Bachelor_s_thesis_mikulova.docx

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Veronika Mikulová

Narrative Presentation and Conceptions of Creative Individuality in Katherine Mansfield’s 'Bliss' Stories Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D.

2015

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Veronika Mikulová

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Doctor Stephen Paul Hardy for his supervision and kind encouragement as well as my supporting family and friends for their motivation and help.

Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 2 1 Life and Literary Work of Katherine Mansfield ..................................................................... 6 2 Major Influences on Katherine Mansfield ............................................................................ 10 2.1 Mansfield and Modernism .............................................................................................. 11 2.2 Mansfield and Literary Impressionism ........................................................................... 13 2.3 Mansfield and the Short Story ........................................................................................ 15 3 Writing Style and Narrative Presentation in Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield ............. 19 4 The Construction of an Individual in the Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield .................. 29 5 Analysis of Selected Short Stories from the Collection Bliss and Other Stories .................. 35 5.1 Analysis of “Bliss” ......................................................................................................... 35 5.2 Analysis of “Prelude” ..................................................................................................... 45 5.3 Analysis of “Je ne parle pas français” ............................................................................ 55 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 60 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 63 Resumé (English) ..................................................................................................................... 67 Resumé (Czech) ....................................................................................................................... 68

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Introduction A uniqueness of writing style and an innovatory approach to the exposition of the inner life of the characters are among the main characteristics that resonate throughout the literary work of Katherine Mansfield (1888 - 1923). As a woman writer of the beginning of 20th century she witnessed the great changes within the society as well as artistic world and became one of the important icons of the Modernist movement. During a short and turbulent life, Katherine Mansfield managed to create a singular literary voice supported by narrative strategies that became widely recognised and generally praised for capturing the psyche and the characteristics of an individual within a broader frame of society. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a characterisation of the Mansfieldian literary persona and explore how the author deals with the construction as well as reflection of character’s inner life. A close analysis of her literary style considers the effects of different perspectives employed by the characters in selected short stories and comments on their relationship to the core questions of inauthenticity, convention and self-recognition. The thesis consists of five major chapters while two of them are divided into several subchapters for a clear thematic division of the work. The first chapter of the thesis introduces the reader into the world of Katherine Mansfield and provides a brief description of her life and her middle-class New Zealand family background. According to the writer’s belief in the interconnection of one’s life and art, it highlights the episodes that had a formative influence and functioned as a source of both - inspiration and criticism in Mansfield’s work. Moreover, this chapter provides the reader with a brief outline of her literary work and introduces the collection of short stories Bliss and Other Stories that offers an illustration of Mansfield’s literary skills and supports discussion of her intentions and creative style expanded in the later chapters dedicated to theoretical as well as analytical exploration.

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The second chapter focuses on the theoretical observation of the major influences on Katherine Mansfield’s work. It is divided into three individual subsections that trace the most important formative powers that contributed to the development of Mansfield’s singular style. The first section, based on the observations from Peter Childs’s book Modernism, aims to elucidate the position of Katherine Mansfield among the Modernist movement. As a writer open to experimentation, Mansfield became an executioner of many of the Modernist thoughts concerning the withdrawal from conventions and rejection of the stable narrative flow and fixed identity. The second subchapter follows the views presented in Julia von Gunsteren’s book Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism while introducing the origins and the main ideas of the movement of Literary Impressionism and pursuing their resonance in the work of Katherine Mansfield. The third section continues in a similar manner while depicting the main characteristics of the short story form and exploring how Mansfield responded to this genre as well as to the legacy of the short story writer Anton Chekhov. This subchapter also focuses on Katherine Mansfield as a woman writer and hints her female experience and reaction to the Victorian ideal in the male-dominated society. The main goal of the third chapter of the thesis is to provide an analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s writing style and emphasize those features that contributed to the creation of complex literary characters. This section elaborates on the ideas withdrawn from the observation of Mansfield’s sources of inspiration in the previous chapters. Introduction of detail as a core element in constructing characters and surroundings, employment of the reader as an active part of the story and the technique of depicting both – inner and outer part of one’s world are among those principles that hint Mansfield’s interest in capturing the complexity of human life. Moreover, her ideas about the plotless perception of events led to the establishment of a specific narrative technique that employs free indirect discourse, psycho-narration and stream 3

of consciousness and composes the stories in a mosaic-like manner. All the narratological features will be discussed in the second part of the chapter with an aid of terminology introduced in the work Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative by Mieke Bal and in Monika Fludernik’s An Introduction to Narratology. Construction of the Mansfieldian literary character is discussed in greater detail in the fourth chapter. Katherine Mansfield’s determination to portray her characters through their inner selves corresponds with her ambition to create her own individual personae instead of employing general character types. The striking complexity of individuals and authenticity of their lives challenges the reader by bringing up questions of identifying one’s true self in the world dominated by convention and hypocrisy. Mansfield responds in a form of “epiphanies” or “glimpses” that often function as a climax of her stories and serve as a tool for revealing the truth about individual’s unmasked self. The last chapter provides an illustrative in-depth analysis of selected short stories from the collection Bliss and Other Stories, while employing the issues identified in the theoretical part of the thesis. The first section focuses on the short story “Bliss” which is one of the best known and most widely praised works. It demonstrates Mansfield’s mastery of the chosen form and functions as a study of mood and feeling set in a modern conventional family circle of the woman-child narrator Bertha. The short story “Prelude”, analysed in the second section, reveals a kaleidoscopic arrangement of viewpoints of different characters inhabiting the Burnell household. The most important characters – Linda, Beryl and Kezia – represent three different individualities with distinct understanding of their inner as well as surrounding world. Through the character of Kezia Mansfield explores the sensitive and imaginative mind of children. Linda and Beryl, on the other hand, embody two contrasting representations of women of their period.

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The last section deals with an analysis of the short story “Je ne parle pas français” which introduces an ambiguous figure of Raoul Duquette – a narcissist Parisian writer deluded by a false self-perception and trapped in a permanent role-switching performance. The direct speech of this first-person narrator opens different possibilities for Katherine Mansfield who openly criticizes the inauthenticity of the society based on role-playing and victimization. Subsequently, the concluding section of the thesis summarizes the notions investigated in the theoretical part and explicates their relation to the analytical exploration within the selected short stories.

