Katherine Mansfield and Her Short Stories
Born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888, Katherine Mansfield moved to England at age 19. She became a writer and a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and others in the Bloomsbury Group. She led a vivacious social and productive professional life there. But her time in London was also chaotic: an unexpected pregnancy by a young musician, a rebound marriage to a much older singing teacher who she left immediately after the wedding to move in with a female classmate, and beginning in 1917, an illness that necessitated visits to spas for recovery. Sadly, she died young of tuberculosis in 1923.
Initially, she was regarded as a minor figure in the development of modernism. But the growth of feminist literary criticism has led to a reappraisal and greater appreciation of Mansfield’s work. Mansfield had in common with other modernist writers, including the male authors, questioning the nature of truth and reality, a challenging of the certainties and assumptions that had underpinned Victorian fiction. The very notion of objective truth was viewed as suspect, and she developed new ways of seeing, interpreting, and recording the world around her. But Mansfield brought something else to the modernist project: an appreciation of the decisive role of gender. One of the crucial assumptions that Mansfield and other female modernists challenged was the practice of presenting narrative fiction through male eyes and according to male values. This had implications not just for her stories’ content but for her narrative style too.
Katherine Mansfield’s writings suggest a sense of personal truth, a point of view based on the female experience in a society where women were marginalized. In terms of form, she explored these ideas principally through the short story. This was partly because her writing career was cut tragically short by her early death, but also because this form gave her a structure within which to polish her characters and experiment. Although she generally wrote using a third-person narrative, she was able to shift in and out of the minds of her characters and consistently succeeded in revealing their psychological state. Mansfield used symbolism as one technique to give the reader insights into the psychological state of her characters, using evocative images rather than analytical descriptions. Her short stories are full of these symbols: the pear tree and the cat in Bliss, the fox-fur wrap in Miss Brill, and the glove and a pickle in A Dill Pickle. A second key to many of Mansfield’s short stories is a signal moment of epiphany, a flashpoint at which the central character achieves a degree of self-realization. But this realization rarely leads to happiness. For instance, in A Dill Pickle, Vera is devastated when she suddenly realizes her former lover. However, he is clearly vain and self-absorbed, understands her far better than she understands herself.
Mansfield was not a political writer, but her stories are rooted in her time’s social, cultural, and political upheavals. Her characters live in a world where options for women are limited. Women, in particular the middle-class women that Mansfield was most familiar with, could be daughters or wives or perhaps left in the socially inferior state of spinsterhood. In between a woman being dependent on her parents and, later, on her husband was a carefully regulated courtship process. Independence and a career were rarely an option. Married women, unless exceptionally poor, did not go out to work, and if they worked while single, frequently gave up their career upon marriage. Society accepted the working spinster, but not the working wife. The latter decades of the nineteenth century saw major changes in women’s rights to keep their own earnings and inherited wealth through the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882. Further advances were made in the early twentieth century through changes to custody and guardianship law and the introduction of universal suffrage. However, Katherine Mansfield demonstrated, through her short stories, that women throughout this period were kept in an almost universally subordinate position to men, disempowered bystanders in a world of action they could only view from the sidelines.
Descriptions of this state of alienation were by no means singular in fiction when Mansfield was writing, and she drew on these critical perspectives. Karl Marx had developed the concept into a radical and secularized critique of society. He focused, in particular, on the alienation of the working class under capitalism. A Dill Pickle clarifies Vera as an unmarried woman, is in a tenuous – if not dire – financial situation, and the work functions, in part, as a structural critique of women’s economic disadvantage outside of marriage. During Mansfield’s time, Sigmund Freud was developing his psychoanalytic theories. Freud took notions of estrangement into the personal realm, focusing in particular on human sexuality. He highlighted the problem of repressed or unacknowledged desires, which Freud argued were the chief cause of psychological illness. Repressed sexuality is a frequent theme in Mansfield’s short stories and is operative in A Dill Pickle, where former lovers test the waters of their failed relationship.
Mansfield’s most successful short stories, including A Dill Pickle, have a palpable sense of intensity and power. Her stories are a triumph of style, challenging nineteenth-century realism and overcoming the conventional constraints of plot, sequential development, and conclusion. Although she was perhaps not central to the modernist movement, Mansfield shared the determination of others, such as Woolf and Joyce, to develop new ways of understanding and describing. In a way similar to contemporaneous changes in the visual arts, Mansfield’s short stories concentrate on communicating moods, impressions, and transient emotions. Her achievement was made not through polemic but the creation of stories containing characters of great psychological depth, characters with tangible inner lives.
[Adapted by the composer from Wikipedia and an essay by Bobby Seal]