of form undercuts the likelihood of order as well as the grandness of vision. The late, wry, performance-dependent comedy "Taking the Veil" provides an example; after a series of absurdly melodramatic actions, the central character leaps to her next decision: Everything is still possible for her and Jimmy. The house they have planned may still be built, the little solemn boy with his hands behind his back watching them plant the standard roses may still be born. His baby sister ... But when Edna got as far as his baby sister, she stretched out her arms as though the little love came flying through the air to her, and gazing at the garden, at the white sprays on the tree, at those darling pigeons blue against the blue, and the Convent with its narrow windows, she realised that now at last for the first time in her life - she had never imagined any feeling like it before - she knew what it was to be in love, but - in - love! (529)

The double fragmentation in this passage, coupled with the parodic phrasing, emphasizes the illusory character of the life Edna longs for. If closure exists at all, it derives from the implied sharing of perspective between author and reader - the critical recognition of at least two forms of discourse that is required to permit parody to function. But the use of fragments within the mindset of the character (as opposed to the use of fragments by an authorial persona) permits the author to reveal without overt comment the continuing contradictions that limit Edna's personal construction of order. Other forms of fragmentation provide possibly more obvious examples of resistance to closure: the end of "A Woman at the Store": "A bend in the road, and the whole place disappeared" (117); the end of "Stay-Laces": "Oh, you know ..." (198); the end of "Prelude": "Then she tiptoed away, far too quickly and airily ..." (259). The oblique mention of the bend in the road that ends "The Woman at the Store" functions almost metonymically, constructing the state of mind that suppresses what it does not wish entirely to comprehend; that the fragment concludes one of Mansfield's most plotted narratives suggests not only that the conclusions of recognition can themselves be resisted but also that the characters, by repressing what they have seen, do not necessarily free themselves from the ongoing pressure of memory. "Stay-Laces," which is constructed as a dialogue, drifts into verbal gesture, as conversations often do, without conclusion; here the evasiveness of automatic language substitutes

78 Reading and Writing

for resolution, and even for the kind of confrontation that in a "conventional" story might constitute a "climax," in the process revealing the way individuals interact self-defensively with power. In the case of "Prelude" the incompleteness of the comparison begun by the words "far too" suggests yet another strategy for avoiding confrontation: retreat. The manner of retreat, moreover, compensates for the preceding action (Kezia, the "she" of the sentence, has just dropped the lid of her aunt's cosmetics jar) without concluding it. Consequences (if there are any, and the earlier parts of the story suggest that all moves have consequences) lie outside the story, within range of implication but beyond the reach of closure. 3. When a story ends with an image, it is usually referring back to earlier passages in the text, drawing force from echoes and resonances. And (as with the "bend in the road" or the "guide book" in examples already referred to) no easy demarcation separates "images" from the structures in which they appear. When "The Wind Blows" ends with the iterative phrase "The wind - the wind" (194), it is unproductive, for example, to declare that "the wind" is an image of change without also recognizing that the structure contributes to meaning. The fragmentation denies a fixed ending; the repetition suggests a relentless persistency, whether as an empirical (if exaggerated) description of Wellington weather or as a metaphoric evocation of unnamed (emotional, intellectual) pressures. Relatedly when Miss Ada Moss, in "Pictures," "sailed after the little yacht out of the cafe" (330), or the title character in "Miss Brill" "put the lid on" the box she kept her fur-piece in and "thought she heard something crying" (377), the construction of the text asks a reader not only to appreciate, by means of image, some features of personality (one figure sailing in tow, the other boxed in and distanced from self) but also to recognize that the imagery is synaesthetic as well as visual; it works by rhythm as well as by picture. The falling cadence in the series of prepositional phrases that conveys Miss Moss to her assignation diminishes her stature as she moves; she is made into an object, the victim of the only choices she seems to have left if she wishes to survive. The repeated "-ing" sounds at the end of Miss Brill's story also function more than just referentially; trochees of sobbing, they hint at the sound of her covert weeping. The end of neither story releases its victimized woman from her vulnerability; restless in the shadow of other people's power - and other people's language - both characters remain suspended: in the unrewarding lives they lead, and in activities they can no more finish than control. 4. The end of "The Man Without a Temperament" shows how a recorded statement can also convey both a surface declaration and a contained image. When the character named Robert (or "Boogies")

79 A Catalogue of Forms

comes close to his ill wife - he has been growing apart from her all story long - she asks him if he minds being with her: "He bends down. He kisses her. He tucks her in, he smoothes the pillow. 'Rot!' he whispers." (341) The surface intention of the statement is clear: he declares his devotion by dismissing her worries; he dons the mask of humble self-effacement and acts at least paternally. To leave the story at that conclusion, however, would be to invoke an unlikely closure, vapid and shallow. Mansfield's technique asks the reader to hear this declaration, but to read past it. The word "rot" (an accurate record of a particular class-based British slang) also resonates in the story with all the preceding references to food and disease. There has been much eating in this story, and much talking, but despite all the surface rituals, there is no longer any sustenance in the marriage. When Robert whispers "Rot!" therefore, the reader recognizes something of his undeclared (perhaps even unconscious) perception of his wife and, by extension, sees how he also reveals a corruption within himself that has contributed to the decay of their relationship. Numerous other stories end with a comparable strategy, ranging from Andreas Binzer's self-serving negation of other people's problems at the end of "A Birthday" - "'Well, by God! Nobody can accuse me of not knowing what suffering is/ he said" (65) - to the intrusive "'Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie" (499) at the end of "The Garden Party." Even the abrupt "And he handed her an egg" (270), which caps the young man's inadequate speech at the end of "Feuille d'Album," suggests a variant version of this technique; and the end of "A Dill Pickle" openly (if indirectly) declares the narrow reach of the speaker's personality, almost hidden during the preceding teatime conversation: '"But the cream has not been touched,' he said. 'Please do not charge me for it'" (276). The man here is fundamentally as negative and egotistical as Binzer, and so perhaps is Laura's brother Laurie in "The Garden Party." It is significant that the recurrent phrase in all these endings is "he said." Lexicon and tense combine not casually but deliberately in this seemingly simple construction, invoking a connection between maleness and the completed act of saying - but then undercutting it. Laurie says his question, he does not ask it; having spoken, he does not expect a reply. Nor does Binzer or Boogies or the man in the cafe; each believes his word to be unassailable, consequently true, consequently law. But the texts of Mansfield's stories do reply, questioning and resisting the illusory order that convention and others' speech impose. 5. They also sometimes envisage an alternative. Another group of story endings suggests this desire for a world in which people are free from the given authority of speech and yet still free to communicate. Such endings perhaps begin as early as the juvenile sketch

8o Reading and Writing

"Die Ensame" (The Lonely One) - "Then a great wave came, and there was silence" (5) - though it is also possible that the structure of this particular sketch merely indicates a youthful reliance on formula. When it is placed beside the closing lines of stories as late as "At the Bay" and "The Doll's House/' however, dismissing it as mere formula seems insensitive both to the function of convention and the power of phrasing to subvert convention. "At the Bay" ends: "Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still" (469). "The Doll's House" ends: "'I seen the little lamp/ she said, softly. Then both were silent once more" (505). Much depends, here, on the way a reader responds to the concepts as well as the words: "speech," "silence," "stillness." That there is a difficulty in using language to combat language is obvious. Mansfield's character Beryl in "At the Bay" and other stories epitomizes one of the dilemmas created by the gender bias in language and its relation to power: if she does not speak, she appears weak (by the prevailing standard), and if she does speak, she appears "masculine" - but acquires only a mimic power to the degree that her speech is only "mimic male." Mansfield's stories attempt in part to redefine the prevailing definitions of power by redefining the words on which the power assumptions rely, "silence" and "stillness" among them. Heard, that is, only as the absence of speech and activity (the accepted signs of power and control), "silence" and "stillness" must "mean" some form of inferior status or ability. Heard as the signifiers of alternative fields of communication, by contrast, they gather other resonances. When Our Else, in "The Doll's House," tells her sister Lil that she "seen the little lamp," her speech communicates only part of her message; it is in the silence that follows that the rest of the message occurs, in the unstated (because there is no need to state it) understanding between sympathetic minds. The stillness at the end of "At the Bay," comparably, does not communicate the day's death but rather the promise of renewal and return. The seemingly static nature of stillness and silence constitutes, nevertheless, an aesthetic challenge. How does a writer write except with words? How can silence be written into a text? Such questions led Mansfield into still further structural designs. SPATIAL STRATEGIES

Silence, stillness, absence, death: the temptation is strong to read these terms as figurative synonyms - conventional usage invites the

8i

A Catalogue of Forms

equivalence. But as in other ways, Mansfield's writing seeks to subvert the convention, sometimes even while appearing to use it. Many of the female characters in her stories do not speak, for example, or do not respond to speech, as though silenced by the power of the voices around them. But to read them as conventionally "weak" would be radically to distort the writing. Just as the quiet day's end in a Mansfield story is seldom as peaceful as illusion suggests, and the stillness of nature (the pear tree in "Bliss," for example) unlikely as immutable as the perceiving character thinks it, so the silent women here are not without language. If they do not always use words to speak, that often means they communicate by other means. By not choosing words as their "natural" medium of communication, moreover, they not only circumvent the limits of conventional "meaning" but also implicitly question the conventional association of male speech with authority. The voice of Stanley Burnell in "At the Bay" is apropos: Stanley thunders, orders, demands, declares, even apologizes, behaving as though all these utterances have power, while all around him a female world operates without recourse to what he actually says. While a few women do respond to men, they appear little concerned with the particular words the men use and motivated more by a desire for the social power that the male world around them seems to associate with speech. Beryl, Isabel, and Mrs Stubbs, for example, use speech as a claim upon authority, yet in practice their behaviour seems imitative and their hold on power even more tenuous than Stanley's. For other female characters, however, Stanley's words simply have no substance; he might himself believe in the efficacy and function of speaking - indeed, he sets great store by the "natural" hierarchy of command - but women such as Linda and Kezia (though they negotiate his world of words) respond to each other and to the world around them more through symbolic nuance: gesture, pacing, association, thought. But how to communicate "symbolic nuance" on a page of words? How, without using words in the process (she grimaced, she spoke rapidly, she was reminded of, she thought)? Any such technique must depend on the reader's recognizing the signs, interpreting the gaps in a verbal structure, reading the "unspoken" narrative that accompanies the surface language. There are, of course, verbal techniques for suggesting concurrent alternatives to apparent statement; these include irony, punning, negation, intertextual allusion, metaphor. But Mansfield sought also to give substance to silence, to make silence a form of communication in its own right, to make wordlessness mean more than just absence or powerlessness or inconsequentiality. One

82 Reading and Writing

of the letters she wrote in 1919 to S.S. Koteliansky provides a relevant comment. It records her appreciation of the technique Chekhov used: he "just touched one point with his pen (. .) and then another point: enclosed something which had, as it were, been there for ever" (21 August 1919, Letters and Journals, 137). In context the comment comes as a tribute to the "immortality" of an artistic conception, to the "truth" outside words that a literary structure allows a reader to recognize; in practice it describes a technique she had herself been using for some time also: a technique of fragmenting a narrative, suspending obvious continuity, introducing spatial breaks in order to "enclose" whatever has intervened - the unsaid but understood, the undeclared but consequential, the duration of a reaction, the gesture of recognition, the seeming silence of active reflection and thought. Spatial breaks - visual interruptions to narrative, represented by a row of asterisks - occur in numerous stories, ranging from early works such as "Die Einsame," "In a Cafe," some of the German Pension sketches, and "Old Cockatoo Curl" through "Something Childish But Very Natural" and "An Indiscreet Journey" to such later stories as "Six Years After." Late variations include "Prelude," "At the Bay," and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" (all three divided into numbered sections) and "Je ne parle pas franc.ais" and "A Married Man's Story" (each internally divided by greater or lesser degrees of white space between paragraphs, but with no asterisk or number as a visual marker). The divisions in all cases affect the pacing of the stories. The narratives speed up, they slow down, depending on the way the spacing directs the reading, just as though the text were a musical score. The gaps in their simplest form (particularly in the early works) also evoke the passing of time; the number of breaks conveys a sense of sequence glimpsed at intervals. Other examples, however, which introduce a single break only (often shortly before the story ends) - "Millie," for instance, "At Lehmann's," "Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding," "The Baron," or "A Blaze" - usually use this break to suggest a shift in perspective as well, perhaps in concert with a passage of time, or perhaps simply as a result of a preceding action. Either way, the two sides of this break "enclose" a recognition, as though there were an "epiphany" of some sort in the interim. But by refusing to state any such epiphany in words, the method resists the temptations of fixity; "understanding" lies outside words, not in a given set of them. Words, for Mansfield, thus invite understanding more than they delineate it. And in the more complex (and mostly later) paradigms the breaks multiply, suggesting an even less unidirectional progress of recognition and a greater degree of interpretive latitude. The breaks, no

83 A Catalogue of Forms

longer just silent cessations in narrative movement, become themselves fields of communication. But the seeming amorphousness of these breaks does not mean that they have no literary structure. They acquire shape from the shape of the words around them, as is most clearly demonstrated in the dialogue-sketches Mansfield wrote for The New Age in 1915 and 1917, especially "Stay-Laces" and "Two Tuppeny Ones, Please."2 Both works contrive "conversations" between a voluble character (Mrs. Busk in the first story, Lady in the second) and a totally wordless one (Mrs. Bone in the first, Friend in the second), their roles in the conversation being indicated by speaker-markers, as in the text of a play. Mrs Bone and Friend are both granted only "..." as the sign of what they say. It is conceivable, as Antony Alpers suggests, that such works represent mere "eavesdropping" (Stories, 555) a record of a dominant voice and the unheard replies in a conversation overheard on a bus, but given the comic effects of the dramatization of speech and silence, it seems more likely that Mansfield used the technique to craft a relationship and weigh its social and psychological implications. In the conversation it is the speaker (Lady, Mrs Busk) who commands, who exercises control; but in the story it is the wordless interruptions that gather effect. The interruptions (for all that they consist only of ellipses) vary in tone: Mrs. Bone's "...!" differs from her "...!...!" (195), and Friend's "...?" differs both from "..." and from "...!!" (202-3). The punctuation differences, that is, also characterize the (non)speaker's reactions: the reader reads the body-language of shock, surprise, curiosity, embarrassment, complaisance, compliance, and so on. Although the direct responses that Lady and Mrs Busk give to the ellipses suggest that the silences express actual words, it is not clear that Mansfield intends these implied words to occupy the gaps and limit the reader's comprehension. When Mrs Bone at one point says "...!" and Mrs Busk replies "Yes, that's what I thought" (198), the text has clearly just made the egocentricity of Mrs Busk transparent. From this perspective it does not matter to Mrs Busk whether Mrs Bone says what she thinks she ought to say or not; for her, Mrs Bone's reaction is a given, her deference assumed, her "place" in the power relationship unquestioned. For Mansfield, by contrast, the one-sided conversation constructs a paradigm of gender politics without gender differences (a paradigm repeated in the relation between Mrs Stubbs and Alice in "At the Bay," or between Aunt Beryl and Kezia in "The Doll's House"). And it is Mrs Bone (who to some degree is complicit in the relationship, in the status quo) whose reactions call attention to the emptiness of the

84 Reading and Writing

presumed authority. Mrs Bone herself (to read the ellipses as a sign of her character) does not necessarily change, nor unequivocally recognize her acquaintance's limitations; the text designs such a revelation for the reader instead. The silences that punctuate Mrs Busk's (and Lady's) wandering speeches do not, therefore, equate with stillness, passivity, or dead air. Instead, by directing the reader's understanding, they work the other way around: they constitute a form of textual speech for which the page's recorded words are the effective punctuation. (. .) But the words themselves are not casually chosen or arranged. To read Mrs Busk for the emptiness of what she says rather, that is, than to read her words as the embodiment of narrative intent or social comment and to read Mrs Bone's silences as an emptiness of reply - leads directly to the last of the compositional strategies under discussion here. RELATIONAL

STRATEGIES

Relational strategies are those that begin with a rhetorical trope of some sort but function only when a reader recognizes the relation between this trope and another, often unstated. There are numerous examples. The basic design involves comparison or contrast; in a simile such a relation is expressed within the trope itself (X is like Y, or behaves as Y behaves); in metonymy the relation depends upon a form of contiguity that requires interpretation (X is associated with Y and can therefore imply Y). Analogy suggests that, inasmuch as a parallel exists between X on the one hand and A on the other, then the logical implications of X (the relation between X and Y, say) must run parallel to the implications of A (e.g., the relation between A and B) - often a persuasive strategy, though not always a logical one. Other juxtapositions are looser in form (X appears beside or runs parallel to Y, or X suggests the existence of a Y that would change an understanding of X), but inasmuch as they require a comparable pairing of terms or referents, they too in practice function relationally. Parody is a special form of implied juxtaposition in that it proves effective only if the reader recognizes the connection between the text being read and the (usually unstated) text or rhetorical convention that is being burlesqued. All humour depends on relation in fact, in that nothing is funny if a listener cannot appreciate a disparity, and a listener cannot appreciate a disparity if he or she lacks (because of an insufficient experience of language, an insufficient knowledge of life) one of the sets of terms that is necessary to recognize when an expression is not limited by its literal or face value. Yet another form of juxtaposition depends on the recognition of what

85 A Catalogue of Forms

might be called competing speech registers in a single literary work which happens when a text (often with a satiric purpose) asks a reader to recognize a functional disparity between two separate, socially marked collocations of vocabulary. That Mansfield's stories repeatedly give rise to comic and satiric observations scarcely needs saying, except that it serves as a reminder of how often and how fundamentally the writer relies on the reader's ability to recognize disparities and connections as they are expressed in language. The satire in the German Pension stories, the imitations of Theocritus ("The Festival of the Coronation," for example), the direct parodies (of, for example, Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells),3 the general burlesques ("Taking the Veil"), the brittle wit of a story such as "Marriage a la Mode," the jokes in "The Advanced Lady," the tonal wit of passages in "The Escape," the comedie humaine of passing phrases in "At the Bay" and "Prelude": each engagement with the comic expresses a slightly different connection with human foible and frailty. If the author/narrator can stand apart and judge, she can construct foible as a characteristic that marks others rather than the self; to the degree that the author/ narrator is sympathetically involved in the human weakness she observes, the disparity that leads to laughter becomes less a marker of ridicule and more a defensive plea for understanding. "Stay-Laces," with Mrs Busk's voluble assumptions of authority over Mrs Bone, is one example of ridicule in action. Nowhere does a narrator appear, but the authorial control over Mrs Bone's eloquent silences and Mrs Busk's phrasing (borrowing, as it specifically does, the vacuous language of shop sales) amply reveals Mansfield's dismissal of the sensibility Mrs Busk represents. The one verbal interruption to Mrs Busk's monologues intensifies this judgment. On the bus Mrs Busk overhears fragments of another passenger's conversation, which involves someone's standing on a chair to perform nameless internal surgery; that she should be so fascinated by so referentless a conversation testifies once again to the shallowness of her interest in (or perception of) the world around her. Still, this fragmentwithin-the-fragmentary-conversation works as a frame-within-aframe, suggesting the possibility of an outer frame as well as an inner one - which would, by implication at least, ask about the kind of interest an author or reader takes in listening to Mrs Busk. Is it part of a social education, or is it just gratuitous curiosity? Simple ridicule would emphasize superiority over the Mrs Busks of the world; a more complex ridicule would recognize the Mrs Buskness of the world but still condemn it; the quality of "sympathy" lies beyond both responses.

86 Reading and Writing

A different kind of comparison operates in 'The Doll's House/' where the Burnell family is given a cheaply painted doll's house, which is kept outside. The daughters, Isabel and Kezia, and their Aunt Beryl, and the daughters' class-marked schoolmates all attach different values to it, one using it to attract admiration, one to share a rebellious insight, one to exercise power, one to cultivate a false closeness, one to exculpate a feeling of inferiority. A first level of comparison involves the contrast in responses, each of which illuminates a feature of personality; a second level involves the relation between the doll's house and the Burnells' house. Then analogy takes over. If the small house is imperfect (though seen by some as perfect), is not the larger house also to be recognized in like fashion; and if the larger house is imperfect, is not the implied still-larger house called "society" also imperfect; and what then? If there is a relation between the perfect little lamp inside the house and the imperfect house itself, is there not also a parallel relation between one perfect insight in the world and the imperfect insights that more usually characterize the world? The structural analogy implies, of course, an imperfect line of logical argument, suggesting a metaphorical power to illuminate that is more rigorously analysed as a metonymical one. Kezia and Our Else, as the two characters who appreciate the lamp, do not end up as lamps in the wilderness themselves, whatever wish-fulfilment motivates writer or readers; rather, by being constructed in relation to the lamp, contiguous with the lamp (not, as Isabel and Beryl are, in relation just to the house without reference to the lamp), they are treated as though they shared in the lamp's qualities. But it is just a share. Their glimpse of an imaginable illumination, whatever its idealism, may have little opportunity for expression in a house mostly governed by the hierarchies of possession and physical desire. As the story makes clear, moreover, these hierarchies, though they might be easy to ridicule or condemn, nevertheless retain their appeal to many people - Mansfield included, perhaps- - offering fame or power or property or certainty in the name of "stability" or "security" or some other such value. The nature of the author/narrator's relation with the world depicted in this story is consequently neither maudlin nor radically reformative. In probing the limitations of the status quo, the narrative also emphasizes the limitations of alternatives to the status quo, leading to a portrayal of life more as a series of unresolvable problems and difficult choices than as a succession of secure judgments and absolute answers. In any event, judgments (insecure or otherwise) repeatedly surface in Mansfield's texts, as moral commentaries on various kinds of

87 A Catalogue of Forms

iniquity, offensiveness, and inequality, and as aesthetic commentaries on the limitations imposed by triteness and vapidity. The theatrical similes that structure the lives of Ada Moss in "Pictures" and the title character in "Miss Brill" readily illustrate the kinds of shallowness that pretence induces; sympathetic to their plight, however, both stories in addition expose the conditions that have led to the characters' life-in-simile - the marauding male "admirers," the "cultivated" taste for stereotypes: in other words, the social and stylistic "corruption" that is the explicit and intrinsic subject of "Je ne parle pas franc.ais." "Two Tuppenny Ones, Please" illustrates further how Mansfield's texts sometimes express judgments through their record of competing speech registers. Like "Stay-Laces," this work is a theatrical dialogue between empty speech and telling silence - except that the speech is not altogether empty. Inside the text it possesses substance but little weight: it does not mean very much. But outside the text in the relation between text and reader - the shifts in vocabulary imply a series of conditional connections between one cluster of words and another, and in consequence sharply convey Mansfield's judgments of prevailing social priorities. The speaker in the story, referred to only as Lady, is (at the literal level of her speech) concerned with the signs of social status: chauffeur, cook, servant, acquaintance with persons of authority, quality of fashion and possession ("poor" and "good" constitute a paired set of words, with varying implications: 202, 204). That Lady is speaking in this way while riding an ordinary bus and reluctantly paying out small change for her fare sets up one frame for these comments, establishing an irony of setting; that the story takes place during the First World War sets up a second frame, one that is more devastatingly critical in that it uses irony to undermine the language of convention that Lady (true to the class she thinks she represents) unquestioningly employs. The word "man," for example (as in the phrases "her new man," "my man," 202, 204), suggests the class power to diminish persons and Lady's own class claim to the right of possessions (both in dispute, as the war goes on). When "manhood" becomes associated with a military vocabulary, the text exposes the limitations of these class assumptions. A chauffeur can be "called up" and "Killed by now" (202) with scarcely a breath drawn before the monologue shifts to reflect on whether "ten bedrooms" is adequate in a house. The war is compartmentalized as a territory belonging to "them" and "there," not "us" and "here"; the closest "one" comes to it (the archness of Lady's impersonal pronoun is another of Mansfield's critical devices)

88 Reading and Writing

is through officer friends, though even here the speaker's claim to know facts is rapidly exposed for its arrogance, inaccuracy, presumptuousness, and self-serving purpose. Within nine lines of text Lady's references to her ostensible acquaintance Teddie promote him from Major to Chief of Staff, with the further claim that he goes '"over the top' every day" (a quietly satiric reflection on style as well). To her Friend's effectively dubious "...!" Lady replies, "Oh, my dear, everybody goes over the top nowadays" (203), thus claiming egalitarian opportunities, familiarity with the great, superior knowledge, and an appreciation of the heroic all at once. Offence and defence are deliberately mixed here. The stylistic competition between military and domestic vocabularies further exposes the disparity between the real war that is inaccurately alluded to and the artificial (though still powerful) social hierarchy that constructs conventional images of combat and control. Lady, claiming that she cannot play bridge on Tuesdays because "I trot out the wounded every Tuesday you know," goes on immediately to illustrate the depth of her recognition and involvement: "I let cook take them to the Zoo, or some place like that" (204). She says she'll be "perfectly free on Wednesday" (204). The claim on the absolute is as hollow as the rhetorical claims uttered in the name of warfare itself; ignorance rules both. When she does not know what another acquaintance does - "She's at the War Office, and doing very well ... something to do with notifying the deaths, or finding the missing" - but knows "At any rate ... it is too depressing for words" (203), the phrasing spells out the emptiness of false rhetoric. The vagueness, the contradictions, the cliche: all indicate an aesthetic as well as a moral barrenness - the story links the two. The reader consequently is asked not only to respond to the cavalier dismissal of the lives of people (Mansfield's brother Leslie's death in France in 1915 sharply focused her condemnation of the war) but also to recognize how social values are constructed and daily reconfirmed in the normative forms of speech. In Lady's contradictions Mansfield constructs not simply a rapid satire of an ambitious, shallow, self-serving person but a way of recognizing the death of a kind of language. To "find the missing" is more than a mere social phrase or bureaucratic enterprise; for the reader it becomes an aesthetic challenge: to fill in the spaces by questioning the assumptions that support empty conventions, by reading past the cliche ("too depressing for words") in order to find the words that will refine, reaffirm, or redesign values, and by relating one set of words to another so as to be able to distinguish a judgment founded (and foundering) in stereotype from one that addresses the moral dilemmas of observed life.

5 Metaphors of Form

So far I have been arguing that form, more than simple narrative imagination or social convention, provides a productive means of reading-Mansfield's texts; I have been ranging through a variety of stories in order to probe the limits and implications of formal choices; and I have been demonstrating the characteristics and the effects of several particular formal strategies. Form works for Mansfield both as aesthetic design (a language about the shape of language) and as a vehicle of social comment (a language about the character of relationships in the empirical world). In both cases the word "about" determines function. Mansfield's stories also suggest that form has a still more diffuse dimension, which it is loosely possible to read as "metaphor." Form in these instances functions less as a language about than as an enactment of a state of affairs, a sensibility, a way of perceiving the world. The "how" of saying matters as much or more than the "what" of something said, with the result that the how of saying also constitutes something said, its metaphoric dimension clear, though perhaps at variance with the surface value of the words themselves. By interweaving and juxtaposing different formal paradigms, moreover, Mansfield sometimes constructs dramas of social discourse; that is, the dramas derive from "meanings" that the characters (and readers) attach to forms (often inchoate meanings, whatever their concrete impact, whose origins are not necessarily clear) rather than to individual words. This technique also provides Mansfield with a way of articulating the kinds of exchange where verbal expression turns into verbal failure: the forms of dislocation and disenfranchisement

90 Reading and Writing

that derive from a "colonial" vulnerability to the appeal of the centre's apparently authoritative language, whether colonial is defined in terms of gender, state politics, occupation, age, or class. A trio of early stories readily illustrates this technique in operation: "The Journey to Bruges," "Being a Truthful Adventure," and "The Little Governess." All three deal with English speakers in Europe coping in different ways with a language barrier. "The Journey to Bruges" records the narrator's glimpses of other travellers' revealing behaviour as she travels to Bruges; by recording their speech patterns, she exposes their efforts to exercise power - from the porter who orders her about to the clergyman who promises her the truth but gets it wrong, from the two young men (whom she calls Enthusiast and Mole, 93), whose conversation reveals the ego of command in one and the ego of deferentiality in the other, to the Old Lady, whose desire for a companion expresses a not-so-covert desire for a servant. (When the Old Lady finds out that the narrator is heading for Bruges rather than Strasbourg, she dismisses her in a zeugma, "closing her fan and the conversation" [96], and goes searching for another person to control.) The story encapsulates these relations in a paragraph describing language loss and power gain aboard the Channel ferry: In the act of crossing the gangway we renounced England. The most blatant British female produced her mite of French: we "Si vous plait'd" one another on the deck, "Merci'd" one another on the stairs, and "Pardon'd" to our heart's content in the saloon. The stewardess stood at the foot of the stairs, a stout, forbidding female, pock-marked, her hands hidden under a businesslikelooking apron. She replied to our salutations with studied indifference, mentally ticking off her prey. I descended to the cabin to remove my hat. One old lady was already established there. (94)

This is the Old Lady who seeks a private attendant. What the text then makes clear (though the vocabulary, strictly speaking, does not) is that control over French in this context (over the language of authority in place) is an exercise in power. The French structures thus become in themselves metaphors of power. The Old Lady, quaveringly, asks the narrator in French: "Vous allez a Strasbourg, Madame?" But the narrator, who speaks French adequately, can counter the request, and she maintains her (metaphoric as well as literal) access to Bruges and its promises of alternatives and freedom. Others (like Mole with Enthusiast) simply succumb to the authority of the fluent; in particular, the "large blond man, in white, with a flowing tie" (96) becomes the substitute servant-in-tow, to whom the

91 Metaphors of Form

Old Lady ends up saying, in a deceptively "delicate voice": "Buy me ... three ham sandwiches, mon cherl" (96) The words "mon cher" no longer function literally here; they function metaphorically instead saying (to the reader) power, control - and the delicacy of voice is an illusion, a mask, carefully crafted to trap those whose limited language makes them at once unwary and unaware. "The Little Governess" extends the same principle of verbal-formas-metaphor, exposing the limits of fluency and implicitly criticizing the system of education that deprives people of (verbal, hence social) fluency. Young women are the chief victims in this regard, protected from the very dimensions of language that would best serve their interests. The little governess who leaves England for a post in Germany presumably understands enough German to get by, but she doesn't understand enough about life to recognize the paradigms of social relationship that are being enacted around her and that (because they affect her) she helps to construct or perpetuate. She orders a hotel waiter about in imperative German ("Gehen Sie sofort," 173), partly because he is young and male and she has been trained to hold herself aloof from such types, but the limits of this training show when she places unlimited trust in an old man because he sounds cultured and looks old ("What a perfect grandfather he would make! Just like one out of a book!" 172). For his part, the waiter reads the old man correctly, identifying him as a lecher, but he mistakes the little governess; he bridles at her order because he reads it as presumptuousness rather than naivete. Neither "fluently" reads the other's culture or circumstances because neither adequately understands the context. When a time comes for the waiter to help the little governess, therefore, he chooses to get even instead - but the method he chooses (telling the young woman's prospective employer that she is out with a "gentleman" [176] and has left no word) so successfully indicts her in the employer's eyes that she is lost, beyond reach of security in a world no longer her own. The little governess has been trained to interpret life according to story-book paradigms, but in practice they do not prove as absolute, as "perfect," as convention declares them to be. She ends up the victim of her literalness as well as of her lack of experience. For here the language - even a word like "gentleman" - carries nuances beyond reach of her training. By means of the failed syntax of her social understanding the reader of her story is asked to appreciate how the forms that language takes can communicate beyond reach of lexical definitions; each limited observation, each inadequate exchange, each tonal shading constructs a partial system of values, until the manner of expression constitutes in itself a sign of its limiting context.

92 Reading and Writing

"Being a Truthful Adventure" intensifies this point. Ostensibly a direct record of what a woman named "Katherine" notices during a trip to Bruges, it works by exposing the limits of various conventions of verbal form. It opens, for example, with a quotation from a guidebook: "The little town lies spread before the gaze of the eager traveller like a faded tapestry threaded with the silver of its canals, made musical by the great chiming belfry" (96-7). As the story goes on to make clear, the guidebook language not only constructs conventional images; it imposes these conventions upon the perceptions of the travellers who rely on it: "enchanting the eye, inspiring the soul and filling the mind" not so much with "the great beauty of contemplation" (97) as with the great ease of saccharine cliche. Through the story the narrator negotiates her way past several other verbal morasses - a hotel-keeper's mercenary arrangements, a hired boatman's theatrical annoyance, a painter's rudeness - in part through her own forms of theatre: her ironic vocabulary overcomes the power inherent in the others' conventional forms of address. She appeals to the hotelkeeper's greed; she laughs at the boatman; she offers an "unfinished stare" (100) to the painter. But the story comes to its point when she has to deal with two New Zealand compatriots-in-exile-in-England, ebullient nonentities named Guy and Betty, who trap her briefly in the language of old school-days and common causes. They espouse female liberty, and hence freedom from the tyranny of empire. The language of the cause of female suffrage, however, is emptied of meaning by these two because (in the context of the conventional forms of language the story has already exposed) it is - as they use it - transparently another form of convention. ("'We're frightfully keen on the Suffrage, you know.' Guy removed the straw. 'Are you with us?' he asked, intensely," 101.) When the narrator frees herself from them, shaking her head "at the familiar guide book emerging from Guy's pocket" (102), the metaphor of the guidebook encapsulates their limitations; they cannot see without the help of someone else, and thus they remain socially "colonial" in more ways than one. The metaphor of guidebook language, moreover, epitomizes the power of forms of social enclosure, forms against which irony is "Katherine's" functioning defence. What she does not directly recognize in the story is that irony, too, is a conventional form. But Mansfield knew it. Aware of its limitations, she did not give up using irony as a way of throwing perspective on social and verbal paradigms, but her 1918 story "Je ne parle pas franc.ais" reveals that she later came not just to use irony as an entertaining device or a technique for distancing narrator from subject but also to examine the ironic mode itself for its psychology, its formal metaphoric implications.