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1 Life and Literary Work of Katherine Mansfield “To thine own self be true… True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well, really, that’s what it looks like coming to - hundreds of selves?” (Letters and Journals, p.173)

An entry from Katherine Mansfield’s journal voices one of the main concerns that echoes throughout Mansfield’s life and finds its reflection in her art. It also hints the problematic nature of attempts to capture her varying personality in writing. Nevertheless, soon after her death in 1923 it became a general interest of different scholars and biographers to create a portrayal of Katherine Mansfield as a woman and as a writer. The following paragraphs will attempt to give a brief account of her life based on the findings in Katherine Mansfield’s Journal edited by John Middleton Murry, Claire Tomalin’s detailed biography Katherine Mansfield: a secret life and some other essays by different authors. She was born as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 to the family of the middleclass colonial banker Harold Beauchamp and his wife Annie Beauchamp, both Australia-born settlers in New-Zealand. Despite the merry family circle and wealthy living secured by her successful father, Katherine rather early decided to embrace a different identity to that inherited from her provincial family. After getting her education at Queen’s College in London and returning to Wellington, Katherine realized that her righteous place is among the art-oriented intellectual groups of Europe. In 1908 she sailed back to London with determination to make her living as a writer. Soon she met some of the most important figures that would instantly influence her life and career – Rhythm magazine editor John Middleton Murry, whom she married in the later years and two significant figures of Bloomsbury group – Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. However, her dream of independence and bohemian life of an artist was almost immediately shattered as she realized that the boundaries of convention binding the women in

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New Zealand were very similar to those in England and other European countries. As a selfreliant woman writer she had to fight exclusion to acquire a proper place in society where women were still marginalized. Thus, early after her arrival in Europe Mansfield found herself in a struggle for money and decent living. Claire Tomalin points out that “she travelled too far outside the boundaries of accepted behaviour for her family to feel she was one of them, but she did not find herself at home in any other group, nor did she make a family on her own” (Tomalin, p.6). As a lonely observer of life, Katherine Mansfield spent most of her life travelling around Europe in search of inspiration, stability and recovery of her deteriorated health. Mansfield’s determination to gain acclaim in the artistic world critically disturbed the balance in her private life and until a very late point she did not realize that to be able to regain this balance she would have do a sacrifice. Arnold Whitridge in his biographic account on 'Katherine Mansfield' characterizes the zeal of Mansfield as a “restless search for happiness. She wanted freedom and she wanted a home, she wanted friends, gaiety, affection, and love, and while enjoying them she wanted to earn her living by her pen” (Whitridge, p.265). Moreover, all events in Mansfield’s life were hindered by her belief that “it is only being true to life that [she] can be true to art” (Journal, p.174-5). Therefore, as a free-thinker and supporter of change, Mansfield kept refusing the rules and values promoted by the previous generation. This attitude contributed to the fact that she was freed from the duty of accepting the role of a middle-class wife and mother, but it also caused her alienation from the rest of the society resulting in the loss of protection and stabile family background. Mansfield’s unruly and hectic lifestyle gradually contributed to deterioration of her health that early in her life resulted in a terminal illness. Critics agree that it was at this point of her life that Katherine Mansfield became disillusioned with the anticipations of artistic life and turned back to her childhood memories from New Zealand. As Arnold Whitridge puts it, 7

Katherine Mansfield’s opinion on New Zealand became very different from that of Kathleen Beauchamp: “One hated her native country with all the intolerance of youth, the other yearned for it with all the passionate regret of a prodigal son” (Whitridge, p.259). First of all, young Kathleen Beauchamp had to undergo the disturbing difficulties of independent life to complete her transformation to the writer Katherine Mansfield. Then she could turn back to her birth land memories and immerse into the process of recreation of her true self. Another important episode that contributed to Mansfield’s re-evaluation of her New Zealand family heritage was the tragic death of her beloved brother Leslie Heron “Chummie” Beauchamp at the front in France in 1915. According to the entries in her journal, this event caused a shock than was much greater than any other experience before. She wrote: Yes, I want to write recollections of my own country till I simply exhaust my store. Not only because it is 'a sacred debt' that I pay to my country because my brother and I were born there, but also because in my thoughts I range with him over all the remembered places (Journal, p.42).

These “debts of love” (Journal, p.42) as Mansfield calls them are according to Don W. Kleine’s observation in his essay 'An Eden for Insiders: Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand', regarded as “transfigurations of an obsessive sorrow, arbitrating distances of space and time which perplexed her from the day she left Wellington at nineteen” (Kleine, p.203). The short stories derived from Mansfield’s childhood experience are thus among the most experimental and most widely acclaimed pieces of author’s work. Katherine Mansfield died in January 1923 after a long exhaustive illness. In 34 years she was able to produce a substantial amount of essays, poems and short stories, many of which were published during her life. Even though she was not a political writer, her work serves as a portrayal of social, cultural as well as political conditions of her time. Mansfield witnessed the publication of three collections of her short stories. The first, called In a German Pension was published in 1911 and suggested a direct influence of the

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events during Mansfield’s stay in a spa town in Bavaria. This collection was favourably accepted, but Mansfield herself later regarded this work as 'immature'. The second collection Bliss and Other Stories was published in 1920 and includes fourteen short stories written between years 1915 and 1920. This collection already introduces the typical Mansfieldian narrative strategies and opens the core questions that will linger throughout the later works. The title story “Bliss” was the first among Mansfield’s short stories to gain international acclaim and promote Katherine Mansfield among the important contemporary writers. The collection The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922 followed the tradition of the previous collection and confirmed Mansfield’s position as one of the most important short story writers of the beginning of 20th century. After Mansfield’s death it was the responsibility of John Middleton Murry to publish two remaining collections – The Dove’s Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924) as well as the compilation of Mansfield’s letters and journals. The most distinctive feature within the writings of Katherine Mansfield lies in their construction that comprises of both, an innovatory style and attentive observation of her experience within the contemporary society and its artistic circles. The following chapter focuses on depicting Mansfield’s encounter and response to different notions introduced among the relevant artistic movements of the period.

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2 Major Influences on Katherine Mansfield Katherine Mansfield lived through the period of the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century that witnessed a great array of changes and new controversial ideas ranging from Freudian discoveries to the achievements of industrial revolution. The artistic circles of the era vividly responded to the innovative tendencies and contributed to the transformation of the image of contemporary society. Viorica Patea in her essay 'The Short Story: An Overview of the History and Evolution of the Genre' emphasises the formative moments in December 1910 when England hosted the post-Impressionist exhibition of Cézanne, van Gogh, and Matisse. She believes that this exhibition caused “a drastic change in contemporary sensibility… that was to affect not only the visual arts, but also the conception of poetry, the novel and the short story” (Patea, p.17). The crucial changes in these disciplines, according to the laws of Impressionism, would result in an abandonment of conventional discourse “in favour of style that registered fleeting impressions, moods, feelings and atmosphere” (Patea, p.17). Successive application of various innovatory ideas triggered the origination of numerous artistic movements, many of which overlapped and contributed to the complexity of the artistic world of the beginning of 20th century. Therefore, after her arrival in London young Katherine Mansfield encountered a varied and creative atmosphere that stimulated and enriched her aborning literary voice. Julia van Gunsteren, whose work Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism focuses on the influence of Impressionist movement, acknowledges also Naturalism, Realism, Symbolism and Modernism among the main sources of Mansfield’s artistic inspiration (Gunsteren, p.7). Nevertheless, van Gunsteren believes that Mansfield’s art is unique to such an extent that it cannot be labelled by any particular literary movement (Gunsteren, p.7). More suitable is to consider her work as a result of eclectic production as the crucial ideas and strategies in Mansfield’s writings come from diverse outer resources that intermingle with her own inner sources of invention. 10

Some of the major influences on Katherine Mansfield’s work will be discussed in the following sections of this chapter. Specifically, they will explore the movements of Modernism and Literary Impressionism as well as the influential short story form that contributed to the final composition of Katherine Mansfield’s expression.

