The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield

Todd Martin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350111455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

Through her formally innovative and psychologically insightful short stories, Katherine Mansfield is increasingly recognised as one of the central figures in early 20th-century modernism. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering her complete body of work, this is the most comprehensive volume to Mansfield scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · New biographical insights, including into the early New Zealand years
· Responses to the historical crises: the Great War, empire and orientalism
· Mansfield's fiction, poetry, criticism and private writing
· Mansfield and modernist culture – from Bloomsbury to the little magazines
· Mansfield and her contemporaries – Woolf, Lawrence and von Arnim
· Mansfield and the arts – visual culture, cinema and music The book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key works of Mansfield scholarship from the last 30 years.

1

Introduction: Expanding the Horizon of Katherine Mansfield Studies

Todd Martin

During her lifetime, Katherine Mansfield enjoyed a wide general readership, and her husband and literary executor, John Middleton Murry, not only made sure that her work remained in print but also edited numerous posthumous volumes culled from her notebooks and papers left after her death. However, until recently, her significance as a writer of influence was generally ignored, and she remained on the fringes of literary modernism until the last decade or so, when her work has experienced a resurgence of popularity. This has been in part guided by the activities of the Katherine Mansfield Society which has sponsored numerous international conferences and which publishes the book series, Katherine Mansfield Studies, as well as through the 2014–16 publication of the Edinburgh edition of the Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield. The groundwork for this revival, however, was laid by Sydney Janet Kaplan’s pivotal work, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991) which set out to elucidate the role of women—specifically Mansfield—in the development of literary modernism, the aesthetics of which were most often defined by the men writing at the time. Kaplan’s efforts brought Mansfield in from the fringes of modernism and placed her more centrally within the modernist context. It is as a member of the social fringe, however, that Mansfield becomes an intriguing figure for many current scholars. Mansfield occupies so many various positions: as a woman and as a colonial, but also as a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group, among others. Yet, despite being in many ways dispossessed, Mansfield was able to insert herself into the heart of modernism, particularly through her connection to some of the literary magazines being published at the time, magazines that helped to define modernism.

Mansfield’s choice of the short story as her primary mode of writing further relegated her to the margins of modernism, a dynamic further compounded by the popularity and accessibility of many of her stories which contributed to the notion that she was not literary enough. However, Kaplan argues that Mansfield’s choice of the genre reveals her evolution as a modernist, for the short story provided her with a degree of flexibility that allowed her to undermine conventions more easily. In particular, Mansfield was interested in representing life through the form of the short story which allowed her to attribute symbolic meaning to the realistic events she portrayed, an achievement that would have been significantly more difficult in the longer form of the novel. Kaplan also shows how Mansfield used free indirect style to emphasize the interiority of her characters, but the effect is developed through the use of sensory impressions.¹ Nevertheless, many of Mansfield’s stories appear quite simplistic in terms of plot and prose, which inevitably had an effect on her reputation. As Jenny McDonnell argues in Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace (2010), though, the accessibility of her stories often belies the complexity of the means by which she creates the impression of the story as well as the adeptness by which she explores the inner self of her characters. McDonnell contends that Mansfield helped to propagate some of the ideas and experiments of other modernist authors through her forays into the popularized magazines, preparing the average reader for the aesthetic innovations which tended to question the assumptions of traditional literature.² Expanding McDonnell’s argument for Mansfield’s influence beyond her fiction to include her criticism, Chris Mourant, in his 2019 book Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture, concludes his chapter on Mansfield and the Athenaeum (where she placed the majority of her book reviews) by positing that “Mansfield’s reviews […] conditioned the public reception and interpretation of her own creative work,”³ particularly as it pertains to her characters and form.

Thus, in a collection of essays like The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, which sets out to provide readers with an assessment of Mansfield’s current critical position while at the same time anticipating future directions for scholarly engagement, it seems appropriate to begin by considering the critical position she occupied at the time she was writing. Drawing on Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of the “horizon of expectation,” I would like to join McDonnell and Mourant in making a similar case for Mansfield’s influence, but extending this beyond her own work to her reviewers who, while not necessarily representing the average reader of the time, wrote for the general audience who read the publications for which they were writing.