93 Metaphors of Form

"Je ne parle pas frangais" - her most desolating critique of both the French and the English (Alpers, Stories, 559-61: she reads the French as parasitic and the English as dull) - is a scarcely oblique attack on the New Caledonia-born writer Francis Carco (with whom Mansfield had a short-lived affair in 1915), and it is a self-declared "cry against corruption" (Collected Letters, 3 February 1918, 3:54); but it also uses two (at least two) interrelated lovers' triangles to tell a formal story about the paradigms of power. The first triangle involves the jaded French narrator, Raoul Duquette, his English friend (or quondam friend) Dick Harmon, and Dick's English "bride" (though it turns out they have never formally married) Mouse. The second involves Dick, Mouse, and Dick's mother (to whom Dick belongs more than he belongs to Mouse and for whom he abandons Mouse in Paris), which establishes the primary story that Raoul recalls. Whether or not there are more triangles depends on how one reads the detail of the text: Mouse, Raoul, and Raoul's admiration of himself might constitute a third triangle; Raoul, the Madame of the cafe where he works as a pimp, and the sequence of women for whom he claims to have been a gigolo might constitute a fourth; Raoul, Dick, and their sexual ambivalence might constitute a fifth; and so on. The number here matters less than the recognition of the triangular pattern, one that is conventionally associated with a corrupted love; the overlay of triangles reiterates the force of Raoul's ego in these several relationships (his name, Duquette, perhaps implies both questeur and queteur, both questor and collector/beggar) - all else and all others in the story are in his eyes subservient to their relevance to him. Relevance, moreover, is something Raoul implicitly equates with their degree of usability; as gigolo he "services" others, he does not love them, and he manipulates the world whenever he can so that it services him. Women supply him with money; Dick is useful to him first as a potential aid to his would-be career as a writer, but later just serves as entertainment, a toy to be played with and discarded; the Madame (whom he imagines in bed, in the longsuppressed original ending of the story [restored in Stones], and whom he rejects because he thinks her skin will "disgustingly" have moles like "mushrooms," 299) tolerates his presence in her cafe; and Mouse is a problem, for she is a woman he once sought to exploit but whom he has abandoned at the moment he thought he had achieved power over her, only to discover that her stubborn independence has proved somehow stronger than circumstance and that in present memory she still dislocates his life. All else he puts aside: "I have made it a rule of my life never to regret and never to look

94 Reading and Writing

back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it. You can't get it into shape; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in" (280). But recurrently he remembers the African laundress who kissed him as a child, and recurrently he remembers Mouse. In looking back, moreover, he is forced to try to justify a life that has long mistaken power for cleverness and recognition for value. Mansfield's story, reconstructing Raoul's, exposes the extent of his self-delusion; but it also reveals to the reader, by means of its form, a kind of closet dialogue about the relation betweeen language and authority. The mushroom image that closes the story does much more than describe the Madame's skin or Raoul's fungoid imagination; it works self-reflexively to epitomize Raoul's entire life - that of a parasite. Language does not take him out of himself; it merely displays his limitations. Even as a writer, that is, he cannot stretch: he sees his published books as "triumphs," but the titles tell a different story "False Coins, Wrong Doors, Left Umbrellas" (289) - and when he three times refers to one of his works simperingly, with false humility, as "my little book" (284, 288), the construction of his words has to be read as carefully as the words themselves. For Raoul uses words for their effect more than for their meaning: he makes "a pretty mouth" (284) at Dick; he sends him a copy of his book "with a carefully cordial inscription" (285). Words such as "true" (281), "simple" (282), "perfectly" (282), "purely" (280), and his most recurrent adjective, "charming" (285, 287, 289, 294), he uses as techniques of ingratiation rather than as statements of fact. The adjective "little," however, he uses on other occasions as though it were natural speech, as though it were denotatively neutral. He opens with a reference to the "little cafe" (277) in which he sits; he refers to "little things, like gloves and powder boxes and a manicure set," which he's been given by "little prostitutes and kept women" and "even advanced modern literary ladies" (282). "I am little," he says of himself (283); he has hands, a woman tells him, "for making fine little pastries" (283); he says that Dick drinks from a "little glass" (283); he observes that Mouse has "a little face more like a drawing than a real face" and that her eyebrows look like "two little feathers" (291); and at the end of the story he says "'Good-night, my little cat'" to a "fattish old prostitute" (298) and fantasizes about promising a young virgin to a "dirty old gallant" in these words: "'But I've got the little girl for you, mon vieux. So little ...'" (299). Raoul tarnishes the world, just by being in it. The effect of repeating the word "little" is to diminish whomever or whatever is being talked about and to transform person, place, and thing alike into

95 Metaphors of Form

objects. That he and his books should appear "naturally" in this list reveals Mansfield's control over irony: she writes the story so that Raoul, in the act of using words, will undermine the self-serving image of himself that his choice of words ostensibly concocts. The word "little" reveals his contempt for women, and his language further suggests that his clear contempt for others derives from his underlying contempt for himself. One woman is called Mouse, another a "little cat," a third a "tall charming creature" with a large "balcony" (289); his concierge is dismissed as "the old spider" (288); and Mouse, dressed in "grey fur" (291), is said to be "tame" (298). If they are not things, then women are merely animals in his lexicon. But he is not free from animal behaviour himself; he is a "Parisian fox-terrier" (293), and Mouse and Dick are his "prey" (289). When, then, he also avers, "I confess, without my clothes I am rather charming. Plump, almost like a girl ... I am like a little woman in a cafe" (283), and later, "I felt as a woman must feel" (286), the text is enacting two separate lexical dramas: one suggests the relation between Raoul's contempt for himself (in that he identifies with a class of person he also expresses contempt for) and his inadequate grasp of masculinity; the other suggests the disparity between his version of womanhood and the reality of femaleness (which Mansfield makes clear is nothing like Raoul's notion). Because, to Raoul's eyes, appearance and reality are one, he seeds illusions; but he is no poet, and his language serves more than anything else to demonstrate that he prefers contrivance over substance. In his own room he can make the two equate; he sees himself in the mirror in the third person: "from top to toe, drawing on his soft grey gloves. He was looking the part; he was the part" (288). For the reader, the word "grey," however, links Raoul both with the ineffectual Mouse that Raoul describes and with the "grey, flat-footed and withered" waiter he depicts in Madame's cafe (278). Raoul's words, in consequence, come not only to convey his hypocrisy but also to stand for his emptiness. For Raoul, that is, formal appearance is the quintessence of effect; for Mansfield, literary form is at once the medium of communication and the paradigm of character. To read this story further for its formal paradigms is to see that Raoul tries on a succession of verbal paradigms as if each were a suit of clothes, to see what reaction it invites. In his first conversation with Dick, for example, when he talks about "the tendency of the modern novel, the need of a new form," he keeps throwing "in a card that seemed to have nothing to do with the game, just to see how he'd take it" (285). He defines Dick's neutral replies as "charming," though Mansfield's elliptical portrayal more satirically suggests

96 Reading and Writing

that English Dick is just preoccupied with his own uncertainties, somnolent and dull. But Raoul sees first of all whatever he would like to see, whatever flatters his own ego. Standing before a mirror, he asks his own reflection, "How can one look the part and not be the part? Or be the part and not look it? Isn't looking - being? Or being - looking? ... This seemed to me extraordinarily profound at the time, and quite new. But I confess that something did whisper ...: 'You - literary? You look as though you've taken down a bet on a racecourse!' But I didn't listen" (288). Other techniques multiply as the story progresses. Raoul tries out description as a literary technique; he tries out anecdotes; he devises meaningless similes (likening "pink blotting-paper" to "the tongue of a little dead kitten, which I've never felt" and going on to admit that, while "rolling [this] ... soft phrase round my mind," he is taking in "girls' names and dirty jokes" and anything else within earshot). He repeats the words to songs and reads letters that others have written; he sentimentalizes; he insults; he employs "comme il faut" formulas (296), uses tourist-brochure cliches, and mimics the language of customs officials; he poses apparently shamelessly ("I was Agony, Agony, Agony," 280), and draws hopelessly inadequate analogies; he interprets photographs, with only relative perspicacity; he digresses; he refers to himself calculatedly as One, He, and I; he even tries out the question-and-answer technique, as though to introduce a gruff reality into the monologue he performs before the reader: Query: Why am I so bitter against Life? And why do I see her as a rag-picker on the American cinema, shuffling along wrapped in a filthy shawl with her old claws crooked over a stick? Answer: The direct result of the American cinema acting upon a weak mind. (278)

The convention is rhetorical, both literally and metaphorically. That he should characterize life as an old woman accords with the rest of his behaviour; so is the fact that he then dismisses this recognition as a joke. But the cinematic allusion is no textual accident. It reinforces his dependence on appearance and the degree to which he accepts the glibly conventional as a working truth. His first portrait of Madame indicates how much he reads the world according to his own limitations and generalizes his own inadequacies into absolutes of human behaviour: Madame is thin and dark, too, with white cheeks and white hands. In certain lights she looks quite transparent, shining out of her black shawl with an

97 Metaphors of Form extraordinary effect. When she is not serving she sits on a stool with her face turned, always, to the window. Her dark-ringed eyes search among and follow after the people passing, but not as if she was looking for somebody. Perhaps, fifteen years ago, she was; but now the pose has become a habit. (278)

The absolutes (always, black and white) run up against the relative words (quite, perhaps, and the implied grey that turns up in subsequent glimpses of the waiter, Mouse, and himself); the word "habit" suggests clothing as well as behaviour (Raoul wears a "grey felt hat," 279, as well as grey gloves); "pose" and "effect" are the criteria that govern his own system of values. Raoul projects himself upon the world, makes his language the norm, even if by doing so he destroys others. "Je ne parle pas frangais" is this story's title. It is Mouse's phrase - she is the foreigner whom love and circumstance abandon abroad here; and what Raoul calls her "stupid, stale little phrase" (280) is precisely the stimulus that compels him to remember her. It also reveals another dimension of this story of power politics. Raoul pretends that his memory of Mouse tells a narrative of love and loss, not of Dick's love for Mouse and the intrusion of the powerful mother but of Raoul's discovery of true love at last in the lost relationship he never himself took up with Mouse. ("If you think what I've written is merely superficial and impudent and cheap you're wrong," he says. "I'll admit it does sound so, but then it is not all. If it were, how could I have experienced what I did when I read that stale little phrase written in green ink, in the writing-pad? That proves there's more in me and that I really am important, doesn't it?" 283) The question marks tell a different story. They tell of the uncertainty that has begot the attitudinizing in the first place: his statements reek of self-justification; they do not hint of love. The memory as it is gradually re-enacted reveals a Raoul with mercenary designs on Mouse more than one with sensitivity to others' feelings, whereas the memory as it is reconstructed in Raoul's mind further testifies to his capacity for corrupting truth. The words "Je ne parle pas fran^ais" declare a vulnerability. If Raoul is moved at all by the way the phrase invites him into the past, it is not because Mouse's innocence sways him - she is "not Madame" (290) in more ways than one, and he makes use of her isolation - but because the phrase so acutely functions as a metaphor for his own vulnerability, the insecurity he hides in pretentious effects. The difference is that Mouse is other people's victim, the (as it were, colonial) woman induced (without language) abroad; he is a victim of himself,

98 Reading and Writing

a (Parisian, male) victim of (and in) the language he claims to be his own. That he should hide from the inadequacy of his own language simply perpetuates his weakness; that the story should reveal both the inadequacies and the effects of language form, however, illustrates the complexity of Mansfield's narrative practice. The opening sentences of the story make clear how Raoul's words work. At once they declare (lexically) his faith in the efficacy of form to hide desolate truths and they reveal (structurally) his denial of the truths he does not wish to recognize. The passage is studded with contrivances: I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little cafe. It's dirty and sad, sad. It's not as if it had anything to distinguish it from a hundred others it hasn't; or as if the same strange types came here every day, whom one could watch from one's corner and recognise and more or less (with a strong accent on the less) get the hang of. But pray don't imagine that those brackets are a confession of my humility before the mystery of the human soul. Not at all; I don't believe in the human soul. I never have. (277)

The number of negatives (do not know, not as if, don't, not at all, don't, never) signals a deep-seated denial of anything wrong, a refusal to admit to failure. The shift in person (from "I" to "one" and back again) suggests the slippery nature of his sense of identity. The adjectives (dirty, sad) hint that there might be a correlative link between himself and the cafe. The brackets (so self-consciously acknowledged) describe the process of digression that characterizes his subsequent narrative. The habits of his verbal practice, that is, equate with his habits of attitude and expectation. He speaks the world that he wants to be believed; he denies the world that might change him. As a result, he lives (like those whom he in turn victimizes) only in parentheses. He constructs similes to shape reality because he lives only in likeness, never in fact. His world, the story's opening tropes make clear, is a world of "as if," from which his denials, digressions, and formulaic utterances will not let him escape. When he later says "(I've been there)" (283), the visual appearance of the parentheses is as important to the story as the particular referent of the adverb. The identity is contained - in the orthography as well as in the memory, the place, the verbal form. To understand corruption, the story argues, it is necessary to recognize it; and to recognize corruption, it is necessary to pierce the false articulateness behind which it hides. Mansfield manages to make Raoul Duquette at once unappealing and understandable,

99 Metaphors of Form

which is not to praise him. But the story is not simply a character study. "Je ne parle pas franc.ais" uses language in order to expose language, constructs a form (the recalled memory, which shapes the whole story as an extended "as if") that will also function metaphorically - as an embodiment, here, of the menace of pretence. To recognize that power without value can be attractive and that value without power can be debilitating is, in other words, a concrete challenge to language as well as an abstract problem in morality. And "Je ne parle pas franc.ais" is not alone in probing this issue. The value of language is one of the most pervasive motifs in Mansfield's writing, and questioning the consequences of language can be one of the most unsettling results of examining her formal practice. "Value," always, is a quality the margins redefine. While by no means inconsequential, therefore, any reading of her stories that confines itself to plots, historical antecedents, biographical implications, and insights into individual behaviour is limited. Reading the stories also for their formal design asks about convention and conventional paradigms of power, about alternatives and the artistry of alternatives, and about the systems of value that conventions and alternatives separately enshrine.

This page intentionally left blank

PART THREE

Reading for Form

This page intentionally left blank

6 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

The paradox in this chapter title has to do with the nature of reiteration itself, whereby the action of repeating something does little to forward any activity. Such reiteration reinscribes instead, perhaps intending to emphasize an observation or idea, perhaps to reaffirm it, perhaps with some other reason in mind. Clearly, the act of reiteration can have an effect, especially on an interlocutor or observer within a story and on the perceptions that a reader (the observerinterlocutor outside it) brings to interpretation. But the act itself is oddly static; it draws attention not to movement or enterprise or vitality but to a lack of progress, a failure of alteration, an inability to embrace change, a resistance to time.1 That so many of Mansfield's stories concern themselves with such issues is itself revealing, perhaps suggesting a personal preoccupation with death and thwarted sexuality, a dissatisfaction with degrees of artistic accomplishment, the debilitating pressures of a persistent illness, or an impatience with self-satisfaction, wherever it is to be found. These subjects, indeed, constitute the overt themes of "A Birthday" (1911), "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" (1917), "A Married Man's Story" (1921), and numerous other stories, and have regularly surfaced as motivating sensibilities in accounts of Mansfield's life. Particular events and phrases within these stories - the scenes of morning exercises, for example - further reinforce a sense that Mansfield's later stories often echoed her earlier ones: the Stanley Burnell of "At the Bay" (1921) is in many ways a textual variant of the character-type earlier constructed as Reginald Peacock and (in

104 Reading for Form

"A Birthday") Andreas Binzer. But the fascination with the actively immobile should not be construed as evidence for mere repetitiveness on Mansfield's part. Far from it. As these stories reveal - along with two others that can instructively be discussed with them, "The Wind Blows" (1915) and "The Voyage" (1921) - reiteration is a deliberate technical strategy functioning to elucidate the attractions of the ostensibly changeless as well as to critique the limitations of a life that does not adequately embrace change. The technique shows up in the way sets of words and phrases are repeated within individual stories for deliberate effects, and in the choice and arrangement of particular verbs. Something of a circular process operates here, for the deliberateness of these effects is apparent from the pattern of recurrence, though of course not all recurrences involve reiteration. As the following chapters reveal, alternative paradigms of recurrence involve such techniques as reversal, inversion, and fragmentation, and these have their own impact upon interpretive strategies. But the general point is that reading for form requires close attention to whatever constitutes the recurrent element in a particular passage of prose, for such an element functions as a kind of formal directive. Such recurrent elements can be lexical (diction, for example, or specific items of vocabulary, or associated clusters of imagery) or phonological (sound patterns) or organizational (dealing with structure, whether at a micro or macro level: prepositional phrases, formulaic phrases, interrogations, juxtapositions, words in series, negations, syntactic choices, sentence patterning, and the like). To focus on verb choice and form and on specific instances of repetition - in order to clarify how reiteration works as a story-telling strategy - is to examine more closely the effect of the relation between stasis and statement. "The Wind Blows" and "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" furnish ready examples of specific kinds of repetition. For instance, the repetition of the single word "wind" in "The Wind Blows" (five times compounded as "The wind - the wind," 191,192, 193,194) functions not only to reinforce, as though physiologically, the reader's sense of the intensity and persistence of a Wellington windstorm but also as a sort of mantra for the central character, a formulaic verbal utterance that here at once invokes change and mediates against it, producing tension. Reginald Peacock's recurrent phrase, by contrast, is sentence length: "Dear lady, I should be so charmed!" (with two or three variants: 262, 264, 265, 266). For Peacock, a singing teacher, this phrase has become the formula through which he egocentrically ingratiates himself with his wealthy female clients. It is oily and empty, but produces the effect he seems to want. The problem is that

105 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

it becomes habitual; substituting for both thought and feeling, it begins to impede any real communication, especially between him and his wife. Automatic utterance replaces language, that is, the verbal formula in this instance getting in the way of the medium that would permit him to express his capacity for growth. In consequence, language itself - the field in which the narrative action takes place - is also the narrative ground here; it becomes as much of a subject in these stories as are such themes as ego, sacrifice, childhood, childishness, and loss, and because of the deliberateness of Mansfield's technique, it is formally integrated with them. The opening sentences of "A Married Man's Story" demonstrate further how the character of reiteration both conveys and constructs a mode of engagement with (or, in this case, disengagement from) the world. As the story opens, the reader abruptly, but without direction, has access to a screed - a diary? - that the married man of the title, the first-person narrator, is writing. The reader is reading over his shoulder, as it were, and at the same time overhearing his internal meditations on his mother's death (did his father poison her?), his failing marriage (is he planning to murder his wife, or leave her?), and his ideas about freedom (are they solipsistic reveries, mere fancies, or mad, perhaps schizophrenic notions about loss of humanity and death?). This is what the reader first reads: It is evening. Supper is over. We have left the small, cold dining room; we have come back to the sitting room where there is a fire. All is as usual. I am sitting at my writing table which is placed across a corner so that I am behind it, as it were, and facing the room. The lamp with the green shade is alight; I have before me two large books of reference, both open, a pile of papers ... All the paraphernalia, in fact, of an extremely occupied man. My wife, with our little boy on her lap, is in a low chair before the fire. She is about to put him to bed before she clears away the dishes and piles them up in the kitchen for the servant girl to-morrow morning. But the warmth, the quiet, and the sleepy baby, have made her dreamy. One of his red woollen boots is off; one is on. She sits, bent forward, clasping the little bare foot, staring into the glow, and as the fire quickens, falls, flares again, her shadow - an immense Mother and Child - is here and gone again upon the wall. (476-7)

The deliberateness of the technique operating here will shortly become evident, but on first reading, the diary entries seem like disjointed reflections and self-justifications - perhaps even pretentious ones, however artfully scripted on the page. Some time later, after dipping back and forth into the external world and the past ("While I am here, I am there," 477), the story closes in ellipsis, which has led

106 Reading for Form

several commentators to treat the whole thing as an unfinished fragment. Certainly the story does not invoke a conventional formal closure; when it comes to its end, this is what the married man finally writes: "I did not consciously turn away from the world of human beings; I had never known it; but I from that night did beyond words consciously turn towards my silent brothers ..." (486-7). The text earlier makes clear that the "silent brothers" are, at least metaphorically, creatures of the wild (480), and that the entire narrative is meant to explain why, since "last autumn" (482), the married man has come to see his wife and child as objects of analysis rather than as a family with whom he enjoys a fulfilling and subjective relationship. But the field of relationship through which as an adult he has had access to others has always been verbal, not emotional, and if he is "beyond words" at the end, the ellipses announce a kind of withdrawal from human discourse - mad? solipsistic? - that is a frighteningly effective closure of a different kind. Words have, that is, for the most part provided him some promise of connection. For while, along the way, he has taken a kind of refuge in "reference books" (they sustain his work, yet are also part of the barrier between himself and the room he ostensibly shares with his family) and observation, he has also found some degree of satisfaction in words - he is a writer of some sort, after all - or at least in the look and taste of them. But at one point he starts to feel separate even from words: "To live like this ... I write those words, very carefully, very beautifully. For some reason I feel inclined to sign them" (478). As words in this way become objects, and as he consciously comes to realize this fact, so they, too - like mother and child (the parodic Pieta reference is not accidental) - become correlatives of death instead of life, of stasis instead of renewal or rebirth. Hence the verbal paradigms of the opening sentences do more than simply set the scene. Embodied in them is a pattern of reiteration that spells out the threat that life presents to this married man, and perhaps the threat that he presents to life. For almost no action occurs in the first paragraph; the predominant verb is is, reiterated (in independent and auxiliary forms together) thirteen times, a pattern echoed in the paragraphs that follow. Any activity is assigned primarily to the fire, which quickens, falls, flares the active piling and clearing of dishes is cast into the future; it has not yet happened. The most the man and his wife can do, in this setting of scene, is to sit and to have - neither of which breaks the sense of immobility that the paragraph designs (or the paragraph-writer, the narrator, as Mansfield designs him). But to recognize that the married man, narrating this paragraph, has to be writing the paragraph adds to the complexity of how the syntax behaves. If the man is

107 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

writing, this fact affirms an action that the paragraph does not directly record; self-reflexively, moreover, the suppression of the one action that is actually shaping this particular narrative scene proclaims a distance between what the married man writes and what his writing reveals. The man's recurrent word is is. Ostensibly the lexicon of record, the verb to be could in other circumstances affirm simple existence, even celebrate it, or assert factuality, perhaps laying claim to some version of neutrality in the process. Here, however, the illusion of an objective - in fact, objectifying - distance seems carefully crafted not to celebrate the way things are (existence, factuality, life) but for the man to justify to himself his nagging, self-pitying disaffection from it. He shapes stasis in order to rail against it; no neutrality governs his observations. The lack of activity stems from him: stasis, death, is of his own creation. It is reiterated into existence in words, until his own words become the agents of undoing, of ruin and dissolution, a parable of the loss of creative power. "A Married Man's Story" is the most dour of the five stories under consideration here, yet its picture of male ego and insensitivity reiterates a characteristic Mansfield motif. The portraits of Binzer and Peacock are related to it, recording earlier instances of men whose shallow command of words reveals a limited capacity for empathy - or perhaps this capacity has been socially limited or stunted, the culture of masculinity being a force that thwarts their capacity to express whatever sensitivity they might once have been able to nurture. The focus in "The Wind Blows" and "The Voyage" falls on young girls, by contrast, a motif that throws the portraits of men into some relief, for in these stories sensitivity governs the entire waking life of the central characters, the senses being acutely alive to surroundings, feeding, intensifying the imagination. The word "waking" is important. In all five of the stories expressions of ego and sensitivity are tied with images of the borderland between waking and sleep. Fenella, in "The Voyage," awakes towards the end of her story, after a long dark night of travelling between islands, following the death of her mother and her move to a new home with her caring grandparents. The married man, however, is cursed with wakefulness; neither sleep nor a sleepless state renews him, and his closing identification with the "silent brothers" of the wild merely intensifies the sense that his is a world of suspended animation. The other three stories all open with scenes of characters waking up: "A Birthday" Andreas Binzer woke slowly. He turned over on the narrow bed and stretched himself - yawned - opening his mouth as widely as possible and

io8 Reading for Form bringin his teeth together afterwards with a sharp "click." The sound of that click fascinated him; he repeated it quickly several times, with a snapping movement of the jaws. What teeth! he thought. Sound as a bell, every man jack of them. Never had one out, never had one stopped ... He looked up at the sky; it shone, strangely white, unflecked with cloud; he looked down at the row of garden strips and backyards. The fence of these gardens was built along the edge of a gully, spanned by an iron suspension bridge, and the people had a wretched habit of throwing their empty tins over the fence into the gully. Just like them, of course! Andreas started counting the tins, and decided, viciously, to write a letter to the papers about it and sign it - sign it in full. (58-9) "The Wind Blows" Suddenly - dreadfully - she wakes up. What has happened? Something dreadful has happened. No - nothing has happened. It is only the wind shaking the house, rattling the windows, banging a piece of iron on the roof and making her bed tremble. Leaves flutter past the window, up and away; down in the avenue a whole newspaper wags in the air like a lost kite and falls, spiked on a pine tree. It is cold. Summer is over - it is autumn everything is ugly ... It is all over! What is? Oh, everything! And she begins to plait her hair with shaking fingers, not daring to look in the glass. Mother is talking to grandmother in the hall. "A perfect idiot! Imagine leaving anything out on the line in weather like this ..." (191) "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" If there was one thing that he hated more than another it was the way she had of waking him in the morning. She did it on purpose, of course. It was her way of establishing her grievance for the day, and he was not going to let her know how successful it was. But really, really, to wake a sensitive person like that was positively dangerous! It took him hours to get over it simply hours. She came into the room buttoned up in an overall, with a handkerchief over her head - thereby proving that she had been up herself and slaving since dawn - and called in a low, warning voice: "Reginald!" "Eh! What! What's that? What's the matter?" "It's time to get up; it's half-past eight." And out she went, shutting the door quietly after her, to gloat over her triumph, he supposed. He rolled over in the big bed, his heart still beating in quick, dull throbs, and with every throb he felt his energy escaping him, his - his inspiration for the day stifling under those thudding blows. (259) These passages are by no means uniform. Binzer is in a narrow bed, Peacock in a big one; Peacock is wakened by his wife, while Binzer

109 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

and Matilda (i "The Wind Blows") awake on their own; Peacock and Binzer are preoccupied with themselves, whereas Matilda fractionally distances self-preoccupation by resisting looking in the mirror. Yet all three examples insist that the waking state (the verbs in all three passages are predominantly active, emphasizing motion) is punctuated by flashes of ego. Peacock blames his wife for his own inactivity; Matilda's mother blames a servant for doing the wash; Binzer wants to sign his name - in full - to complain about what "the people" do to his property. Ego, however, resists change - it is a psychological expression of emotional stasis - in part because it is the outward expression of a satisfaction taken in ownership, an identification between security and a position in the social hierarchy. It is not only men who express this satisfaction; Matilda's mother occupies a position ratified by her husband's property and she uses her social authority to dictate order to the world about her. But Mansfield's male characters are the chief exemplars of this state of mind. Binzer and Peacock are both envious and insecure, afraid of being seen through by others, and they use their claims on property and artistic talent, icons of self-definition, as claims upon social recognition. Those who are close to them oddly constitute in their own minds a threat to this self-image; their wives know the reality - the sleeping person, as it were - an identity to which their wakened ego will not admit. At least directly. Binzer's preoccupation with the habits of the people on the suspension bridge can clearly be read as a projection of his own insecurities; Peacock's observation that his wife wears a buttoned overall likewise says something about his own need to remain covered, or (as his habitual, reiterated phrase has it) "charmed." For them, change threatens; the way things are the static status quo - offers a kind of protection and (in their minds at least) a kind of power. In such circumstances growth (which at least is accessible to Matilda and Fenella) is a difficult proposition, and perhaps impossible to attain. The relation between ego and power, a motif that surfaces in a range of other Mansfield stories from "The Doll's House" to "The Garden Party" and "The Fly," provides further direction to the reader of these stories. Towards the end of "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" Peacock attends a champagne party given by Lord Timbuck, where, at one point, he is called "Peacock ... - not Mr Peacock - but Peacock, as if he were one of them" (265). Immediately, however fatuously, Peacock turns the "as if" into a declaration of reality, failing to read it as a code-word for imitation. When the story closes with him thinking that he could confide in his wife if only she were not his enemy, if she were his friend, if he felt she were "here to come

no

Reading for Form

back to" (266), then artifice has taken hold; ego has supplanted person. He has turned from "Reginald" into "Peacock," from king into strutter, mistaking projected image for the authority to rule. As empty of functional words as the "married man," Peacock, whose singing lessons exude performed emotion, proves himself finally to be incapable of actively expressing the emotional connections that would give his ordinary life meaning. Binzer, too, who ends up saying "'Well, by God! Nobody can accuse me of not knowing what suffering is'" (65), returns the focus from others to himself when he is finally told that Anna, his wife, has given birth to a son. (Doctor Erb's actual phrase is "hooked a boy," 65, which is oddly piscatorial for this context.) Binzer does worry about his wife, but he projects this concern in a variety of directions that do little to aid her. He claims himself to be ill; he frets over neighbours' behaviour, government inaction, and old times; and he aspires to eat as well as the doctor does. He seems incapable, that is, not only of accepting that he is not the centre of the universe, especially on this birthing day, but also of giving up his private competition for power and precedence among the other men in his community. Doctor Erb offers the chief rivalry (the German prefix erb has to do with inheritance, and the word Binse means "rush": in die Binsen gehen, an informal phrase, means "to be a wash-out"). Erb represents a style of life that Binzer envies, a life of late hours, plenty of food, numerous possessions, vapid aphorisms ("Good weather is as necessary to a confinement as it is to a washing day," 64), and apparent imperturbability (Erb "thrust his hands into his pockets, and began balancing himself on toe and heel," 64). So insistent is Binzer's jockeying for power in this milieu that he can scarcely see the degree to which this ambition isolates and stultifies him. When he walks from home to fetch the doctor, all the shutters on the street are closed (61); when he is convinced that his wife will die in childbirth, he shuts the drawing-room door behind himself, mopes over a picture of Anna "holding a sheaf of artificial poppies and corn" (65), and regrets the degree to which time has altered how she looks. Erb and the servants take little notice of him, except to judge him "flabby as butter" (65). But there is a paradox here. Infatuated with artifice, Binzer nevertheless admires the fact that Anna at one time had "more 'go' and 'spirit' in her" (64); and he is bothered by stillness - when the wind drops, he is convinced his wife has died: "the whole house was still, terribly still" (65). Conceptualizing this character (the parallel with Stanley Burnell is sustained yet again), Mansfield seems, for all his limitations, to have initially granted him some promise. Yet when Erb announces to him that all is well, Mansfield's

in

Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

phrase for describing Binzer's reaction is curiously, revealingly flat: "He was exultant" (65). Was. Tactically, the phrasing emphasizes the state of being rather than the act of doing, as though Binzer aspired to be seen to be something, to have others grant him station and authority ("Nobody can accuse me"), rather than actually to exercise himself to action: to be seen to be a father of sons rather than actually to spend time raising children, to be exultant rather than to exult. Investing his faith in the appearance of being powerful (the adjective), he surrenders his claim to live as a person who can actually empower (the verb). "The Voyage" and "The Wind Blows" provide an interesting counterpoint to these stories of male gridlock. For "The Voyage" begins in disempowerment. Fenella's mother has died; her father cannot keep her; her grandmother comes to take her away; and the words that initially evince her condition reiterate stasis and death. Despite the setting (a boat dock), they imply no immediate possibility of change: The Picton boat was due to leave at half-past eleven. It was a beautiful night, mild, starry, only when they got out of the cab and started to walk down the Old Wharf that jutted out into the harbour, a faint wind blowing off the water ruffled under Fenella's hat, and she put up her hand to keep it on. It was dark on the Old Wharf, very dark; the wool sheds, the cattle trucks, the cranes standing up so high, the little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as if for itself. (470)

Four repetitions of the verb "was," the intensifying repetition of the word "dark," the seeming conversion of the sites of wharf activity to immobile "carvings," the overshadowing immensity of the fungal mushroom, the attachment to the hat, the personified timidity of the light, the closing adverb (as if) with its hint of uncertain hypothesis: all these technical strategies together suggest the bleakness of Fenella's circumstances and the power they exert over her. Against them, the active verbs and present participles exert only a quiet claim on an alternative possibility: started, jutted, blowing, ruffled, standing, unfurl, quivering, burned. But alternatives are precisely what the story opens up. On board, and just before sleep, Fenella sees her grandmother with her head "uncovered," her stays "loosened," breathing "a sigh of relief" as she "slowly and carefully pulled off her elastic-sidedboots and stood them side by side" (473). It is an example of possibility. All will be well, the story promises, or at least

112 Reading for Form

an improvement on what has been. But this is no naive blinding transformation. Mansfield's story works to a different and more sophisticated kind of revelation, one that requires the sense of bleakness to recur and permits the counter-powers of action and life to deal again and yet again with it, before stasis slowly loosens its hold on Fenella's future. This textual voyage (as distinct from the thematic and psychological voyages that constitute the substance of the overt narrative) records an ongoing exchange, adumbrated in the first paragraph, between verbs of state and verbs of motion.2 Hence, when the Picton boat draws near its destination, before dawn, the verbs reiterate the opening motif: the apparent immobility of death and mourning. Fenella puts on "her black clothes again" - except that this time they don't quite cover: "a button sprang off one of her gloves and rolled to where she couldn't reach it" (475). Already the containment loosens, although (the antiphonal dialogue continuing) the static verbs return: "But if it had been cold in the cabin, on deck it was like ice. The sun was not up yet, but the stars were dim, and the cold pale sky was the same colour as the cold pale sea" (475). Had been, was, was not, were, was: not a dynamic moment. Yet the word "but," signalling a change in syntactic direction, also occurs twice, twice signalling further changes in psychological sensibility as well. Then active verbs re-enter the discourse, though the adjectives and nouns they carry at first do little to combat the sense of a pervasive morbidity in the landscape: "On the land a white mist rose and fell. Now they could see quite plainly dark bush. Even the shapes of the umbrella ferns showed, and those strange silvery withered trees that are like skeletons ... Now they could see the landing-stage and some little houses, pale too ... And now the landing-stage came out to meet them" (475). While the other passengers "looked gloomy," Fenella's grandmother "sounded pleased" (475), the difference between passivity in the one instance and animation in the other echoing the slow shift from an inanimate landscape to one inhabited, then peopled, then actively engaging, encouraging connection. But it is not enough that the grandmother should know her landscape; Fenella, so far, remains a stranger, and once they reach shore, the landscape turns still once more, the text reiterating the cyclical phrase that describes the mist: "Not a soul was to be seen; there was not even a feather of smoke. The mist rose and fell, and the sea sounded asleep as slowly it turned on the beach" (475). Almost at once, however, Mr Penreddy, the cart driver, speaks of other people in the community, and of their active concern to help each other. Treated already as though she were one of the local townspeople, Fenella quickly reaches her grandmother's home.

ii3 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

Yet twice more Fenella has to face immobility before the story closes, once for each time she stands on the threshold of a new (and each time smaller, more contained) territory: island, then port-town, then house, then room. At her new home the flowers "were fallen" in front of the "shell-like" house; the blinds "were drawn"; and bluchers and watering-can seem fixed in place on either side of the front door (475). Fenella waits. It is her grandmother who "turned the handle" and who calls out for her husband. And then (the vocabulary of death and timidity reiterated from the beginning here, but this time altering in resonance) the "white cat, that had been folded up like a camel, rose, stretched itself, yawned, and then sprang on to the tips of its toes. Fenella buried one cold little hand in the white, warm fur and smiled timidly while she stroked and listened" (476). When she then goes in to greet her grandfather, who is still lying in bed this early in the morning, and when she sees that above him, on the wall, "there was a big text in a deep-black frame" that speaks of a lost golden hour that "Is GONE FOR EVER" (476), it seems as though death (or dying) wins out after all. But then the story closes, in speech - language in use as a medium of communication between generations, between sexes, between people: "'Yer grandma painted that/ said grandpa. And he ruffled his white tuft and looked at Fenella so merrily she almost thought he winked at her" (476). Six active verbs in a row. They turn away from stasis at the end, and celebrate connection, affirm life, instead. To turn in more detail to Matilda's story, "The Wind Blows," is to see how another version of Mansfield's reiterative strategy elucidates the contrary appeals of a different personality and a different moment in life: to trace not a story of ego and desiccation, nor one of recuperative rebirth, but one shaped by the tensions of impending adolescence. On the edge of puberty, Matilda is impatient with the way things are and contrarily wants things to stay the same; she desires change and fears change, all at the same time, a state of affairs for which the incessant Wellington wind, moving and yet somehow not changing, is a strikingly apt metaphor. (Jacqueline Bardolph points to several occasions in Mansfield's fiction where the wind appears as a contrary image, associated paradoxically with both liberation and death [161] - that is, with both change and stasis.) Several further motifs here also clearly link "The Wind Blows" with other Mansfield stories: hats, for example, and music lessons. Hats, repeatedly, are signs of deference to convention, as when Fenella wears one for propriety's sake, or Laura Sheridan (in "The Garden Party") puts one on at her mother's behest; in "The Wind Blows" Matilda (rebelling against her mother) deliberately wears an

H4 Reading for Form

old hat to her music lesson and shouts '"Go to hell'" (192) at her mother as she runs down the road, an imprecation that likely dissipates in the wind. In another parallel, Mr Bullen, the oozingly charming music master to whom Matilda runs, combines features of Reginald Peacock and the pedophiliac old man of "The Little Governess." (Still later "music" stories include "The Singing Lesson" and, less directly, "Miss Brill," and once again these stories obliquely deal with sexuality.) Matilda's brother Bogey, like Laura Sheridan's brother Laurie, is the seeming counterfoil who, by his presence, combats the sense (stated, but not actually believed) that "Life is so dreadful" (193) and who can walk out with her into the wind and share her fantasies on the seashore esplanade. Most commentary on this story (though few critics pay it any attention at all) indeed concentrates on Bogey, using the story to romanticize Mansfield's relationship with her brother Leslie (for example, Hankin, 106; Daly, 62), and Saralyn Daly's version of it as a sketch with many tonal changes is a total misreading, arguing as it does that the story ends with a shift in perspective to "many years later" (60), when the narrator is leaving her island home with her brother and asks him to remember their childhood. No one leaves the island, and there is no shift in time. Place alters, in part in the imagination, but the entire action takes place within a single (turbulent, reverberating) day. Only Sydney Janet Kaplan acknowledges that, symbolically, it is "a story about awakening sexuality" (no). Returning the focus to Matilda, and to the story's form, reinforces this interpretation. Basically the story divides into two sections, the first recording Matilda's waking up to a stormy day and heading off almost immediately to Mr Bullen's, where she is the second of three young girls to take piano lessons. In the second section Matilda and Bogey go for a walk on the esplanade to watch the storm, and when they see a ship leaving harbour, Matilda imagines them both aboard it, leaving behind the world-that-is for a world-that-might-be. In both sections flowers and mirrors repeat as images; in both sections particular phrases are repeated (as when Bullen, anticipating Peacock's "charming" phrase, greets each new student with "Sit ... in the sofa corner, little lady," 192, 193). The question to ask is what effect the reiteration serves. The opening paradox - "Something dreadful has happened. No nothing has happened. It is only the wind" (191) - spells out the tension between change and changelessness that characterizes Matilda's age; at the same time the hint of the "dreadful," coupled with the apparent difficulty in recognizing what constitutes real threat,

H5

Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

suggests how a gothic desire for adult adventure goes along, in this instance, with an apparent susceptibility to manipulation. The overriding effect of the first section, which takes Matilda away from her childhood home, is to get the reader to infer how corrupt the outside world is and how much safer Matilda would be if she didn't grow up and away; one effect of the second section is to reminisce on how innocent her (and Bogey's) childhood once was, and how inevitable and positive is the fact of growing up and away. The tension of "static action" with which the story opens, that is, repeats itself in the structural dialogue between the two halves of the story, two halves of a single glimpse of adolescent (and possibly artistic) desire. The flower references contribute to this tension. Early on, Matilda's neighbour Marie Swainson "runs into the garden ... to pick the 'chrysanths' before they are ruined" (191). "Ruin" might refer only to the storm's simple physical effect on flowers were it not for the fact that chrysanthemums are conventionally associated with death, and were it not also for the social and sexual innuendo of the succeeding sentence: "Her skirt flies up above her waist; she tries to beat it down, to tuck it between her legs while she stoops, but it is no use - up it flies" (191). Outside, the dust comes "in waves" (192) as Matilda runs to her lesson (sea and land overlapping in the windstorm), but Bullen's "cave"-like drawing-room seems "peaceful" (192) in contrast. What kind of peace can this be? Despite Matilda's fancies about her own maturity and musical sensitivity (she is dismissive of the "girl-before-her," who blushes when Bullen "puts his arms over her shoulders and plays the passage for her," 192), the "passage" she herself is undergoing is far more threatening and demanding than she realizes. The room "smells of art serge and stale smoke and chrysanthemums" (192). Matilda thinks she likes the smell, and likes the images that punctuate the room: the black piano, the pale photograph of Rubenstein on the mantelpiece, the picture of "'Solitude,' a dark, tragic woman" that hangs on the wall. These images, however, describe a room not of life but of seductive death. When Bullen leans over her shoulder ostensibly to play Beethoven and says "'Let's have a little of the old master'" (192), it is hard to ignore the double entendre. When Matilda's fingers "tremble" (and therefore cannot untie the "knot" in her satchel: "It's the wind ... And her heart beats so hard she feels it must lift her blouse up and down," 192), when she asks if she should "take the repeat," and when Bullen goes on to say "something about 'waiting' and 'marking time' and 'that rare thing, a woman'" (193), the musical vocabulary overlaps with that of seduction. In this artificial indoor room Matilda thinks she can be "comfortable ... for ever" (193), a moment

n6 Reading for Form

broken suddenly when Marie Swainson, the student-after-her, arrives early, causing Bullen to stand up quickly and pull away from Matilda. When he reiterates his now-formulaic charge to the next girl, "Sit in the sofa corner, little lady," the first half of the story abruptly stops. The second half just as abruptly begins "The wind, the wind" (193), with Matilda alone in her own room, where the "bed, the mirror, the white jug and basin gleam like the sky outside," where a pile of stockings lies "knotted up on the quilt like a coil of snakes," and where "It's the bed that is frightening" (193). With the interpenetration of storm and room, the implicitly sexual vocabulary takes a different turn. For if the covertly sexual escapade with Bullen implied stillness and death, the impending adventure with Bogey will at least initially seem active. Together the brother and sister will walk out into the storm, dismissing Shelley ("T bring fresh flowers to the leaves and showers/ ... What nonsense," 1933) and observing instead that the wind has "bent to the ground" the "pahutukawas" (the New Zealand Christmas flame tree, Mansfield's misspelling, 194). Dressed in identically hooked ulsters - that word "hooked" again (193) - they join arms ("'Hook on,' says Bogey," 194) and "cannot walk fast enough. Their heads bent, their legs just touching, they stride like one eager person through the town, down ... [to] where the fennel grows wild" (194). At the breakwater "They pull off their hats" (194). Outside and inside coalesce once more: "They are covered with drops; the inside of her mouth tastes wet and cold" (194). And then there follows a passage that not only emphasizes Bogey as Matilda's age-mate but also links their relationship with the sexuality that had been broached in Bullen's music-room: Bogey's voice is breaking. When he speaks he rushes up and down the scale. It's funny - it makes you laugh - and yet it just suits the day. The wind carries their voices - away fly the sentences like the narrow ribbons. "Quicker! Quicker!" It is getting very dark. (194)

When they then see a "big black steamer ... putting out to sea," and characterize her (the text emphasizes the female pronoun) as a force that the wind cannot stop, and when the text imagines them on board "arm in arm," the naive musical morning is made to seem as though it took place "many years ago" (194). The brother and sister together "on board" have transformed the day, in what might be taken as little more than wish-fulfilment, or might be read as a more active sexual experiment.