2.1 Mansfield and Modernism According to the definition of Peter Childs, “Modernism is variously argued to be a period, style, genre, or combination of these” (Childs, p.12) and is either viewed as “a timebound or a genre-bound art form” (Childs, p.18). Within the time presentation it ranges throughout the period of the late 19th and early 20th while functioning as a response to the great mental shift within the European society initiated by the processes of industrialization, urbanization, advancement of branches of science and the crisis of belief in the course of the First World War. The central change within the artistic circles occurred in the way the artists of the era started to perceive subjective experience and individuality. While the “previous dominant modes had been a poetics of mimesis, verisimilitude and realism… Modernism marked a clear movement towards increased sophistication… self-scepticism and general antirepresentationalism” (Childs, p.22). ”Jan Manfred in his article on 'Focalization' reflects the core concerns in his claim that “Modernist writers were not interested in realistic representations of external phenomena but in presenting the world as it appeared to characters subject to beliefs, moods, and emotions” (Manfred). He highlights the observation of Virginia Woolf: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms… Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind

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in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incidence scores upon the consciousness” (Woolf, p.160-1).

The notions reflected in this quote are according to Jan Manfred some of the basic thoughts constituting the “Modernist 'novel of consciousness'” that employs “a 'figural narrative,' that is, a third-person narrative in which the storyworld is seen through the eyes of a character” (Manfred). The main focus of the writings concurrently lies in the portrayal of the protagonists’ perception of both, their inner and outer world. In general was the main interest of the writers of Modernism in responding to “the tradition of the new”, to use the term by Peter Childs, and offering alternative modes of representation to those initiated in the previous era, comprising of “a dependable narrator, the depiction of a fixed stable self; history as a progressive linear process; bourgeois politics, which advocated reform not radical change; the tying up of all narrative strands, or 'closure'” (Childs, p.22). Therefore, according to Childs’s observation Modernism can be essentially “understood through what it differs from” (Childs, p.2) as its form, demonstration of time, perspective, level of narration and other aspects stand in a sharp contract to those of the previous era while creating works pushed towards the introspection and abstraction to express the new sensibilities of the era and challenge the readers to find their own response and interpretation of the contemporary society. Katherine Mansfield, as an attentive observer of the world, clearly perceived many of the thought-provoking notions and discussed her ideas in her letters and diaries. Her life among the contemporary writers, particularly Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, caused that her work adopted very similar notions to those of their fiction. Miroslawa Kubasiewicz observes in her essay 'Authentic Existence and the Characters of Katherine Mansfield' that Mansfield’s approach to both, life and work was very similar to the notions characteristic for Modernism:

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Alienation, dread of death, or the search for freedom and authenticity manifested themselves in her life and found reflection in her work… Most, if not all critics agree that isolation, and emotional and spiritual loss, are among the dominant themes in her stories and reflect her view of the human condition (Kubasiewicz, p.53).

All these themes, in addition to those of victimization and alienation within the urban areas and domestic circles are among the topics that Mansfield shared with the Modernist writers of the period who pondered upon the situation of the individual and his relationship to the new thoughts and technologies introduced in different spheres of life and society.

2.2 Mansfield and Literary Impressionism The term Impressionism is generally used to describe the movement in fine art during the late 19th and early 20th century. It primarily involves the Paris-based painters Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and others who opposed the conventional art community and decided to portray the current subjects in an innovative way. Gradually Impressionism spread to other areas and had a decisive influence on contemporary music as well as literature. Literary Impressionism is a term introduced by Ferdinan Brunetière in 1879. It reflects the ideas and techniques employed in the art of Impressionists, therefore, as Brunetière observes it is “a systematic transposition of the means of expression of an art, which is the art of painting, into the domain of another art, which is the art of writing” (Brunetière, p.452). Some of the main principles of Impressionism that found resonance in literature are recorded in Angela Smith’s work 'Katherine Mansfield and Rhythm'. She considers the tendencies to

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…favour every-day subjects drawn from the close observation of people within their own environment – from bourgeoisie to the working class and those who lived at the fringe of society…, interest in the momentary effects of light, atmosphere and movement” and “privileging the role of the senses in the observation and recording of the transitory and ephemeral (Smith, p.16).

Moreover, Impressionists experimented with different levels of perception while employing only limited views of the actions. This technique formed the specific Impressionistic visions termed “epiphanies” that Julia von Gunsteren characterizes as “privileged moments, moments of being, visionary instants… or moments bienhereux” (Gunsteren, p.61). The critic also discusses the relationship between Literary Modernism and Impressionism while characterizing Literary Impressionism as “an incipient movement to Modernism” (Gunsteren, p.7) that anticipated some of its most striking qualities. She believes that both movements have “common roots in a set of shared assumptions in which there is a primacy of perception, with a fragmentation of perceived reality, no chronology, and no clear beginnings and endings” (Gunsteren, p.26). Literary Impressionism emphasizes subjectivity in which various characters perceive the actual fragments of reality through their senses. According to Gunsteren’s view, the only responsibility of the author is to “render a character’s reactions to the external stimuli as truthfully as he can” (Gunsteren, p.52) while the actual narrative method can vary from “a narrator who pretends to be the character, or a character who serves as a narrator, or a number of different characters who see reality in different terms” (Gunsteren, p.19). As stated earlier, Katherine Mansfield did not acknowledge the primary influence of any singular figure or movement. Despite Mansfield’s frequent trips to Paris, there are only some minor references to Impressionist paintings in her journals and critics agree that she has never used the term itself. However, her stories are often regarded as an allusion to Impressionism on the level of theory and composition. Angela Smith makes a comparison 14

between Mansfield’s stories and paintings of her friend Anne Estelle Rice, while interpreting her work as its literary equivalent (Smith, p.104). Moreover, Mansfield’s writings may be regarded as elaboration on one of the most important notions of Impressionism articulated by Ford Madox Ford: “We saw that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render … impressions” (Ford, p.73). In Mansfield’s case, the singular impressions were constructed through the concepts influenced by Literary Modernism - her technical composition of fleeting 'glimpses' of existence, unattached to conventional flow of time and narration with an emphasis on sensual and pictorial evocation created a highly imaginative frame that could contribute to the immediacy and reality of the crisis presented in an actual story. As Anne Friis puts it in her discussion of Mansfield’s Technique in Katherine Mansfield: Life and Stories: As the impressionist painter paints things as they appear at any given moment, so [Mansfield] renders only the momentary impression; but the description of the immediate happening becomes to her the means of implying a deeper reality behind the outward appearance (Friis, p.132).

