Abstract
Many of Katherine Mansfield’s stories explore the theme of national identity. The most explicit, perhaps, are the stories collected in In a German Pension, which are often scathing in their portrayal of German stereotypes.1 Less obvious, but perhaps more effective, are Mansfield’s explorations of British and French identities. While stories such as ‘Feuille d’album’ (1917)2 treat the intersection of British and French social norms, it is ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (1915), ‘Je ne parle pas français’ (1918), and ‘Miss Brill’ (1920) that expose a self-conscious manipulation of national stereotypes by their protagonists. Raoul Duquette, the narrator of ‘Je ne parle pas français’ sees himself as a customs official expecting to be duped by other travellers:
And the moment of hesitation as to whether I am going to be fooled just before I chalk that squiggle, and then the other moment of hesitation just after, as to whether I have been, are perhaps the two most thrilling instants in life. (142)
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Notes
Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (New York: Bantam, 1991).
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Feuille d’Album’, in Angela Smith, ed., Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 129–34. All further references to Mansfield’s stories will be taken from this edition and placed parenthetically in the text.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 14–27 (p. 19).
Con Coroneos, ‘Flies and Violets in Katherine Mansfield’, in Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds, Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 197–218 (p. 207).
Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 133.
Seshagiri, p. 133. See Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 3, p. 273, for Mansfield’s letter of 6 April 1920 to John Middleton Murry. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number.
See Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield, A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 17;
Sydney Janet Kaplan, ‘“A Gigantic Mother”: Katherine Mansfield’s London’ in Susan Merrill Squier, ed., Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 161–75 (p. 172);
and Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction’ to The Aloe (London: Virago, 1985), pp. v–xviii (p. xviii).
Sarah Henstra, ‘Looking the Part: Performative Narration in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield’s “Je ne parle pas français”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 46: 2 (Summer 2000), 125–49 (p. 132).
Saralyn R. Daly, Katherine Mansfield: Revised Edition (New York: Twayne, 1994), pp. 65–6. Emphasis in original.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, trans. by Harry Zorn, in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 211–44 (p. 222).
Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 184.
16. Pamela Dunbar, ‘Exile and its metaphors: a reading of Katherine Mansfield’s “Je ne parle pas français”’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 29 (Autumn 1997), n.p. [online]. http://jsse.revues.org/index136.html (accessed 18 June 2012).
Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (Horndon: Northcote House, 2004), p. 78.
Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 77.
Roger Robinson, ‘Introduction: In from the Margin’, in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 1–8 (p. 4).
Edward Wagenknecht, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, in Jan Pilditch, ed., The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 19–27 (p. 26).
Miriam B. Mandel, ‘Reductive Imagery in “Miss Brill”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 26: 4 (Fall 1989), 473–7 (p. 473). Mandel herself refers to the fur as a fox as well as to Sylvia Berkman’s similar assessment.
Eudora Welty, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill”’, in Myron Matlaw and Leonard Lief, eds, Story and Critic (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 18–19 (p. 18).
Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 273.
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© 2015 Erika Baldt
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Baldt, E. (2015). ‘How can one look the part and not be the part?’: National Identity in Mansfield’s ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, and ‘Miss Brill’. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_11
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