117 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

But what, fundamentally, is it that Matilda wants? Another set of textual repetitions comes into play. First thing that morning she had been reluctant to look in the mirror at all; when she and Bogey leave for their walk, they look together into a glass and "know those two" (193), the familiar faces of their nearly gone childhood ("they have the same excited eyes and hot lips," 193); in the dark at the end of the day "They can't see those two" any more (194). Is it the two that they have imagined, those who are sailing away on board the disappearing ship? or the two in the glass, from earlier? The question remains unanswered; "The wind - the wind" (194) persists at the end, closing the story with the only fixed truth the narrative will admit to - that of change. But the question does beg for an answer, and however a reader unpacks it reflects back on the whole story. If the sketch is just a narrative of childish dreaming, then it is possible to accept that the couple standing on the shore at the end can just no longer see their mirror-selves at sea, and say so; they have lost their glimpse, in other words, of the adult versions of themselves that they have hypothesized as sophisticated world travellers. This hypothesis raises still further questions, however, and even if it were the only possible interpretation, it would seem a tenuous and unsatisfactory reading. What, for example, does one make of the adult couple? Siblings, they stand arm in arm at the ship's rail like lovers, their innocence extended sexlessly from their early adolescent selves into the indeterminate future. It is only by such a configuration that "The Wind Blows" can be read simply as Mansfield's fond tribute to her real-life brother, but such a reading patently ignores the sexuality of the language of the rest of the story. What, then, if the story has nothing necessarily specific to do with Leslie Beauchamp at all? What if the brother in the story serves a fictional function? What if the story proposes an incestuous relationship rather than merely a strolling friendship? Such a reading would make more sense of the mirror imagery, the "excited eyes and hot lips," and the textual rhythms of music and seduction. Even the idea of "active stasis" (different but the same) gathers a new resonance in this context. This interpretation becomes more tenable, too, to the degree that it also makes sense of the hatless couple in the dark who can no longer see (recognize? catch a glimpse of? look at the world through the eyes of?) their childish selves but who, whatever they have come to realize, are still subject to the wind. It would, however, be a mistake simply to accept a tangentially worded narrative of incest at face value, as though Mansfield were necessarily confessing an autobiographical secret or trumpeting her freedom from a literary taboo. In fact, if she herself

n8 Reading for Form was ever the victim of parental or fraternal incest, evidence is indirect at best, and largely absent; if incest was ever a literary taboo, by contrast, scores of earlier writers had already transgressed the interdiction, and it is this context that extends even further the implications of "The Wind Blows." Mary Burgan, in Illness, Gender and Writing, quotes entries from Mansfield's 1916 journal, after Leslie Beauchamp had died, to suggest that the "brother/sister incest taboo had always shadowed Mansfield's feeling about her little brother; now the longing for some ultimate intimacy with the loved usurper became a passionate identification with him. In imagining her brother as a twin who takes over her body" (102), Burgan argues, Mansfield is not necessarily recalling a physical fact but simply demonstrating a pattern of behaviour - a "displacement" of identity - characteristic among some adolescents, those who have fixed on a sibling as a "twin" and are at once enraged and paralysed when the artificial identification breaks down. Faced with the break from her real brother, Burgan says, Mansfield called "into play an ethic of work, ... her ideological commitment to writing" (102), to counter her feelings of anger, paralysis, longing for death, and childish vulnerability. It was this sensibility, continues Burgan, that led to the great stories of "childbirth and its possible power of reconciliation," especially "Prelude" and "At the Bay" (104). "The Wind Blows," of course - in its first incarnation called "Autumn n"4 - appeared in the journal Signature on 4 October 1915, three days before Leslie's death in France (Alpers, 555), and Burgan does not mention the story in connection with her argument. But the psychological paradigm she outlines, one that involves writing as therapy, relates interestingly to a line of literary uses of the theme of incest that extends at least from Milton to Byron, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and beyond. Surveying women's writing of the nineteenth century in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar provide some relevant comments. Arguing that the complicated relation between women writers and Byronic heroes "derived in part from Milton's portrayal of the Sin-Satan relationship" (which produced the child Death), they argue that "admiring, even adoring, Satan's Byronic rebelliousness, his scorn of conventional virtues, his raging energy, the woman writer may have secretly fantasized that she was Satan or Cain, or Manfred, or Prometheus. But at the same time her feelings of female powerlessness manifested themselves in her conviction that the closest she could really get to being Satan was to be his creature" (207). Quoting from Adrienne Rich's "Natural Resources" - to the effect that Will Ladislaw, Dorothea's lover in George Eliot's

119 Reiteration: Stories of Static Action

Middlemarch, is a prototype of the kind of man who tries to understand women and who is figured as brother, as twin (530) - they further characterize the incest motif by alluding to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: "For Milton, and therefore for Mary Shelley, who was trying to understand Milton, incest was an inescapable metaphor for the solipsistic fever of self-awareness that Matthew Arnold [in his preface to his Poems, 1853] was later to call 'the dialogue of the mind with itself" (229). The relation between metaphors of sexuality and metaphors of language consequently emphasizes at once the dangers, the isolation, and the ecstasy of creativity: To the extent that the desire to violate the incest taboo is a desire to be selfsufficient - self-begetting - it is a divinely interdicted wish to be "as Gods," like the desire for the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, whose taste also meant death. For the woman writer, moreover, even the reflection that the Byronic hero is as much a creature of her mind - an incarnation of her "private, brooding, female resentments" - as she is an invention of his, offers little solace. For if in loving her he [the Byronic hero, Satan, "artist of death, the paradigmatic master of all those perverse aesthetic techniques that pleasure the body rather than the soul, and serve the world rather than God"] loves himself, in loving him she loves herself, and is therefore similarly condemned to the death of the soul that punishes solipsism ... [D]efining herself as the "creature" of one or the other of these irreligious artists, the woman writer would be confirmed ... in her fear that she was herself a false creator, ... for whom the arts of language ... are ... only ... parodies of the language of the angels and the music of the spheres ... [D]windling by degrees into an infertile drone, she might well conclude that this image of Satan and Eve as the false artists of creation was finally the most demeaning and discouraging avatar of Milton's bogey. (209-10)

"The Wind Blows," however, does not express discouragement, nor any overt or passive acceptance of a Miltonic world order, though perhaps there is more than the usual rebellious resonance in the fact that Matilda's first, shouted words in the story are "Go to hell" (192). It may be difficult to turn either Bullen or Bogey into a Byronic giant, but not hard at all to see Bogey as Matilda's "twin" and therefore an extension of herself with whom she is in some sort of close, impassioned (if finally unproductive) dialogue, nor is it hard to read Bullen as a father-figure agent of creative death. Reading "The Wind Blows" as a sketch involving an incest motif does not require a specific Satanic paradigm; it does, nevertheless, return the critical focus to the issue of language and creativity, and to the formal dialogues between stasis and change that structure a number of Mansfield's fictions.

12O Reading for Form

For the paradigms of reiteration have repeatedly concerned themselves with the power to use language creatively. The married man cannot do so, nor can Peacock, or Binzer, or Bullen, yet all make claims on sexual power and on the power that accrues from precedence and social convention. Mansfield's accomplishment in these portraits is in part to demonstrate the emptiness of the social and artistic prototypes that - however much they were granted authority - merely repeat the past. The challenge lay in finding an alternative mode of discourse within which to express a sensibility beyond insecurity. Insecurity, in these stories, produces automatic utterance, formula, coercive texts that inhibit growth and understanding; it expresses itself as mental inactivity because it employs language as a barrier, a "static agent" against the world rather than a means of engaging with the processes of living. If, in consequence, language is a barrier, it functions more like silence than speech, more like death than life, and Mansfield's female characters in particular, often silenced by convention, are textually required to reread their silence and find new ways to express their identities and their claims upon the future. As "The Voyage" and "The Wind Blows" elucidate this process, the passage into creative language is not smooth, nor is it guaranteed of success. Reiteration can sometimes imply creative failure. But by linking the creativity of language with the creativity of female sexuality, Mansfield emphasized that a dialogue with death and an engagement with the twinned, divided self could also lead alike to social renewal and psycholinguistic rebirth.

7 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

By "overturns" I refer to a variety of strategies of deliberate narrative delay sometimes temporal, as in the postponement of some sort of action or revelation; sometimes spatial, as in visual forms of interruption and fragmentation; sometimes logical, as in organizational paradigms involving the inversion or contradiction of an anticipated order. The delay - or the "deferral" of the characters' or readers' recognition - can variously heighten suspense, complicate the circumstances that affect interpretation, extend the fact of pressure or the illusion of freedom from pressure, prolong a measure of happiness, ignorance, or insensitivity, or perform other narrative functions. Thematically Mansfield's early stories provide numerous examples of delay serving as a working motif. In "The Woman at the Store," for example (perhaps the most conventionally plotted of all Mansfield's stories), the delay that leads to the central characters' staying where they do, and staying on, and meeting the "woman at the store," coincides with the delayed revelation of the likely facts of a murder and the equally delayed identification of the murderer (or does this, after all, remain mere conjecture?). In "Millie" the title character's equivocation about whose side she is on - she vacillates between helping a young man who is fleeing the law and participating in the pursuit, between a motherly concern for a "sick kid" (137) and a seemingly atavistic delight in treating him as a savage animal - is sustained to the final lines of the story. "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped" uses the overt motif of an ostensible "kidnapping" (an obvious overturning of expected order) as the central narrative line

122 Reading for Form

on which to hang some observations about race, class, and stereotype in colonial Victorian New Zealand; at the same time, the "pearl button" image (obliquely charged with suggestions of a constricted sense of sexual and social propriety, a theme reiterated more directly in the name, Pearl, and the desires and preoccupations of the central character in the later story "Bliss") perhaps calls for a necessary overturning - a metaphoric kidnapping - of yet another kind, one that reimagines how order should be understood. Several other stories, through a range of thematic templates, also depend upon a deferral of understanding. In "Miss Brill" as in "Bliss" the characters' circumstances turn out not to be as they first appear; Pearl and Miss Brill have both misapprehended their relation with the figures around them and are devastated by their longdelayed recognition of the resistant truth. Relatedly, the title figure in "The Little Governess" seems even to have been trained to misapprehend - "foreigners," specifically, and ideas about class, and men. "Feuille d'Album" also hinges on a failure to see others adequately, though it ends in bathos, when the young man's unanticipated lovetoken to his distantly admired love turns out to be a dropped (and therefore cracked? broken?) egg. "The Swing of the Pendulum," as the title might imply, ends up foregrounding a change of mind. The ending of "The Garden Party" emerges from an intrusion of the unexpected. The impact of "The Doll's House" hinges on there being an exception to the rule that at the beginning of the story has seemed to be unchallengeable and inflexible, "painted" and "glued" (499). My focus here, however, falls less on these variants of thematic deferral than on the strategies of formal deferral that Mansfield occasionally used, and on the story-telling functions they serve - especially in "Ole Underwood" (1913), "Something Childish but Very Natural" (ca 1914), "A Dill Pickle" (1917), and "The Stranger" (1920). "Ole Underwood," the least sophisticated of this group, is none the less a useful example here in that it so obviously opens with inverted sentence order: "Down the windy hill stalked Ole Underwood" (131). Inversion, like a "periodic" or "left-branching" sentence structure, is a classic strategy for delaying a reader's or listener's understanding of what's going on; when inverted sentence order is in play, moreover, the subject comes after its verb, delaying even the sense of who or what the sentence is about. With this first sentence in "Ole Underwood" the emphasis falls initially on direction ("Down"), with all that that word implies (soon echoed in "Under"), and on a rhythmic pattern (two trochees followed by three monosyllables and a dactyl) that stresses the weight or pressure of each movement onward. How stress and direction affect the person

123 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

will only become apparent over the course of time. Indeed, time becomes a matter of key concern here (rhythm functioning yet again as a measure of time), for as the narrative of Ole Underwood's day proceeds forward, it also moves backward, till the old vagrant's perceptions of the present become so interspliced with his memories that the real and the imagined finally coalesce in a moment of startling, revelatory, and wholly ambiguous recognition. Critics have tended not to comment much on this story. Heather Murray notes that it adheres to the editorial principle that Middleton Murry and Michael Sadlier espoused for Rhythm magazine, where it first appeared: that is, "Before art can be human again it must learn to be brutal" (107-8). Saralyn Daly criticizes the diction for not sustaining the imaginative vision of the narrative, or at least for not sustaining the limited perspective of the old man (64). Roger Robinson, commenting on what he calls Mansfield's "mobility and multiplicity of vision," her capacity for disturbing "preconceptions and complacencies" (the technique I am calling "overturns"), uses "Ole Underwood" as a tangential example of the way the author can make a "perspective ... flip over disconcertingly": "a derelict's appalling act of cruelty is as much a source of strength and release" (4). Brutality, cruelty, limited sympathies: as he proceeds downhill, Ole Underwood frightens a child, crushes flowers in a pub and is summarily ejected, disrupts a card game and is shouted at, cuddles a kitten for a short time and then suddenly swings it by its tail and flings it out to a sewer opening (133) before he himself walks on towards the wharves. It is hard to find him sympathetic. But that is not, I think, Mansfield's point. The formally inverted opening suggests instead a need not so much to trace his current "progress" as to pursue him somehow in reverse, to explain, perhaps, the sources of the pressing urge to violence. For it transpires that he was once a sailor who found himself in a love triangle and ended up murdering the woman he loved; the reputation for violence has followed him through life, and the fact of violence has disturbed his mind, made him erratically susceptible to rash action. Can he, the story asks, nevertheless still love? The sight and touch of the kitten is what for a moment takes him consciously back to the past, for, associatively, he realizes that "his woman" (132) had liked a cat he once gave her, and he recalls how she used to speak to it. This memory doesn't revive him; on the contrary, it disturbs him even further, propels him into the most violent act that the story actually portrays. There may still be more. When he returns to the wharves and climbs aboard a ship, it seems he can retrieve a glimpse of the young man he once was, peaceful and in love. Yet the story's ending remains

124 Reading for Form

ambiguous. As with other Mansfield stories in which fancy constructs visions, the vision can lie. Has Ole Underwood truly reconnected with his youthful self here? Or has he instead simply walked in on someone else's present life, found another young sailor asleep on his bunk, with "his woman's picture" (133) looking down on him (the "his" in this instance serving double duty)? Has Ole Underwood found "strength and release," therefore, or has he just escaped into total lunacy, or is he on the verge of striking out yet again, at a real sleeping young man aboard a real and present ship, whom his mind has irrationally transformed into the intrusive young man of the past to whom he attributes his unhappiness? No closure follows; the possibilities for further inversion merely multiply. Despite the intrinsic interest of this general conception, Saralyn Daly is right to question the diction. The mix of similes with which the story opens proves to be less evocative of Ole Underwood's plight than unintentionally banal.1 Underwood, the text declares inside a single paragraph, wears a black cap "like a pilot"; his eyes snap "like two sparks"; his bearded face is a "smoulder"; the trees on the hill he is "stalking" down "roared like waves" and "creaked like the timber of ships"; something inside him beats "like a hammer," "like someone beating on an iron in a prison"; and he is afraid, at which point he begins to "shuffle and run" (131). The mix of nautical and prison imagery links Ole Underwood's historical experience with his mental state, but the artifice of the mix is more apparent than the stress it is perhaps designed to intensify. More effective, though still obvious, is the use of a series of doublets and triplets, words repeated two, three, four, or even six times, throughout the text: "One two - one two" (131), "bang - bang - bang" (131), "Mumma - Mum-ma!" (131), "Red - red - red - red!" (132), "Ya-Ya! Ya-Ya!" (132), "Kit! Kit! Kit!" (133), "I will! I will! I will!" (133). Each time this "hammer," this repetition, sounds in his head, Ole Underwood flees in a new direction. It is this hammer that motivates his downhill rush, his crushing the flowers and flinging the cat: it is the voice of memory pushing him again and again into abrupt behaviour, forwarding and delaying at once his acceptance of his uncontrolled and uncontrollable past. When he "sees" the sleeping sailor aboard the ship at the end, the hammer has just told him "Mine! Mine! Mine!" (133). Given the force of the preceding hammer sounds, this claim upon a state-room (133) has also to be read for its evocation of a mental state: not for change or transformation so much as for its deferring uncertainties. "Mine," the possessive adjective - echoed in the phrase "his woman" - also, of course, reiterates the connection between property

125 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

and gender relations that Mansfield's fiction recurrently portrays and disputes, configuring dependency (and especially the "institution" of marriage) as a different kind of prison-house. "Something Childish But Very Natural/' "A Dill Pickle," and "The Stranger" all take up this relationship, probing in particular the kinds of uncertainty that undermine and overturn some men's and women's claims - or pretensions - to equal power. "Something Childish" also invokes the formulas of fantasy (dream visions, a vocabulary involving smallness or largeness, an escapist version of nature, repeated motifs, and scenes of transformation, for example), and, as with "Ole Underwood," the uncertainty about what "actually" happens and what happens "only" in the imagination leads to a decided ambiguity at the close of the story. Here ambiguity seems to be the intent, for that is obliquely what the (left-branching, deferring) opening sentence signals: "Whether he had forgotten what it felt like, or his head had really grown bigger since the summer before, Henry could not decide" (151). Hypothesis, alternative, impossibility of decision: the trio of logical structures in operation here does not convey resolute action nor lead a reader to expect some authoritative closure. For all its specificity, the second sentence does not immediately appear to clarify this dilemma, for precisely what eighteen-year-old Henry could not decide at the opening seems initially somewhat trite: he is concerned about why his hat pinches, and why his head aches. The fact that hats in Mansfield's stories are repeatedly associated with (often unarticulated) systems of authority, however, suggests that the story will subsequently turn on questions involving the possession of power. And so, after several deferrals, it does. In due course Henry meets sixteen-year-old Edna. Both are childlike in manner, idealizing the future and romanticizing each other; both want to escape the confines of their childhood homes but also to extend their childhood - to secure safety - more than to embark on a conventional adult romance. Symbolically they both, at one time or another, take off their hats, but the close touching that might be expected to follow this gesture does not follow. The fantasy of perpetual innocence will not allow it. But whose fantasy is this, Edna's or Henry's? And is it in fact innocence that is the abiding touchstone of the dream, or is it something more like freedom from control? On this point the critics bluntly disagree. Cherry Hankin and Marvin Magalaner both read the story as a narrative primarily about the loss that Henry suffers when - after he and Edna agree to live together in a "sweet" and "tiny" cottage with "apple trees" in front (164) Edna does not show up and sends a telegram (of refusal?) instead. Henry, Hankin avers, is required to participate in Edna's fantasy

126 Reading for Form

(86-9), and it results for him in something like death. To this interpretation Heather Murray replies that Edna takes evasive action to avoid male domination (106), that it is effectively Edna's story, in other words, one about needing to resist the psychological and social appeals of an implicitly male fantasy of power. For Edna, by this reading, the cottage with the apple trees would be no Eden but something more like a prison. This latter reading has a strong appeal, particularly in the context of Mansfield's other stories about failed, failing, or limited marriages, and it makes sense of the scene where the text refers to Edna's mother's dissatisfaction in her own marriage; it nevertheless excludes Henry from any claim on human feeling at all, and (however much he might be embodying a set of unexamined social assumptions about "appropriate" gender relations) he seems a curiously childlike and ineffectual character to charge with deliberate malice. Clearly, Murray's reading does not specifically extend this far, nor does it directly address the hurt that Henry suffers when the dream he has been living begins to dissipate; indeed, to take delight in Henry's hurt, or to see it as somehow "deserved," would itself be cruel, an interpretation that Mansfield's text would seem to forestall. Henry appears, instead, to be more like a preliminary sketch of a character-type that later splits into both Stanley Burnell (the bluff, materially successful, loved, but emotionally insecure patriarchal male) and Jonathan Trout (his sensitive but largely self-defeated brother-in-law) - or their female mirrors, Mrs Harry Kember and Beryl Fairfield - in "At the Bay."2 Within this split character versions of the "unspeakable" (that is, of the prohibited - whatever results from the powers of prohibition, however defined) come up against versions of the "unspoken"; "silence" confronts "silencing," sometimes to counter it, sometimes in fear.3 (The temptations of "forbidden" sexual attractions constitute a clear subtext of "At the Bay," where desire is repeatedly linked with, or thwarted by, constructions of "perversion" and power; projected into ostensibly "natural" terms, these same attractions likely inform the immature heterosexual desires of "Something Childish But Very Natural" as well.) Henry, working in the business world but none the less wanting freedom from it, acknowledging the restrictions of social convention and appreciating the joy of not having to live by clock rules, is at the same time wanting to touch Edna and not really understanding why she doesn't want him to. He lives less in a dream fantasy than on an emotional cusp. There "wasn't any question of their belonging to each other," he says to himself; "And yet he couldn't touch her" (158). But of course he does. At first he just impotently re-enacts the

127 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

role of the mythical unicorn; he '"would give anything to lie down and cry' ... and he added limply, 'with my head in your lap"' (161). Despite his uncertainties, however, his fear of love's transience, he begins, in the very act of attempting to assert love's permanence, to give voice to a language of control. Edna asks if he is "absolutely certain that we shall have a house like" one he has sketched aloud for her (162) - one, significantly, haunted by ghosts. He doesn't even hear the dubiety in her question, and he replies not only that faith in certainty is not enough but also that he wants immediate satisfaction of his desire for union and release ("I want to be sitting on those very stairs and taking off these very boots this very minute," 162). When, subsequently, they find the cottage with the apple trees, Edna says that she has "quite got over the feeling" (164) of reluctance. Henry then puts his arm around her; she says she wants to be kissed; and he tells her she is "perfect, perfect, perfect" (164). Perhaps, after "Ole Underwood," this triplet of repetitions ought to resonate with more danger than in "Something Childish" it seems to; certainly the absolute assertion it makes sounds a lot less like recognition than wish-fulfilment, not unrelated to the haunted house Henry has earlier imagined as a dwelling-place. Perfection, moreover, logically prohibits any further growth or change. Perhaps the reader is expected to see how such language would imprison Edna, for immediately after Henry's assertion Edna effectively disappears from the story. Mansfield composes a silence instead - an actual physical break in the narrative, a starred space - after which the focus falls on Henry's real (or is it mad, escapist, metaphoric?) habitation of a house to which Edna will not come. Here Henry keeps looking at his watch; he imagines what their domestic life will be like (full of idealized but intrinsically deadening repetitions); he tells himself she will arrive, and to prove his faith declares '"I feel just like God'" (165). This long-deferred, finally articulated claim to authority underscores the emptiness of patriarchal power, however. It does not bring him fulfilment, peace, or the decisiveness he seems most to have been wanting. It brings stillness instead, a world of shadows, a spider-"web of darkness" (166) that claims him as its victim, as it would, presumably, have otherwise claimed her. Yet there is still another dimension to this narrative, which returns interpretation to the opening and seemingly inconsequential image of the headache and the hat. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar make clear in The Madwoman in the Attic, and as Mary Burgan reconfirms in another context in Illness, Gender and Writing, disease and dis-ease are symbiotically related in much women's writing, and a dis-ease of the head offers a particularly powerful - not "inconsequential" at all

128 Reading for Form

- symbol for a commentary on the conflict (or absence of congruity) between the intellect and power. Citing examples from Jane Austen's Emma to George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil/' and from Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Bronte to Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate how headaches in women's fiction are repeatedly linked with a frustration at not having ready access to expression. Phrased another way, many women have found themselves adopting male personas in order to be heard, but in doing so have also committed themselves (to use Gilbert and Gubar's term) to a kind of "mimicry." At one level this mimicry leads to a split sense of identity, a construction of the self as double, as other (a construction of self in third-person terms). At another it concerns itself with language, with a choice of literary strategy. The authors cite Emily Dickinson's warning about the dangers of dropping words carelessly on to the page: "Infection in the sentence breeds" (45). They also quote from Margaret Fuller's journal to establish the "patriarchal nature of the plots and poetics available to" the woman writer in the nineteenth century and to demonstrate "what seem to be irreconcileable contradictions of genre and gender": "For all the tides of life that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual, when it comes to casting my thought into a form. No old one suits me ... At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle; as, on the other hand, I should palsy, when I play the artist" (71). Fuller, they add, dreamt of her body as a dungeon, with an angel escaping at the head (480); still other writers troped women as angels with headaches (64), whose lives were storyless except for narratives of repression (55, 75, 314). But storylessness led to mimicry in order to get lives told at all, and mimicry led to division and dissatisfaction in a recurring sequence of deferrals. Insight and imagination, as a consequence - intellectual and artistic aspiration, the dreams of expressive power - came to be figured as agents of dis-ease and disease: of self-distrust and deprecation, of headache and hallucination (446, 448, 617). In "Something Childish But Very Natural," of course, it is Henry whose head hurts as the story begins, and Henry who does not move at the end, after he receives the telegram. But because Henry has been at least initially cast as a sensitive youth (whatever his latent male tendencies to assert domination), and because he and Edna are described as sufficiently similar to be mistaken for siblings ("There's a likeness,'" says the woman who lets the apple-garden cottage to them, 163), it becomes possible to read the two characters as the configurations of a split or doubled identity, ill at ease with the (social) storylines they have been given but powerless to invent satisfactory alternatives. Fantasy takes over from reality, but fantasy

129 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

lies, to them both, in a narrative that turns implicitly on the gendered restrictions that circumvent artistry. The fantasy invites the two characters to believe (the Coleridge poem that gives the story its title reinforces this notion) that dream can be divorced from sleep, but in their world only sleep can support dreaming, and sleep - a metaphoric stasis - deprives them of life. Together, they seem merely to reinscribe the world they would have preferred to rewrite; mimicry subverts the illusion of independence on which they briefly build their future. Apart, however, the Edna-half of this aspiring pair is silent - even her telegram (if indeed it is her telegram) has in it no words the reader can read - and the Henry-half seems again susceptible to self-distrust (expecting a snake in the paper he unfolds, 166), a perpetual victim in a world where other people design the hats, tell the stories, write the rules. To read "A Dill Pickle" in this context is to see a substantial development in Mansfield's technique, and yet something of a continuation of the preoccupations of the earlier stories. Again a woman meets a man; again the man combines a degree of sensitivity with a larger degree of boorishness; again the woman must somehow choose to connect with him (or in the later case reconnect, for she has had a relationship with him once before), and likely be consumed by him, or else disconnect herself from him, embracing uncertainty over constraint. Because "A Dill Pickle" begins in medias res, with unnamed characters - the woman is subsequently (and emblematically) called Vera, though the man is never named - it is even tempting (however specious) to read it as a deliberate footnote to "Something Childish But Very Natural": "And then, after six years, she saw him again" (271). These characters are much more urbane, much more travelled, and the woman in particular much more inwardly secure than Henry and Edna, but there is enough in common with those earlier characters to make the connection between stories not altogether misleading. The man, like Henry, has a straw hat that at one point he has taken off, but he ends up waving it around ludicrously; in both stories a girl in white appears briefly in their lives, representing some sort of opportunity for recognition, but it is an opportunity that Henry turns into a fantasy and that the nameless man does not even see; in both, the woman cuts off her (first) relationship with the man by sending him a written message, and in both the man responds, initially, with despair; in "A Dill Pickle" the man "had lost all the dreamy vagueness and indecision" that once characterized him (272) but, like Henry, still indulges in a bit of maudlin fantasy, saying that what he "really wanted" before was to be a carpet under her feet, one that would "turn into a magic

130 Reading for Form

carpet and carry you away" (275). What the nameless man never recognizes, however, is that Vera wants to be understood (276), listened to (as she listens to him, 274), taken seriously (272) - but not taken over, transformed. What transpires instead is that she chooses her present independence (and her economically straitened circumstances) over a renewed relationship with him (and his latterly acquired wealth and ability to travel). She, who has "raised her veil and unbuttoned her high fur collar" on joining him for coffee (271), gives him an opportunity to be a new man; when it turns out he hasn't sufficiently changed, she buttons her collar and draws down her veil again (275); he keeps talking; and she has gone from the room before he even notices she is leaving. Marvin Magalaner, puzzlingly, reads this ending as somehow odd; he argues that the man, who was desolate when Vera left him the first time, has been "deserted" (no) again by her this time and in consequence reverts to a previous behaviour. But shifting the blame in this way from the victimizer to the victim fails to take into account the dynamic of the relationship that Mansfield's technique has all along been carefully revealing. From the opening sentence the exchange between the two characters has been contingent on a previous set of exchanges. More generally, any reading of the present is contingent on the way past experience has educated the reader to read. (Mansfield repeatedly makes this observation, primarily about women's opportunities in the world: the Little Governess mistakes age for class and so does not recognize corruption when she meets it; Ada Moss in "Pictures," faced with economic reality, chooses payment for sexual favours over class image and unpaid hunger; Laura, in "The Garden Party," expects only goodness from the world, an assumption she must reconcile with unpredictability; Isabel, in "At the Bay," learns to mimic the behaviour of her Aunt Beryl, mistaking orders for authority, mimic-manhood for actual power.) In "A Dill Pickle" Vera goes through a process of re-viewing the possibilities in a relationship, and rediscovering that the possibilities are still overbalanced by the limitations. Once again this understanding comes about in the story through a series of strategic deferrals. As the story opens, for instance, Vera recognizes the man and intends to join him; he, by contrast, "looked up and met her eyes. Incredible! He didn't know her! She smiled; he frowned. She came towards him. He closed his eyes an instant, but opening them his face lit up as though he had struck a match in a dark room ... 'Vera!' he exclaimed. 'How strange. Really, for a moment I didn't know you'" (271). The question will be to see if he ever did, or ever can: what are the contingencies that will or will not permit recognition in

131 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

return. Each short, sharp, simple clause in this opening passage, reinforced by the fragmentary exclamations, takes the action forward by hesitant degrees, but already the story is ironic. For a moment, he says, he doesn't know "Vera" - truth. But it is for more than a moment. Almost at once, instead of moving into a consequential exchange, the story enacts another deferral. Vera begins to speak (about weather and age), and he interrupts to tap on the table and order coffee and cream. He then returns to what she had been saying ("the older one grows - ") and asks her to continue, and although she does, saying, ambiguously, "The colder" (271), she is is perhaps completing a different thought: "she was thinking how well she remembered that trick of his - the trick of interrupting her - and of how it used to exasperate her six years ago" (271). Even the dashes in these sentences function to delay and overturn, to convey, as though parenthetically, the difference between the power that he seems to assume rests naturally in what he has to say and the inconsequentiality of any words of hers. The story then progresses through a series of further, largely onesided exchanges. He tells her about his memories of their previous relationship (though she remembers events somewhat differently, through different details). He asks if she's forgotten their former plans to visit Russia, and when she says no, he leans back and begins to tell her that he has in fact "carried out all those journeys that we planned" (273), another claim to power that at least metaphorically sidelines her. He remembers how she used to play the piano, and when it transpires that she has since had to sell her instrument, he changes the subject. He delights in the memory of a Russian dill pickle; she, who "was not certain what a dill pickle was" (274), is silently sure it is sour. He recalls one night when "I brought you the little Christmas tree, telling you all about my childhood" (274), and she recalls that he was more concerned that night about the cost of caviar. He "drums" on the table again; she begins to make ready to leave. Extrapolating from himself to her, he declares that "we were such egoists, so self-engrossed," and he uses this generalization to explain why they broke apart before; by the time he returns to the pronoun "I" and begins next to explain to her the "Mind System" he had begun to study while he was in Russia, she has already left the room. When he finally notices her absence, the text adds, "He sat there, thunder-struck, astounded beyond words" (276), but then almost at once he begins to complain about the likely cost of the cream that he has ordered for her and that she has not touched. He does not change. Only momentarily does he lose language ("astounded beyond words"), and then to no effect. Spending most