Therefore, it can be argued that Mansfield’s main concern is to employ the concepts of Literary Impressionism to activate the imagination and self-identification of the reader that is concurrently challenged to ponder upon the situation of the main characters dealing with the existential topics of struggle and search for identity.

2.3 Mansfield and the Short Story The last section of this chapter focuses on the genre of the short story that became the core medium in Katherine Mansfield’s work and contributed to both, formation as well as original realization of her ideas. 15

The today’s concept of the short story form is a relatively recent invention. According to Viorica Patea’s observation, it is a child of the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century that grew up along with the media of cinema and photography, though did not find its field of criticism until half a century ago (Patea, p.1). The only critics until then were the practitioners of the genre themselves, among the first of whom we can find Edgar Allan Poe or Anton Chekhov. Patea argues, that it was the decisive voice of E.A. Poe in the 19th century that through his writings initiated the birth of the short story as a separate genre and determined the “form, style, length, design, authorial goals, and reader affect” while developing the framework of the notions such as “brevity, intensity, suggestiveness… closure and design” within which is the short story discussed until today (Patea, p.3). While the short story shares the medium of prose with novel, it also employs the metaphorical and suggestive language of poetry making the final work highly imaginative and prone to “challenge notions of conventional truth to dwell on moments of breakup in the experience of everyday reality” (Patea, p.14). In the course of the century the short story proved to be a very flexible form apt to respond to the changes of the contemporary literary tradition. Anthon Pavlovich Chekhov is one of the main contributors to the development of the short story genre at the end of 19th century. Apart from the notions of constructing apparently plotless stories with abrupt endings he also introduced the exploration of the inner world of the characters and a tendency towards a naturalistic depiction of reality. Moreover, he was one of the first authors that contributed to the development of the short story form as an autonomous literary genre. Chekhov’s legacy also remains the most important model for Katherine Mansfield’s own literary production. From the early beginning of her career she was profoundly influenced by his technique and style and critics believe that one of her first short stories “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” is a result of Mansfield’s adaptation of Chekhov’s story “Sleepyhead” (Tomalin, p.72). In later years, Mansfield pursued her own way of dealing with and contributing 16

to the short story genre. However, her attachment to Chekhov’s legacy remained highly visible, especially at those moments of her career when Mansfield struggled with the inclination to doubt the quality of her work as well as her artistic ability. She proclaimed Chekhov as her guide who “makes [her] feel that this longing to write stories of such uneven length is justified” (Journal, p.65), even though she could not dispose of the feeling that the true art lies within the novel as a highest form of fiction. Mansfield’s own contribution to the development of the genre of short story lies mainly in the incorporation of the ideas of Modernism and Literary Impressionism and elaborating on their adjustment to suit the character of the short story form. As Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy points out in her essay on 'Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”', Mansfield challenged “all conventional parameters of nineteenth-century realism constrained to plot, sequential development, climax and conclusion” (D’Arcy, p.245) and produced a form of short story that is highly praised for its fluid quality. By cutting out the formal barriers Mansfield opened space for introduction of the new experimental notions of substituting the plot-based action by “movements of mind” and employing the streams of consciousness and free indirect discourse in capturing the fleeting moments of impression and self-recognition. As Harriett Feenstra concludes in her essay 'Circling the Self' on Mansfield’s genre innovations, it is the very shortness of the short stories that enables to “create a particular impression” (Feenstra, p.72) and “encourage the reader to speculate beyond the confines of the text, making connections with the external world and thereby assuming a mental state similar to that portrayed in the narration of the stories themselves” (Feenstra, p.66). Therefore, by engaging the potential of the short story genre Mansfield offers the reader an authentic experience of encountering character’s essential self captured in a singular moment of being.

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In terms of topic of her short stories is Katherine Mansfield considered to be a female counterpart to Chekhov’s male world. As André Maurois observes in his book Poets and Prophets: The world of Tchehov is a male world: the thoughts and the conversations of its inhabitants are filled with ideas and activities. The world of KM is primarily a feminine world. The house, clothes, children, women’s cares… are the things that matter. With the household cares she likes to mingle the feelings of women, their judgements of people, their musings (Maurois, p.239).

Being a woman writer concerned with the reality of everyday life, Mansfield based her works on her feminine experience and concentrated on depiction of the roles of women within their households as well as broader frame of society. Under the simple, nearly trivial description of feminine space Mansfield entangled another level of meaning which condemned the values of the 19th century period that pushed women to act as mere dolls, ornaments and caretakers. Through the concentration on heroines’ inner life she opened the important topics of struggle for recognition and self-fulfilment that would resonate throughout the following decades.

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3 Writing Style and Narrative Presentation in Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield The following chapter will concentrate on the exploration of different methods and strategies that Katherine Mansfield employed in her writings. It will develop some of the ideas initiated in the discussion of Mansfield’s sources of inspiration and highlight those aspects that contributed to the depiction of the complexity of individuals portrayed in Mansfield’s fiction. According to the discussion from the previous chapters, Mansfield’s methods and techniques sprang from her inspiration by various literary movements and forms as well as her reaction to the conditions of contemporary society. In any case, the main interest of Mansfield’s development of a singular literary voice lies in the initiation of the construction of Mansfieldian personae designed to communicate the criticism of the era to an attentive reader. However, in the course of time Mansfield’s stories were often criticized for their triviality and repetitive patterns. To give an example of such criticism, Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy emphasizes Virginia Woolf’s condemnation of Mansfield’s short story “Bliss”: “Virginia Woolf obviously found this 'surface' feature of the narrative quite disconcerting for she apparently exclaimed on reading the story: 'She’s done for'… she is content with superficial smartness… (D’Arcy, p.249). From this moment on, opposing critics fought to justify the conciseness of Mansfield’s writing style and purposeful familiarity of her themes. William Herbert New in his work Reading Mansfield And Metaphors Of Form substantiates Mansfield’s endeavours in his depiction of her being “a clever parodist, a caustic satirist of personal and public foible” (New, p.14) and Sidney Cox in 'The Fastidiousness of Katherine Mansfield' articulates the general acclaim of Mansfield’s brevity of expression that praises her “exquisite truth and economy in depiction of trivial detail” that after all “are not so trivial as the prevailing assumptions about them” (Cox, p.158). 19

