Modernist Literature: A Guide for the Perplexed by Childs Peter

Author:Childs, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2011-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Born in 1888, Katherine Mansfield came permanently to Europe from New Zealand in 1908, after a previous period as a music student in London. She is associated almost exclusively with the short story, which she developed in the lyrical style of Chekhov, rather than in pursuit of the well-made tale of Maupassant, Stevenson and Hawthorne. Her first collection, In a German Pension, followed on from a stay in Bavaria, where she went to avoid scandal over a pregnancy, but which resulted in a miscarriage. She achieved success with Bliss and Other Stories, a noticeably more accomplished collection.

Mansfield’s first collection has stories that contain fine writing, but also passages that seem callow or trenchant, aggressive or embattled. There is a sense that she is not yet fully comfortable with her own voice and prose. This changes with the second volume and is noticeable from the opening three stories. She worked on the first, ‘Prelude’, from 1915 to 1917, and the story was first published by the Woolfs through their Hogarth Press. In the process of shaping this new kind of work, after three years in which she wrote almost nothing, Mansfield developed her mature style and method through a long, reflective and lyrical story of her childhood in New Zealand. Over the course of 12 parts, first envisaged as the start of a novel, ‘Prelude’ consistently and convincingly conveys the impressions drawn by the characters in the story without moving away from the third person. The narrative presence is almost expunged by a technique that conveys events as though filtered though the emotional prism of the shared unconscious of the family at the heart of this elegiac paean to Mansfield’s island home. Set initially on the day of a house move, it is a story of change and disruption, suggesting the nostalgic approach to a lost past, but it is also a very modern tale in exposing the fears of individuals and the group discordances at the dysfunctional core of a happy family. In the first advanced short story of modernist psychological realism that she would perfect, Mansfield’s narration and symbolism expose the underbelly of the characters’ thoughts, and move the reader into a vantage point from which to view the tensions apparent in three generations of a family, emerging from which is a young girl, Kezia, anticipating Laura in Mansfield’s best-known story, ‘The Garden Party’, who begins to imagine things in terms other than those of the traditions she has inherited.

The following two stories were written early in 1918, after Mansfield finished ‘Prelude’. They are well-crafted and intriguing analyses of sexual ethics and interplay. The first, ‘Je ne parle pas francais’, again marks Mansfield’s new confidence as she focuses the entire story through the main character, whose perspective has to be seen beyond by the reader. A monologue on the past from someone who claims never to look back, it is at heart a sad narrative of failed love in a callous world. Told as though in conversation by a man seated in a Parisian cafe, it is a story that can also be read in many ways.

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