132 Reading for Form

of the time talking at her, not with her - telling, ordering, explaining, not listening - he can neither hear validity in her words nor appreciate the depth of her silences. She knows a great deal about flowers, for example, as a memory of a visit to Kew Gardens recalls (272); yet he does not think flowers an important enough subject to warrant learning even their common names - to bother, that is, learning from her what he does not already know. Never, in this entire series of exchanges, does he see himself as she sees him. For her part, she, who is tempted at one point to permit his memory of events to be "the truer" (272), ultimately absents herself from his language, thus extricates herself from his Mind System and by implication from the restrictions that it would impose. What she extricates herself into, however, remains unclear. Or is it? For the paradigm worked out here recapitulates, in some measure, the gendered dilemma of the headache and the hat. To accept the received language of "art" - the received conventions of story-telling - was an option Mansfield repeatedly refused; she found plotted, closed stories anathema, and their politics a "corruption." Parody, in her early narratives and her dramatic sketches, was one sign of this resistance, but mimicry had its limitations; whatever the quality of the critique, the fact of critiquing continued somehow to grant a sort of generative power to the "original" that was being criticized. To find an alternative other than silence, however - the "palsy" or paralysis that Margaret Fuller wrote of feeling when faced not with an audience but with a page - demanded that Mansfield reconsider the politics of style. The language she chose to use (a language often not adequately read or heard, but casually dismissed by means of those assumed synonyms, feminine and sentimental) relied on the reader's ability to read form: not, that is, to assume that "meaning" derived from narrative plot, from arranged events, but rather to look for consequentiality in the organizational arrangements themselves. Vera, that is, might disappear out of the tea-room that her male companion still occupies with statements, but she does not disappear from Mansfield's story. While the language of the characters conveys a thwarted dialogue between two persons (one committed to declarations of authority, the other silenced by them), the language of the story structures an oblique dialogue between assumptions about reality (the received categories of history and memory) and the counter-realities of experience and understanding. The man who postpones recognizing Vera, who postpones recognizing that she might have something alternative to say, depends constantly on her deferring to him. She recognizes him at once, even six years later, but however attractive he continues to be (she finds his

133 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

assurance "impressive" and his clothes "admirable," 272: metaphoric observations both), she realizes that she does not depend upon him to explain life's meaning. She already lives another kind of life. Out of this formally realized and therefore formally active "dialogue" comes the long-deferred story that this life tells. On a number of other occasions Mansfield used tense variation (shifting the narrative perspective subtly through time), often together with variations in verbal modality, to conduct related kinds of dialogue, though not always with the same positive commitment to independence as a result. In a note to the late narrative fragment called "Weak Heart," for example, Antony Alpers comments on tense variation as a "quality" that this work shares with "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" and "Six Years After" (Stones, 575), stories completed at about the same time, in 1920 and 1921. They also relate to "A Dill Pickle." Adapting one of the penultimate phrases of "A Dill Pickle" (and a situation from "The Garden Party" and other works), for example, a journal note about the composition of "Weak Heart" says that Edie, the central character, will have a brother with whom she will "walk arm in arm ... Her Sunday hat is trimmed beyond words" (574). But will she find a life apart from him? Will Laura ever be separate from Laurie, in "The Garden Party"? Vera in "A Dill Pickle" can choose life, but Constantia and Josephine, the daughters of the recently late Colonel, finally cannot. They are unable to commit themselves to a life outside the house that their father - who used to thump the floor in a manner reminiscent of the table-drumming in "A Dill Pickle" - has thundered effectively into place. For Constantia and Josephine, the thumping, the metaphoric patriarchal claim on power, never stops. While parenting also informs the uncompleted sketch called "Six Years After" (which echoes, in its title, the dramatic setup of "A Dill Pickle"), its setting aboard a steamer and its primary thematic concern with marriage and loss link it more directly with "The Stranger" than with "A Dill Pickle" or "Daughters" - though in both "The Stranger" and "Six Years After" some confusion between spousal and parental roles raises further questions about male expectations of marriage, perhaps in "A Dill Pickle" as well; rather than partners, the men in these stories appear to want their wives to be at once mothers and obedient children, figures from past and future rather than from the present, figures whom they place metaphorically in parentheses and whom they consequently feel they have the right to draw from and ignore at will, while going on with the status quo. Still other stories - "Poison," "Bliss," "Miss Brill," "Sixpence," "Her First Ball" - turn on whether or not a character can suppress a moment of unanticipated revelation and can in consequence permit

134 Reading for Form

a lapse in perceived "perfection" to be forgotten, the alternative being a surrender to a forever-blemished future. Sometimes this moment of (perhaps poisoned) insight can function epiphanically in a Mansfield narrative. But in the instances where tense variations implement a dialogue, they constitute more than a "quality"; they at least in part fulfil something of the same formal function as does the opening strategy of "A Dill Pickle": they illustrate in practice the impingement of the past upon the present, the continuing activity in the present of some experience the past will neither complete nor contain. Like "Ole Underwood" and "A Dill Pickle" in this respect, "The Stranger" elucidates how a present conflict arises out of something that has happened before, how a tension has been deferred, and how, unresolved itself, it continues to have the power to overturn subsequent expectations of resolution. Once again, the narrative line is extremely simple. A character named John Hammond is waiting to greet his wife Janey after she has been some ten months away; when the steamer finally docks, she seems more distant than he expects; when they are in bed together, later that evening, she tells him what has been preoccupying her: on board the ship she had been helping to comfort a first-class passenger, and on the previous night, after appearing to get somewhat better, he had died. John Hammond, presumably because the passenger was male and because Jane has therefore been alone in a compartment with another man, feels wounded, abandoned, desolate. Though until that moment the fire has been blazing in their room, it now "fell": "her words, so light, so soft, so chill, seemed to hover in the air, to rain into his breast like snow" (373). Or perhaps the right word to describe John is unmanned - for if he feels, on the basis of this narrative, that they "would never be alone together again" (373), then he has transferred to himself Janey's sense of being disconcerted by the closeness between life and death. He is, and all along apparently has been, deeply insecure. It is this insecurity that generates his desire for her. He appears to need to project a public image of manhood more than to be a generous private lover, and he confuses this image of virility with a whole complex of other attributes: authority, ownership, leadership, position, display. Because this insecurity, this need, and this confusion so fundamentally motivate his behaviour, he can read the world only as it impinges upon himself; he cannot even recognize that others are living alternative histories, let alone grant them their separate claims on validity.4 Hence the sexual resolution that he desires of Janey's return, and the emotional resolution that she desires, in sharing her story with him, are alike deferred. A stranger (estrangement) having intruded into their lives - having been articulated, that is; having

135 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

been consciously acknowledged - they they do not come together as they would. They remain strangers to each other. A tension persists instead. It is not that John Hammond is without sensitivities. (Nor is Andreas Binzer, in "A Birthday/' or Stanley Burnell, or Mr Reginald Peacock.) He is, the text observes, "something between the sheepdog and the shepherd" (364) for the people who are waiting for the steamer to dock as the story opens. He leads, he amuses, he calms, he encourages, he lifts little Jean Scott on to his shoulders so that she can see the ship better as it lies offshore. The problem is that he doesn't follow through on the commitments to which sensitivity might be expected to lead. If he has been warmly friendly to the crowd, he soon forgets them. If he has been helpful to Jean Scott, that doesn't last. As soon as the ship starts to move towards the wharf, "'Jean'll be all right,' said Mr Scott. Til hold her.' He was just in time. Mr Hammond had forgotten about Jean. He sprang away to greet old Captain Johnson" (366). Scott looks after his own child, but Hammond's children occupy only parenthetical space. They have sent letters to their mother with him, but he does not bring them to the dock. When Janey asks for them at the hotel, he says "'later on will do'" (370). When she finds the letters and tucks them in her blouse, his impulse is to "chuck them into the fire" (371). Always he is trying to erase his own uncertainty. He 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? He wanted to blot out everybody, everything. He wished now he'd turned off the light" (371). Light, fire, food, pen and ink: the metaphoric overlap here between images of perception, images of consumption, and images of language as an agent of commercial exchange (obligation, indebtedness) reveals the mindset he brings to love. He even reflects that her kiss, as usual, "confirmed what they were saying, signed the contract" (371). He realizes, at least, that "that wasn't what he wanted; that wasn't at all what he thirsted for" (371). But he never learns to see how his insecurity and his possessiveness are related. Once again, in this story Mansfield uses images of clothing to characterize the tensions between desire and accomplishment, possibility and act, in particular, buttons, umbrellas, and hats. When the story opens, Hammond is dressed "very snugly in a grey overcoat, grey silk scarf, thick gloves and dark felt hat," and he marches up and down "twirling his folded umbrella" (364), an icon of authority rather than a necessity against the weather. When he unbuttons his coat, moreover, it is to bring out his watch (364), the acts of disclosure and calculation somehow contradicting each other. Like the characters in

136 Reading for Form

"The Wind Blows," he briefly imagines himself aboard the ship (365), looking after Janey, but like them he also cannot sustain this fancy of inhabiting a separate space and time. Even when, subsequently, he takes off his hat to wave at the passengers on deck - at Janey in particular, who waves a white handkerchief back - he at the same time is competing for precedence among the people who are crowded on the wharf ("'Get out of the way there!' he signed with his umbrella," 366). When he next "seize[s] his hat" (368), he has just noticed that, though his wife's veil has been thrown back, she is wearing black, and - deducing incorrectly that she has some illness - he is determined to "wring the truth" out of the ship's doctor (368). Power again supersedes understanding, as it does when he next "unbuttoned his overcoat and took out his bulging pocket-book" (370). When they reach the hotel together, Mansfield stresses the link between dress and temperament by focusing on several items of clothing separately. Hammond "flung his hat on to the huge bed and went towards her" (370). An interruption stops him, and another, the satisfaction he is seeking being repeatedly delayed. Then Hammond "paced up and down the room, tearing off his gloves, tearing off his scarf. Finally he flung his overcoat on to the bedside" (370). Rather than opening himself to her by these actions, he demonstrates the aggressive violence of his impetuosity: a sensibility ruled by childishness, not innocence; by selfishness, not empathetic love. When he invites Janey to "sit on my knee before the fire" (371), and she replies, "Til just unpin my hat'" (371), it still seems as though communications might open between them, and indeed that is the moment at which she finds the children's letters, puts them in her blouse, kisses him, embraces him, lies down beside him, and shortly tells him the story of the stranger who has died. He, who might have responded with sympathy or caress at this point, goes cold instead, and can see only the paraphernalia of constraint: "There was the great blind bed, with his coat flung across it like some headless man saying his prayers" (375). The inference is clear: the protective covering is headless, impotent against time, tide, and lack of self-esteem. Author of his own failure, John Hammond still cannot see why he cannot see; and Janey, in whose breast he hides his face and whom he enfolds at the end, consoles when she might have been consoled, without any further expectation, it seems, of being understood. The story at the heart of this narrative, in other words, the one that asks to be listened to, is Janey's; the story that frames it is John's, and as he cannot listen to what she says any more clearly than he sees her, her real story - the one she tells, as distinct from the one he hears - never reaches him. That it reaches the reader, however, is due in

137 Overturns: Stories of Deferral

part to the strategies Mansfield uses both to set it up and to critique the power that the frame might be conventionally presumed to possess. For example, the opening paragraph serves multiple functions: it sets the scene; it introduces some of the story's recurrent images; it establishes the motif of postponement (instead of landing directly, the steamer lies for an unexpectedly long time offshore); it uses free indirect discourse to convey John's limited perspective, and it reveals his assumptions about class and gender. It does not ask to be taken solely at face value: It seemed to the little crowd on the wharf that she was never going to move again. There she lay, immense, motionless on the grey crinkled water, a loop of smoke above her, an immense flock of gulls screaming and diving after the galley droppings at the stern. You could just see little couples parading - little flies walking up and down the dish on the grey crinkled tablecloth. Other flies clustered and swarmed at the edge. Now there was a gleam of white on the lower deck - the cook's apron or the stewardess perhaps. Now a tiny black spider raced up the ladder on to the bridge. (363-4)

"It seemed": and appearances recurrently lie. It is tempting to read words like "loop," "flock," and "gulls," as well as "couples," for their metaphoric overtones, and while to do so might be to overread the text, it is clear that the "couples parading" through a metaphorically domesticated environment (the boat on the crinkled water turns into a dish on a crinkled tablecloth) at once conveys John's expectations about married behaviour and anticipates the action that Janey's narrative will overturn. The gendering of the ship, moreover (however conventional this idiom was at the time the story was written), further emphasizes here John's distance from Janey and from Janey's world of experience. While all initially seems still (and "grey"), words such as "edge" and "bridge" - through a technique known as "oversetting": a kind of punning reliance on the effects indirectly heard in, not directly stated by, the diction in context - do hint at the possibility of change, movement, difference. But the insect imagery immediately counters any idea of positive resolution, suggesting instead that the perceiver's desires are unlikely to be fulfilled. For whatever the flies do - parade, cluster, swarm - it is the spider that races to the bridge. The webbed end of "Something Childish But Very Natural," that is, is already adumbrated as "The Stranger" begins. As much of John's own making here as it was of Henry's in the earlier story, the spider that reweaves the world of male order would trap both women and men alike; to the degree that Janey can hold apart her memory of another way of connecting with

138 Reading for Form

life, she dislocates this order. But one lingering problem is that Janey is as class-conscious as John (she comforts the dying man in the first place because they are both first-class passengers and the stewardess is not - and "he might have wanted to leave a message/' 373). She remains committed also to the received notions of fashion and taste that class and money buy her access to. Because of the experience aboard ship that she has found so extraordinary independence of mind is something she might achieve. Independence of person remains another matter. In some respects the fate of the characters in each of these stories is of less consequence, however, than the fact of the story-telling itself. For what Mansfield has developed here is a narrative mode that takes up the challenge of communicating insights that conventional forms of story-telling had been inclined to defer, delay, silence, or ignore. Not content with merely repeating the past, even parodically or argumentatively rejecting the explicit sequential complications of conventional plotted narrative, and impatient (as an early story, "Being a Truthful Adventure," admirably reveals) with the "guide-book" (102) behaviour of organized, coterie commitments to modernity, Mansfield sought ways to make story implicit in the shaped arrangement of words. Out of mimicry emerged something less direct than argument in its challenge to received fashion, and more instructive about the complex possibilities of narrative choice. In the stories under consideration here, deferral functions formally, as a way to recognize the contingencies that frame silenced lives (particularly, but not always, the lives of women), as a medium of dislocation, therefore, and also as a route through the conventions of dependency to the oblique articulation of alternative and overturned desires.

8 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

In 1913 Katherine Mansfield wrote three sketches for the May, June, and July issues of J.M. Murry's magazine the Blue Review (the only three that ever appeared). She called these sketches "Epilogues" "Epilogue i: Pension Seguin," "Epilogue n," and "Epilogue in: Bains Turcs." Antony Alpers, Mansfield's 1984 editor, says that she "rather wantonly described" the sketches as "epilogues" (Stones, 553), though he goes on to attack Middleton Murry for editing them highhandedly when Murry collected them in 1924, after Mansfield had died, in Something Childish But Very Natural.1 Alpers in particular dismisses Murry's addition of an acute accent to the name "Seguin" and his removal of the word "Epilogue" from each of the three titles, so that in Murry's 1924 text (and in most subsequent anthologies where any of the sketches have reappeared) the respective titles are "Pension Seguin," "Violet," and "Bains Turcs." Alpers also goes on to defend the textual integrity of Mansfield's "originals," quoting from her 19 May 1913 letter to Murry (when Murry had wanted to cut "Epilogue n" by "half a page to make it fit six [printed] pages"). The letter insists: "To my knowledge there aren't any superfluous words: I mean every line of it. I don't 'just ramble on' you know ... - you cant cut it without making an ugly mess somewhere ... I'd rather it wasn't there at all than sitting in the Blue Review with a broken nose and one ear as though it had jumped into an editorial dog fight" (Collected Letters, 1:124). Alpers quotes only an excerpt from the middle of the letter: "I'm a powerful stickler for form in this style of work ... I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid"

140 Reading for Form

(Stories, 553). The irony of this argument is that, even though Alpers restores the 1913 titles (incidentally adding "Violet" as a subtitle to "Epilogue n"), his word "wantonly" suggests that the original titles could themselves be exempted from Mansfield's defence of the stories' form. Far from that being the case, the word "Epilogue" is a precise formal signifier, one that links the three sketches into a discontinuous revelation of the nature of sequence and the reconstitutive value of "second" thoughts. Briefly, "Epilogue i" records the sequence whereby the narrator secures for herself an ostensibly quiet pension. Declaring, with temporary security, "What is there to believe in except appearances" (139), she seeks accommodation in a place where she observes white curtains and innumerable crocheted mats, treating them as material evidence of the landlady's virginity, or at least of virtue and sobriety. Asking if the pension is near any church bells, railway stations, boys' schools, or crowing roosters, and receiving a negative reply, she takes the room for a month - only to discover within a day that she has asked an incomplete series of questions. A neighbour practises the piano most of the day; a baby cries; the multitude of children in the house quarrel at the dining table; and the crocheted mats, icons of solitude, turn out to have been made not by the landlady but by a tenant on another floor. "Epilogue ii" is cast as an event of the second day at the Pension Seguin. The narrator, walking into town, meets up accidentally with her old friend Violet Burton. Apparently emotionally upset, Violet courts the narrator's confidence so that she can explain the romantic escapade that has brought her away from home, and the narrator first bored by what she interprets as theatrical gesture, and then intrigued by the possibility of learning scandal - urges the story on. When Violet's story turns out to be crashingly mundane, scarcely scandalous at all, the narrator's expectations are made clear: she has wanted a story (of a particular kind) to be able to tell again later, and instead acquires nothing except the knowledge of having exposed her own interest in innuendo. "Epilogue in" - which punningly opens: "Third storey - to the left, Madame" (146) - occurs at some indeterminate other time (not directly tied to the previous two sketches), and takes place in a women's Turkish bath. The narrator records the behaviour of a number of other women (particularly three of them) and the conversations they variously have with and about each other, and (in one case) with her. Specifically, a solitary and "short stout little" (148) German woman talks to the German-speaking narrator about two others, both younger and blonde, whom the German woman takes

141 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

to be of suspect morality. (She uses such terms as dreadful, bold, disgusting, hussies, horrible, low, false, 149-50.) After bathing and dressing again to go out, the German woman, having praised her own "good husband and four children" (149-50), continues to be preoccupied with the two "hussies" (now dressed discreetly in blue, one with a bunch of violets, the other with ivory suede gloves), and says "'How do you suppose they can afford clothes like that? ... No, they're enough to make a young girl think twice'" (150). But the narrator sees that the statement, however judgmental in form, expresses not a sense of unassailable superiority but perhaps regret (over why as a young girl she did not think twice) and certainly desire: the "sallow face all mouth and eyes, like the face of a hungry child before a forbidden table" (150). The image of the feeding child is one of several tropes that textually link the three epilogues. It echoes, for example, the image of the crying baby and the noisy dining table in the first sketch, and the narrator's hunger for gossip in the second, as she sits with Violet on a park bench while nursemaids chatter and "genteel babies" (143) bowl hoops nearby. Recurrent images of hats and windows also tie the sketches together. They suggest several kinds of containment and openness, as well as the relation between these two conditions. The nursemaids wear stiff caps, but chatter when they are outdoors like cockatoos. The crocheted mats that lie around inside the pension actually cover more than the narrator sees; the window that lets light stream into her room, moreover, proves at the same time to mark a limit to what she thinks she understands. In addition, the two blonde free spirits in the Turkish bath, who button up before they leave, also put on stylish feathered hats and furs, while the German woman referred to throughout as Mackintosh Cap, because of the restraint she wears inside the bath-house - can scarcely ever change her appearance: leaving, she puts on her head "a terrible bird nest, which Salzburg doubtless called Reise Hut" (150) - a "travel hat," the kind of close-fitting hat that a middle-class woman might wear, as opposed to one with a fashionable wide brim, open to the wind. Several-storey staircases appear in all three sketches also, requiring the narrator to manoeuvre her way from one spatial condition to another. Hinting at processes of transformation, over time as well as in place, these codes (which trope perception) reinforce and make specific the condition of understanding that is implied in the three original titles. They are visual signs of "epilogue." Etymologically, of course, the English word "epilogue" derives from the Greek for "peroration": epi + legein, "to say in addition." In English it refers to a speech appended to a play or to the performer

142 Reading for Form

who delivers it; it also refers to a (usually short) passage that follows the "main" text, often for the sake of commentary or explanation. It is an after-word, or the afterword's speaker. And the use of the word posits the existence of the text it comes after. In Mansfield's case no obvious text immediately precedes any of these three sketches, a gap that is presumably what led Antony Alpers to see the original titles as in some way "wanton" or cavalier. Yet as the brief summaries of the sketches suggest, the Epilogues are each concerned with how second looks can reconstruct the apparent truth of first impressions. As elsewhere, Mansfield asks her readers to read the gaps, and the words that shape them, not for sequential narrative - the conventions of a "main text" and its forms of closure - but for the ramifications of inconsistency. And because Mansfield reads inconsistency in language, language becomes a medium of apprehension and her formal discourse a field of relationships, a site of contesting perceptions and values. The three Epilogues thus interact not simply by recording three moments in, say, a single individual's sojourn at a Swiss spa. They also enact three separate kinds of second sight. "Epilogue i" concerns itself with the illusions created by material objects, "Epilogue n" with the illusions created by words, "Epilogue in" with the illusions created by institutions. Or, speaking more strictly, they concern themselves with the ways that narrators/observers/listeners/readers construct illusions on the basis of material objects, words, and institutions - and then behave as though such illusions constituted a finite limit to reality and possibility. These three demonstrations are cumulative. Through "epilogue" - which has in consequence to be seen as a verbal process, not a static category - the narrating character (and through her point of view, the reader) comes to pierce three barriers or filters to her understanding, or at least to appreciate how such barriers and filters effectively disconnect people from life. That language is the site of contestation is signalled openly in "Epilogue i" when the Seguin family gathers at the dinner table with the tenants and they all are served soup "with vermicelli letters of the alphabet floating in it. These were last straws to the little Seguins' table manners." One child thinks another has "more letters than me"; another complains that a sibling is "taking my letters out with her spoon" (140). Meanwhile two of the adult tenants, a stout pianist and a Russian priest, exchange denials with each other - "'You didn't.' T did.'" (141) - in a direct mirror of repetitive childish argument, and the crying baby "passes whole days banging his little head against the floors and walls" (141). The persons with the power of effective speech, as distinct from the capacity to speak at all, remain the senior

143 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

Seguins. The narrator might write out the narrative, but it is Madame Seguin who has the last word; and with the oppositional force of rhetoric - "But alas, no!" (141) - she removes the last of the narrator's blithe assumptions. What follows is the process of reconsidering or reconstructing what has already been seen and accepted: the narrator is not explicitly named; it is the reader's role to read backwards, but also to read on - into, perhaps, Epilogues n and in. "Epilogue u" further emphasizes that language - perhaps especially in the literary shapes it sometimes takes - is an artifice open to both creative and stereotypical interpretation. Opening with the narrator's ironic account of awaking to sunshine and neighbouring tenants, the sketch imagines "a day in the country with Katherine Tynan" (Katharine Tynan, in all likelihood, the popular and prolific Irish romance writer and social reformer) and then dismisses this illusion as the narrator heads off ostensibly into the presumed realities of town. When Violet Burton suddenly greets her on the street, however, the text shifts abruptly back into the cliches of conventional romance: "the voice faltered and cried my name as though I had been given up for lost times without number; as though I had been drowned in foreign seas, and burnt in American hotel fires, and buried in a hundred lonely graves" (143). The narrator's voice (as opposed to Violet's) remains ironic in this passage, the irony signalled by the series of extravagant and parallel explanations; and the irony (though it may derive more from the voice of retrospection and recall than from that which represents present experience) appears to keep the narrator sufficiently urbane and detached to preserve her objectivity. When Violet's discourse leads her to anticipate scandal, however, the narrator is still drawn into cliche. She reads possible truth through Violet's verbal conventions, magnifying them into a saga that the reality cannot sustain (all that has ever happened, it transpires, is that Violet has enjoyed a single kiss with a man who is engaged to someone else), and the sketch closes in deliberate and self-reflexive anticlimax. Violet's "narrative" - full of gaps and hesitations - proceeds obliquely, through a series of fragmentary phrases, negations, and apparent contradictions, to an ostensibly obvious and finite conclusion: "I came here to forget ... But ... don't let's talk about that. Not yet. I can't explain. Not until I know you all over again ... - not until I am sure you are to be trusted." "And even if it were true ... but no, it can't be true ... Can it? But then ... I don't know."

144 Reading for Form

"It has beaten me. Absolutely - once and for all... Now," said Violet, impressively, "you know what I meant when I said I came here to forget" (144-5).

When the narrator replies, "But I assure you I don't" - thus falling into Violet's rhetorical paradigm (But no) - she ensures that the story will continue; but she does not recognize the degree to which she has been taken in by Violet's stance. Later she even hastens the telling with expressions that signal her increasing desire for continuity: "Go on," "Yes, go on," and "Do go on." When Violet's narrative stops rather than leads to climax and closure, "'Is that all?' I cried. 'You can't mean to say that's all?'" With these questions the narrative control promptly passes to Violet and to the declarative voice that Violet quickly adopts: "What else could there be? What on earth did you expect. How extraordinary you are - staring at me like that" (145-6). The sketch closes with a pathetic fallacy; the inanimate world is given the power to laugh at the absurdity of the narrator's expectations. The force of the word "epilogue" in "Epilogue n" thus works to resist the seductive power of closure - to avoid focusing on Violet as the centre of the story and instead to interrogate the way conventions can make the extravagant and the overwrought seem the inevitable consequences both of narrative form and of everyday living. "Epilogue in" generalizes from this position to some reflections on institutional closure, particularly that which is constructed by a conventional marriage. The "good husband and four [live] children" that the German woman - Mackintosh Cap - declares are her life appear to be precisely what the blonde women lack. She has come to the baths to recuperate after having lost her fifth child; they, however, have presumably come for relaxation or entertainment (certainly they are seen to peel oranges and laugh). The German woman's unhappy recognition of the difference (epitomized by youth and weight and possessions) leads the narrator to ironize about the implications of "railing against the two fresh beauties who had never peeled potatoes nor chosen the right meat" (150), a phrase dismissive of convention but symbolically resonant, angry (perhaps self-reflexively) at the conventional institutional determiners of role and value. By implication the sketch then asks what the narrator's own role is. To the blonde women she is apparently irrelevant, a nonentity; to Mackintosh Cap, however, she is a necessary interlocutor, the one who must listen, ostensibly to understand but in this instance to hear past the surface narrative to the one beneath. The under-story (as with "Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding") tells what the "epilogue" to marriage is; it tells of the consequences of age and use. The German woman has approached the narrator in the first place

145 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

because she "knows" that "you can speak German. I saw it in your face just now. Wasn't that a scandal ...?" (148). To the narrator the conversation is unwelcome, possibly because it promises to be as deeply discommoding as it is superficially tedious; she calls the woman's voice "hideous" (149). The assertion of "scandal," however, echoing the subject of "Epilogue n," again insists on itself being deconstructed, something that the sketch quickly does through the reiteration of particular phrases in the German woman's monologues: "Those two ... Do you know who they are? ... They're not respectable women - you can tell at a glance. At least I can, any married woman can. They're nothing ... you know ... You never know, women like that ... I know ..." (149). The phrases, focusing on who or what is or can be "known," couple sexual politics with the social politics of domesticity; at once they reaffirm the propriety of socially approved security and reveal the woman's insecure desire - "all mouth and eyes" (150) - for freedom from her social constraints. She hungers for independence, youth, beauty, wealth; that she does not see that these, too, are socially constructed categories simply intensifies her dislocation. "You can tell," she has said to the narrator, with one intonation in mind; but it almost reads like the granting of narrative permission as well. It is in the fiction - the "epilogue" - that the nationality or artifice, of the conventional marriage/closure plot can be made clear. And it is in the broken fiction, likewise, that her own predicament can be revealed as consequential. The three "Epilogues," in short, constitute strategies for revealing consequence, the general condition of "what follows." Within each of the sketches separate narratives occur, but in each case the process of narration makes clear the difference between linear story and the rhetoric of this general condition of understanding. Mansfield's titles for the sketches offer overt guides to this rhetoric, for they emphasize that the process of reading literary forms depends on the reader's receptivity to them. The history of the reception (and retitling) of the sketches ironically reveals how sharp her insight was. Readers' desire for plot and for an obvious theme or social point long took precedence over an appreciation of the kind of commentary that was implicit in rhetorical form. That Mansfield characteristically resisted "plot" does not, of course, mean that she eschewed social observation. The Epilogues, like others of her sketches, speak directly to relations between social opportunity and social constructions of gender; but they also speak about discourse, and so (to some degree self-reflexively) they elucidate further the formal practice of Modernist fiction. After, and also Before: Mansfield's fictions - just as, in the Epilogues, they consider the rhetoric of consequence - sometimes relatedly fasten

146 Reading for Form

on the condition of anteriority. The late stories of childhood ("The Doll's House," for example) furnish the most consistent examples of this interest, but none of them more clearly than "Prelude," which even by its title signs its preoccupation with that which precedes. The word "prelude" is, of course, a musical term for one kind of composition that ordinarily precedes another kind - a preliminary piece before a fugue, say, or a suite or an opera, though some composers turned it into a form in its own right. Mansfield's extensive musical knowledge made works by such composers as Chopin (writing preludes between 1836 and 1841) and likely Debussy (publishing his preludes between 1910 and 1913) familiar to her. In a letter as early as 1908 she urged her sister Vera to read Hans Andersen's fairy tale "The Fir Tree," saying: "The last sentence is so astonishingly Chopin I read it over and over - and the simple unearthly words flood your soul like the dying phrase of a Majorca nocturne" (Collected Letters, 1:48; the editors of this volume quote the sentence in a footnote: "Past and gone, past and gone! - it's the same with all stories," 49). Mansfield's recurrent reliance on prose rhythm as an agent of meaning, moreover, suggests that the technique of the musical prelude contributes to what her story called "Prelude" has to say. (She produced "Prelude" in 1917, for publication by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, revising and truncating a 1915-16 manuscript story she had first called "The Aloe.") The second title, that is, openly invites the reader to listen for hints of that which is (or was) yet to come, and to read recurrent motifs - images, situations, individual words - for their power to echo and reconfigure whatever has come before. The Burnell family stories ("Prelude," "At the Bay," "The Doll's House") have often been read for their biographical interest,2 and a number of the details of Mansfield's life so parallel the names and circumstances surrounding the character called Kezia Burnell that making this link is almost inevitable. It is also misleading, to the degree that it shifts attention away from the text, and the condition that the text evokes, to a kind of critical diversion called Spot the Source. A more productive critical approach would be to recognize that, in reading a fiction, the "reality" of the text takes precedence over the "reality" of the life with which it is too often and too readily identified. For a writer to investigate the "condition" of anteriority might well derive from reflections on the satisfactoriness or unsatisfactoriness of the present time; such an inquiry might well represent an attempt to revisit a time gone by and so uncover the experiences or events that have led to a current joy or current plight, and this desire might well have informed Mansfield's late fictional return to the childhood settings of her native New Zealand. (Given this possibility, William Wordsworth's poem "The Prelude" supplies

147 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

another conceivable antecedent and parallel; begun in 1798, and first published posthumously in 1850 - the title supplied by his widow - "The Prelude" returns to the poet's childhood, then traces his life, focusing on what, later in life, he has reconstructed as significant incidents in it; the whole work, in some sense, elucidates the familiar line in his 1807 poem "My Heart Leaps Up": "The Child is father of the Man.") The techniques of Mansfield's writing, however, shift the focus of these later stories from some putative need to explain the present to an evocation of the character or condition of what it feels like, what it means, to experience the world prior to change. But yet another factor intervenes in this inquiry. The word "prelude" derives etymologically from the Latin prae + ludere, "to play before." Play: the word suggests not just musical performance but also the frolicsome character of games. Games, however, are not as socially unrestricted as a word such as "playtime" invites one to believe, and in Mansfield's "Prelude" the preoccupation with gameplaying leads the reader from a kind of cosy nostalgia about an innocent past into a recognition that cosy innocence - the hypothesized, idealized "condition of anteriority" - is at once both irretrievable for individual persons and in any event inconceivable inside a social context. The predicate, as it were - constructed as the agents of context and time - effectively takes priority over any hypothesis about an initiating, perhaps "pure" subjectivity as soon as the story begins. "Before" is not entirely beyond imagination, but it is, the story suggests, essentially beyond reach. Mansfield opens the story with a sentence that reads: "There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy" (223). The Burnell family is moving from a house in town to one in more rural surroundings that Stanley, the father, has got "dirt cheap" (233), and the buggy is not only full already with Pat, the driver, and at least three passengers - Linda, the pregnant mother of the family; her eldest daughter Isabel; and her own mother Mrs Fairfield (Linda's sister Beryl and the servant girl Alice show up at the new house, and so are travelling separately, at the house already, or, unnamed, also in the buggy) - but also piled high with what Linda calls "absolute necessities" (223) - the baggage, in other words, from the previous house, from "before." The new house will not be free of it, whatever happens. While the first sentence, with its categorical exaggeration ("not an inch of room"), could be read simply as the voice of an omniscient narrator (a voice that the story often, subsequently, calls upon), the context here suggests that the third-person narration, by means of free indirect discourse, is being used at this point to convey Linda's perspective, a "voice trembling with fatigue and excitement"

148 Reading for Form

(223) - a voice, in other words, at once of exhaustion and expectation, after and before, hand in hand. Before the younger daughters, Lottie and Kezia, can even embark for the new house, in consequence, they are "cast ... off" (223), left behind with their neighbour Mrs Samuel Josephs until the drayman can take them later in the day. For them (and for others as well) the condition of before is already compromised; it is constrained by other people's after and repeatedly shaped according to other people's expectations. It is subject from the outset, that is, to the exigencies of time and the seeming capriciousness of play. Constantly shifting its perspective in person as well as time (Linda, Beryl, and Kezia are given the greater portion of the narrative, but the perspectives of Pat, Alice, Stanley, Mrs Fairfield, and others also find expression at different moments), the story repeatedly invokes a fluid sense of what differentiates "now" from "then" (time present, time past, time present-in-the-past, time next-tohappen).3 Yet it progresses in a basically linear, if interrupted, fashion. Divided into twelve numbered sections (with sections iv and vn internally subdivided), the story depicts moments in the lives of the Burnells from the moment the buggy is first full to a time, apparently four days later, when Kezia calls Beryl down to lunch and stays behind in Beryl's room to play at her dressing table with a powderpuff and a jar of face cream. The discreteness of the episodes, with their frequent departure into memory, dream, and make-believe, suggests a fragmentation of time; an insistently sequential overall chronology nevertheless suggests the continuities that connections among the episodes transform into revelatory narrative. Together these two technical strategies further reiterate the difficulty in isolating a time "before" a time when social conventions had already been set. Each new episode, each new day, each new narrative section promises a new beginning; every time the episode gets underway, however, some sort of game happens. And the games the characters play are not innocent of intent. They are, as much as anything, exercises in differing forms of power; they are the agencies, in other words, occasionally of resistance, but always of social training. To tabulate events in each of the numbered sections is to make explicit the connection that "Prelude" repeatedly draws between perception and power, action and play: i. The buggy leaves Lottie and Kezia behind with the Samuel Josephs, for tea.

i. The Josephs children offer Kezia the option of strawberries and cream, and when Kezia accepts, they laugh at having taken her in.

149 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude" ii. After tea, Kezia wanders back to her old house and looks for mementoes, until the storeman with the dray comes for her and Lottie.

n. Kezia looks at the world through the coloured glass of the house windows, but the game leads to her imagining a terrifying "IT" (226) pursuing her.

in. Lottie and Kezia reach the new house in the dark; Mrs Fairfield greets them with the lamp; Linda has a headache; Beryl wants the lamp put down; Stanley orders everyone about and suspects Beryl is rebuking him.

in. Lottie tells the drayman of her dreams of parrots and other "rushing animals" whose "heads swell e-normous" (228); the hall wallpaper in the new house is filled with rushing parrots; Stanley asks Beryl if she expected him to "rush away from the office" (230); Isabel boasts to her sisters of having eaten a whole chop, and then tattle-tales on Kezia drinking from Beryl's cup.

iv. All the characters go to bed.

iv. Kezia plays at being Indians; Kezia rebukes Lottie for saying her prayers in bed; Beryl imagines herself to be beautiful, with a rich lover who is fascinated by her; Stanley exults in having got the new house for a low price; night birds in the garden chatter "Ha-ha-ha" (232).

v. The dawn birds begin to sing; Linda dreams of a tiny bird that her father gives her, which grows bigger until it turns into a baby with a "gaping bird-mouth" (233); Stanley gets dressed and ready to leave for the office; the children go out to play, Kezia by herself; Linda traces a wallpaper poppy and, imagining she can feel its hairy stem (235), continues thinking about her dream.

v. Linda's father, in her dream, laughs; Stanley shows off by doing exercises; Isabel shows off by arranging for Lottie to walk with her as she wheels her "neat pramload of prim dolls" (234); Linda imagines that things come alive, that the room is filled with "THEY" (235), and that the silence is like a web.