Moreover, Mansfield’s own approach to writing supposes her devotion to skill and perfection. In her letter to John Middleton Murry’s brother Richard she states: 'It’s a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details… In Miss Brill I choose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence. I choose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her, fit her on that day at that very moment' (Letters and Journals, p.213). By insisting on constructing a well-crafted voice and inner characteristics that would reflect the outer presentation of individual characters Mansfield reacted to the general rejection of traditional and well-constructed forms of the previous century. Edward Wagenknecht remarks that instead of “forcing her fresh materials into alien molds” Mansfield decided to come up with “understanding of character, her fresh, unhackneyed presentation, her ability to observe and to chronicle an astonishing amount of astonishingly real detail which apparently nobody had observed for literary purposes before her” (Wagenknecht, p.275). With these and many more literary tools Mansfield succeeded to escape from the conventional forms of the 19th century and set out on the journey of exploring the new perspectives of her characters’ lives. Her experimental approach and fascination with innovative forms of expression are reflected in her letter to Hon. Dorothy Brett where Mansfield states: “'What form is it?' you ask. Ah, Brett, it’s so difficult to say. As far as I know, it’s more or less my own invention” (Letters and Journals, p.85). Thus, apart from her careful attention to literary technique, Mansfield did not succeed to clearly define her artistic principles. However, while observing her complex work, it is possible to trace several notion that set the tone of her writings. First of all, Katherine Mansfield greatly valued the role of literature that aimed not to function just as “an aesthetic object, nor merely a didactic object, but in addition a creative object; that of subjecting its readers to a real and at the same time illuminating experience” 20

(Wagenknecht, p.276). Therefore, the prime concern of Mansfield’s short stories is not only to offer a well-illustrated account of events but also to employ evocative language that hints, creates tension and leads the reader to a profound understanding of Mansfield’s view of social aspects. Accordingly, W. H. New points out that Mansfield’s language no longer functions as “a neutral carrier of determinate propositions but as a deliberate design and a conscious field of revelation (New, p.63). Through application of certain narrative techniques Mansfield succeeds in transgressing the traditional division between the text and its reader and leads them to engage in a constant play of suggesting and interpreting. However, along with the enigmatic nature of her narratives, Mansfield largely relied on the familiarity of topics picturing an everyday life. As indicated by both, Sidney Cox and Helena Furlong, Mansfield attempted to present the new events of her stories as familiar through “identifying herself with the minds of people whom she wished to portray” (Cox, p.168). Mansfield stated in one of her letters: “I have tried to make it as familiar to 'you' as it is to me… one tries to go deep – to speak of the secret self we all have – to acknowledge that” (qtd. in Furlong, p.91). This quote confirms Mansfield’s interest in the paradoxical notion of experiencing both - new and familiar at the same time that becomes one of the main devices triggering the process of reader’s self-identification with her literary characters. Moreover, according to Mansfield’s interest in the inner life of her characters the reader is seldom given any outer characteristics. By contrast, Sidney Cox argues that he is challenged to compile his own portrayal of individuals through the interconnections of “their voices and silences, their smiles and efforts at composing their faces, their gestures and uncompleted motions, and all the manifold and contradictory hints of their behavior” (Cox, p.158). Miroslawa Kubasiewicz elaborates on the notion of reader’s reflective construction and states that Mansfield guides her readers to “notice the inauthentic behaviour of her characters and, as a result, become aware how they themselves are conditioned by the objective values imposed

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on them by society” (Kubasiewicz, p.55). Resolution of Mansfield’s subtle suggestions therefore enables the reader to perceive the characteristics of the individuals conditioned by the values of the middle-class world of the early 20th century while supporting the comparison of reader’s own experience within his time. In accordance with the Modernist code, both the familiarity and credible portrayal of Mansfield’s characters are mainly attained through the characterization of individual’s voice. Being a woman writer and living a female experience in the male-dominated world, Mansfield focused on depiction of women characters in a style described by Virginia Woolf as “feminine” (qtd. In Aihong, p.101). W. H. New elaborates on the nature of this specific style and claims that it is rooted and further developed through specific registers of speech that contribute to various mindsets of characters and convey “perspectives on [their] class, gender, and age” (New, p.73). Moreover, to individualize each of her characters Mansfield employs a wide range of lexical and grammatical devices that Lawrence Mitchell terms “modernist manifestations of a 'dramaturgy of voice'” (Mitchell, p.5). They include the elements of character’s idiolect as well as various grammatical tools just as exclamation and repetition used for emphasising, sights, silences, dots and dashes used to form omissions to be filled by the reader and different metaphors and symbols that contribute to the enigmatic nature of character’s perception of inner self. In addition, an important aspect that manipulates the characteristics of Mansfieldian voice is its musicality and performativity. W. H. New observes that Mansfield intended to achieve the effects of scenes “through the conscious choice of prose rhythm” (New, p.55). He supposes that to read Mansfield’s stories effectively, it is necessary to recognise the singular power of her word choice and “follow the effects of the structures of rhythm and arrangement” (New, p.18) that contribute to the animation of character’s inner voice and consciousness.

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Another feature of Mansfieldian narrative that contributes to the specific treatment of its characters is the plotlessness. Opposing the tradition of plot-based stories of the previous century, Mansfield turns her attention away from the surface and action. Claire Tomalin notices the influence of Impressionism on Mansfield’s stories in her claim that “there is no plot to speak of, but a series of impressionistic scenes, and a 'merging into things'…” (Tomalin, p.200). Therefore, when considering the events in Mansfield’s stories that are based on physical action and movement, nearly nothing substantial happens. As Samya Achiri remarks in her essay 'Transcendental Selves of Woman Characters in Katherine Mansfield’s “At the Bay”', Mansfield chooses not to expose her characters physically but “concentrates on the workings of the mind. It is a criterion which makes the mind the site of action throughout the story” while employing the “inward vision, or vision within the mind… which reflect the predicaments of the soul” (Achiri, p.99). Thus, the most important events within Mansfield’s stories that contribute to an effective climax are situated and reflected through characters’ minds. As stated in the previous chapter, singular moments or 'glimpses' of being come from the Impressionistic observation of reality and in Literary Impressionism follow the function of revelation or epiphany. In Katherine Mansfield’s work these emphasise the moment of internal change and are an important element in exploration of the inner self. Following Edward Wagenknecht’s remark that Mansfield’s plotless stories are based on her own understanding of life, which is arranged into distinct impressions rather than specific plots (Wagenknecht, p.278), epiphanies become the main structuring principles in composition of both, direct and indirect narrative of Mansfield’s stories. Moreover, the time structuration is another element that affects the reader’s perception of characters as well as their surrounding. Mansfield deliberately manipulated the time representation in her short stories to create an illusion of witnessing only a fleeting moment of