According to Jauss in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, the extent to which an author’s works challenge and revise the aesthetic expectations of readers can be directly tied to the literary significance of her work. The enduring value of a work, for Jauss, is determined not simply by an author’s response to her historical moment, but also by the impact it has on the reader:

[L]iterature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject—through the interaction of author and public [ … through] the interrelations of production and reception.⁴

For Jauss, the work of art “is no longer just mimetically defined, but rather is viewed dialectically as a medium capable of forming and altering perception.”⁵ In other words, the value of a text is determined by how the author uses and builds upon aesthetic trends, but also how her innovation helps to change readers’ aesthetic expectations—the general premise of both McDonnell’s and Mourant’s studies—as well as how readers respond to her work over time.

While Jauss’s view of the horizon of expectation emphasizes the continual reassessment of a text over time, he does acknowledge that “it must also be possible to take a synchronic cross-section of a moment in the development [of aesthetic attitudes … ] and thereby to discover an overarching system of relationships in the literature of a historical moment.”⁶ My intent, then, is to unpack what Mansfield’s reviewers reveal about their aesthetic expectations during the time she was writing. While Mansfield’s first collection of stories, In a German Pension (1911), received some attention in the UK, it wasn’t published in the United States until 1926, after the publication of both Bliss and Other Stories (1920; 1921 in the United States) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1923), as well as after her death in 1923. Therefore, responses to this early volume of stories from US reviewers would have been tempered by her two more mature volumes; likewise, the anti-German sentiment which buoyed the reception of In a German Pension in Britain which was on the brink of war would have been muted in the United States almost a decade after the First World War ended. Both Bliss and The Garden Party, however, were published almost simultaneously in the UK and in the United States as well as during the height of Mansfield’s career; they stood or fell on their own merits.⁷ In light of this, I will be tracing the shifting perspectives of Mansfield’s reviewers through these latter two collections; I want to suggest that Mansfield helped to expand their horizon of expectation for her short fiction and thereby indirectly influenced her literary successors by extending the aesthetic boundaries within which they could write.

The comparison that many of Mansfield’s contemporary reviewers made between her work and that of nineteenth-century Russian and French writers has been widely acknowledged. Oftentimes they compared her broadly to general trends in these national literatures, particularly their realism, though at other times specifically evoking Fyodor Dostoevsky or Guy de Maupassant and, of course, Anton Chekhov. Such comparisons are telling in that, according to Jauss, “the first reception of a work by the reader includes a test of its aesthetic value in comparison with works already read.”⁸ Chekhov, then, can be understood not only as a direct influence on Mansfield but also as one whose “slice of life” stories provided the groundwork for contemporary reviewers to better appreciate Mansfield’s work. But Mansfield continued her formal experimentation and pushed the horizon ever further, becoming a benchmark for other writers.

Focusing on the aesthetic perception of the reviews, one discovers that while the reception of both Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories was generally positive, reviews of Bliss often noted that the characters were unlikeable and the stories too cynical, while reviews of The Garden Party felt the need to address the plotlessness of the stories, explaining that they often relied too much on atmosphere and character. What I would like to suggest is that Mansfield’s contemporary reviewers reveal a tension between an admiration for what Mansfield accomplishes in her short stories and their own resistance to fully fit her aesthetics into their perceived expectations of what a short story is, thereby confirming that Mansfield was pushing the horizon of their expectations. I will focus here particularly on how her contemporary reviewers responded to her treatment of both character and plot (or lack thereof) and suggest some of the implications for her reception.

In his 1921 assessment of the characters in Bliss and Other Stories, the influential American critic Malcolm Cowley notes that Mansfield’s “observation of people is extensive and accurate,”⁹ but it is her hate that leads to “understanding.” Many of her characters are “disagreeable” and “neurotic,” and for Cowley, these tend to overshadow the other characters because they are the most striking, making the book “very hard to forget.”¹⁰ For Cowley, though, this memorableness is a negative facet of the collection. Contrasting Cowley’s view, in an anonymous review in the Athenaeum that Mansfield’s bibliographer B. J. Kirkpatrick convincingly attributes to Walter de la Mare, Mansfield is praised for her “unflinching contemplation and acceptance of life,”¹¹ what the author calls a “coming-alivedness”¹² which suggests that Mansfield offers an honest portrayal of her characters achieved through an intellectual detachment.