150 Reading for Form vi. Mrs Fairfield washes the breakfast dishes and recalls her earlier life as a young mother in Tasmania; Beryl hangs paintings and photographs; Mrs Fairfield dusts them and makes tea for Linda; Kezia wanders in the garden, finding it to have an ordered side and a "frightening" side, and discovers, growing there, "pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick stalks" (239), and numerous others flowers, including an aloe.

vi. Beryl complains that the Chinese paintings are "hideous" (236) and finds places to hang the office photographs so that they will not readily be seen; Kezia imagines creating small surprises for her grandmother, out of the garden leaves and flowers.

vn. On his way home from the office Stanley buys oysters, cherries, and a pineapple; he eats the cherries and gives Linda the oysters and the pineapple; the children go to bed; Linda sits beside Stanley, thinks there will be a moon that night, and shivers; Beryl plays the guitar, until Alice interrupts, complaining about having had "'a job with that oving'" and saying "'I've got to come in and lay'" (244).

vn. Stanley imagines what a figure he will cut at church; Beryl, restless, looks in the mirror and imagines herself to be suffering and adorable.

vin. The children are outside; their cousins, Pip and Rags Trout, arrive, with their mongrel dog Snooker, to play with them.

vin. The girls play at being adults; Pip pretends that Snooker is a hunting dog; Isabel tries to control what game they play together; Rags likes to play with dolls; Snooker shivers miserably and trails after the children.

ix. Pat coaxes the children to come with him, beyond the fence palings and across a bridge, to the fringe of the paddocks, to watch him chop the head off a duck; they react variously, with fright, fascination, and (in Kezia's case) horror.

ix. Kezia is distracted by the fact that Pat wears earrings; she plays with them and "huskily" (249) asks if they come on and off.

151 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude" x. Alice prepares tea; she reads from a book about dreams, discovers that dreams of spiders are good, suggesting money and "an easy confinement" (250), but that "care should be taken in sixth month to avoid eating of probable present of shell fish" (250); after Beryl interrupts her, she complains to herself about Beryl.

x. Beryl devises supercilious ways to put Alice down; Alice, to herself, devises comforting comebacks.

xi. At dinner they eat the duck, and afterwards sit in the drawingroom; Linda and her mother go out in the moonlight to look at the budding aloe.

xi. Beryl and Stanley play crib; she lets him win; Linda muses about a Newfoundland dog that disconcertingly rushes at her, which leads her to think of Stanley and children; Mrs Fairfield thinks of making jam.

xn. Beryl, in her room, writes a letter to her friend Nan Pym, complaining about being "buried" (256) in the country; Kezia calls her for lunch; Beryl is to eat with Stanley and a man friend from his office; Kezia stays for a while, and then - "far too quickly and airily" (259) - tiptoes away.

xn. Beryl's letter is, she acknowledges herself, pretentious and contrived; Kezia plays with the objects on Beryl's dressing table until one of them falls.

To read the left-hand column is to follow the narrative sequence on which the story hangs; but to read the right-hand column is to realize how often the characters are at play and to recognize how "Prelude" uses the paradigms of play to comment on contrivance and the limits of innocent beginnings. Play, of course, takes several forms, each vying for precedence in the story: child's play, sexual play, hierarchical gamesmanship (involving classed, gendered, and ethnically closed categories of priority and value), linguistic play, imaginative play (dreams of fear, dreams of salutation), surprises, cruel jokes, board games, and laughter. It is not necessary to spell out in detail how the social games work: Stanley's assumptions about Pat's class difference, and Beryl's about Alice's, supply ready examples of hierarchical toying with other people's feelings; the tensions between Stanley and Linda,

152 Reading for Form

Beryl and Stanley, Pip and Isabel derive from presumptions about both sexuality (whether expressed, repressed, or nascent) and the authority attributed (or not attributed) to gender; the dismissal of things "Chinese" and the romanticizing of the "tomahawk" (247) and "Indian brave" (230) illustrate the ethnic boundaries of the time; and the competition between Isabel and her younger sisters turns sibling rivalry into a mimicry of adult tugs-of-territoriality. Metaphorically, though clearly Kezia does use Beryl's things - her powder, her face cream - it is the power-seeking Isabel who, as it were, drinks most desperately and ambitiously "from Beryl's cup." Section vin of the story, focusing entirely on the children at play, emphasizes the centrality of mimicry in this story. As the section opens, the three girls are playing at being Ladies-with-Servants and have cast each other as "Mrs Jones," "Mrs Smith," and "Gwen" two with status-marking titles, one without, about whom the other two quarrel: should she be "introduced" to a Visiting Lady or not? What do the rules of propriety dictate? When the Trout boys arrive, this game of Visiting-and-Taking-Tea turns into a different kind of competition. Pip wants to draw attention to himself, boasting (not unlike Stanley in this respect) about his athletic accomplishments; Isabel wants to play Hospitals ("I will be the nurse and Pip can be the doctor and you and Lottie and Rags can be the sick people," 246) and then Ladies ("Pip can be the father and you can be all our dear little children," 247), salvaging the roles that would continue to give her at least some degree of precedence in male company. Rags, however, finds it impossible to reconfirm Pip's vaunted athleticism absolutely; Lottie resists the game of Hospitals because she got hurt the last time they played it; and Kezia forthrightly rejects the game of Ladies - rejects, that is, its adherence to a preset version of order and possibility ("You always make us go to church hand in hand and come home and go to bed," 247). The childhood play, clearly, is not preliminary to adult social games; it already participates in them, even trains the children to accept (or, more rarely, to resist) the roles that convention would assign them. Nor, significantly, is their play preliminary to sexuality. The games of Hospitals and Ladies fairly directly hint at childhood sexual curiosity. The initial game of Ladies-with-Servants treats the subject more comically, because apparently more naively - when "Mrs Jones" (who claims Queen Victoria as her godmother) asks "Mrs Smith" if she has brought her children visiting with her, Mrs Smith replies: "Yes. I've brought both my twins. I have had another baby since I saw you last, but she came so suddenly that I haven't had time to make her any clothes, yet. So I left her" (244). But this statement is not, textually,

153 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

unsophisticated. The reader can hear the way it resonates with the opening of the story, for example, the way it indirectly observes (and resents?) Linda's current pregnancy, and the way it conveys the opening disappointment at having been left behind, cast out of the buggy that conveyed the others, the elders, to the new home. Similarly, when Pip, the elder of the two boys, brags of being able to "walk round the monkey tree on my head," the metaphor is implicitly, if obliquely, sexual. When Kezia challenges him to try it, there and then, on the porch, he refuses, saying, "You have to do it on something soft. Because if you give a jerk and fall over, something in your neck goes click, and it breaks off. Dad told me" (246). A different kind of Victorian proscription seems implied. Section ix picks up on the ramifications of this scene, for Pat, the handyman, almost immediately takes the children off (through the gate in the paling fence, across the bridge, to the fringe of the paddocks, to where the fowls have strayed) so that they can watch him chop off the duck's head. There is no reason to presume that the duck is not a duck and that it is necessary to interpret this passage as an exhibitionist act, symbolic or otherwise; but given the sexual undercurrents of the rest of the narrative, the scene is clearly a rite of passage of some sort for all the children, an event that contributes to their ongoing education in birth, death, consumption, revival, and other obscure secrets of adult activity.4 Section ix closes with Kezia first wanting things as they had been before, but she is then distracted by what at the time were signs of sexual ambiguity: Pat's earrings. The children cross several boundaries to acquire this knowledge, and do so without requesting parental permission. Already they are without the innocence with which nostalgia would imbue them. The entire scene, moreover, appears in the context of the wild garden, with its "monthly roses," and Beryl's impassioned moonlit longing, and the household desires, which are at once less ambiguous and less oblique: Stanley's impulse to buy oysters (240), for example, and Alice's concern for her "oving" (244), Mrs. Fairfield's rhubarb beds (236), and even Kezia's own dream of rushing animals with swelling heads, which she recounts to the storeman on the dray while touching his "hairy" sleeve (228). Linda's response to the swelling aloe is perhaps most direct of all, reaffirmed by her reaction to Stanley and the rushing dog, and to the hairy poppy stalks, and to the stroked bird that swells, in her dream of what her father has shown her, with implications that resonate through the lives of all the characters in the story (Pat's "coat and trousers" droop "like a hanged man" when he sleeps, for example, and his "bird-cage" (232), emblematically, is empty) - implications of desire, confusion, insecurity, and abuse.

154 Reading for Form

The story further makes clear that sexuality is linked not just with desire and fear but also with various kinds of constraint, from repression to enclosure. The use of the word "confinement" (250) to refer to childbirth makes the connection explicit, but the diction of the story elsewhere reiterates the overlap between social and sexual politics.5 When Beryl is asked what she thinks of the house (to the children it has already seemed like a "sleeping beast," 228), she answers that it "feels very far away from everything" (meaning, in her idiom, visitors, suitors, men, 237). She further emphasizes the restrictedness of isolation when she writes to Nan Pym that she feels "buried" (256) in a house that Stanley has bought (she quotes him, she says) "'lock, stock and barrel'" (255). This is a house where Stanley rattles and raises the Venetian blinds before Linda is even awake (233), where Beryl thinks she will "rot" (238) and Linda has a headache (228), where the garden is a "tangle" (239) and the tree roots make designs that, to Kezia, look like the tracks of fowls' feet (239), an image that the duck scene extends from the external world to the inchoate origins ("roots," in another sense) of emotional arousal. Even fashion and interior design repeat the association between appearance and social control. While Beryl is casually dismissive of the pictures Stanley wants hung in the new house, she "spitefully" says, "I suppose he thinks the frames might fetch something some day or other" (237). So does she, it seems. Mrs Fairfield merely dusts the frames, which Beryl finds infuriatingly "deliberate": "It was old age, she supposed, loftily" (237). But she herself wears a cinch belt to look attractive (257); she insists that doilies be placed under the tea-plates to avoid looking "common" (251); and while she knows that she preens falsely and is "playing the same old game" (258) when she writes to Nan Pym, she none the less continues doing so. She continues acting the part, that is, to which she feels she has been assigned: that of tennis partner, cribbage partner. Beryl is "a good player, too" (241), Stanley admits, planning a weekend tennis game for his own enjoyment. Though Stanley thinks he is in control here, that he is the one who does the framing in this world, Beryl lets him win when they play crib; she even deliberately flirts, letting her pansies drop on top of the competing cribbage pegs - "'What a shame,' said she ... 'Just as they had a chance to fly into each other's arms'" (253) - ingratiating herself against the future. ("T've two kings,' said Stanley. 'Any good?' 'Quite good,' said Beryl," 253.) Stanley often suspects he's being got at by Beryl, and he's desperate for Linda's love, but he never seems to recognize his own limitations or the degree to which his will to control is what isolates him from others. Indeed, he sometimes even insists

155 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

on isolation, thinking it elevates him. Though he considers sharing with Pat the cherries he buys on the way home, for example, he resists doing so lest it imply equality between them, and he puts a cherry cluster in his buttonhole instead; and when he thinks of hiring a church pew for the family, he decides he wants to put a "neat brassedged card on the corner" (241) - a frame, as it were, presumably to display to others the stature he claims to possess by right. His sense of the world - and of power in the world - is spatial. This is the world that Kezia lands in; she is ready to be different - for the women in the story, the most personal dimensions of experience are temporal, not spatial - but like the women before her, she is already conditioned by the politics of male space. The imagery of entrapment that touches the lives of Linda and Beryl - an imagery of spiderweb and pyrotropic moth as well as of restriction and enclosure - recurs in Kezia's life through a series of references to boxes and buttons. As the story opens, she and Lottie are displaced by the "hold-alls, bags and boxes," for example, and their coats are fastened with "brass anchor buttons" (223); even at the beginning they are already marginalized, conventionally contained. When Kezia then leaves the Samuel Josephs to look around in the old house (where the Venetian blinds are down, but not quite closed, 225), the remnants of the past that she finds to take with her as mementoes thus function metaphorically: some beads, a needle, a pillbox, and a stay-button. She is not automatically free from psychosexual and social restriction just because she is young, and her subsequent ventures into the garden of the new house only intensify this understanding. It is a "high box border" that she notices there, "and the paths had box edges" (238, the term "box" here referring to the hard-wooded Buxus sempervirens); and when she sits down "on one of the box borders," she does not find the position permanently comfortable. "By pressing hard at first it made a nice seat. But how dusty it was inside!" (239) - like the frames around the outside of Stanley's pictures, in fact. While Kezia can still think of a matchbox as a container for a surprise to give to her grandmother (239) - a leaf, a violet, some lavender, and a carnation petal (just as she could think of the leftover pillbox as a container for a bird's egg, 226): fragments of nature, metaphoric glimpses of the future - the boxing of the future already limits it. The worlds of the other characters reiterate this sense of restriction. Alice (who honks in her sleep, like a duck, 232, 250) is afraid of sleeping next to a box of matches lest she bite the ends off; it is a "box" (240) that the buggy driver sits on when driving people back and forth to the new house; it is a "box ottoman" that Linda sits on, after she shivers, "strangely discovered in a

156 Reading for Form

flood of cold light" (243), and moves back from the window to stay beside Stanley. Adulthood, analysed, seems only to promise the fulfilment of the restrictions to which by class and gender these characters are born. If anteriority is unattainable, if it is impossible to get back to a state of personal wholeness - an implicitly spatial conception - that is presumed to have existed before a hierarchical society marked, shaped, and confined it, then the "prelude" is, as it were, already over even as it begins. Time is rhythmic, not just linear, and life, ongoing, is a discourse in epilogue.6 Mansfield approaches this intellectual conclusion by putting a particular rhetorical strategy to work on at least six occasions in the story, a strategy that invokes an adverbial sense of "not yet." In the first four instances it appears that the condition of "before" might still be achieved: 1. At the end of the first section, after Kezia has been fooled by the nonchoice the Josephs offer her, a tear begins to drip down her cheek, but "she caught it with a neat little whisk of her tongue and ate it before any of them had seen" (225). 2. In the fifth section Linda, awaking from dream, "seemed to be listening with her wide open watchful eyes, waiting for someone to come who just did not come, watching for something to happen that just did not happen" (235)3. Also in section v, Mrs Fair field urges Linda to go into the garden to look after the children, but she demurs, saying that Isabel is "much more grown up than any of us"; to her mother's reply ("but Kezia is not"), Linda utters the breezy, though sexually loaded remark, "Oh, Kezia has been tossed by a bull hours ago," and promptly "winds herself up in her shawl again" - but once again the text refuses this conclusion, and takes the rhetorical turn "But no": although Kezia has seen a bull, she does not find it friendly, and she walks "away back" (238). 4. In section vm "Mrs Smith" speaks of the baby who comes so suddenly that no clothes are yet made for her (244).

The fifth example of this structure, however, makes clear that even in these previous instances the conception of a future that has not yet happened remains contingent on whatever has happened in the past. Kezia cries at the Josephs' table because she has been deceived; Linda waits because she is pregnant; Kezia is watching the bull through the paling between the tennis lawn and the paddock, and when she walks back she is already in the tangled garden; and for its part, the unclad Smith baby is an invention outside the rules of nature. The fifth example occurs when Beryl makes Alice "feel low,"

157 After and Before: The Epilogues and "Prelude"

and Alice wants to respond but does not quite dare openly to do so: "Alice was a mild creature in reality, but she had the most marvellous retorts ready for questions that she knew would never be put to her" (250). In other words, that which follows appears already to precede (and therefore preclude) the closure to which it would give rise; and that which precedes is devised as an alternative whose reality is only ever alive in the language of the imagination. Hence, when "Prelude" closes with the sixth example of this rhetorical technique, the reader is prepared for the logical spin it puts on sequence, the difference it draws between the seeming intransigence of events and the games of perception that work their own kind of power. At the end of the story Kezia enters Beryl's room and stays to play at the dressing table. There she unscrews a little pot of cream, sniffs it, and, childishly, balances the lid of the cream jar on one ear of her stuffed calico cat. And then: "The calico cat was so overcome by the sight that it toppled over backwards and bumped and bumped on to the floor. And the top of the cream jar flew through the air and rolled like a penny in a round on the linoleum - and did not break" (258-9). "But," the text continues, "for Kezia it had broken the moment it flew through the air, and she picked it up, hot all over, and put it back on the dressing table" - "far too quickly and airily" tiptoeing away. "Lid. Lid - lid - lid - lid - ," Pat had called to the ducks (248) to get them to come to be fed and then axed. The cream jar has a "top," not a "lid," but it echoes the earlier word nevertheless. (Alice's kettle has a "lid," and it rattles in the steam, and the blind taps for no apparent reason at the window, at the same time as the clock ticks, "slow and deliberate" - deliberate: the word Beryl uses against her mother - "like the click of an old woman's knitting needle," 250.) Near the beginning of the story Kezia finds a needle in the old house, to keep as a treasure. She does not know that it is Time she holds, or Time that holds her. At the end she is standing on her toes, poised between a past that never was and a future that she has already imagined into fixity.7 "Not yet" is the language of time, the speaker trying to preserve the illusion of "before" so that there will be an "after" to follow; but it is also the language of desperate hope against the knowledge that - at least so long as society educates itself to accept a set of restrictive codes "after" and "before" are one.

9 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"

In this last chapter I turn in detail to Mansfield's story "The Escape," partly because it has been repeatedly ignored/ and partly because a close reading of the story reveals so much about how Mansfield uses narrative form. At first "The Escape" seems deceptively simple, with what looks like a conventional beginning, middle, and end, but the "scalene design" of conventional short story theory is misleading here, for with this story the reader has constantly to adjust, to interpret anew what has just been read. The ending, moreover, is ambivalent, throwing into question everything that has seemed obvious on first reading, including the personality of the characters and the course of the narrative. But such an ending should not be a total surprise, for "adjustment" has been built into the form of "The Escape" from the beginning. The story asks readers to recognize the deceptiveness of absolutes and at the same time the power of illusion. The process of reading asks readers to interpret how the forms of deception and adjustment connect with the events in the narrative. Thematically, this story focuses on the tense relationships between men and women. Technically, it dramatizes how these relationships repeatedly surface in language and in control over conventional systems of social authority. By concentrating first upon technique, I examine ways in which form in this story constructs, and then reconstructs, the character of events and the dimensions of personal relations. I then go on to consider some of the ramifications of these formal patterns, particularly as they bear upon an interpretation of the ending, and hence upon a fuller appreciation of the text.

159 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"

"The Escape" is a story with a limited known history. It first appeared in the Athenaeum on 9 July 1920, and it was used (Antony Alpers observes) "as a late addition to Bliss and Other Stories" (Stories, 563) - it is the concluding story in this volume, which appeared in December that year. Alpers adds: "No MS is known." The exact date of composition seems also uncertain - Alpers leaves it out of his chronology - but there is evidence in the text and in Mansfield's journal that suggests it was written close to the time of publication.2 The setting, for one thing, suggests Mediterranean France, where Mansfield lived in early 1918, the year of her marriage to Middleton Murry. The story was presumably written after that time - possibly in 1919 (a year in which Mansfield completed almost no stories) or, more likely, as Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr argue,3 in Hampstead in 1920. Possibly it was written in Ospedaletti or Menton, to which Mansfield went in September 1919 seeking a sunshine cure for her tuberculosis,4 and where she remained through the spring of 1920. Motif and technique in the story also link it with others of this period. A story involving marriage, its focus on the man as well as the woman, "The Escape" can be compared to "Je ne parle pas franc,ais" (1918), to "The Man Without a Temperament" (designed in January 1920 and completed in Ospedaletti), to "Marriage a la Mode" (1921), and, in a kind of inverse way, to "Mr and Mrs Dove" (1921). A central image of a tree in a closed garden - an image of transcendent or epiphanic illumination - also suggests connections with "Bliss," which had been completed in southern France in early 1918.5 Noting the ambivalent ending, Alpers (563) suggests a direct formal link between "The Escape" and the story called "Revelations," which immediately precedes it in Bliss and Other Stories and had also been published in the Athenaeum in 1920 (on June 11). Like "Revelations," "The Escape" makes use of a contrast between a desire for freedom and a commitment to enclosure or safety, a tension that takes figurative form in tropes and images of fashion, appearance, and travel. Such comparisons suggest the frame of mind in which these stories were composed. They only hint, however, at the particularities of text. The story tells of a man and a woman (both unnamed) who have missed the train that will take them away from where they are. It begins - and for most of the narrative continues - inside the woman's perspective. She blames her husband for all mistakes, difficulties, and failures with which she feels she has to contend. As the story continues, it details their quarrels, or their suppressed quarrels, or at least her inner quarrels with him, all the while a driver with an

160 Reading for Form

open carriage is taking them over a hill from one bay to another to catch another train. After an abrupt stop along the way, which is separately perceived by the husband and the wife and which affects them differently the story even more abruptly shifts time and place, and ends aboard the second train. The wife (who speaks both English and French) is in a compartment with another couple - a man, who speaks some English, and his wife, who appears to speak French only. Meanwhile the husband stands in the corridor, silent, just outside the open door. The "escape" of the title can refer to their simple (or complicated, depending on one's point of view) process of departure. It can also refer to each main character's separation from the past, to their different techniques for removing the self from (or denying) the present, and to their separate flights from themselves and from each other. Such escapes are worked out in part thematically in so far as the reader is openly advised of the theme of responsibility and is sometimes told directly of changes and of failures to change. But for both the reader and the characters these escapes seem problematic. The characters are travellers, in transit. But while movement would seem readily to imply change, mere travel sometimes changes little except place. Contrarily sometimes a declaration of changelessness in the story has to be queried, as when the wife declares that her husband never alters and never learns; this judgment has first of all to be heard as her assertion - it declares a perspective, not an absolute, and may be incomplete. Sometimes, further, an image implies change, as when the wind blows, although sometimes change occurs - or seems to occur - in the still moment in the midst of movement rather than in movement itself. (That is one apparent function of the copper-coloured tree in the story, which in this case the husband sees, not the wife.) But seems is as important a word here as change. In many ways the story is more fundamentally concerned with the forms of escapzsra than with the fact of escape. It is concerned with illusion - that is, with people's resistance to the things that go by the names of "fact" and "logic," with their reluctance to escape self and embrace change (despite their declared longing to do so), and with their occasional refusal even to recognize when a real opportunity to escape arises. This thematic dimension of "The Escape," moreover, also shows in the story's narrative syntax. The story sets up these propositions in its opening paragraph: It was his fault, wholly and solely his fault, that they had missed the train. What if the idiotic hotel people had refused to produce the bill? Wasn't that simply because he hadn't impressed upon the waiter at lunch that they must

161 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape" have it by two o'clock? Any other man would have sat there and refused to move until they handed it over. But no! His exquisite belief in human nature had allowed him to get up and expect one of those idiots to bring it to their room ... And then, when the voiture did arrive, while they were still (Oh, Heavens!) waiting for change, why hadn't he seen to the arrangement of the boxes so that they could, at least, have started the moment the money had come? Had he expected her to go outside, to stand under the awning in the heat and point with her parasol? Very amusing picture of English domestic life. Even when the driver had been told how fast he had to drive he had paid no attention whatsoever - just smiled. "Oh," she groaned, "if she'd been a driver she couldn't have stopped smiling herself at the absurd, ridiculous way he was urged to hurry." And she sat back and imitated his voice: "Allez, vite, vite" - and begged the driver's pardon for troubling him .... (346)

This paragraph is remarkably tightly constructed. The point of view is established as the wife's; the illusion of speech is to be read as an internal monologue; speech itself is in a foreign tongue, and in that form is to be heard as an imitation; the train and the parasol are introduced as images; the waiter is contrasted with the driver, both as figures and as roles; the words still and change (and all their intricate echoes) are punningly connected; and the intertwined themes of possibility and security, of the mix of certainties and uncertainties that attends the attribution of responsibility, are revealed by the entire scene. This mix also shows up in the sequence of syntactic structures. Repeatedly, exception succeeds absolute. "If" and "what if" intersplice with "wholly and solely," "paid no attention whatsoever," "any other man," and "couldn't have stopped," so that the paragraph reveals, formally, the contrary desires that have generated the woman's plaintive irascibility: her desire for freedom from other people's tempo and opinion and order, and her desire for other people to construct the world around her. She seeks to be free to live by her own terms, but at the same time she refuses the responsibility for her own actions. Repeatedly she redesigns reality subjectively, one result being that she can attribute blame elsewhere. The first sentence announces this attitude: "It was his fault, wholly and solely his fault, that they had missed the train." To read this sentence carefully is to see how its syntax also articulates the process of reconstruction by which she rewords events, and so reworks experience, until they establish her in the thwarted role that she chooses to play. "It was his fault" is her reading of events, but it is a first draft of the reality she wants; "wholly and solely his fault," she adds, reconstructing in order to allow no possibility of an alternative. By doing so she reinvents what has happened; she also invents a fiction into

162 Reading for Form

which she can escape. Inside it, she can - from a superior vantage point - see herself as a victim of others, a victim of their stupidity (she calls them "idiots") or their indifference, or their calculated malevolence. At the same time she can feel safe from them, for she lays simultaneous claim to being a respectable English matron, secure if not serene in the mantle of her public identity and station. That this restructuring of events, this fictionalizing of her life, is deliberate is apparent from the way the story proceeds. Each time the woman apprehends a new event or occasion, her observation takes a preliminary and then a second form. The whole story, in more than one sense of the word, reveals the effects of re-vision. Sometimes the woman in this story directly alters her initial perception; sometimes (through free indirect discourse) the narrative follows the woman's shift in posture or behaviour. Always the story emphasizes what seems to be a greater clarity of observation, only (by the sheer repetition) to reveal the degree to which the clarity is an illusion wrought by rationalization and desire. The process, that is, is less additive than it is adjustive, designed to reshape more than to represent the dimensions of the real. Several particular techniques are involved, including these five structural patterns: 1 The noun with a calorific modifier following: "And then the station - unforgettable" (347). 2 The intensifying alteration of a verb: "Oh, to care as I care - to feel as I feel" (347); "Her voice had changed. It was shaking now crying now" (347). 3 The repetition of a phrase with the addition of adjectival detail: "the last of the houses, those small straggling houses with bits of broken pots flung among the flower-beds" (347); "he wore a new, a shining new straw hat" (347); "'Oh, the dust/ she breathed, 'the disgusting, revolting dust'" (347). 4 The alteration of number to intensifying effect: "Every five minutes, every two minutes the driver trailed the whip across them" (347). 5 The use of nominal and verbal lists, to account - almost cinematically - for swift sequential perceptions, as for example in describing the rapid change in the movement of the carriage: "They swung down the road that fell into a small valley, skirted the sea coast ... , and then coiled over a gentle ridge on the other side ... The carriage swung down the hill, bumped, shook ... She clutched the sides of the seat, she closed her eyes, and he knew she felt this was happening on purpose; this swinging and bumping, this was all done [first passively, with no agent, and then with an agent

163 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"

named] - and he was responsible for it, somehow [in the absolute] - to spite her because she had asked [and the naming of possibility is once again connected with dislocating consequences] if they couldn't go a little faster" (348-9). In all cases the text insists upon the effects of intensification and reconstruction. By rewording events, the woman validates her version of them and her reaction to them. What she doesn't notice is the degree to which she has involved her husband in her methods of seeing; and what she doesn't accept is the degree to which her claims on independence are limited by her own behaviour. Throughout, she is irritated by dust and smoke - and by her husband - till (in her mind and in the text) he becomes equated with them. He is so restructured by her speech patterns, moreover, that after a while they also become his own, forcing him to reassess himself and then almost to believe in his own diminishment. In her absence, just before his moment of revelation, for instance, "He felt himself, lying there, a hollow man, a parched, withered man, as it were, of ashes" (349). But Mansfield uses this technical device to paradoxical ends. The man's reduction to nothing gives him on the surface a sustaining spiritual power, whereas the woman's verbal claims on absolutes and accurate identifications consign her ultimately to a dependent position. It is not what she seems to want; but it is what she claims, leaving her confined by her willed misapprehensions. The fiction leads him into an experience he thinks of as clarity; her claim on clarity leads her resolutely into fiction. The story does not, however, work out a simple chiasmic exchange. And it is hard, finally, to accept either one of the characters as hero, heroine, underdog, or sole victim. Indeed, Mansfield's analysis seems to have less to do with contrast and balance than with the ambivalence of consequence and desire. This connection requires a consideration of the story's imagery, especially the images of train, tree, parasol, and veil. The parasol is present in the first paragraph, a "pointer" in more ways than one. It is the instrument the woman refuses to use to call up a carriage. It is also the item that permits what she later calls "escape" (349) from her husband - and hence it gives rise to the separation that permits him his metaphysical escape from her. The parasol appears three times in the story: first as the thematic pointer; next in a narrative ploy made out to be the apparent cause of a quarrel between the man and the woman; and third as the agent of climactic separation. Working in all three cases as a sign of the couple's marital tensions, it also functions - in concert with the images

164 Reading for Form

with which it is textually associated - to suggest why the woman finds herself behaving as she does. The scene of their quarrel illustrates how this technique works. The stylistic features of the story's opening suggest that the woman is particularly articulate: the man is the one whose command of language and tone of voice are claimed to be ineffectual. But repeatedly when the woman does speak - that is, when the text puts her speech into quotation marks, signalling statement, though it is not always clear that she speaks aloud - the statements tail off into fragments.6 It is one such occasion - an occasion of one of her ongoing restructurings of reality - that sets the quarrel in motion, though not directly and not immediately: "Oh, to care as I care - to feel as I feel, and never to be saved anything never to know for one moment what it was to ... to ..." Her voice had changed. It was shaking now - crying now. She fumbled with her bag, and produced from its little maw a scented handkerchief. She put up her veil and, as though she were saying for somebody else: "I know, my darling," she pressed the handkerchief to her eyes. (347)

The veil is lifted. And the little bag, with its animal-like open "jaws" (347), displays its contents to the man, who identifies them not simply as toiletries but as the artifacts of her own life and the accoutrements of a god-ruler's afterlife: The little bag, with its shiny, silvery jaws open, lay on her lap. He could see her powder-puff, her rouge stick, a bundle of letters, a phial of tiny black pills like seeds, a broken cigarette, a mirror, white ivory tablets with lists on them that had been heavily scored through. He thought: "In Egypt she would be buried with those things." (347)

At this point a tiny wind blows, just enough to cause "a whirling, twirling snatch of dust" to settle "on their clothes like the finest ash" (347) ~ at which point she takes out a powder-puff, the powder flies over them both, and she recoils at what she inconsistently calls "the disgusting, revolting dust" (347). In other words, it is her own action that causes the powder to fly, but by calling the powder "dust" she resists identifying herself as an active agent in her own life. When he then suggests she use her parasol to protect herself, she blazed again. "Please leave my parasol alone! I don't want my parasol! And anyone who was not utterly insensitive would know that I'm far, far too exhausted

165 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape" to hold up a parasol. And with a wind like this tugging at it ... Put it down at once," she flashed, and then snatched the parasol from him, tossed it into the crumpled hood behind, and subsided, panting. (347)

Subsequent events are read so as to extend this quarrel. He buys her flowers from some children running along beside the carriage; she interprets his action as an insult to her, and as a reward for the children, whom she identifies as "Horrid little monkeys" and "beggars" (348). So she hurls the flowers away. Each character misrepresents the other as weak, and acts accordingly; they misread each other's behaviour, finding deliberate malice or cruelty where sometimes there is only petulance and self-absorption. Obliquely duplicating her action with her bag, he takes out a container, this time a cigarette case; she reminds him theatrically that she suffers anguish when smoke floats across her face. Smoke, dust, powder, and ash, associated with each other, now alter the way the natural landscape is perceived. The wind begins to blow "stronger" (348), and the roadside gardens take on "bright, burning" colours (348). The landscape burns; language blazes. This has become more a destructive environment than a conventionally nurturing or creative one. Then the carriage goes over another bump; the parasol falls out; and the woman bursts into another incomplete statement, which she concludes quietly but only with a false-seeming, mimic gentleness, again blaming her husband: "My parasol. It's gone. The parasol that belonged to my mother. The parasol that I prize more than - more than ..." She was simply beside herself ... "Look here," he said, "it can't be gone. If it fell out it will be there still. Stay where you are. I'll fetch it." But she saw through that. Oh, how she saw through it! "No, thank you." And she bent her spiteful, smiling eyes upon him, regardless of the driver. "I'll go myself. I'll walk back and find it, and trust you not to follow. For" knowing the driver did not understand, she spoke softly, gently - "if I don't escape from you for a minute I shall go mad." (349)

At this point the story continues its gradual shift to the man's point of view. He has his epiphany by the copper-coloured tree, and the narrative closes. The quarrel sequence involving the parasol occupies the main body of the story. And it might be possible to dismiss the whole exchange as an example of what Virginia Woolf and some other readers of Bliss and Other Stories found to be sentimental excess (Tomalin, 218), were it not for the way that the images, the objects, the events,

i66 Reading for Form

and the structures of language in the sequence are co-ordinated to emphasize gender, role, and theatricality. Interspersed with the accounts of events aboard the carriage, a series of passages describing the changing landscape contributes to this effect, for it creates the illusion of backdrop, of a changing set design against which the actions occur. The very staging of the actions, consequently, has to be read as part of the narrative form and as an integral element in the story's achievement. To start with, the list of the contents inside the gaping mouth of the woman's bag is no random collection. Some of the items in it the powder, the rouge stick, the mirror - are not only cosmetic but also part of a theatre of masking or disguise. Coupled with the other items - the broken cigarette, the black pills, the bundled letters, and the ivory tablets - they link various systems or agencies of alteration. But in the process they deny power - both to "pills" and to "language." The pills are only seed-like, the letters bundled, the lists on the tablets scored-through, their fertility or potency or potentiality removed from them. All that is left is paint and "dust" - the image of change and the image of identity, but not the reality (an effect that is reinforced by the presence of the mirror). These actions aboard the shaking carriage begin, moreover, when the woman lifts her veil - that other mask of fashion's theatre - thus opening her face to view. Except that this is not really true: for beneath the veil is the powdered face, or the face accustomed to powder - mask covering mask in an indefinite series of implied layers of disguise. Further, although she refuses the parasol, another revelatory covering of the conscious coquette, the reader has to recognize that she refuses it when the man offers it to her outside the accepted social context (he suggests it as protection against wind and dust rather than against the sun); she later claims it as her own, from her mother, when she knows it has been lost. There appears to be a power in possession, but there is a question whether the power rests in the object itself, in the illusion created by the object, or in the language that is used to articulate either object or illusion. Here there is theatre in the action as well as in the image. For the woman is torn between acting in accordance with precept, which confines, and acting in accordance with convention, which also confines. It seems she cannot win. To use the parasol is to hide; to throw it away is to put on a false face; to claim it is to hold the possession through the identity of another; to escape in order to retrieve it is to withdraw. All actions involve role-playing. And all roles, here, cause language to stutter into fragments or silence.