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events in her characters’ full life. Or as Anne Friis notes, “she takes a small section of life and puts it under the microscope” (Friis, p.167) while such treatment responds to Rober Littell’s opinion that “the truth is in minutes rather than in years, in the emotion not of a day, but of a second, in the chill or warmth of a sudden mood…” (Littell, p.166). In her essay on 'The Elusiveness of Reality' in Katherine Mansfield’s work, Joanna Kokot emphasizes the usage of praesens historicum that contributes to the recognition of the instantaneousness of the moment along with the singularity of the stimuli influencing the character (Kokot, p. 74). The critic also argues that the suspension of time results in suspension of Mansfield’s world where characters do not develop but only react and dive into the discussion of the nature of their “true self” (Kokot, p. 74). However, the suspension does not necessarily create a static portrayal, in contrast, it preserves the ephemeral quality through engagement of different time shifts disregarding the time order. As Edward Wagenknecht observes, Mansfield “writes as the mind works” (Wagenknecht, p.279) what contributes to the natural perception of characters’ thoughts and words as well as the great array of realistic details that constitute their world. When it comes to the characterization of the outer sphere it is primarily the use of distinct details that conveys the formation of Mansfield’s fictional reality. Monika Fludernik in her work An Introduction to Narratology observes that it is the “superfluity of apparently pointless details which authenticates the text as realistic” (Fludernik, p.54). The employment of descriptive passages results in decelerating of the pace of the action and gives space to the activation of “frames” or “schemes in which one part of the frame evokes the whole thing” (Fludernik, p.54). Yet under Mansfield’s treatment some of the details gain a very specific feature – apart from a mere evocation of images they embrace suggestions. Wagenknecht stresses mainly those subtle reactions or gestures that imply the characteristics of the whole character (Wagenknecht, p.277), just like Beryl’s biting of her lip in “Prelude” or Mouse’s

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stroking her muff in “Je ne parle pas français”. Therefore Mansfield’s sensitive writing requires an equally sensitive reading so that the reader can fully perceive character traits as well as symbolism hiding under the trivial and familiar surface. The second part of this chapter introduces the terminology of narratology and explores the features and methods of constructing narrators and narratives along with other means of presentation that Katherine Mansfield employed in her works. According to Monika Fludernik’s conception, narratology is a field of study where the main objective is to “describe the constants, variables and combinations typical of narrative and clarify how these connect with the framework of theoretical models” (Fludernik, p.8). Its classic models adopt the structuralist approach and apply ideas of different theorists, such as Claude Brémond or Gérard Genette, while the more recent conceptions concentrate on more general notions of narrative research and narrative theory (Fludernik, p.158). However, the difficulty of narratological analyses resides in the inconsistency of the narratological terminology used within the works of different narratologists. Both Mieke Bal and Monika Fludernik base their narratological strategies on conceptions introduced by their predecessor narratologists while praising, criticizing and integrating new notions and trends. To open the narratological discussion, it is important to distinguish the term narrator as it is the most significant and inseparable aspect of each narrative captured in a textual form. Fludernik engages terminology of Gérard Genette and distinguishes between two basic types of narrators – first-person or homodiegetic, where “the narrator is the same person as a protagonist of the story level” and third-person or heterodiegetic where “the spheres of existence of narrator and characters are non-dentical” (Fludernik, p.158). Apart from the dual division there are numerous specific features that different types of narrators may embrace to gain particularity and uniqueness.

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Early in her career Katherine Mansfield accepted that part of Modernist aesthetics which rejected an authorial narrator that had been a very prominent aspect of the literary production in the previous century. Authority of “godlike” and “omniscient” narrator that “has an overview of the entire fictional world, tells the story from on high, as it were, in full knowledge of the outcome of the complications that exist on the plot level” (Fludernik, p.150) did not suit the concerns of Mansfield’s expression. She wished to focus on the inner characteristics of her protagonists and let the reader project their thoughts, views and dreams into a mosaic-like portrayal. In terms of narratology Mansfield experimented in employment of the restricted third person point of view through internal focalization, therefore captured “a view from within” (Fludernik, p.153) while resulting in a specific reflector mode where the “mediacy is not generated by a narrator but through the consciousness of a reflector character, creating the illusion of immediacy” (Fludernik, p.160). This method enabled Mansfield to explore the present moment instead of lingering in the retrospective narration characteristic for the firstperson account and also contributed to the exposition of Mansfieldian personas to the critical eyes of both, the author and the reader. Julia van Gunsteren gives an account of different narrative methods explored by the authors within the movement of Literary Impressionism: Method with a narrator who pretends to be the character, or a character who serves as a narrator, or a number of different characters who see reality in different terms. Another method is the complex device of uncertain or unreliable narration, in which the narrator attempts to discover the truth about his own experience (Gunsteren, p.19).

In Mansfield’s short stories we can trace all of these methods of narration while some of her most widely acclaimed stories employ even more experimental method known as “parallax” presenting “an event or scene as perceived by multiple characters or narrators” (Gunsteren, p.19). This method, applied in such stories as “Prelude” or “At the Bay” creates the most fruitful background for exploration of the singular 'slice of life' where according to Joanna 26

Kokot are different impressions and points of view presented and encompassed in an “incongruous mosaic of incompatible versions of reality that do not complement but rather exclude one another” (Kokot, p.71). This great array of different perspectives projected through conscious as well as unconscious minds of different characters considerably reduces the direct involvement of the narrator. However, the final composition of Mansfield’s stories flexibly balances the characters’ expression with a subtle commentary as well as colourful and imaginative descriptions from the part of the observing narrator. Narrator’s imaginative characteristics of the outer world also contribute to its cinematic representation. In her essay 'Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Short Story' Gerri Kimber observes Mansfield’s fascination with the new medium of cinema and reflects her tendency to imitate this interest in her narratives manipulating “deliberate cinematic impressions” portrayed through the narrator and his “moving camera, panning across then focusing in, which provides so many of the stories with their unique 'pictoral' quality” (Kimber, p.16). Concurrently, the switches between various perceptions of characters are correspondingly performed on the level of narrative acts. Mansfield uses numerous techniques to capture the sentiments and positions of her characters, among which there are two methods that function as a key element in representation of the protagonists’ internal world. Both of these techniques are characterized in Päivi Kuivalainen’s essay 'Emotions in Narrative: A Linguistic Study of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction': “Psycho-narration” functioning as the narrator’s “rendering of characters’ psyches or their non-verbalised thought processes, and free indirect discourse” where the narrator employs” indirect quotation of the words that the characters say or think, their verbalised speech or thought” (Kuivalainen). Both psycho-narration and free indirect discourse respond to the notions of internal focalization and focus on depiction of the framework of characters within the third person

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narrative. Moreover, the main purpose of psycho-narration in Katherine Mansfield’s stories is to report “those feelings or states of consciousness that the character may be unaware of” (Kuivalainen) and to implicate the inner voice of characters through their idiomatic language and orthographic marks (Kuivalainen). Psycho-narration is also an important device in communicating the inner conflict of the characters that triggers the revealing moment of emotional climax. Free indirect discourse, on the other hand, represents a compromise between direct and indirect discourse. It is formed in commentaries of the narrator of the story, though reflected through the characters’ indirect discourse. Gunsteren points out that its omission of quotation marks sets free indirect discourse from the narration and serves as a vehicle of stream-ofconsciousness, irony, and epiphany (Gunsteren, p.112). As Päivi Kuivalainen concludes, both “psycho-narration and free indirect discourse provide Mansfield with a tool to point out the significant moments in the protagonists’ lives and separate them from the rest of the narration” (Kuivalainen). Distinct techniques of narratology are therefore a fundamental element in construction of Mansfieldian “moments of being” that encompass the inner as well as outer exposition of their protagonists. The following chapter will explore how these two worlds are interconnected in a universal search of authenticity and one’s true self.