De la Mare’s positive assessment, however, was in the minority. Perhaps the most scathing indictment of Mansfield’s characters occurs in a review in the Saturday Review titled “Unpleasant Stories” which claims that

We see in Miss Mansfield’s book an entire ignorance of the repellent nature of her subjects which puts her on a different plane. She is not inhuman, but unhuman, observing the writings of the objects before her, like a savage watching the attempt of a wounded animal to reach its hole in safety—with interest indeed, but without either cruelty or pity. We cannot pretend to feel any beauty or aesthetic enjoyment in making acquaintance with the emotions of some of her characters in the execution of their business.¹³

The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement likewise disparages Mansfield for the fact that her characters are “horrible: all of them are dismal. Here are no roseate hues for life as it is, nor golden promise of what life shall be.”¹⁴ The expectations for laudable characters and an optimistic view of life are particularly striking, given that the First World War had ended only two years previously. The irony is all the more pronounced given that the column just to the right of the review is an advertisement for The Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front, which is pitched as a “Christmas gift for a Man” and which includes the blurb: ‘“There is not a soldier who can pick up this book without feeling that some of its pages are particularly his pages.’”¹⁵ Mansfield’s reviewer, evoking Thomas Hardy, considers that she fails to portray her characters with pity, as Hardy would have done, and claims that the elements of tragedy—which by implication would redeem the harshness of the stories—are absent, undermining the stories’ ability to “enlarge and purify life.”¹⁶ Like Cowley, the reviewer acknowledges the “singularity” of form that will appeal to some, but this is overshadowed by the critique of Mansfield’s treatment of her characters.

What this reveals is that while many of the early reviewers of Bliss and Other Stories found something compelling in Mansfield’s collection, the stories themselves disturbed their contemporary sensibilities about character. When The Garden Party and Other Stories was published two years later, however, the general tenor toward Mansfield’s characters had changed. One reason for this shift could be attributed to the fact that many of the reviewers of The Garden Party noted that these new stories seemed more hopeful; however, with the exception perhaps of Mansfield’s sordid depiction of Raoul Duquette in “Je ne parle pas français,” the tone of the collection does not seem strikingly more or less hopeful than in Bliss. Therefore, the revised perspective could signal a growing acceptance of characterization that is more realistic. In fact, the reviewer from The New York Times praises the stories in The Garden Party as “vivid slices of life animated by a clever and meticulous characterization that lifts them far from the usual run of stories.”¹⁷ Unlike Conrad Aiken, who in his review of the collection suggests that Mansfield lacks range in her characters and claims that they “are not real people” and that rather than their own voice we hear only Mansfield’s,¹⁸ most reviewers commented on the objectivity with which she approached her characters, allowing the readers to provide their own moral judgments—a point regarding which she had been criticized in Bliss. In The Observer, for example, the reviewer of The Garden Party notes that “nothing is more remarkable than her absorption in these creatures of her fancy, creatures who are never mere mirrors of her own mood, but are the fruit of a genuinely sympathetic imagination reflecting on the ironies and tragedies of the world.”¹⁹ This was a significant shift from the notion that Mansfield observed her characters like a savage watching a wounded animal.

Perhaps more significant is a comment by Marion Holden reviewing for The Detroit Free Press: “Her trick of getting into character is one of Katherine Mansfield’s most engaging devices. […] Miss Mansfield gets behind the character and stays there. It is a method much experimented with these days.”²⁰ Here, the suggestion is that an author removing herself from the context of a story has gained traction as an aesthetic expectation. Reviewers, thus, appear more open to the fact that Mansfield’s characters exist independently of the author, and they accept the author’s dependence on the reader to render their own moral judgments. Furthermore, unlike the earlier critiques of Bliss, the fact that Mansfield portrays ordinary lives here garners ready praise.

Mansfield’s treatment of plot is another instance where we see a marked difference between the reviews of Bliss and those of The Garden Party. Conrad Aiken, in his 1921 review of Bliss, praises the form of Mansfield’s stories, which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Expanding the Horizon of Katherine Mansfield Studies Todd Martin
• Part One: Katherine Mansfield at Work
• Part Two: Katherine Mansfield and Her Contemporaries
• Part Three: Katherine Mansfield and Genre
• Part Four: Katherine Mansfield and the Arts
• Part Six: Critical Approaches to Katherine Mansfield
• Annotated Bibliography of Selective Criticism Aimée Gasston
• Index
• Imprint