167 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"

The ambivalence surrounding the veil and the parasol has to be understood further if the ending of the story is to reveal more than just superficial portraiture. To elucidate it takes the reader into contexts of allusion and composition. Consider first of all the image the woman projects, in a 1920 story. She is married: that gives her conventional status. She also smokes, or did once (though she doesn't like her husband to, near her), and she wears rouge: that makes her (to conventional eyes) smart. The ambivalence of the imagery stems directly from this dichotomy. For the woman clearly claims all the privilege that marriage accords her, while at the same time she seems to blame her husband for her own attraction towards - or at least dependence on - him. The make-up is a mask; but it is also a mask put on at once to declare her fashionable independence from convention and to impress or appeal to others around her, including men. The parasol - a "woman's object" - is spurned when her husband offers it to her: that is, when he establishes her role for her. But she is also at some level conscious of the fact that to give up the parasol (to declare her independence, perhaps) is to give up the kind of role that her mother has set for her. To lift the veil, moreover, is potentially to give up the constraints of a traditional role; but it may also be interpreted as the giving up of mystery or power or both. In any event she has lowered the veil again before she refuses the parasol, and she lies back, as the text has it, "as if overcome" (347), the theatre of imitation ruling her action as well as her appearance. Her dark eyes look immense and imploring "behind the veil" (348) when she asks him not to smoke, but her voice, though "calm," is "weak" (348). Neither the characters nor their circumstances are as they seem. Hence the possibility for other kinds of reversal, or reconstruction, is strong. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have commented explicitly in The Madwoman in the Attic on the significance of veil imagery. The veil, they write, is an "image of confinement ... related to the imagery of enclosure that constantly threatens to stifle the heroines of women's fiction ... Unlike a door, which is either open or shut ... , [a veil] is always potentially both - always holding out the mystery of imminent revelation."7 In nineteenth-century literature the veil is associated with romantic fantasies about "the myth of penetrating vision" (470); and "it makes perfect sense," they add, "that the ambiguity of the veil ... should associate it in male minds with that repository of mysterious otherness, the female. As an inspiration and source of imaginative power, the presence behind the veil for many a poet is the female muse" (471). The "veiled lady of male literature," moreover, "frequently identified with spiritual powers" (472), is usually

i68 Reading for Form

angelic, though this muse, in male writing, often turns into the hag Medusa. But for women writers,8 say Gilbert and Gubar, the exceptional insight, with resultant duplicity of a veiled lady becomes a strategy for survival in a hostile, male-dominated world. Denied the freedom to act openly out in the world, their heroines exploit their intuitive understanding of the needs of the male ego in order to provide comfortable places for themselves in society ... [T]hose cut off from political power may exploit their passivity by becoming instruments compelled by higher forces, even as they are drawn to what constitutes a shortcut to authority through a personal relationship with spiritual powers presumably beyond the control of men ... Finally, ... the recording of what exists behind the veil is distinctively female because it is the woman who exists behind the veil in patriarchal society, inhabiting a private sphere invisible to public view. (473-4)

These comments appear in an essay on George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil," a short story that first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859. Eliot's story tells of the miserable life and impending death of a man named Latimer, from the point of view of the man himself. Cursed rather than blessed by the gift of foresight, Latimer early in the story imagines himself in mortal conflict with the wife he has not yet married. But he marries her anyway, and then lives to know (in a Gothic deathbed scene involving medical experiment and a revived corpse) of his wife's actual plans to poison him. Now any connection between this story and Mansfield's "The Escape" might seem tenuous, and whether or not Mansfield even knew Eliot's story I have not been able to determine. To pursue this aside, however, suggests some instructive ways to read "The Escape" further, and thereby to begin to make more than superficial sense of the epiphany scene and its relation to the rest of the story. Mansfield's biographers have drawn some connections between her and George Eliot, which, though they do not immediately seem consequential, at least establish a frame of reference. Claire Tomalin, for example, asserts that Mansfield "rather enjoy[ed] her role of free woman of letters, living outside the confines of convention like George Eliot" (104). In a letter to Dorothy Brett on 10 June 1919, moreover, Mansfield herself observed that she had to break a Friday appointment because "I quite forgot Virginia is coming to talk over the Centenary of George Eliot with me" (Letters, 2:^28).9 "Virginia," of course, was Virginia Woolf, whose subsequent essay "George Eliot" appeared first in The Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1919) and then, revised, in The Common Reader in 1925. Here Woolf

169 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"

comments specifically on the ramifications of trying to live outside social codes. She mentions the effects of Eliot's social choices, of her health, her gender, and the unconventionality of her connection with George Henry Lewes: "Her union with Lewes had surrounded her with affection, but in view of the circumstances and of the conventions it had also isolated her" (Common Reader, 170). In Woolf's judgment of Eliot's personal circumstances it is hard not to hear a comment on Mansfield also, given what she later wrote, on 8 August 1931, about Mansfield to Vita Sackville-West: We did not ever coalesce; but I was fascinated, and she respectful, only I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish; and yet we were both compelled to meet simply in order to talk about writing ... Only then she came out with a swarm of little stories, and I was jealous, no doubt; because they were so praised; but gave up reading them not on that account, but because of their cheap sharp sentimentality, which was all the worse, I thought, because she had ... the zest and the resonance - I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in ones nostrils ... But the fact remains ... that she had a quality I adored, and needed; I think her sharpness and reality - her having knocked about with prostitutes and so on, whereas I had always been respectable, was the thing I wanted then. (Woolf, Letters, 366)

It is impossible, too, not to read into "The Escape" some revelation of Mansfield's personal association with Middleton Murry.10 The images of the ineffectual man married to the shrew, of the would-be rebel who desires safety, and of the ill woman (with ineffectual pills) who has ambivalent attitudes to childhood and children: all are testimonies to the complex desires of her own experience, though not all readers, of course, have found complexity in the story. Sylvia Berkman's adjectives for the woman in "The Escape" - callous, temperamental, selfish, unreasonable, nervous, irritable, neurotic, rapacious - do not allow for many alternatives. But though to Berkman these adjectives suggest that Mansfield, out of her "specialized knowledge of exacerbation," was here "turning the knife on herself" (180, 121), it seems impossible to accept "The Escape" simply as unmediated autobiography. And to make this judgment redirects the reader to the functions and effects of story form. It is apparent, that is, that Mansfield deliberately chose to cast her story as she did. In some ways, too, her choice can be seen to be following a line of writing that the nineteenth century had made familiar. Gilbert and Gubar outline a pattern as follows, adapting a romantic mythology of the "fallen woman" to their reading of "The

170 Reading for Form

Lifted Veil." In a fallen woman's relationship with a man, they say, quoting Mario Praz, "'he is obscure, and inferior either in condition or in physical exuberance to the woman, who stands in the same relation to him as do the female spider, the praying mantis, etc., to their respective males."11 Mansfield's woman, with her open-jawed bag, occupies at least an analogous position. Gilbert and Gubar go so far as to characterize Eliot herself as "an outsider, a fallen female viewing respectable society, an insect watching provincial life," whose "unique perspective gains by its obliqueness" (475). They also argue that Latimer, the narrator of "The Lifted Veil" - a sensitive man on the outskirts of "ordinary" society, who is described in the story as the second and "odd" child of an "intensely orderly" banker (Eliot, 31) - bears a kind of parodic relationship with Eliot the author (though the reader of Mansfield might hear anticipatory echoes of another kind): the ability of Latimer and George Eliot to see into a dreadful future which they are then helpless to avoid corresponds to the feeling among women that they are trapped in stories, unable to evade plots created for them by alien, if not hostile, authors and authorities. Mute despite their extraordinary gifts, Latimer and George Eliot remind us of the powerlessness of, say, Cassandra, whose expressive exertions never alter the events of the past or the future and whose speech is therefore as ineffectual as silence. Latimer's essentially feminine qualities - his sensitivity, his physical weakness, his secondary status in the family, his dispossession, his passivity, and his intense need to be loved - are a source of anguish because they make it impossible for him actually to become a poet. Granted poetic abilities but denied the power to create, Latimer lives out the classic role of women who are denied the status of artist because they are supposed somehow to become works of art themselves. (449-50)

In part, one might add, they do so by wearing conventional theatrical masks. When Mansfield's woman is "beside herself" over the loss of the parasol, it is possible to read the statement, therefore, as more than a sentimental cliche. The phrase reiterates the tensions that rise from the division or doubling of the creative personality when it is pressured simultaneously to rebel and to conform. And as Gilbert and Gubar observe, "imagery of enclosure and the use of doubles in women's literature ... both are complementary signs of female victimization" (443). In this context it bears remembering two particular scenes in "The Escape" for what the language reveals. In the incident of the smoking case, first, the woman uses submissive forms of language (such

171 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"

as "I beg and implore you/' 348) - which she has just herself associated with the flower-children whom she calls "beggars"; but in the succeeding incident, involving the lurch that loses the parasol, the verbs tell a different story: "her eyes blaze at him, and she positively hissed" (349). There are two personalities here. Yet the categorical division between muse and Medusa, angel and monster (the submissive and the assertive), is part of traditional male literary design. Hence Gilbert and Gubar go on to argue that the female self, so divided - and they are speaking of both characters and authors - will "explode" as a consequence or dissolve into a "paralysis" of "selfloathing" (465-6), of perhaps the kind that Sylvia Berkman had in mind. Such a paralysis will have a further impact on literary methodology. "The Lifted Veil" implies, in Gilbert and Gubar's words, that the insights of realism, the appreciation of another's point of view, while sometimes identified "with the honesty of the dispossessed," "can also ... diminish the self, inundating it in the trivial pettiness of humankind, ... and paralyzing it with the experience of contradictory needs and perspectives" (474-5). Consequently, the dislocation of personality, the construction of a fiction of woman, constitutes both a problem and an escape from confronting the problem. If authors, like characters, are trapped in alien stories, who takes responsibility for the fiction of experience? Who has authority over it, in other words? Such questions refer to Eliot, but they also direct the reader back to Katherine Mansfield. Clearly "The Escape" is at most a kind of closet gothic, if any parallels with Eliot hold at all. But the doubling of character and the role-reversals that accompany this division reconfirm that Mansfield's story is to be read as more than a simple realistic marital spat; they also bear directly on the story's ending. Unlike "The Lifted Veil," "The Escape" is not told primarily from a man's point of view, but it is the men in both stories who are given the visionary capability. Over the course of "The Escape," too, the roles of the man and the woman - and the conventional associations with those roles begin to blur, becoming part of an authorial comment on the ambivalence of authority and fictional invention. Eliot's Latimer, at his moment of insight, pointedly finds nothing. Able to see through everything except Bertha, his wife, he finally discovers that the veil that encloses her encloses nothing but pettiness and negation: "The terrible moment of complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall" (Eliot, 55). Her shallowness, he realizes to himself, has interpreted his sensibility as weakness, as a quality that would put him in her power, whereas it

172 Reading for Form

turns out to be a strength that has kept him separate from her grasp. But Eliot also explains why his recognition does not free him, and why "complete illumination" cannot free anyone: "So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between" (52).12 When the woman in "The Escape" walks back to reclaim her parasol, however, and the man has his moment of revelation, what he finds seems on the surface to be some sensibility to life that is missing in the daily routine. But this passage of Mansfield's story is full of paradoxes. He sees the tree, lit by its "great arc of copper leaves" with "a whiteness, a softness, an opaque mass ['with delicate pillars'], half-hidden" beyond it. And As he looked at the tree he felt his breathing die away and he became part of the silence. It seemed to grow, it seemed to expand in the quivering heat until the great carved leaves hid the sky, and yet it was motionless. Then from within its depths or from beyond there came the sound of a woman's voice. A woman was singing. The warm untroubled voice floated upon the air, and it was all part of the silence as he was part of it. (349-50)

Yet for his revelation to take place he apparently has to surrender to the visionary experience completely, to be "enfolded" by an element that he identifies not only as female but also as "dark ... unbearable and dreadful," something floating "like a great weed ... warm, stifling," which none the less in due course gives him "heavenly happiness" (350). The question is: Is this the man's discovery of his nascent sensibility, or is it a retaliatory escape from his wife, or is it something else? Is it a revelation or a re-veiling?13 Is Mansfield on his side in a marital war or really on the wife's, if on either character's side? Is the man responding to an empirical woman or to a convention of Woman, a mix of sibyl14 and siren and mother? And where does power finally rest: with sensibility, silence, or speech? Pointedly, the "epiphany" is not a conclusion, and not the end of the story. The text shifts abruptly from the still moment to the activity aboard the train. The woman is in the compartment, talking; the man is in the corridor, both hands gripping the brass rail15 as the train rushes and roars through the dark. The voices of the woman and her fellow passengers come out to him but do not reach him. His epiphany seems to have separated him even further from others. Yet while the husband may seem solitary, occupying the margins of the compartment, he remains self-contained. He continues to be a presence.

173 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape"

In public, as an individual person, it is the woman who has effectively disappeared - into her role as middle-class wife. For all her comments are now focused on her husband, and as the story moves to a close, they dissolve into lies and half-truths and fragmentary reconstructions of truth that come to no conclusions at all: "Do not disturb yourself, Monsieur. He will come in and sit down when he wants to. He likes - he likes - it is his habit .... Oui, Madame, je suis un pen souffrante .... Mes nerfs. Oh, but my husband is never so happy as when he is travelling. He likes roughing it .... My husband .... My husband ...." (350)

In silence, the husband has surrendered to some mysterious female force and found happiness; in words, she escapes from herself only into incomplete utterances that declare her dependent relationship with a man. It seems he finds happiness not in "travelling" at all, but in stillness. He now wears his "habit" like a cloak, a veil. It is she who seeks to move on; but travel gives her no satisfaction, for despite moving, she remains in an enclosure, defined by herself but from without. Clearly, this scene does not resolve matters. The man is still ineffectual, despite his presumed insight (or perhaps the insight, because he is a man, is made to seem somehow a conventional attribute of his presumed ineffectuality16); and the woman, swinging from vulnerability to shrewishness, gradually draws some of the reader's sympathy because she shows herself over the course of the story to be as much a victim of physical discomfort and a pawn of the social pressures around her as a deliberate designer of discord. The problem, if there is one, lies in the reader's expectation of a resolution. But Mansfield's language has throughout insisted on exposing the limits of reconstruction, dramatizing artifice and effect, and undercutting the validity of absolutes, absolute conclusions, and absolute reversals. The ending, the epiphany scene, and the language of roles and story-telling have consequently to be considered further. The title story of Bliss (completed in 1918) provides a paradigm by which to read the epiphany scene of "The Escape." In "Bliss" the ecstatic, romantic, epiphanic glimpse of the pear tree is given to Bertha (which is also the name of Larimer's wife17); in Bertha Young's case in "Bliss," too, the power to see past surface into luminescence is deceptive. It is an escape from reality, not into it. Relatedly, in "At the Bay" (which Mansfield completed the year after "The Escape," in 1921) it is the men who possess conventional language and the women who discover in silence a fulfilling and alternative form of expression that renders conventional language in some degree irrelevant. "The

174 Reading for Form

Escape/' then, constitutes a formal variation on a literary structure that Mansfield uses elsewhere. Here she appears to have asked what kind of story would result if an author gave silence to a man and speech to a woman. One result might well have been to reverse roles altogether, and so produce something that, given the conventions of the time, might read as a fantastic or ironic critique of the status quo. Overtly reversing the options presented to men and women might well have exposed the limiting conditions that the status quo regularly imposed upon their behaviour. "The Escape" hints at this last suggestion, but for all its reversals it is not so straightforward a story. It suggests that men, put into an apparently secondary "female" role, even given the creative power of silence, will transform it into an absolute, either on their own or by absorbing the structures of the language of power; and that women, given what seems to be the dominant role, and control over speech, are not so free from convention that power would not also limit them. Given the technical context that the story has established from the beginning, the man's so-called epiphany can be read as yet another reconstruction of events - an escape, not a recognition - and as an experience that is framed by the woman's language patterns (which are those of conventional male literature) even though the experience does not directly happen to her. Authority, in other words, remains powerful because it remains articulate. But for neither character does this authority bring freedom. For the man, at the end of the story, reconstruction dissolves into absolute repetition: "The voices murmured, murmured," says the text, after which comes the last - and I think sardonic - statement in the story (and therefore in the entire collection of stories in which "The Escape" appears): "so great was his heavenly happiness as he stood there he wished he might live for ever" (350). For both of the characters, to accept the absolute is to refuse to face the reality of the alteration that is represented by the motions of their lives; it is to accept fiction as a given, as though it were complete and true. In the woman's words, at the end of the story, her husband becomes a fiction. But in her compartment she does not escape from enclosure either, for all that her voice and her fellow passenger's are "never still" (350). Hence the story obliquely suggests that if women espouse the language of convention, they too will become fictions, enclosed by the very language in which, even as they have attempted to reconstruct it, they have invested authority. Given this paradox, how, then, does the reader finally respond to the "revelations" of "The Escape" - and to the veils of illusion that revelations contrive?

175 The Art of Reconstruction: Reading "The Escape" Claire Tomalin observes about Mansfield that she was a liar all her life - ... and her lies went quite beyond conventional social lying. Whereas Murry "forgot" things or distorted subtly, she was a bold and elaborate inventor of false versions. A charitable view of the origin of this habit could be that it was a bid for attention, a response to feeling obscured and overlooked in a large family with an inattentive mother; this may then have developed into a pleasure in dramatizing for its own sake, making herself into the heroine of a story. If the truth was dull, it could be artistically embroidered; and if she was the heroine of her own life story, lies became not lies but fiction, a perfectly respectable thing. (57)

This paragraph reads in some ways like a commentary on "The Escape." "The Escape/' however, argues that not all fictions are, finally, acceptable. For while fictions can instruct, they can also mislead. They can articulately represent alternatives, or they can discover themselves bounded by the power of the conventions they employ. Sometimes fictions simply reconstruct the limits of the status quo, and are all the more seductive when they seem most to promise escape. Hence story-making - the temptation that invites both the woman and the man to reinvent their own and each other's lives can be a temptation for an author as well as for the characters. "The Escape" dramatizes this interconnection between the desire to escape from reality and the desire to change it, between wish-fulfilment and reform. It demonstrates that articulateness and illumination are both sometimes notional rather than substantive, imitations of power rather than signs of possessing it, asking always to be read carefully. But that reading, too, is a reconstructive process seems to me, in this context, finally to spell out an interpretive dilemma. One of the many fascinations of "The Escape" is that it not only delineates, by means of its narrative, some familiar paradigms of power, but also provides within its textual method some ways of commenting on the narrative and questioning the authority of the paradigms it uses. Cogently addressing the nature of interpretation, this story refuses to resolve all the questions it raises. The very refusal is part of the narrative design, suggesting that in this, as in other ways, Mansfield was at the forefront of fashion, using words to contrive an illusion of life, and using writing here to speak about the contrary appeals of fiction itself.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

PREFACE

1 The seven decades of commentary since her death in 1923 have mostly had the effect of shaping many different Katherine Mansfields into existence. For example, there is the supersensitive female, the immoral woman, the tubercular victim, the acid-tongued shrew, the colonial naive, the boring imitator, the absorbing innovator, the dutiful citizen, the rebellious daughter, the loving sister, the long-suffering wife, the cruel wife, the unfaithful wife, the feminist reformer, the secret lesbian, the social climber, the plagiarist, the image-maker, the sloppy sentimentalist, the arch satirist, and a small host of other categorical enclosures. These identities do not easily coalesce. Pilditch's anthology of Mansfield criticism (Critical Responses) collects examples of these positions, from early anonymous reviews to the comments of Claire Tomalin and others in the late 19803 and early 19905. Wevers ("This World's Imagining") surveys a range of Mansfield biographies and comments on their transformative character. 2 On the power of frames to affect reading strategies, see, e.g., Gurr ("The Question of Perspectives"), Reid ("Framing"), and (especially in relation to "A Married Man's Story") Calder ("My Katherine Mansfield"). Relatedly Mary Paul ("Bliss") brings three separate reading practices to bear on "Bliss," practices she identifies as a decoding of a "tale of a hysteric" (213), an account of "uniquely female images of creativity" (218), and a "Modernist" (222) analysis of such issues as sexuality and perspective. Acknowledging that still further reading

178 Notes to pages x-6 strategies are possible - Marxist and narratological, for example - Paul stresses the degree to which theory and critical practice are themselves subject to fashion, belief, and time. 3 The anthologies are those edited by Cassill, Mellard, Roberts and Jacobs, Taube, Taylor, Muller and Williams, Charters, Wiebe, Isherwood, Ashley and Astor, Lynskey, Foff and Knapp, Brooks and Warren, Smith and Hart, Rees and Menikoff, Havighurst, Heilman, Short and Sewall, Perrine, Barroll and Wright, Jaffe and Scott, Davis, West and Stallman, Karl, Atwan and Wiener, Pickering, Magalaner and Volpe, New and Rosengarten, and Messenger and New. 4 The total number varies with the method of counting. Mansfield published 88 stories, but if one includes the stories left in fragments or in incomplete form and subsequently published, the number rises to approximately 120. Full details on her publications are available in Kirkpatrick (A Bibliography). 5 Great English Short Stones, 233. As my text later emphasizes, Isherwood was commenting on the appeal of the image of Mansfield that John Middleton Murry had constructed after her death. This construction may have been inadvertent as well as deliberate, in that Murry's inability to read Mansfield's handwriting led to his sometimes guessing at what she actually wrote and producing sentimental similes in places where she had written more realistic ones; Webby ("{Catherine Mansfield," 238) cites, for example, an occasion in an early notebook where Mansfield had compared the first stars in a night sky to "pinholes" and where Murry rendered them instead as "primroses." CHAPTER ONE

1 Married & Gone to New Zealand subsequently became the title of an anthology of extracts from the writings of female pioneers in New Zealand, ed. Alison Drummond. On the importance of the colonial background, especially in relation to "Kezia and Tui," see Orr ("Reading with the Taint of the Pioneer"); Stead ("Colonial Realist") also affirms the realism of Mansfield's representation of colonial life. 2 His book Democracy in New Zealand was translated by E.V. Burns in 1914. 3 See also Waldron ("Mansfield's Journal"). 4 See also Gordon's Introduction, 20. 5 "Katherine Mansfield," in Exhumations. Feeling "restless and miserable" in the "stuffy and provincial" atmosphere of New Zealand, he writes, she turned herself into "a Chekhov character" - not being English at this point, she apparently becomes Continental - for she saw herself as "the Artist in Exile, alienated by her own finer feelings from

179 Notes to pages 7-10

6

7

8 9

the vulgar herd." But having said this, Isherwood is not altogether willing to accept it, for he then writes that "every detail of" (66) New Zealand, once she was in London, began to seem "magically beautiful, flawlesssly happy." Except that by now she had become "clever," which was her undoing, and "false and embarrassingly sentimental" (71), which she detested in herself, and in any event "We can never return to the childhood paradise in a state of primitive simplicity. For we have eaten the apple of experience and we cannot unlearn the knowledge it has brought us" (68). Duggan continues: "Katherine Mansfield despised her mother-city because, avoiding the slavishness of London, it did not mop and mow to 'the greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery, leg-in-the-grave young men.' The Pacific soused sunflower buttonholes and black satin breeches." Alcock ("An Aloe in the Garden") and Kleine ("An Eden for Insiders") stress the cultural force of New Zealand settings and perspectives. O'Sullivan ("The New Zealand Stories") argues for a relation between Modernism and an emerging New Zealand character. For a more extended commentary on what it means to write about New Zealand - about family, nation, and property, for example - see Wevers ("The Sod under My Feet"). Red Funnel (1905-09), like the New Zealand Railways Magazine (1926-40), was an industrial periodical that published some fiction; these two, distributed generally, were among the most popular New Zealand journals of the early years of the twentieth century, and the "manly adventures" that they published were the sort of story that had strong public appeal. This paragraph summarizes an argument made in my Dreams of Speech and Violence, 138. Sydney Janet Kaplan, in "Katherine Mansfield's 'Passion for Technique,'" raises questions about the validity of Brophy's Freudian interpretation. Kaplan's essay (extended in her book-length study) acutely summarizes the nature of the relation between Mansfield and Woolf, dismisses H.E. Bates's conventional definition of feminine style, and demonstrates various particular features of Mansfield's stylistic techniques, arguing that her strategies for distancing and her use of associative fragmentation reveal her female consciousness. Moran, by contrast, praises Brophy for her explication of mother-daughter rivalry (a rivalry that Moran's work seems to accept as universal) and critiques Kaplan for not focusing on mother figures in Mansfield's fiction. Corballis ("From The New Age"), with reference to "A Fairy Story" and G.B. Shaw among other subjects, comments on ways in which the editorial policies of different journals (The New Age, Rhythm, Blue Review) actively shaped Mansfield's narrative practice.

180 Notes to pages 11-15 10 Lady Rothermere was the patron of Eliot's magazine The Criterion. In After Strange Gods (38) Eliot finds the "limitation" of Mansfield's story "Bliss" to "feelings" to be "feminine" (i.e., in that, in his view, it leaves "social and moral ramifications" aside). On "Bliss" and female sexuality, see Nebeker, "The Pear Tree." 11 See also Boddy, Katherine Mansfield; Lederman, "Through the Looking Glass"; Else, "From Little Monkey"; Glage, "Biographies and No End"; Blodgett, "The Inviolable Self"; and Gubar, "The Birth of the Artist." In "Familiar Lives" Boddy further examines Mansfield's differing representations of men and women. 12 The remark was made in a paper Walcott delivered at the University of Kent in Canterbury, August 1989. 13 As when, for example, she skewered her lover Francis Carco, her husband, and her long-suffering and possibly long insufferable friend Ida Baker in such stories as "Je ne parle pas franc,ais" and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel." Unflattering versions of Mansfield, of course, appeared in other books; she was the model for Gudrun in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and Winnie in Francis Carco's Les Innocents; she was also portrayed as "that foul-mouthed, brazen-faced broomstick of a creature [who has] got herself up as a pad of rose-scented cotton wool" (Lytton Strachey's comment after reading Murry's version of her letters, quoted in Boddy, Katherine Mansfieldfioi); and she appeared as a figure in memoirs by Virginia Woolf and others. As Catherine in William Orton's 1937 novel The Last Romantic, by contrast, she appears as an innocent. See also n 23, below. 14 O'Sullivan's "The Magnetic Chain" traces in part her connections with Wilde, Pater, and Joyce. Edward Wagenknecht ("Dickens") argues (less persuasively, I think) for parallels with Dickens. 15 The TLS correspondence is reprinted as an appendix to Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, 261-72. It extended from 19 Oct. 1951 to 21 Dec. 1951, and involved (in addition to Almedingen) Middleton Murry, Sylvia Berkman, Antony Alpers, C.H. Norman, and A.E. Coppard. Mansfield's story appeared in The New Age in February 1910 and was collected the following year in In a German Pension. 16 "Katherine Mansfield: Plagiarist, Disciple, or Ardent Admirer?" 58-76. The Chekhov connection is also stressed in Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice, esp. 137-41, and in Elizabeth Bowen's introduction to Stories by Katherine Mansfield, esp. p. vii: "Chekhov was her ally, but not authority." David Daiches merely finds the Chekhov influence "crude" ("The Art," 109) - his general point being that in the best stories (he lists four: "At The Bay," "The Doll's House," "Prelude," and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel") "art and life are identified" (97) although on other occasions he observes that, when reading Mansfield, it is worthwhile to pay attention to style (word choice and word order;

181 Notes to pages 16-22 100). See also Harmat ("Essai d'analyse"), Zohrab ("Previously Unknown"), and David W. Martin ("Chekhov"). A doctoral dissertation by Charanne Carroll Kurylo, "Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield: A Study in Literary Influence," disputes the aspersions of literary theft, but acknowledges the extent of Chekhov's influence over the course of Mansfield's career, especially in so far as his work affected her solutions to various technical problems. This work is based in part on Kurylo's analysis of copies of Chekhov's stories with annotations by Mansfield, then in the possession of Mary Middleton Murry. Carol Franklin, in "The Function of Refunctioning," a paper delivered at the Victoria University of Wellington, 13 Oct. 1988, defends the story as a parody in the serious sense, a "singing beside" the original; she argues that the important critical question involves not the degree to which Mansfield imitates Chekhov but the purpose to which she puts the differences. Both Ian Gordon and Vincent O'Sullivan dispute the blackmail story; see Gordon's "Katherine Mansfield in the Late Twentieth Century," 23. Hanson and Gurr (Katherine Mansfield, 32-4) argue that Chekhov's story is "metonymic" and "realistic," focusing on society, and that Mansfield's story is "metaphoric" and "symbolist" and more "inward"-looking. 17 In fact she did. As Fullbrook makes clear (Katherine Mansfield, 52), Mansfield agreed in 1920 to have In a German Pension reprinted (ten days after she had rejected the idea); Kirkpatrick (A Bibliography, 8-9) lists this reprint as the first American and second English edition (Knopf in New York, Constable in London), both dated 1926. 18 Among the most helpful analyses of imagery are those by Corin ("Creation," on imagery and atmosphere), Bateson and Shahevitch ("A Critical Exercise," on "The Fly"), Wright ("Boat Image," "Darkness as a Symbol," on boat and darkness imagery), Zinman ("The Snail under the Leaf," on pain), Mandel ("Reductive Imagery," on "Miss Brill"), and Zorn and Neaman ("Visionary Flowers" and "Allusion," respectively, both on "Bliss"). Harmat ("Bliss Versus Corruption"), surveying imagery relating to water, food, animals, mirrors, darkness, silence, and sleep, suggests that Mansfield's construction of symbolic atmosphere relates to her concern for truth and revelation. For a stylistic analysis of the way Mansfield represents speech and thought, especially in "The Garden Party," see Brinton, "Represented Perception." For a comparative study of approaches to discourse strategies, especially with reference to "The Fly" and "Something Childish But Very Natural," see Morrow, Fiction, 14-27; and on the significance of structural paradigms in "Bliss," see Moran, Word of Mouth, 40-66. 19 When Clement Shorter asked Mansfield for a story in 1921, she wrote contemptuously to her cousin Elizabeth, the Countess Russell: "He is bringing out an anthology of short stories and he said the more 'plotty'

182 Note to page 22 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" (Letters and Journals, 239). 20 My use of the term "form" to refer generally to stylistic choices (whether lexical, morphological, syntactical, or phonological) goes against the vocabulary adopted by much current narratological theory; so does my use of the term "plot" to describe an organized arrangement of a series of narrative events (often inexactly equated with "narrative structure"). The roughly parallel terms that current narratology tends more often to employ - drawing them directly from Seymour Chatman (Story and Discourse, 1978), and indirectly from Gerard Genette's figures m (1972; trans, as Narrative Discourse, 1980) - are "discourse" and "story." To have used "story" (where I use Mansfield's own term, "plot") in a context referring to the genre of the "short story" would have been to introduce an unnecessary ambiguity. In any event, no fixed narratological vocabulary is yet universally accepted. As Patrick O'Neill points out, in his admirable survey of narrative theory Fictions of Discourse, theoretical systems often attach quite different values to the same terms: hence "Bal's 'story' corresponds to Rimmon-Kenan's 'narration'" (20-1). Moreover, Toolan (The Stylistics of Fiction) uses the same terms as Rimmon-Kenan (Narrative Fiction); Bal (On Story-Telling) uses "fabula" where they use "story"; and the applicability of any of these terms is compromised further when one adds the notion of interactive play between them - referring, say, to the distinctions that derive from what O'Neill calls narrative's "nested worlds" (108-16). In a metafiction, for example, each "level" of discourse can potentially subvert another, so that "the narrator's discourse is itself 'story' to the implied author's discourse, which is in turn 'story' to the authorial discourse" - "the whole constituting not just a structure, but an interlocking structure of structures" (O'Neill, 113). While O'Neill's work examines the state of understanding that a structural reading of the broad range of narratological theory permits, Kathy Mezei's Ambiguous Discourse focuses more on the force of contextual matters. Specifically, Mezei's introduction ("Contextualizing Feminist Narratology," 1-20) questions both the gender neutrality of Genette and others and the "male sexual trajectory" (11) of any paradigm that relies on "masterplots"; relatedly, the essays that Mezei collects in her book look at such subjects as the relation between gender, authority, and free indirect discourse; the rhetoric of female conversation, including gendered discourse and gossip; and the structural relation between the female body and the composition of space. Chatman's work, however, remains a clear introduction to the categories of analysis that follow from a distinction between story and

183 Notes to pages 22-6 discourse, provided one keeps in mind Bal's refusal of the absolute ness of the dichotomy. By story, Chatman refers to "content," which he further subdivides into "events" (e.g., actions) and "existents" (e.g., characters and settings); and by discourse, he refers to "expression," which leads to commentary on "structure of transmission" and aspects of "manisfestation" or mode of performance ("verbal," "cinematic," etc.; 9). In addition, Chatman uses the term "plot" to describe certain aspects of the organization of events, and he draws on Genette (88) to distinguish order, duration, and frequency. His assertion that "temporal order is more significant in resolved than in revealed plots" (49) is, however, questioned by Mansfield's practice; for in resisting the temporal sequencing associated with conventional plotting (and its suggestions of causality) and resisting equally the conventions of the wholly revelatory moment, Mansfield does not ignore (indeed, she uses shifts in tense and perspective to foreground) the importance of time. It is worth adding that, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis observes of twentiethcentury women's narrative strategies (without specifying Mansfield), the resistance to "plot" in practice expresses a tacit rejection of the "romance" design, the "sociological script" (Writing beyond the Ending, 92) that women characters have conventionally (and ideologically) been constrained by, and that impinges on real life. For further comment on the stylistics of fictional expression, see Wimsatt ("Style as Meaning"), who in 1939 was wrestling with problems of definition, trying to distinguish style from taste; Riffaterre ("Criteria for Style Analysis"), who in 1959 was discussing coding and the question of who controls it, and such criteria as "context," or normative surrounds, and "convergence," or an effective accumulative conjoining of disparate stylistic features (428-9); and Toolan (The Stylistics of Fiction), who in 1990 was surveying the field of "literary linguistics" and applying his observations to William Faukner's Go Down, Moses. 21 See her favourable comments in "A Terribly Sensitive Mind," a review of Mansfield's diary for the New York Herald Tribune (18 Sept. 1927), rpt in Granite and Rainbow, 73-5. For further comment on connections between Mansfield and Woolf, see Siegel ("Responses to D.H. Lawrence's Criticism"), Banks ("Virginia Woolf"), Moran (Word of Mouth), Sellei (A Personal and Professional Bond), Angela Smith ("Thresholds"), and Sportelli ("Ritrovarsi"). See also Leonard Woolf, quoting from Virginia Woolf's comments on Mansfield, in Beginning Again, esp. 202-7. 22 On the relation between Mansfield's and Ihimaera's works, see Carole Froude Durix, "Point Counterpoint." 23 "The Moslem Wife" (1979) takes another approach again, locating Mansfield by means of style in order to reflect on the impact that time the has on attitudes both personal and social. The story contrasts the

184 Note to page 26 reality of an expatriate woman's experience during the Second World War in the south of France with the conventional force of her husband's memory of the same experience, which he was not present to observe and so can scarcely remember. His inaccuracies, ironically turn into received history in part because the wife permits this process to happen. The direct Mansfield allusion in Gallant's opening paragraph "In the south of France, in the business room of a hotel quite near to the house where Katherine Mansfield (whom no one in this hotel had ever heard of) was writing The Daughters of the Late Colonel,' Netta Asher's father announced that there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again" (From the Fifteenth District, 36) - focuses the reader's attention on the ironies of time, which both authors express through the nuances of tense. The structures of verbal relationship further express other nuances, involving power, constructing in language and explaining through language how sequence and authority are predicated on fluency. For the Scots poet Douglas Dunn, Mansfield is a stimulus to memory; the first of his elegies for his dead wife, called "On Re-reading Katherine Mansfield's Bliss and Other Stories" (Elegies, 9), transforms Mansfield's story titles into a mnemonics of affection: A pressed fly, like a skeleton of gauze, Has waited here between page 98 And 99, in the story called "Bliss," Since the summer of '62, its date, Its last day in a trap of pages. Prose Fly, what can "Je ne parle pas frangais" mean To you who died in Scotland, when I closed These two sweet pages you were crushed between? Here is a green bus ticket for a week In May, my place mark in "The Dill Pickle." I did not come home that Friday. I flick Through all our years, my love, and I love you still. These stories must have been inside my head That day, falling in love, preparing this Good life; and this, this fly, verbosely buried In "Bliss," one dry tear punctuating "Bliss." The poet here, rereading Mansfield, also of course runs the risk of re-enacting Murry's role in recreating Katherine, to the degree that the story that he locates in her projects a story about himself.

185 Notes to pages 26-38 24 Judith Dale ("Performing") recounts the Wellington performance of Alma de Groen's play and places it in the context of other theatrical adaptations of Mansfield, Mansfield's writings, and Mansfield's image. These include Leave All Fair (film, 1984); Brian McNeill, The Two Tigers (stage play, 1977; first performed 1973); Cathy Downes, The Case of Katherine Mansfield (stage play, 1986); Craig Thaine, Today's Bay (stage play, 1983); Gillian Boddy and Julianne Stretton, A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield (film, 1986); Brian McNeill, The Love and Ladies Man (stage play, 1988); Elizabeth O'Connor, Bright Birds (stage play, 1988); and Vincent O'Sullivan, Jones & Jones (stage play, 1988). Critics have cited still other literary parallels; see, for example, Richard F. Peterson ("The Circle of Truth") and William Rankin ("Ineffability"), who respectively find connections with Mary Lavin and Jean Toomer. Linda Hardy ("The Ghost") refers to "Mansfield" poems by Fleur Adcock, Marilyn Duckworth, and Anne French, and reads Janet Frame's novel Living in the Maniototo and Ian Wedde's novel Symme's Hole as Mansfield variants. On the relation between Mansfield and Colette, see Ruth ParkinGounelas ("Reading Other Women"). Liselotte Glage ("Biographies and No End") refers also to a Mansfield character in Aus tausen grttnen Spiegeln, a 1988 novel by the West German writer Christa Moog; see Michel and Dupuis, The Fine Instrument, 45-8. Mansfield has also, of course, through such techniques as diminishing the role of the narrator, deeply influenced the general practice of short story writing in the twentieth century, both on cultural margins and in the mainstream, as Kaplan (Origins of Modernist Fiction, 130) and Gordon (Katherine Mansfield, 105), among others, have observed. 25 Glage (43-4) praises Kate Fulbrook and other feminist critics for rejecting the idea that a single self is the necessary model for female identities. CHAPTER TWO

i Of relevance here is the substantial body of theoretical writing on the subject of narrative mediation or localization. Introduced by Genette, the term "focalization" is used to sharpen the distinctions that the term "point of view" more conventionally refers to, distinguishing the perspective of the narrator/speaker from that of the character whose observations condition how as a reader one views events. Focalization does not just express the question "Who sees?" but also attempts to indicate how that angle of seeing affects reception or understanding. (The parallel issues raised by the question "Who speaks?" invite discussion of voice.} In the case of "The Child-Who-Was-Tired," the voice is that of the unnamed narrator, but the focalization (the angle of perception) is that (primarily) of the Child. Bal (On Story-Telling, esp.