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4 The Construction of an Individual in the Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield The aim of the following chapter is to present those means of exposition that Katherine Mansfield employed in the construction of outer as well as inner lives of her characters. It will elaborate on some of the methods and techniques presented in the previous chapter and explain their involvement in the composition of multi-layered individuals related to the conditions of the surrounding world. Following the tendencies of Modernism, numerous writers turned from the objective reality of the outer world and started to focus on depiction of subjective workings of characters’ minds often captured under the influence of extreme situations. Accordingly, Katherine Mansfield responded to the trend by creating troublesome characters trapped in troublesome moments. As Nancy Gray remarks in her essay ' Un-Defining the Self in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield', she seized the opportunity to depict the complexity of human beings while portraying both, their attachment as well as freeing from convention (Gray, p.79). It could be therefore argued that the primary concern of Mansfield’s short stories lies in depicting the conflict between the individuals and the society. Though instead of direct confrontation with society’s obstructions Mansfield chooses a much subtler presentation where different aspects of the story hint and suggest rather than state the problematic nature of Mansfield’s characters and surroundings. For instance, many conflicts originate from the inauthentic pattern of life that characters adopt and are required to follow. Miroslawa Kubasiewicz observes that most of Mansfield’s characters do not realize they “have the right to change their perspective and enjoy their existence with new meaning” (Kubasiewicz, p.59). Instead, they conform to the expected patterns of behaviour issued by their upbringing that represses most of the prospects of independent deeds and thinking. As Katherine Mansfield’s 29

prior interest lies in portraying the women characters, the faults of upbringing are mainly reflected in women’s victimized position within authoritarian male world. The cases of the governess in “The Little Governess” or Mouse in “Je ne parle pas français” may serve as an example of victimization where the influence of convention resulted in the creation of childlike women suffering from inability of escaping the naivety of judgement and narrowmindedness of thinking. However, even the women that find the determination to fight convention are doomed to fail as they are not able to abandon the familiar grounds. Julia van Gunsteren emphasizes the fact that it is not only the condition within society that creates the tension, it is a combination of factors along with the nature of characters themselves, as each “individual should be responsible for himself at least to a certain extent; it he fails there must be something wrong in his personality” (Gunsteren, p.23). Thus, in most cases heroines suppress the inner voices characterized by John Warson as the bearers of “negative messages, telling Isabel (“Prelude”) that she is 'shallow, tinkling, vain'… and Bertha (“Bliss”) that she is 'so cold'”. Instead of performing a change in their lives Mansfieldian women often succumb to the idea of comfort and stability provided by the old, convention-bound world. Nevertheless, the presence of a conflict remains the main inspiration of Katherine Mansfield that resonates throughout her short stories. It operates on many different levels affecting the images, behaviour, thoughts as well as language of the characters. In case of language, Mansfield employs various lexical and grammatical devices to attain both, experimentation with prose sound and individualization of voice that were discussed in the previous chapter and expression of social influence that is closely related to the conditioning of Mansfieldian individuals by society. Through the speech as well as thoughts it is possible to trace the impact of the background on the means of the character’s expression. It often lacks clarity and abounds with repetition, exaggeration and affective expressions. 30

Comparably important in Mansfield’s writings are also the moments of silence. As Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy points out, Mansfield’s characters are often unable to “verbalize [their] state of mind – to give full expression to [their] emotions” what leaves them “marginalized or alienated from a culture (and language) which cannot accommodate such feelings” (D’Arcy, p.252). They often find themselves wordless in the buzz of voices surrounding them, though it does not mean that the lack of expression would signify their defeat. William Herbert New proposes that Mansfieldian women deprived of the language are often prone to communicate by other means (New, p.80), often embedded in character’s unconsciousness. Moreover, the silence of characters is often accompanied with the feeling of stillness that according to Gunsteren functions as one of the “most fundamental elements in Literary Impressionist fiction”, whose characters, despite the petrified state of body and language employ very “active, restless consciousness” (Gunsteren, p.53). These characters “passively absorb a bewildering flood of an outside world moving in a constant flux” while they often find “a 'creative synthesis' in passive perception and final 'active conception'” (Gunsteren, p.53). In case of the Mansfieldian characters, another very important element that contributes to the awakening of the inner voice and consciousness is the solitude. Being in a state of isolation from the rest of the public enables the protagonists to leave their roles designed by society, escape the illusion of unity and ponder upon the nature of their true identity that is often impossible to communicate in words. Nevertheless, Kubasiewicz remarks that for Mansfield’s women characters “escaping the roles imposed by society is a heroic task, which not everybody can face up to” (Kubasiewicz, p.59). In order to pull women characters out of their routines and expose them to the process of individuation, Mansfield constructs various critical situations that constitute

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the evocative images of revelations, moments of awareness in which the character achieves an epiphany - a new realization. The epiphany is characteristic for its lucidity and subjective nature of judgement of own individuality independent from the influence of character’s family or society. Katherine Mansfield discusses the nature of epiphany in her journal: …moment of suspension [where] the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up – out of life – one is 'held', and then, - down, bright, broken, glittering on to the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow (Journal, p.148).

Mansfield employs epiphanies to bring her characters as well as the story itself to a climatic state. Through this technique Mansfield creates narrative spaces that might be equated with Mieke Bal’s term slow-downs characterized as small sections of narrative with “extremely evocative effect” that “at moments of great suspense… work like a magnifying glass” (Bal, p.107). Correspondingly, epiphanies function as moments of spatialisation where, as Renata Casertano states, “the subject… is no longer perceived as temporal or time-bound but as spacebound and a-temporal” (Casertano, p.100). The timeless suspension causes that the external conflict is replaced with internal crisis which is according to Nancy Gray neither explained nor elaborated within the compressed space but its role is to “enact the experience of its happening” (Gray, p.79). However, the revelation inflicted through epiphanies does not function as a solution or answer to character’s internal struggle. Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy observes that the “moment of being” typically serves the contrary as it is “a point of maximum conflict that marks the denial of a solution” (D’Arcy, p.266). Therefore the characters are restrained from a conversion that would encompass their newly uncovered individuality. After the moment passes most of the characters resume their old roles, just as in the case of Raoul from “Je ne parle pas français” or

