Abstract
In the six years after her arrival in England in 1908 Katherine Mansfield made a number of journeys to continental Europe, such as to Geneva, Bruges and Paris. These travels can be traced in stories that combine romance tropes with imag es of movement and interruption, drawing on her own romantic entanglements and unsettled circumstances. Her protagonists are inevitably youthful travellers or tourists surprised by the sudden awakenings that travel generates. This chapter analyses stories of adolescence about female vulnerability and transgression written during these years, focusing on the young subject who is susceptible to compelling but disillusioning romantic encounters, often occurring when they are in transit. It sees them in terms of her trajectory towards ‘The Aloe’ — the first draft was written in Paris in March to May 1915 — in which she refined and consolidated her style.
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Notes
Antony Alpers, ed., The Stories of Katherine Mansfield: The Definitive Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 552. Alpers says that ‘there was much uncertainty of style over the next three years (after 1911) as she tried to attain a natural voice resolving the pull between satire and art and the pull between New Zealand and Europe’.
Cherry Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 86, notes that apart from ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ (1908), ‘The House’ (1912) and ‘A Fairy Story’ (1910), most stories written in her early years in London are ‘unrelievedly realistic’.
Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 57–61.
Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, pp. 199–200 (19 November 1915). Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number.
Ruth Parkin Gounelas, ‘Katherine Mansfield: Reading Other Women’, in Roger Robinson, ed., Katherine Mansfield: In From the Margin (Baton Rouge and London: Louisana State University Press, 1994), p. 48.
Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson, Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 120–21, note the frequency of ‘childish’ to describe the heroine in the fiction of George Egerton.
The description by John Middleton Murry (1991), ‘Katherine Mansfield’ in Rhoda B. Nathan (ed.), Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield (New York: G. K. Hall & Co), p. 186. Murry testifies to the initial confusion caused by the relationship.
Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 121;
Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 97, says the relationship ‘sapped her creative energies’.
Cited in Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 126.
Letters, 1, p. 136; Letter to Murry (10 February 1914); Mary Burgan, Illness, Gender and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 95–98 (p. 96).
Stanley G. Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols (London: Sydney Appleton, 1905), I. pp. x, xiii.
Hall, p. xiii. See Philip Graham, EOA: The End of Adolescence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 28.
Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Vol. 1, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1898–1915, p. 543. All future references to this edition will be included parenthetically in the text.
According to Tomalin, p. 125, it is one of Mansfield’s most vapid stories; to Patrick D. Morrow, Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press: 1993), p. 126, it is one of her weakest due to the uncertainty of effect and problems of interpretation; Alpers, Life, pp. 164–5, notes that its ‘queer, half-lit sense of reality’, is also a feature of Mansfield’s diary in this period; Hankin, p. 87, sees it as a new departure due to its handling of fantasy to offset the pain of reality and as a forerunner of other stories about the relationship with Murry.
Heather Murray, Double Lives: Women in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1990), p. 106: Hankin, p. 87.
W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), p. 125.
Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 94, 96.
Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 51, argues that this suggests an account of female desire quite different from the Freudian or Jungian accounts.
Alpers, Life, p. 117; Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Vol. 2, p. 180.
Published in The New Age in 1917; Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller (Auckland: Penguin, 2010), p. 299. I am grateful for the reference to Daudet’s fable to C. K. Stead and Gina Wisker.
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© 2015 Janet Wilson
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Wilson, J. (2015). Katherine Mansfield’s Stories 1909–1914: The Child and the ‘Childish’. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_14
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