186 Notes to pages 38-103 75-108) charts in greater detail the narratological attributes of focalizer and narrator. Rimmon-Kenan (Narrative Fiction, 71-85) adds to these distinctions some introductory comments on how focalization involves more than the perceptual components of space and time; it must also, she argues, take into account the "cognitive and ... emotive orientation of the focalizer towards the focalized" (79) - that is, psychological components - and the issues of ideology, which may be part of or expressed through the other components or may be the revelation to which, in concert or in conflict, they will lead. See also O'Neill on "Points of Origin: The Focalization Factor," 83-106. 2 Several features of the story anticipate Mansfield's later practice also; the powerful but inanimate "voice," for example, hints at Aunt Beryl's disembodied voice in "At the Bay"; the headless duck at the end of the story recurs in another form in "Prelude"; and the "little white road" recurs in "Something Childish But Very Natural." 3 Kaplan (Origins of Modernist Fiction), Hankin (Confessional Stones), and others examine in greater detail the facets of lesbian desire that appear in the Maata fragments and other stories; see especially Kaplan, chap. 3 ("Sexuality Encoded," 36-52). At other times (e.g., in Mansfield's letters to Arnold Trowell) gender references are clearly heterosexual, and on still other occasions they are left ambiguous. 4 On Orage and Hastings and their relationship with Mansfield, Murry, and Koteliansky, see Carswell, Lives and Letters. CHAPTER FOUR

1 On Mansfield's connections with the Modernists, see esp. Carswell (Lives and Letters), Kaplan (Origins of Modernist Fiction), and the extensive commentary on Mansfield and Woolf (see chap, i, n 21). On the relation between conventional plot formulas and theories of discourse, see my earlier comments on narratological theory (chap, i, n 20). 2 On the dialogues, and their indebtedness to, e.g., Theocritus, see the commentary that introduces the anthology of Mansfield's Dramatic Sketches (1-14). 3 On these imitations and parodies see Beachcroft ("Mansfield's Encounter"), Dowling (Introduction to Mansfield's Dramatic Sketches), and Alpers (Stories, 557). CHAPTER SIX

i In Fiction and Repetition ]. Hillis Miller draws attention to two kinds of repetition, which, he argues, interrelate, and help to shape the character of the realistic novel. Although his analyses of repetition as subversion,

187 Notes to pages 112-24 irony, and revelation of the "uncanny" in nineteenth century and Modernist novels is tangential to commentary on Mansfield, his distinction is relevant here: between a "Platonic" model and a "Nietzschean" one (6) - i.e., between one that, through mimesis, acquires its validity by the fact of repeating an original model and one that, however strong the sense of similarity it draws on, can only, in the action of repeating, emphasize its difference from that which preceded it. 2 For a structuralist analysis of "The Voyage," see Bonheim ("Metaphor Boxes"); see also Lojkine-Morelec ("Les Objets comme reperes"); and cf Harmat's structuralist analysis of "Miss Brill" ("Essai d'analyse"). 3 Shelley's "The Cloud" of course opens "I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers"; Mansfield's deliberate misquotation here not only suggests Matilda's limited memory for poetry but also converts the phrase into one that functions more pointedly within the imagery of "The Wind Blows" itself. Clearly, what Matilda's storm of adolescent aspiration is not associated with, in a context of dead chrysanthemums and bent pohutakawas, is "fresh flowers"; the sexual longing that the story obliquely expresses is far less domestic and far more dramatic than that. 4 "Autumn i" also appeared in Signature and was subsequently collected, as "The Apple-Tree," in Murry's "Definitive Edition" of Mansfield's Journal. While Alpers calls the story "a trivial piece" (Stories, 555), and does not collect it in the so-called "Definitive Edition" of Mansfield's Stories, the imagery of "Autumn i" is relevant to a reading of "Autumn n." In the earlier sketch an unnamed narrator recalls two orchards from her youth, one a "wild" one (Stones, 86) that she and her brother Bogey do not go near, the other one that they do visit, "hidden from the house," where the grass grew "so thick and coarse that it tangled and knotted in your shoes" (86). This latter orchard has a "Forbidden Tree" (87), named so by their father, who anticipates (because an Englishman has told him so) that it will bear special fruit; when they bite into the apples it produces in the autumn, however - even though they lie to their father that the apples are "perfect" - the fruit tastes "floury" and "bitter" and "horrible" and "dry" (89). "Autumn," perhaps coincidentally, is also the season that dates the moment of crisis in the life of the narrator of "The Married Man's Story." CHAPTER SEVEN

i For a contrary view see Hanson and Gurr, Katherine Mansfield, 40-3, who argue that the "extremity of language," the "expressionist" diction of the opening paragraph, aptly conveys Ole Underwood's "fractured vision" (41). Hanson and Gurr also argue that the repetition of

i88 Notes to pages 126-34 "gibberish or near-gibberish words also foreshadows the loss of rationality" (41) with which the story will close; they read the ending as a moment of "suspension as Ole Underwood is about to re-enact his tragedy" of thirty years earlier (42). 2 On the relation between formal construction, silence, mimicry, and gender in "At the Bay," see my chapter on Mansfield in Dreams of Speech and Violence, 211-20, 281-3. 3 These roles are not fixed. In "At the Bay" Beryl is herself excluded from power, in part by others' arrogation of authority (over language, over money, over morality, over behaviour). But in "The Doll's House" Beryl takes on the role of silencer, prohibiting Kezia's contact with the Kelvey girls; Kezia acts to countermand Beryl's order, and Else Kelvey, the silent one whom class lines have ostensibly excluded from power, at least briefly at the end of the story, in admittedly limited circumstances, acquires speech. For further comments on class in "The Doll's House" see Delaney ("Short and Simple Annals"); for further analysis of Beryl's role, see Dowling ("Aunt Beryl's Doll's House"). Moran (Word of Mouth) also devotes extended comment to this story. 4 Critical comment on this story has been more extensive, and several details of interpretation bear upon the relationship between John and Jane. Saralyn Daly observes, for example, that Hammond, early in the story, regrets not having brought field-glasses with him to see the steamer at a distance, but adds that John cannot see his wife no matter how close they get (Katherine Mansfield, 106). Cherry Hankin links Hammond with characters from other stories, such as Stanley Burnell and the boss in "The Fly," characters who are outwardly demanding and emotionally insecure (Confessional Stories, 246). (The relation between "The Stranger" and "The Fly" is further confirmed by the parallel use of the word "snug" in both [Stories, 364, 529], to set up a premise that the narrative resists; in both stories dislocation overturns location.) Marvin Magalaner comments on the names and suggests that the little girl named Jean is merely a momentary substitution for Jane in John's life (The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 102). While Magalaner goes on to read the story as a study of loneliness, as does Heather Murray (Double Lives, 118) - though Magalaner tends to sympathize with Hammond, whereas Murray argues that Jane constructs barriers against John because women have to withdraw into privacy to escape male depredations (117-18) - Sydney Janet Kaplan focuses more on the theme of the possessiveness of heterosexual love (Origins of Modernist Fiction, 215-16), and on the way it leads John Hammond, for example, to be jealous even of children in his drive to command attention for himself. See also Breuer, "Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen."

189 Notes to pages 139-54 CHAPTER

EIGHT

1 Saralyn Daly (Katherine Mansfield) is one of the few critics to comment on these stories, but her judgment, that "All are clever wit but of insignificant value" (48), is characteristic of the point of view Alpers was later to reaffirm in his notes to Stories. 2 As Hubbell does, for example ("Mansfield and Kezia"), or Alpers, especially in his earlier, 1954 biography. 3 Sarah Sandley's comments on Mansfield's use of tense are apropos ("The Middle of the Note"). 4 Hanson and Gurr read the scene as a symbolist expression of Stanley's will to control (and thus destroy) Linda and Beryl; by this reading, Pat is Stanley's "surrogate" (Katherine Mansfield, 53), his role that of executioner. The "decapitation of the duck," moreover, "is also an objectified expression of a repressed desire" of Linda's, "for it suggests castration" (53-4). 5 Few of Mansfield's stories have attracted as much critical attention as "Prelude," yet most commentaries reiterate one of two positions. The first suggests that a summary of the multiple viewpoints reveals that Kezia (and in some instances Beryl) still have the future before them, and that this story recounts their "prelude," but that Linda has no future (e.g., Daly, Katherine Mansfield, 65-73); this perspective usually finds Mrs Fairfield a figure of warmth and encouragement as well. Marvin Magalaner (The Fiction, 26-39) thinks of the story as an "annunciation of the birth of [Mansfield's] brother" (29), and focuses on the imagery as a way of coding the difference between reality and dream; he further reads the story for literal examples of preludes, finding a family prelude in the move to "a new kind of suburban living" (29), a pre-adolescent prelude for the children, a pre-spinsterhood prelude for Beryl, a pre-death prelude for Mrs Fairfield, and an indication of no change whatsoever in the marital relationship between Linda and Stanley - all of which unduly circumscribes the story. The second view uses the imagery to reveal the power struggle between men and women, and the codes of social behaviour that militate against change; Kate Fullbrook, for example (Katherine Mansfield, 63-85), traces the relation between men in the story and images that involve devouring and monstrosity, and the relation between women, birds, imprisonment, and (in Linda's case) paranoia; she writes that "the Burnells' destructive marriage ... turns the pastoral setting of the story into a battlefield for a sexual guerrilla war" (85). Mary Burgan (Illness, Gender and Writing, 105-18) pursues further the implications of Linda's "hysterical rebellion" (111), the feverishness of phallic dreams, and competitions in the

190 Notes to pages 156-8 cycles of nature, finding that criticism that responds primarily to Mansfield's sense of the "ecstatic" in nature deflects attention from her greater concern to analyse how women become depersonalized (105-6). Sydney Janet Kaplan elucidates the way the story explores "feminine consciousness" (Origins of Modernist Fiction, 115). 6 As early as 1904 (Letters, 1:10-11, 44) Mansfield had read works by the Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck (winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize), and she may have been familiar with his play The Blue Bird, which depicts children's quest for the happiness of the condition that precedes birth and mortality. 7 Kate Fulbrook reads this ending in a more positive way; she argues that the lid is "a sign of established cultural codes" (84) and that, while it does not break here, the story hints that for Kezia (unlike her mother, who cannot bear to look deeply at herself in the mirror) the lid someday will break. CHAPTER NINE

i Most comments have been made in passing. Marvin Magalaner, for example, asserts that it is because Mansfield equates love with childhood that her fiction "eliminates the likelihood of philosophical consideration, effectively reduces history to the immediate present, and denies the validity of relevant intellectual speculation." This approach, he suggests, explains why Mansfield is especially successful with presentations of children and why "stories like ... The Escape' ... suffer from treatment too one-dimensional and simplistic" (The Fiction, 124). Sylvia Berkman refers to the story as one of some "uncharitable studies of neurotic women": "The women of these stories are exposed as rapacious, selfish creatures, of highly irritable nervous sensibility. One cannot help thinking that out of her own specialized knowledge of exacerbation Miss Mansfield, in part, was here turning the knife against herself" (A Critical Study, 121). Further, "Miss Mansfield had no affection for the modern metropolitan young woman. Almost without exception the young women she presents are callous, temperamental, selfish, and unreasonable. They demand the servile, undeviating attention of their men; their hypersensitive nerves cannot endure the slightest strain. It is in the delineation of these self-conscious, egocentric beings that she utilizes the syncopated accent of their own speech" (180). Rhoda Nathan (Katherine Mansfield, 104-6) also reads the story as a demonstration of the selfishness of a neurotic. Heather Murray (Double Lives, 86-90) comments in greater detail, emphasizing the woman's illness and suggesting parallels between her and Mansfield's character Monica Tyrell in "Revelations."

191 Notes to page 159 2 The tree scene may have some empirical basis in Mansfield's observations in the south of France. Her journal entry for 5 Feb. 1920 reads in part: "Saw an orange-tree, an exquisite shape against the sky: when the fruit is ripe the leaves are pale yellow" (Journal, 198). Another passage, entitled "The Glimpse" - which precedes the entry for 29 Feb. 1920 adds to the context for reading the epiphany scene: "And yet one has these 'glimpses,' before which all that one ever has written (what has one written?) - all (yes, all) that one ever has read, pales ... What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment (what do I mean?) the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up - out of life - one is 'held', and then, - down, bright, broken, glittering on to the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow. I don't want to be sentimental. But while one hangs, suspended in the air, held, - while I watched the spray, I was conscious for life of the ... flowers on the tree I was passing; and more - of a huge cavern where my selves (who were like ancient sea-weed gatherers) mumbled, indifferent and intimate ... and this other self apart in the carriage, grasping the cold knob of her umbrella, thinking of a ship, of ropes stiffened with white paint and the wet, flapping oilskins of sailors ... Shall one ever be at peace with oneself? Ever quiet and uninterrupted - without pain - with the one whom one loves under the same roof?" (203) Commenting on Mansfield's pictorial abilities, Gillian Boddy quotes from a passage that Mansfield wrote about Bandol in November 1915 (Journal, 90), which may also be relevant: "The wind died down at sunset. Half a ring of moon hangs in the hollow air. It is very quiet. Somewhere I can hear a woman crooning a song" (Katherine Mansfield, 108) The pear tree in "Bliss" provides a parallel example, and on the possible relation between the enclosed gardens there and in Chaucer's "The Merchant's Tale" (the January-May story), see Moran, Word of Mouth, 40-67. 3 "The Escape," they write, was "written at Hampstead in the summer ... of 1920" (Katherine Mansfield, 57). Murray calls the story "prophetic" and suggests that it anticipates a train trip Mansfield and Middleton Murry took in 1922 (Double Lives, 89-90). Vincent O'Sullivan advised me (personal letter, 1988) that there are no direct references to the story in Mansfield's letters of 1920, though Peter Halter quotes a possibly relevant statement from a letter Mansfield sent to Richard Murry a month before the story appeared: "'People today are simply cursed by what I call the personal ... What is happening to ME. Look at ME. This is what has been done to ME. It's just as though you tried to run and all the while an enormous black serpent fastened on to you'" (Kurzgeschichte, 135). 4 The way the woman in the story uses masks (the make-up, the veil, the parasol) as rejections of or resistances to the sun may perhaps be read

192 Notes to pages 159-69

5

6

7

8 9 10

as an unconscious denial of the need for treatment. The combination of musical motifs, the south of France, and the threat of tuberculosis may also hint at parallels with La Tmviata. Berkman points out the symbolic value of the copper-leaved tree (A Critical Study, 192), as does Martin Armstrong ("The Art of Katherine Mansfield"); Armstrong calls "The Escape" and "Bliss" "prose poems [that use] symbolism ... [T]he idea of the story is embodied, or partly embodied, in a tree. Just as in poetry, those trees stand for an emotion, a state of mind, which, as beautiful visual images, they translate directly and emotionally to the reader. It is, as it were, a short-circuiting of emotion from writer to reader without any coil of analysis and generalisation" (488). This subject is taken up at greater length by Halter (Kurzgeschichte, 133-5), who, like Berkman, stresses the metaphysics of the epiphany; Halter focuses on the man's escape, and reads the epiphany in two stages: first as a regressive, effectively suicidal flight, and second as a release from the weight of a restricted personal identity as the man folds into the radiant harmony of all natural being. See also Sandley on prose poetry ("The Middle of the Note," 70-2, 77-9). Given the story's concern with mirrors, mimicry, and fragmentation, it is well to consider Toril Moi's comments on Luce Irigaray as another possible context for reading "The Escape." As Moi understands her, Irigaray argues that women's writing uses the techniques of mimicry and incomplete statements in order to parody the normative assumptions of patriarchal rhetoric (including its concern for "wholeness" and "centre") and to claim for women a freedom from the "logical" strictures of consistency, identity, and limited meaning (Sexual/Textual Politics, 139-46). In the case of "The Escape," however, incomplete utterance seems rather to reinforce the woman's dependency. The promise of revelation, they go on, is conceived as either a promise or a threat that the viewer will be able to see through the veil from one sphere to a second: between, for example, "the phenomenal and noumenal; culture and nature; two consciousnesses; life and death; public appearance and private reality; conscious and unconscious impulses; past and present, present and future" (Madwoman, 468-9). They are referring to Louisa May Alcott, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Bronte at this point in their argument. See also Benet, Writers in Love. Virginia Woolf goes on, in her 1931 letter to Vita Sackville-West: "And there was Murry squirming and oozing a sort of thick motor oil in the background - dinners with them were about the most unpleasant exhibitions, humanly speaking, I've ever been to." In "The Escape," however, the musical sensitivity of the husband, in his moment of epiphany, also suggests parallels with Garnet Trowell and George Bowden.

193 Notes to pages 170-3 11 Gilbert and Gubar (Madwoman, 460-1) are referring to George Eliot against a context that at this point includes Eve, Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, Goethe's Faust, Shelley's Medusa, Keats's Belle Dame Sans Merci, and figures in Coleridge and Wordsworth. 12 The passage continues: "Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end at sunset" (52). 13 The root-word for "revelation" is, paradoxically, "re-veiling," as though mystery defers not to clarity but to another mystery; it must be emphasized, however, that the Latin prefix re-, in this context, means "back from" rather than "again." 14 The "pillars" in the vision suggest an oracle. 15 He is re-enacting in some degree the position his wife took in the carriage, gripping her seat against the shaking motion; both appear to be cradled, rocking, and hence both appear to be working out their connection with a mother figure as well as with each other. 16 Cf Toril Moi, writing about Helene Cixous: "It is ... patriarchy, not feminism, that insists on labelling women as emotional, intuitive and imaginative, while jealously converting reason and rationality into an exclusively male preserve" (Sexual/Textual Politics, 123). 17 She is Bertha Grant before her marriage to La timer. "Bertha" is of course also the name of Rochester's "mad wife" in Jane Eyre.

This page intentionally left blank

Works Cited

Alcock, Peter. "An Aloe in the Garden: Something Essentially New Zealand in Miss Mansfield." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 11.3 (Apr. 1977): 58-64. Alpers, Antony. Katherine Mansfield: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape 1954. - The Life of Katherine Mansfield. London: Jonathan Cape 1980. Armstrong, Martin. "The Art of Katherine Mansfield." Fortnightly Review 113 ns (i Feb. 1923): 484-90. Ashley, Leonard R.N., and Stuart L. Astor, eds. British Short Stories. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1968. Atwan, Robert, and Harvey Wiener, eds. Enjoying Stories. New York: Longman 1987. Baker, Ida. Katherine Mansfield: The Memories ofL.M. London: Michael Joseph 1971. Bal, Mieke. On Story-Telling. Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge 1991. Banks, Joanne Trautmann. "Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield." In The English Short Story 1880-1945: A Critical History, ed. Joseph M. Flora. Boston: Twayne 1985. 57-82. Bardolph, Jacqueline. "The French Connection: Bandol." In Robinson, In from the Margin, 158-72. Barroll, J. Leeds, and Austin M. Wright, eds. The Art of the Short Story. Boston: Allyn and Bacon 1969. Bates, H.E. The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey. 1941. Rpt with a new preface. London: Michael Joseph 1972.

196 Works Cited Bateson, F.W, and B. Shahevitch. "{Catherine Mansfield's The Fly': A Critical Exercise." Essays in Criticism 12 (1962): 39-53; and correspondence concerning this article (R.A. Jolly, R.A. Copland, E.B. Greenwood, F.W. Bateson), 335-51. Beachcroft, T.O. "Katherine Mansfield's Encounter with Theocritus." English 23 (1974): 13-19. - "Katherine Mansfield - Then and Now." Modern Fiction Studies 24.3 (197879): 343-52. Benet, Mary K. Writers in Love. New York: Macmillan 1977. Berkman, Sylvia. Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study. New Haven: Yale University Press 1951. Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1985. Blodgett, Harriett. "The Inviolable Self: Reappraising Katherine Mansfield's Women." New Renaissance 5.3 (Fall 1983): 104-12. Boddy, Gillian. Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin 1988. - "The Annotated Notebooks of Katherine Mansfield, i895-July 1908, with Commentary." PhD, Victoria University of Wellington, 1996. - "Familiar Lives - Men and Women in the Writing of Katherine Mansfield." Commonwealth SP 4 (1997): 50-61. Bonheim, Helmut. "Teaching Katherine Mansfield's The Voyage': Metaphor Boxes." Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 20.1 (1987): 99-113. Bowen, Elizabeth. Introduction to Stories by Katherine Mansfield. New York: Vintage, 1956. v-xxiv. Breuer, Hannelore, and Horst Breuer. "Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen zu Katherine Mansfields Erzahlung The Stranger/" Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 20.4 (1987): 505-17. Brinton, Laurel. '"Represented Perception': A Study in Narrative Style." Poetics 9 (1980): 363-81. Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. Understanding Fiction. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts 1943. Brophy, Brigid. "Katherine Mansfield." London Magazine (Dec. 1962). Rpt in Brophy, Don't Never forget. London: Jonathan Cape 1966. 256-7. Burgan, Mary. Illness, Gender and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1994. Calder, Alex. "My Katherine Mansfield." In Robinson, In from the Margin, 119-36. Carswell, John. Lives and Letters. London and Boston: Faber and Faber 1978. Cassill, R.V., ed. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 3rd ed. New York: Norton 1986. Charters, Ann, ed. The Story and Its Writer. New York: St Martins 1987.

197 Works Cited Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Houghton Mifflin 1978. - and Samuel R. Levin, eds. Essays on the Language of Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1967. [Chekov] Tchekhoff, Anton. The Black Monk and Other Stories. Trans. R.E.C. Long. 1903; rpt New York: Frederick H. Stokes 1915. Clough, Arthur Hugh. The Poems of Arthur Hugh dough. 2nd ed. Ed. F.L. Mulhauser. Oxford: Clarendon 1974. Corballis, Richard. "From The New Age to The Blue Review. Katherine Mansfield's 'Kick Off Towards Maturity, 1910-13." Commonwealth SP 4 (1997): 18-26. Corin, Fernand. "Creation of Atmosphere in Katherine Mansfield's Stories." Revue des langues vivantes 22.1 (1956): 65-78. Daiches, David. "The Art of Katherine Mansfield." New Literary Values: Studies in Modern Literature. 1936; rpt Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries 1968. 83-114. Dale, Judith. "Performing Katherine Mansfield." Landfall 43 (Dec. 1989): 50311. Daly, Saralyn. Katherine Mansfield. New York: Twayne 1965. Davis, Robert Gorham, ed. Ten Modern Masters. New York: Harcourt Brace 1953Deframont, Franchise. "Impossible Mourning." In Michel and Dupuis, The Fine Instrument, 157-65. De Groen, Alma. The Rivers of China. Sydney: Currency Press 1988. Delaney, Paul. "Short and Simple Annals of the Poor: Katherine Mansfield's 'The Doll's House.'" Mosaic 10 (1976): 6-17. Dowling, David. "Aunt Beryl's Doll's House." Landfall 34.2 (June 1980): 148-58. Drummond, Alison. Married and Gone to New Zealand. Hamilton and Auckland: Paul's Book Arcade; London: Oxford 1963. Duggan, Eileen. "Three New Zealand Books." Art in New Zealand 7:2 (Dec. 1934): 92. Dunn, Douglas. Elegies. London: Faber & Faber 1985. Durix, Carole Froude. "Point Counterpoint: Both Sides of the Broad Road in Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party' and Witi Ihimaera's This Life is Weary.'" In Michel and Dupuis, The Fine Instrument, 175-86. Eliot, George. A George Eliot Miscellany. Ed. F.B. Pinion. London: Macmillan 1982. Eliot, T.S. After Strange Gods. New York: Harcourt Brace 1934. - The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Valerie Eliot. Vol. i. London: Faber and Faber,

1988.

Else, Anne. "From Little Monkey to Neurotic Invalid: Limitation, Selection and Assumption in Antony Alpers' Life of Katherine Mansfield." Women's Studies International Forum 8.5 (1985): 497-505.

198 Works Cited Fairburn, A.R.D. "Katherine Mansfield." New Zealand Artists Annual 1.3 (1928): 69-71. Foff, Arthur, and Daniel Knapp, eds. Story. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth 1964. Franklin, Carol. "The Function of Refunctioning." Paper delivered at Victoria University of Wellington, 13 Oct. 1988. Fullbrook, Kate. Katherine Mansfield. Brighton: Harvester 1986. Gallant, Mavis. From the Fifteenth District. Toronto: Macmillan 1979. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1979. Glage, Liselotte. "Biographies and No End: Katherine Mansfield Criticism in Search of Its Subject." In Michel and Dupuis, The Fine Instrument, 28-48. Gordon, Ian. "The Editing of Katherine Mansfield's Journal and Scrapbook." Landfall 13:1 (Mar. 1959): 62-9. - Katherine Mansfield. London: Longman 1964. - "Katherine Mansfield in the Late Twentieth Century." In Michel and Dupuis, The Fine Instrument, 15-27. - , ed. Undiscovered Country: The New Zealand Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Longman 1974. Gubar, Susan. "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine." In The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1983. 19-59. Gurr, Andrew. "Katherine Mansfield: The Question of Perspectives in Commonwealth Literature." Kunapipi 6:2 (1984): 67-80. Halter, Peter. Katherine Mansfield und die Kurzgeschichte. Bern: Francke Verlag 1972. Hankin, C.A. Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories. London: Macmillan 1983. Hanson, Clare, and Andrew Gurr. Katherine Mansfield. London: Macmillan 1981. Hardy, Linda. "The Ghost of Katherine Mansfield." Landfall 43 (Dec. 1989): 416-32. Harmat, Andree-Marie. "Essai d'analyse structurale d'une nouvelle lyrique anglaise: 'Miss Brill' de Katherine Mansfield." Les Cahiers de la nouvelle i (1983): 49-74. - "Bliss Versus Corruption in Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories." Commonwealth SP 4 (1997): 62-71. - "Un tres mansfieldien plagiat de Tchekhov: 'L'Enfant-quit-etait-fatiguee' de Katherine Mansfield." Litteratures 16 (Spring 1987): 49-68. Havighurst, Walter, ed. Masters of the Modern Short Story. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace 1955. Heilman, Robert B., ed. Modern Short Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace 1950..

199 Works Cited Holcroft, M.H. Reluctant Editor. Wellington: Reed 1969. Hubbell, George S. "{Catherine Mansfield and Kezia." Sewanee Review 35 (July 1927): 325-35. Ihimaera, Witi. Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute. Auckland: Viking 1989. Isherwood, Christopher. Exhumations. New York: Simon and Schuster 1966. - ed. Great English Short Stories. New York: Dell/Laurel 1957. Jaffe, Adrian H., and Virgil Scott, eds. Studies in the Short Story. New York: Dry den 1949. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. "Katherine Mansfield's 'Passion for Technique.'" In Women's Language and Style, ed. Douglas Butturff and Edmund L. Epstein. Akron: University of Akron Press 1978. 119-31. - Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1991. Karl, Frederick R., ed. The Signet Classic Book of British Short Stories. New York: New American Library 1985. Kirkpatrick, B.J. A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon 1989. Kleine, Don W. "An Eden for Insiders." College English 27 (Dec. 1965): 201-9. Knister, Raymond. "Katherine Mansfield." The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose. Sel. Peter Stevens. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976. 427-35Kobler, J.F. Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne 1990. Kurylo, Charanne Carroll. "Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield: A Study in Literary Influence." PhD, University of North Carolina 1974. Leacock, Stephen. "'We Have with Us To-Night."' My Discovery of England. 1922. Rpt in The Best of Leacock. Ed. J.B. Priestley. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1958. 174-87. Lederman, Marie Jean. "Through the Looking-Glass." Women's Studies 5 (1977): 35-49Leighton, Lauren G. "Chekhov in English." In A Chekhov Companion, ed. Toby W. Clyman. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood 1985. 291-309. Lojkine-Morelec, Monique. "Les Objets comme reperes de 1'identite dans The Voyage' de Katherine Mansfield." La Nouvelle de langue anglaise 3 (1989): 43-52. Lynskey Winifred, ed. Reading Modern Fiction. New York: Scribners 1962. McLaughlin, Ann L. "An Uneasy Sisterhood: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield." In Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 1983. 152-61. Magalaner, Marvin. The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1971. - and Edmond L. Volpe, eds. Twelve Short Stories. New York: Macmillan 1969. Mandel, Miriam B. "Reductive Imagery in 'Miss Brill.'" Studies in Short Fiction 26.4 (Fall 1989): 473-7.

2OO Works Cited Manhire, Bill. The Brain of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Auckland University Press 1988. Mansfield, Katherine. The Aloe with Prelude. Ed. Vincent O'Sullivan. Wellington: Port Nicholson Press 1982. - The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Vol. i: 1903-1917; 2: 1918-1919; 3: 1919-1920; 4: 1920-1921. Oxford: Clarendon 1984, 1987, 1993, 1996. - The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Clare Hanson. London: Macmillan 1987. - Dramatic Sketches. Intro. David Dowling, Wilhelmina Drummond, and David Drummond. Palmerston North: Nagare Press 1988. - Journal of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. J. Middleton Murry. Definitive Edition. London: Constable 1962. - Katherine Mansfield: Manuscripts in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library 1988. - Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, 1907-09. Ed. Jean E. Stone. Sydney: Wentworth 1977. - The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. C.K. Stead. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977. - Letters and Papers of Katherine Mansfield, 1907-1922. Newberry Library Chicago. MS Group 44. - "[London]." Ed. Margaret Scott. Turnbull Library Record 3.3 (Nov. 1970): 129-36. - Poems of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Vincent O'Sullivan. Auckland: Oxford 1988. - The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. J. Middleton Murry. London: Constable 1939. - The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Antony Alpers. Auckland: Oxford University Press 1984. - "Study: The Death of a Rose." Triad (Dunedin), 1908, 35. - The Urewera Notebook. Ed. Ian Gordon. London: Oxford 1978. Marr, David. Patrick White: A Life. 1991. Rpt Sydney: Vintage/ Random House 1992. Martin, David W. "Chekhov and the Modern Short Story in English." Neophilologus 71.1 (Jan. 1987): 129-43. Maurois, Andre. Poets and Prophets. Trans. Hamish Miles. London: Cassell 1936. Mellard, James M., ed. Four Modes. New York: Macmillan 1973. Messenger, WE., and WH. New, eds. A 20th Century Anthology. Toronto: Prentice-Hall 1984. Mezei, Kathy, ed. Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 1996. Michel, Paulette, and Michel Dupuis, eds. The Fine Instrument. Aarhus: Dangaroo 1989.

2Oi

Works Cited

Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1982. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. London and New York: Methuen 1985. Moran, Patricia. Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia 1996. Morrow, Patrick D. Katherine Mansfield's Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press 1993. Muller, Gilberlt H., and John A. Williams, eds. The McGraw-Hill Introduction to Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill 1985. Murray, Heather. Double Lives: Women in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Dunedin: University of Otago Press 1990. Nathan, Rhoda. Katherine Mansfield. New York: Continuum 1988. Neaman, Judith. "Allusion, Image, and Associative Pattern: The Answers in Mansfield's 'Bliss.'" Twentieth-Century Literature 32.2 (Summer 1986): 242-54. Nebeker, Helen E. "The Pear Tree: Sexual Implications in Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss.'" Modern Fiction Studies 18.4 (Winter 1972-73): 545-51. New, W.H. Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press 1987. - and H.J. Rosengarten, eds. Modern Stories in English. New York: Crowell 1975- Modern Stories in English. 2nd ed. New York: Longman 1986. Oak Not Ash. "Katherine Mansfield." New Zealand Listener, 2 Mar. 1951, 5. O'Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. Cleveland and New York: World 1963. O'Neill, Patrick. Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994. Orr, Bridget. "Reading with the Taint of the Pioneer: Katherine Mansfield and Settler Criticism." Landfall 43.4 (Dec. 1989): 447-61. O'Sullivan, Vincent. "The Magnetic Chain: Notes and Approaches to Katherine Mansfield." Landfall 29:2 (June 1975): 95-131. - "The New Zealand Stories." Commonwealth SP 4 (1997): 4-12. Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth. "Katherine Mansfield Reading Other Women: The Personality of the Text." In Robinson, In from the Margin, 36-52. Paul, Mary. "'Bliss,' and Why Ignorance Won't Do: The Use of Criticism and Theory in Current Reading Practices." In Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing, ed. Mark Williams and Michele Leggott. Auckland: Auckland University Press 1995. 211-31. Perrine, Laurence, ed. Story and Structure. 5th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1978. Peterson, Richard F. "The Circle of Truth: The Stories of Katherine Mansfield and Mary Lavin." Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978): 383-94. Pickering, James H., ed. Fiction wo. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan 1978. Pilditch, Jan, ed. The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield. Westport, Conn., and London:. Greenwood 1996.

202 Works Cited Rankin, William. "Ineffability in the Fiction of Jean Toomer and Katherine Mansfield." In Renaissance and Modern, ed. Murray J. Levitt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1976. 160-71. Rees, Robert A., and Barry Menikoff, eds. The Short Story. Boston: Little, Brown 1969. Reid, Ian. "Framing Mansfield." Short Story i (Spring 1990): 83-95. Riffaterre, Michael. "Criteria for Style Analysis." 1959. In Chatman and Levin, Essays on the Language of Literature, 412-30. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen 1983. Roberts, Edgar V, and Henry E. Jacobs, eds. Literature. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1986. Robinson, Roger, ed. Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Sandley, Sarah. "The Middle of the Note: Katherine Mansfield's 'Glimpses.'" In Robinson, In from the Margin, 70-89. Schneider, Elisabeth. "Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov." Modern Language Notes 50.6 (June 1935): 394~7Scott, Margaret. "The Unpublished Maunscripts [sic] of Katherine Mansfield, Part n." Turnbull Library Record 3, ns 3 (Nov. 1970): 128-36. - ed. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. 2 vols. Auckland: Lincoln University Press/Daphne Brasell/Whitireia 1997. Sellei, Nora. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond. Frankfurt: Peter Lang 1996. Short, Raymond W, and Richard B. Sewall, eds. Short Stories for Study. New York: Henry Holt 1956. Siegel, Carol. "Virginia Woolf's and Katherine Mansfield's Responses to D.H. Lawrence's Criticism." The D.H. Lawrence Review 21.3 (Fall 1989): 291-311. Siegfried, Andre. Democracy in New Zealand. Trans. E.V. Burns. London: G. Bell and Sons 1914. Smith, Angela. "Thresholds in 'Prelude' and To the Lighthouse." Commonwealth SP 4 (1997): 39-49Smith, Elliott L., and Andrew W. Hart, eds. The Short Story. New York: Random House 1981. Sportelli, Annamaria. "Ritrovarsi nell'altro: Note sulle Ricerca Estetica di Katherine Mansfield." In Ritratto dell'artista come Donna, ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones and Vita Fortunati. Urbino: Quattroventi 1988. 91-111. Stead, C.K. "Katherine Mansfield as Colonial Realist." Commonwealth SP 4 (1997): 13-17. Sutherland, Ronald. "Katherine Mansfield: Plagiarist, Disciple, or Ardent Admirer?" Critique 5:2 (Fall 1962): 58-76. Taube, Eva, ed. Seasons of Life. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1985. Taylor, J. Chesley ed. The Short Story. New York: Scribners 1969.

203 Works Cited Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. London: Viking 1987. Tomlinson, Sophie. "Mans-Field in Bookform." Landfall 39.4 (Dec. 1985): 465-89. Toolan, Michael J. The Stylistics of Fiction: A Literary-Linguistic Approach. London and New York: Routledge 1990. Wagenknecht, Edward. "Dickens and Katherine Mansfield." Dickens and the Scandalmongers. Norman: Oklahoma University Press 1965. 99-108. Waldron, Philip. "Katherine Mansfield's Journal." Twentieth Century Literature 20.1 (1974): 11-18. Webby, Elizabeth. "Katherine Mansfield: Everything and Nothing." Meanjin 41:2 (June 1982): 236-43. Wendorf, Richard. "Alexander Pope: An Essay on Man, Epistles i-m." In The Marks in the Fields: Essays on the Uses of Manuscripts, ed. Rodney G. Dennis with Elizabeth Falsey. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Library, Harvard University 1992. 47-57. West, Ray B., and Robert Wooster Stallman, eds. The Art of Modern Fiction. New York: Rinehart 1949. Wevers, Lydia. "The Sod under My Feet': Katherine Mansfield." In Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing, ed. Mark Williams and Michele Leggott. Auckland: Auckland University Press 1995. 31-48. - "This World's Imagining: The Biographies of Katherine Mansfield." Commonwealth SP 4 (1997): 27-38. Wiebe, Rudy, ed. The Story-Makers. 2nd ed. Toronto: Gage 1987. Wimsatt, W.K., Jr. "Style as Meaning." 1939. In Chatman and Levin, Essays on the Language of Literature, 362-73. Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again. London: Hogarth 1964. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2: 1920-24. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. 1978; rpt Harmondsworth: Penguin 1981. - The Common Reader. 1925; rpt New York: Harcourt Brace and World 1953. - "A Terribly Sensitive Mind." 1927. Granite and Rainbow: Essays. London: Hogarth 1958. 73-5. - A Reflection of the Other: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1929-1931. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: Hogarth 1978. Wright, Celeste Turner. "Darkness as a Symbol in Katherine Mansfield." Modern Philology 51 (1953-54): 204-7. - "Katherine Mansfield's Boat Image." Twentieth Century Literature 1.3 (Oct. 1955): 128-32. Zinman, Toby Silverman. "The Snail under the Leaf: Katherine Mansfield's Imagery." Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978-79): 457-64. Zohrab, Irene. "Katherine Mansfield's Previously Unknown Publications on Anton Chekhov." Journal of New Zealand Literature 6 (1988): 137-56. Zorn, Marilyn. "Visionary Flowers: Another Study of Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss.'" Studies in Short Fiction 17.2 (1980): 141-7.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Alcott, Louisa May, 1921110 Alexander Turnbull Library, 52 Almedingen, E.M., 15-16 Alpers, Antony: and Burnell stories, 7; as editor, xix-xx, 42, 139-40, 159; on "Revelations," 18, 21; on tense, 133; and White, 51 Andersen, Hans Christian, 146 Anteriority, 146-57 Anthologies, x-xiv Antony and Cleopatra: Mansfield on Shakespeare, 58 Armstrong, Martin, 192^ Arnold, Matthew, 119 Athenaeum, 15, 18, 22, 63, 65, 159 Austen, Jane, 128 Australia, 24, 26, 42, 51 Authority: and evidence, 16, 32, 68, 73; and hat imagery, 125; and speech, 79; and syntax, 71; see also Gender, Reputation

Baker, Ida, 22, i8onii3 Bal, Mieke, xiv, i82n2o, i85m Bardolph, Jacqueline, 113 Bates, H.E., 11 Beauchamp, Leslie, xii, 88, 114, 117-18 Beauchamp, Vera, 146 Bennett, Arnold, 85 Berkman, Sylvia, 169, 171, igoni Best, Marshall, 51 Bibliography, xix, 42 Biographies, xx, 52, 168; see also Criticism, biographical Blackmail, 16, i8ini6 The Black Monk and Other Stories (Chekhov), 34 "Bliss" (in Dunn), 184^3 Bliss and Other Stories, 18, 159, 165 Bliss and Other Stories (in Dunn), i84n23 Bloomsbury Group: see Prewett, Strachey, Wool! The Blue Bird (Maeterlinck), I9on6 The Blue Review, 139 Boddy, Gillian, 6, igin2

Body, 12, 40; body language, 82; twin who takes over, 118; see also Sexuality "The Bothie of Tober-naVuolich" (Clough), 3 Bowden, George, i92nio "The Boy with the Camera" (Ihimaera), 25 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, i92nio The Brain of Katherine Mansfield (Manhire), 24 Brett, Dorothy, 12, 22, 33, 168 Bronte, Charlotte, 128, i92nio Brophy, Brigid, 10-11, I79n9 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 128 Burgan, Mary, 12, 118, 127 Burnell names, 7, 146; Burnells dismissed as characters, 65 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 118-19 Canada, 23-4

2o6 Index Canon and canonicity, x, xiii, 23, 28 Carco, Francis, 93, i8oni3 Carswell, John, xiv Character types, 43; see also Sentimentality Chatman, Seymour, i82n20 Chaucer, Geoffrey, igin2 Chekhov, Anton, xii; compared with Mansfield, 33-41; as influence, 23; Mansfield as a C character, I78n5; Mansfield's references to, 48, 63-4, 82; as source, 1317, i8ini6 The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), 15 Child figures, 9, 11, 35-7, 135, 140, 152-4; death as, 118; and happiness, I9on6 Childhood: in Chekhov, 15; and language, 19, 73; late stories of, 146; as paradise, 6, 53; and play, 147-52; and social judgment, 5, 8; in stories, 69, 117, 125, 131; see also Father figures, Mother figures Children's book, 24 Chopin, Frederic, 146 Cinematic form, 96, 162 Cixous, Helene, I93ni6 Class, xiv, 20, 34, 60, 79, 137; associated with race and stereotype, 122; and character, 138; and children, 156; classmarked schoolmates, 86; confused with age, 130; in "The Doll's House," i88n4; and power, 87; and sentence structure, 73; and slang 79; Stanley and Pat, 151 Closure, 65, 75, 144; and indeterminacy, 76; see nlcn Fnrlincrc

"The Cloud" (Shelley), i87n3 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 129, i93mi Colette, xiv, 15, 185^4 Colony and empire, viiiix, xiii, 3-4, 6, 14, 26, 45-6, 90, 97; and women, 9 The Common Reader (Woolf), 168 Constable Press, 5 Coppard, A.E., i8oni4 Corruption, cry against, 79, 87, 93/ 97-8, 132 Cosmetics, 78, 157; as mask, 167 Criterion, iSonio Critical expectation, fashion, ix, 6, 17, 34, 41 Critical perspective, 32 Critical versions of Mansfield, i77ni; see also Criticism, Reputation Criticism: biographical, 13, 24, 41, 51, 53, 146, 168; feminist, xiii, 12-13, i85n25, I92n6, I93ni6; formalist, xiv; narratological, xiv, i82n20, i85ni; nationalist, 4, 8, 24; postcolonial, xiv; psychological, 17, 49, 53, i8gn5; reader response and reception theory, xiv-xv, 64, 71, 87, i85ni; semiotic, xiv Daiches, David, i8oni6 Daly, Saralyn, 114, 123-4, i88n4 "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" (in Gallant), i84n23 Dear Miss Mansfield (Ihimaera), 24-6 Death, xiii, 21, 37, 80, 11011, 113-14, 168; motif of dead babies, 53; sex and, 44; see also Disease

Debussy, Claude, 146 De Groen, Alma, 24, 26-8, 31 Dialogue, dialogues, 94, 119, 132-3; antiphonal form of, 112; created by tense variation, 134; satiric, 43, 83, i86n2; structural, 115; theatrical, 87 Diaries, 4, 6, 51; entries as narrative form, 105 Dickens, Charles, i8oni4 Dickinson, Emily, 128 "A Dill Pickle" (in Dunn), i84n23 Disease, illness, fever, 27, 118-19, 127-8; and body, 13; imagery of, 13, 79; Mansfield's, xiii, 16, 26, 53, I93n4; and music, 192114; and neurosis, 169, igoni; presumed, 136; selfloathing and paralysis, 171; and shame, 70; see also Death Documentary and subjectivity, 19-20, 26, 92 The Dove's Nest and Other Stories, 56 Drama, 26-7, 185^4; see also Dialogue, Mansfield, dramatic sketches, Performance, Theatrical language Drawings, 55-6 Duggan, Eileen, 7 Dunn, Douglas, 24, 26, i84n23 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, i83n20 Editing Mansfield, xix-xx; see also Alpers, Boddy, Dowling, Gordon, Hanson, Murry, O'Sullivan Scott, Stead, Stone Education, 40, 44, 70, 85, 153,157; and women, 91; see also Queen's College

207 Index Egerton, George, 42 Elegies (Dunn), 24, 184^3 Eliot, George, 118-19, 12^/ 168-72 Eliot, T.S., xiv, 9, 11, 22 Emma (Austen), 128 Empire: see Colony Endings of stories, 18, 46, 65, 75, 106; and ambiguity, 123-4; epilogues, 139-45; eschewing epiphany, 172-3; and imagery, 78-80; marriage plot, 145 Englishness, 32 Epiphany, 23, 75, 121, 134, 165, 168, 172-4; hypothetical, 82; metaphysics of, I92n5; in narratological theory, i82n2o; and "re-veiling," ig2my, suppressed, 133 Ethnic biases, 152 Ethnic humour and power, 3 Ethnicity and idiom, 59-60 Evidence, assumptions about: see Authority Exhumations (Isherwood), 6

Food, 12-13; see also Imagery of food Form, 32-3, 54; and punctuation, 82, 83; as metaphor, 89-99 - grammatical structures as stylistic markers, 6770; adjectives, 45, 58-9, 67, 94, 98, 111-12, 162; adverbs, 44, 59, 67-9, 98, in, 156; conjunctions, 67; nouns, 58-9, 67, 112, 162; prepositional phrases, 73, 78; pronouns, 38-40, 71, 87; verbs, 48-9, 59, 67-8, 74, 104, 106, in, 162; see also Tense, Verbs, Verbal aspect - modalities of: absolutes, 21, 75, 97, 161; anteriority, 146-57; concession, 74; condition, 68, 75, 87; contingency, 130; exception, 161; hypothesis, 20, in, 117, 161; oversetting, 137; paradox, 68, 114 - as parenthetical space, 135; as spatial condition, 80-4, 121, 141 Formal effects: kinestheFable, 43 sia, 58; synesthesia, 58, Fabula, i82n20 78; see also Humour, Fairburn, A.R.D., 9 Imagery, Irony, Parody, Fantasy, fancy, fairytale, Satire, Visual appear45, 47, 53, 114, 119, 124ance 9, 136, 146; see also Formal organization, stratUtopia egies of: alliteration, 44Father figures, xiv, no, 5; analogy, 84, 86, 96; 113, 149, 154 anticlimax, 143; capital Feminist criticism: see Criticism letters, 44; climax, 74-5; comparison, 81-6; com"The Fijian Girl and the peting speech registers, Octopus" ("J.G."), 9 "The Fir Tree" (Ander44, 77, 85; contradicsen), 146 tion, 20; contrast, 68-70, Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 23 84; deferral, 121-38; ellipsis, 83-4, 105; "The Fly" (in Dunn), i84n23 imperative structure, 73; Focalization: see Point of interrogative structure, view 71, 97; interruption, 75,

85; inversion, 104, 1212; juxtaposition, 69, 84; lists, 44, 53-4, 56, 162; negation, 20, 69, 74, 98; parallelism, 74, 84, 86; placement strategies, 75-80; punning, 40, 63, 69, 81, 137; reconstruction, 158-75; relational strategies, 84-8; repetition, 20, 48, 103-20, 162, i86nip; reversal, 20, 104; sequence, 140, 148, 156; syntactical structures, 70-5; transferred epithets, 45; word choice, 58-62; zeugma, 90; see also Endings, Fragmentation, Metonymy, Openings, Sentence form, Simile, Usage Formulaic language, 34, 47, 80, 92, 94, 104, 116, 132, 136; emptiness of false rhetoric, 88; see also Sentimentalism Forster, E.M., 64 Fragmentation, 48-9, 55, 77-8, 81-5, 104, 106, 142-3, 173; silence and, 166; of time, 148 Framing, x, 3, 43, 85, 87, 136; and contingency, 138; of epiphanic moment, 174; as image, 154-5; and silence, 138 France, 51-2, 93-9, 118, 159 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), 119 Franklin, Carol, i8ini6 Free indirect discourse, 35, 137, 147, 162 Freud, 8 Fullbrook, Kate, 12,189^, igon7 Fuller, Margaret, 128 Gallant, Mavis, 24, 26 Game-playing, 147-52

2o8 Index Garland, Peggy, 51 Garnett, Constance, 34 Gender, 3, 8, 20, 32, 137; and artistry, 129; and authority, 39-40, 152; and critical authority, 14; and genre, 128; and language, 11, 14, 23, 41; and power, 27, 35, 39, 118; as restriction, 156; role and theatricality, 166; and sentence structure, 73; and ships, 78, 137; and social expectation, xiv; and twinning, doubling, 118-19, 129, 171; see also Role reversal Gender politics, 14, 82; see also Sexuality Genette, Gerard, i82n2o, i85ni "George Eliot" (Woolf), 168 Germany, xii, 15-16, 39, 91, no, 144-5; see a^so In a German Pension Ghosts, 20, 127 Gilbert, Sandra, 118, 127, 167-71 Gogol, Nikolai, 18 Gordon, Ian, 4-5, 7 Gothic, 168, 171 Grammatical structures, as harmonic progression, 59; see also Form Gubar, Susan, 118, 127, 167-71 Gurdjieff, xiii-xiv; as character, 26-7 Gurr, Andrew, 7, 159, iSTni Halter, Peter, I9in3 Handwriting, 4-5, 52, 54 Hankin, Cherry, 12, 52, 125, 188114 Hanson, Clare, 159, i87ni Hastings, Beatrice, 14, 22, 46, i86n5 Hemingway, Ernest, n

Heron Press, xix Hogarth Press, xix, 146 Holcroft, M.H., 9 Howard's End (Forster), 64 Hubbell, G.S., 7 Humour, vii-ix, 3-4, 17, 24, 63-4, 84-5, 152; see also Irony, Parody, Satire Huxley, Aldous, xii-xiii, 14 Ihimaera, Witi, 24-6, 28, 31 Illness, Gender and Writing (Burgan), 118, 127 Imagery, 37, 104; ambivalence of, 167; analyses of, i8ini8; of animals, 95, 106, 123, 153, 164-5; of clothing, 73, 94-5, 97, 109, 133, 135-6, 141, 155, 159; of disease, 13, 79; drawings as, 56; of feeding and monstrosity, 12, 141, i8gn5; of flowers and mirrors, 45, 47, 73, 95-6, no, 114, 132; of food, 39, 70, 79, 135; of foreign languages as masks, 90-1; of frames and traps, 154-5; °f hats, in, 113, 125, 127, 135, 141; of insects, 137; of language and commerce, 135; of light and darkness, 43-5, 49, 86; of mushrooms, 93-4; of nature and landscape, 44, 46; of perception, 135; of sexuality, 45; of ships and prisons, 124; of size, 13; of sleep, 107; of storm, 78, 115; as synesthesia, 78; of tower, 45; of train and parasol, umbrella, 94, 112, 135-6, 161, 163-5; of tree in garden, 159, 163-5, 191112; of unicorn, 127; of veil, 130,

163-4, 167-8; of window and night, 45, 49, 141; of wind, in, 113; see also Sexuality Imitation, 3, 12, 17, 31-41, 46, 49-50, 109; and mimicry, 128; speech as, 161; as theatre, 167 Impersonation, 12 In a German Pension, 38, 43, 68, 82, 85; reprinting of, i8ini7 Incest, 117-19 Influence, literary: of Mansfield, 22-8; on Mansfield, 15, 42; see also Chaucer, Chekhov, Colette, Dickens, Lawrence, Pater, Shakespeare, Theocritus, Wilde, Woolf Intertextuality, 34, 81 Irigaray, Luce, ig2n6 Irony, viii, 68, 73, 81, 92, 95, 131, 143-4; formal techniques of, 14 Isherwood, xiii, 6, n, 12 Italy, 159 Jane Eyre (Bronte), igjn-Lj "Je ne parle pas franc, ais" (in Dunn), 184^3 The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, 5, 47, 52, 65, igin2 Joyce, James, 23, i8oni4 Kaplan, Sydney Janet, xiv, 12-13, 41/ H4/ i?9n9/ i88n4 Kinesthesia, 58 Kirkpatrick, Brownlee, 42 "The Kiss" (Chekhov), 34 Knister, Raymond, 23 Kobler, J.F., 65 Koteliansky, S.S., 15, 82, 186114 Landscape, 46, 74, 112, 114, 166; as narrative ground, 105; perception

209 Index of, 165; of war, 87; see also Sexuality and possession, property Language: see Formal organization, Style Language barriers, coping with, 90-2, 97-9, 145 La Traviata, 192^ Lawrence, D.H., xii-xiv, 15, 23; Mansfield as a character in, i8oni3 Leacock, Stephen, vii-viii Leighton, Lauren G., 34-5 Lesbian desire, 12, i86n3 Lewes, George Henry, 169 "The Lifted Veil" (George Eliot), 128, 168-72 Literary history, ix, 13, 234; see also Canonicity London, xii, 4-5, 7, 45-6, 48-9, 56, I79n6 Long, R.E.C., 34-5

"Maata" (Ihimaera), 25 The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar), 118-19, 167-8 Maeterlinck, Maurice, igon6 Magalaner, Marvin, 23, 125-6, 130, 18804, i89n5, igoni Manhire, Bill, 24 Mansfield, Katherine: critical writings of, 64-5; diary and notebooks, 14-15, 63-4; dramatic sketches, 14, 132; handwriting, 4-5, 52, 54; letters, 12, 15, 18, 33, 51, 63, 82, 139, 146, 168, iSinig, i86n3, 191113; life, ix-xiv, xx, 16, 24, 4°' 53/ 93/ H7-18> 175; life, and Burnell names, 7; limericks, 63; literary versions of, 24-8, i8oni3, i85n24; manuscript practice of, 51-65; methods of composition, 52-3; mother fig-

ures in, 10, 38, I79ng, I93ni5; plagiarism charges against, 3, 1517, 31; pseudonyms of, xiii; self-criticism of, 53, 63 sketches and stories: "About Pat," 42; "The Advanced Lady," 67, 69, 71-2, 85; "All Serene," 60; "Almost a Tragedy," 42; "The Aloe," 55, 146; "The AppleTree," 187x14; "At Karori," 56; "At Lehmann's," 68-70, 82; "At the Bay," 7, 42, 44, 55, 59, 63, 71, 74, 80, 82, 85, 103, 118, 126, 130, 135, 146, 173, i8oni6, i86n2, i88n3; "Autumn i," i87ri4; "Autumn n," 118, i87n4; "Bains Turcs," 139; "The Baron," 71-2, 82; "Being a Truthful Adventure," 43, 76, 90, 92, 138; "A Birthday," 103, 107-11, 135; "A Blaze," 82; "Bliss," xi, 12, 71, 74-5, 81, 122, 133, 159, 173, I22n2, i8onio, igin2; "Boss," 63; "The ChildWho-Was-Tired," 15-17, 33-41, 67, i85m; "Country Life," 25; "Dame Seule," 63; "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," 42, 55, 57, 63, 82, 133, i8oni3, i8oni6; "Die Einsame," 80, 82; "A Dill Pickle," 71, 75, 79, 122, 125, 129-34; "The Doll's House," xi, 26, 56, 64, 80, 82, 86, 109, 122, 146, i8oni6, i88n3; "The Dove's Nest," 59, 65; "The Education of Audrey," 42; "Enna Blake," 41-2; "Epilogue i: Pension

Seguin," 139-45; "Epilogue u," 139-45; "Epilogue in: Bains Turc," 139-45; "The Escape," 85, 158-75; "A Fairy Story," 43, 179^; "The Festival of the Coronation," 43, 85; "Feuille d'Album," 79,122; "The Fly," xi, 59-60, 109, 188114; "Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding," 82, 144; "The Garden Party," xi, 7, 59, 71/ 75' 79' 1O9/ 1:t3' 122/ 130, 133; "The GardenParty," 56; "The Glimpse," igm2; "Her First Ball," 67-8, 133; "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped," 71, 73,121; "In a Cafe," 42-3, 46-7, 82; "In the Botanical Gardens," 43, 46, 49; "An Indiscreet Journey," 82; "Je ne parle pas francais," 54, 56, 82, 87, 92-9, 159, i8oni3; "The Journey to Bruges," 71, 73, 90; "Kezia and Tui," I78ni; "Late Summer," 60; "Little Fern Fronds," 59; "The Little Governess," 90-1, 114, 122, 130; "[London]," 48; "Lovelies-bleeding," 60-1; "Maata," 25, 41; "The Man Without a Temperament," xi, 78-9, 159; "Marriage a la Mode," xi, 46, 85, 159; "A Married Man's Story," 56, 71, 74, 82, 103, 105-7, I77n2, 187114; "Millie," 82, 121; "Miss Brill," xi, 18, 78, 87, 114, 122, 133; "The Modern Soul," 67, 76; "Mr and Mrs Dove," 159; "Mr Maude," 56; "Mr Reginald Peacock's

2io Index Day," 103-5, 108-10, 114, 135; "My Potplants," 59; "The New Baby," 61-2; "The Office Boy," 63; "Old Cockatoo Curl," 82; "Ole Underwood," 71, 73-4, 122-5, 127/ 134/ 187111; "Our Hilda," 60; "Pension Seguin," 139; "A Pic-Nic," 63; "Pictures," 78, 87, 130; "Poison," 133; "Prelude," 7, 25, 37, 42, 77-8, 82, 85, 118, 146-57, i8oni6, i86n2; "Revelations," 18-22, 159, igoni; "Seesaw," 62; "Silhouettes," 42-3, 45; "The Singing Lesson," 114; "The Sister of the Baroness," 76; "Six Years After," 82,133; "Sixpence," 133; "Something Childish but Very Natural," 44, 82, 122, 125-9, !37/ i86n2; "Stay-Laces," 77, 82, 85, 87; "The Stranger," 122, 125, 1338; "Study: The Death of a Rose," 43, 49; "A Suburban Fairy Tale," 59; "Summer Idylle," 54; "The Swing of the Pendulum," 67, 122; "Taking the Veil," 77, 85; "This Flower," 56-8; "The Tiredness of Rosabel," 42; "Two Tuppeny Ones, Please," 82, 87-8; "Vignettes," 43, 45-9; "Violet," 139; "The Voyage," 104, 107, 111-13, 120; "Weak Heart," 64, 133; "Westminster Cathedral," 54; "The Wind Blows," 78, 104, 107-9,113-20,136; "The Woman at the Store," 25, 43, 77, 121; "Young Country," 56; see also

Style, and titles of individual book-length works Mantz, Ruth, 7 Manuscript practice, 18, 51-65 Maori, 26 Marr, David, 51 Marriage, 4, 47, 74, 105, 125; and narrative closure, 145; as theme, 141, 144; as theme in "The Escape," 158-75; construed as war, 189^; male expectations of, 133,137; see also titles of individual stories Maurois, Andre, 9-10 Memory, 77, 99, 131 Men: boys' behaviour as imitation of, 152-3; competition between, 93-5, 109-10, 134, 155; and ego, 79, 109, 168; figures of patriarchy, 26, 103-4, 126, 133; and language, 9, 39, 73, 79-81, 171; and military vocabulary 87-8; and power, 40, 73, 109; with sensitivities, 135; and social values, 8, 10, 34; and subservient roles, 26; and unmanning, 134; see also Father figures, Sexuality, Silence, Women "The Merchant's Tale" (Chaucer),i9in2 Metafiction, i82n2o Metonymy, 77, 84, i8ini6; and metaphor, 86 Mezei, Kathy, i82n2o Middle-march (George Eliot), 119 Miles, Patrick, 34 Miller, Henry, 11 Miller, J. Hillis, i86ni The Mills of the Gods (Robins), 65 Milton, John, 118-19

Mimicry, 152, 165; of patriarchy, 192116; see also Imitation, Parody Modernism, xiv, 42, 145, I77n2, i86ni Moi, Toril, I92n6, I93ni6 Moran, Patricia, xiv, 12, i79ng "The Moslem Wife" (Gallant), 24, 26, i83n23 Mother figures, 10, 109, 117, 172; in Ihimaera, 25-6; see also Mansfield, mother figures in Murray, Heather, 12, 123, 126, 188114, 190111 Murry, John Middleton, xiv; as character, 26-7, 169; and editorial policy, 123; as editor of Mansfield, xix-xx, 47, 52-4, 61, 63, 65, 139; Eliot and, 14; impact on Mansfield's style, 10; marriage to Mansfield, xii, 5-6, 53; trip with Mansfield, 191^; Woolf's version of, ig2nio Murry, Mary Middleton, i8ini6 Murry, Richard, xix, 18, 191113 Music, xiv, 27, 55-6, 58-9, 65, 114, 116, 131; in De Groen, 27; and disease, 192114; drawing and metaphor, 55-6; line spacing as, 82; and rhythm, 58-9; in Robins, 65 Musical vocabulary, 115 Musicians, 142; Mansfield on Chopin, 146 "My Heart Leaps Up" (Wordsworth), 147 Mysticism, feminine (Maurois), 10 Narratology: see Criticism The Native Companion, 43

211 Index "Natural Resources" (Rich), 118 The New Age, 16, 46, 82 Newberry Library, 52 New Zealand, ix, xii, 3-8, 14, 24-6, 45, 49, 56, 78, 92, 1O4, I n

Il6, 122,

146,

75 5/ I79n6 New Zealand Listener, 9 New Zealand Railways Magazine, 179117 "Oak Not Ash," 9 O'Neill, Patrick, 1821120 "On Re-reading Katherine Mansfield's Bliss and Other Stories" (Dunn), 26, i84n23 Openings of stories, 1819, 36, 45, 71-4, 98, 105, 160-1; in medias res, 75, 129; Mansfield wondering how to begin, 65 Orage, A.L., 14, 46, i86n4 Oral metaphor, 12 O'Sullivan, Vincent, 12, 15, 191113

Parody, 14, 77, 84-5, 106, 119, 132, 170, i8ini6; of patriarchy, ig2n6 Pater, Walter, 42, i8oni4 Pathetic fallacy, 144 Patrick White: A Life (Marr), 51 Payne, Robert, 34 Pedagogy, x-xi Performance, 77, 91-2, 96; language as, 56; of emotion, no; see also Drama Pilcher, Harvey, 34 Plagiarism, 3, 15-17, 31 Plot, 20-1, 32-3, 41, 43, 65, 77, 170, iSinig; and meaning, 132; and narrative history, 76; and patriarchy, 128; in theory, i82n2o; marriage plot and closure, 145

Poets and Prophets (Maurois), 10 Point Counter Point (Huxley), 14 Point of view, 39, 42, 62, 76, 85, 98, 128, 140, 142, 144, 147; focalization defined, i85ni; see also Free indirect discourse Poland, 10 Pope, Alexander, 54 Postcoloniality: see Criticism Pound, Ezra, n Praz, Mario, 170 "The Prelude" (Wordsworth), 146-7 Prewett, Frank "Toronto," 12 Property and gender, 1245; and person, 34-5 Punctuation, 18, 72, 82; and pacing, 62; spacing as, 83 Queen's College, xii-xiii, 15,49 Reader response, reception, 21, 145; see also Anthologies, Criticism The Red Funnel, 8, 179^ Reputation, 16-17 Rhythm, 16, 123 Rhythm, 55, 69-70; in prose, 17-22, 56-7, 146; of time, 156; sentence and time, 122-3; see also Music, Formal organization Rich, Adrienne, 118-19 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, i85ni The Rivers of China (De Groen), 24-8 Robins, Elizabeth, 65 Robinson, Roger, 123 Role reversal, 174 Romance convention: see Sentimentality

Rothermere, Lady, 11, iSonio Russell, Elizabeth, Countess, iSinig Russia, 4, 14, 34-5, 131 Rutherford, Sir Ernest, 3 Sackville-West, Vita, 169, I92n6 Sadlier, Michael, 123 Satire, 14, 24, 43, 46, 85; of style, 88 Schneider, Elisabeth, 15 Scotland, 24 Scott, Margaret, 6, 15, 48, 54 The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield, 47-8, 52, 61, 63, igin2 Sentence form, 21, 71-5, 122, 125; hypotaxis, 71; length, 74; parataxis, 71; see also Formal organization Sentimentality and cliche, 10-12, 14-15, 17, 19, 31, 41, 46, 55, 88, 96, 132, 170; guidebook language, 92, 96, 138; and Murry's version of marriage, 5; and romance convention, 143, i83n2o; see also Formulaic language Sexual innuendo, 115-18 Sexuality, xiv, 11-12, 44-5, 69-70, 103, 114; childhood and, 152-4; and creativity, 120, I77n2; and language, 115-19; pedophilia, 114; and play, 151; and possession, property, 86, 109, 155; and propriety, 122; as resolution, 134; see also Incest Sexual politics, 144, 154 Sexual power, 120 Shakespeare, 58 Shaw, George Bernard, I79n9

212 Index Shelley, Mary, 118; Percy Bysshe, 116, 187113, 1931111 Sheridan characters, 7, 65 Shestov, Leon, 47 Shorter, Clement, 65, iSinig Siegfried, Andre, 3 Signature, 118 Silence, 74, 80-3, 87; composed, 127; distinct from silencing, 126; and framed narrative, 138; of language, 120; of male figure, 173; and paralysis, 132; roles and, 166; and shame 70; and symbolic nuance, 81 Similarity and identity, 45-6; see also Imitation Simile, 13, 45, 84, 87, 96, 98, 124 Sketch forms, 41-50; and adjectives, 67 "Sleepyhead" (Chekhov), 15-16, 33-41 Smoking, 167 Sobieniowski, Floryan, 16 Social politics, 14, 34-5, 87, 97, 154 Something Childish But Very Natural, 139 Sound patterns, 60, 78, 104; oversetting, 137; tonality, 72; see also Formal organization, Music, Rhythm Spatial divisions, 55; spatial shifts, 160; see also Form as parenthetical space Sphere, 67 Stead, C.K., xx Stone, lean, 42 Story: conventional forms of, 75-6; and discourse, terms defined, i82n2o; as narrative history, 22, 46; and plot, 33, 76 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, i92nio

Strachey, Lytton, i8oni3 Style, 17-22, 54, 66, i8oni6; and politics, 132; see also Formal organization Stylistic jokes, 63, 69 Suffrage movement, 92 Sutherland, Ronald, 15 Synesthesia, 58, 78 Syntax and authority, 71

Undiscovered Country (Gordon), 7 United States, xi, xiii, 3, 14, 23, 60, 143 The Urewera Notebook, 4-5 Usage: slang, 60, 79; solecisms, 73; syntactic rules, 71; see also Form Utopia, dystopia, 4, 6, 26, 126; see also Fantasy

Tense, 26, 35, 62, 64, 67, 79, 133-4; see a'so Time Textbooks, ix, 75; and expectation, x Theatrical language, 21, 91-2, 95; staging of action, 166; see also Drama, Performance Theocritus, 15, 85, i86n2 Time, 19-22, 45, 48-9, 56, 67-8, 82, 114, 134; and codes of transformation, 141; fragmentation of, 148; literary representation of, xiv; in narratological theory, i82n2o; present as unsatisfactory condition, 146; resistance to, 103; as rhythm, 156; shifts, 160; as structural subject, 139-57 Times Literary Supplement, 168, i8oni5 Tomalin, Claire, 15-16, 168, 175 Tomlinson, Sophie, 12-13 Transformation, 130 Translation, 16, 33; of boce, 60; of Siegfried, I78n2; strategies of, 34-5 Triad, 42-3 Trowell, Arnold, i86n3; Garnet, I92nio Twinning, doubling, 11819, 129, 171 The Twyborn Affair (White), 51 Tynan, Katharine, 143

Verbal aspect, 67-8, 133; see also Form Verbs: see Form, Tense, Verbal aspect Visual appearance of the page, 82 Voice, 38, 40, i85ni, i86n2 Volpe, Edmund, 23 Walcott, Derek, 13 War, 60, 87 "The Washerwoman's Children" (Ihimaera), 25-6 Webby, Elizabeth, 7 "We Have with Us ToNight" (Leacock), viii Wells, H.G., 85 Wendorf, Richard, 54 West Indies, 13 White, Patrick, 51-3, 64 Wilde, Oscar, 15, 42, i8oni4 "Women" (Chekhov), 34 Women: biology, 11; and language, 9-10; and tradition, ix; see also Feminist criticism, Gender, Lesbian desire, Marriage, Men, Mother figures, Sexuality Woolf, Virginia, xii-xiv, 20-1, 146, 165; attitudes to Murry, i92nio; connections with Mansfield, 169, i83n2i; and Hogarth Press, xix; Mansfield on, 168 Wordsworth, William, 146, i93nn

Permissions

For permission to quote from materials in copyright, the author and publisher are grateful to: Alpers, Antony, from his editorial comments in The Stories ofKatherine Mansfield: courtesy of Oxford University Press Australia. Alpers, Antony, from Katherine Mansfield: courtesy of Jonathan Cape. Armstrong, Martin, from Fortnightly Review (1923): courtesy of Routledge Ltd. Berkman, Sylvia, from Katherine Mansfield (1951): courtesy of Yale University Press. Bowen, Elizabeth, from Introduction to Katherine Mansfield's Stories, ed. Elizabeth Bowen (1956): courtesy of Random House, Inc. Burgan, Mary, from Illness, Gender and Writing (1994): courtesy of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chatman, Seymour, from Story and Discourse (1978): courtesy of Cornell University Press. De Groen, Alma, from The Rivers of China (1988): courtesy of Currency Press. Dunn, Douglas, "Re-reading Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss' and Other Stories" from Selected Poems 1964-1983. Courtesy of the author and Faber and Faber Ltd. Eliot, T.S., from After Strange Gods (1934): courtesy of the publisher, Harcourt Brace & Company. Gallant, Mavis, from "The Moslem Wife," from From the Fifteenth District, ca 1979: reprinted by permission of Macmillan Canada. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, excerpts from The Madwoman in the Attic (1979): courtesy of Yale University Press.

214

Permissions

Hanson, Clare, and Andrew Gurr, from Katherine Mansfield (1981): courtesy of Macmillan Press Ltd (UK). Isherwood, Christopher, from Exhumations (1966), published by Simon & Schuster; reprinted by permission of Donadio & Ashworth, Inc., copyright © 1966 by Christopher Isherwood. Kaplan, Sydney Janet, excerpt from Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991): courtesy of Cornell University Press. Magalaner, Marvin, from The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield (1971): courtesy of Southern Illinois University Press. Manhire, Bill, from The Brain of Katherine Mansfield (1988): courtesy of the author. Mansfield, Katherine, from Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Clare Hanson: courtesy of Macmillan Press Ltd (UK). Mansfield, Katherine, from The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, and The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield: courtesy of the Society of Authors on behalf of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield; also, from Katherine Mansfield's Journal, ed. John Middleton Murry, and The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield: courtesy of Constable Publishers. Mansfield, Katherine, Katherine Mansfield Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library: courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library. Mansfield, Katherine, Katherine Mansfield Papers, the Newberry Library: courtesy of the Newberry Library. Mansfield, Katherine, excerpts from Manuscripts held at the Turnbull and Newberry Libraries; excerpts from Triad, Publications in Australia, and The Aloe: courtesy of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield, Katherine, excerpts from The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott, vol. \ (1984), vol. 2 (1987), vol. 3 (1993), vol. 4 (1996): reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Mansfield, Katherine, from The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Copyright 1937 and renewed 1965 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Marr, David, from Patrick White: A Life (1992): courtesy of the publisher, Random House UK Limited. Mezei, Kathy, from her editor's Introduction to Ambiguous Discourse (1996): courtesy of University of North Carolina Press. Moi, Toril, from Sexual/Textual Politics (1985): courtesy of Methuen & Company. O'Neill, Patrick, from Fictions of Discourse (1994): courtesy of the University of Toronto Press Inc. Paul, Mary, from "Bliss," in Opening the Book, ed. Mark Williams and Michele Leggott: courtesy of Mary Paul and Auckland University Press.

215 Permissions Robinson, Roger, from Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin: courtesy of the author, and Louisiana State University Press. Scott, Margaret, from "Unpublished Manuscripts of Katherine Mansfield," Turnbull Library Record (1970): courtesy of Margaret Scott, the Turnbull Library Record, and the Alexander Turnbull Library of the National Library of New Zealand. Woolf, Virginia, from The Common Reader: courtesy of the Society of Authors on behalf of the Estate of Virginia Woolf; also, excerpt from The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1925 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Woolf, Virginia, excerpt from A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf, copyright © 1954 by Leonard Woolf and renewed 1982 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company; also, for excerpt from The Diaries of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press), courtesy of Random House UK Limited and the estate of Virginia Woolf. Woolf, Virginia, from Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 (1978): courtesy of The Hogarth Press.