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Millie from “The Man Without a Temperament”. Other characters are similarly to Berta from “Bliss” abandoned by Mansfield at the moment of climax and the reader does not learn how they managed to cope with the critical situation, however, he can often guess that security and familiarity of their present life will prevail and discourage them from aspiring for a change. The third type of epiphany, represented by Linda Burnell, functions more like a portrayal of a single reflective moment that sheds light on the state of Linda’s inner self, torn between the demands of society and her own dreams. Consequently, the role-playing remains the most important part of each character’s personality. As their true self proves to be unsuitable for public consumption, Mansfield’s heroines regain their roles of wives, mothers and ornaments to their husband’s lives that are the few public identities Mansfieldian women are allowed to impersonate. Harriett Feenstra observes Mansfield’s identification of role-playing as “one of the key social strategies” where different characters “assume roles in relation to particular social context” (Feenstra, p.64). She also emphasizes the notion of fragmentation of one’s identity as a response to impotence of reaching authenticity and satisfaction. Mansfield’s characters are therefore presented from various levels of their selves as a direct consequence of performing different roles imposed by the demands of society as well as their inner struggle for recognition and change. Yet one of the best demonstrations of the complexity of the characters’ selves is embedded in the portrayal of children. Rosemary Jackson praises Mansfield’s depiction of children’s inner life that blends “with reality more freely than adults, who are conversely more alert to the objectivity of facts and the potential distortions deriving from perceptions and references” (Jackson, p.45). It is mainly through children’s games that Mansfield reflects the subconscious awareness of social roles as the children observe and practice the entangled social structures of the adults. Moreover, Edward Wagenknecht perceives the negative consequence these structures impose on Mansfield’s children as they are “generally lovely, sensitive 33

innocents” who are trapped in a pitiful endeavour “to adjust themselves to a coarse world constructed by adults to suit themselves” (Wagenknecht, p.282). Children in Katherine Mansfield’s stories therefore function as very attentive perceivers of the conditions of the surrounding society and intermingle their open minds and simple perception of things with the harshness of reality of everyday life. Nevertheless, it is not Katherine Mansfield’s interest to construct a true-to-life portrayal of the society of early 20th century. She always chooses to experiment, hint and suggest and create a mere fleeting image of her characters’ world. It is up to the reader to materialize the bricks constituting the inner and outer spheres and come up with interpretation of the character’s endeavours. Thus as Miroslawa Kubasiewicz observes, Mansfield’s short stories “tell us as much, if not more, about who we are as they do about the characters who exist in the world of her fiction” (Kubasiewicz, p.59). The main focus of the following chapter will be the analysis of the particular notions, techniques and methods explored in the previous chapters within the content of the selected short stories from Bliss and Other Stories collection.

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5 Analysis of Selected Short Stories from the Collection Bliss and Other Stories The last chapter of the thesis focuses on Katherine Mansfield’s collection Bliss and Other Stories and provides a textual analysis of selected short stories serving as an illustration of the methods and techniques explored in the theoretical part of the thesis. Katherine Mansfield’s collection Bliss and Other Stories, compiled and published in 1920, comprises of fourteen short stories written between years 1915 and 1920. Many of the stories are among the most widely acclaimed and recognised works of Mansfield that demonstrate the originality and creative genius of the author. For the sake of the thesis this chapter will mainly concentrate on three specific works – “Bliss”, “Prelude” and “Je ne parle pas français” as these writings are of the greatest relevance to the topic of the thesis while offering the clearest presentation of Mansfield’s intentions, encompassing the greatest range of narrative styles and suggesting the characterization of distinct Mansfieldian character types.

5.1 Analysis of “Bliss” The short story “Bliss”, whose name inheres also in the title name of the whole collection Bliss and Other Stories, is one of the most intense and expressional works. During the course of the century the story had been widely discussed by many critics from different points of view while emphasizing the complexity of the mood and feeling and contrast between the familiarity of modern conventional family circle and the intensity of the inner experience of the main protagonist Bertha. At the opening of the story Mansfield uses the technique known as in medias res that is widely employed within the Modernist works as well as Mansfield’s own writings. Instead of the traditional introductory sequences providing the reader with the descriptions and 35

background information Mansfield chooses to plunge right in the middle of her heroine’s day, thoughts and feelings. This notion corresponds with Mansfield’s ambition to depict the singularity and instantaneousness of the moment drawn from the protagonists’ full life. Gerri Kimber likens this notion to the beginning of a theatre play as it is “cutting straight through to the action, from the very first line, as if a stage direction is being given, with the use of temporal constructions implying a prior knowledge of the event being described” (Kimber, p.15). Moreover, despite the absence of the outer description of the main character, in medias res technique thrusts the reader directly into Bertha’s present feeling and immediately initiates the construction of her inner self that later reacts to the impulses of outer circumstances and reflect the portrayal of Bertha’s characteristics. Mansfield’s economic treatment of words causes that the reader learns much about Bertha’s mental state from the few initiatory lines: ALTHOUGH Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again… What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss! (Bliss, p.49).

The initial capitalized particle suggests that Bertha’s thoughts and feelings are exceptional and in contrast to society’s expectations of the behaviour of a 30-year-old woman. Bertha is instantly presented as a child-woman who has not yet crossed the borders of her childhood to reach maturity as an adult. Instead, she lingers in an imaginative and playful world where, according to Ala Eddin Sadeq “her benumbing sense of elation” is expressed “in a manner similar to that of a child when given a precious gift or playing with other children in a playground and feeling innocently happy” (Sadeq, p.17). Correspondingly, Bertha’s childish nature is prone to hypersensibility and spontaneity, while engaging in exaggerated and sensual perception of the surrounding world. The reader encounters Bertha in a state where her vivacity is heightened by the feeling of 'bliss' that brightens everything and everyone and makes Bertha’s 36

thoughts burst with energy and indefinable desires. The incommunicability of Bertha’s feelings is reflected in the chains of thoughts where Bertha tries to describe the joy through the imaginative actions of her mind: “throwing something up in the air…” and “laugh[ing] at – nothing—at nothing, simply” (Bliss, p.49). The elusiveness of the thoughts later compels Berta to filter her inner sensations through different means, hence Bertha switches her attention to the sensual perception and praises the colours, textures, smells and sights accompanied by seemingly banal actions of arranging fruits and matching their colour with the colour of the dining-room carpet and squeezing and ordering pillows for upcoming dinner party. Apart from the point of view of Bertha that bursts with dynamic responses, the reader is also provided with the subtle observations of the omnipresent narrator that sympathetically comments on Bertha’s situation. At the beginning of the story the narrator speaks directly to the reader while posing the question “What can you do if you are thirty…” (Bliss, p.49) and facing a similar situation to that of Bertha. This notion evokes the direct involvement of the reader who is positioned between Bertha and the all-framing conventional society of which Bertha is uncomfortably aware. While observing Bertha’s thoughts and utterances Mansfield introduces two faces acknowledged by her heroine. One is linked with Bertha’s revealing sensitive inner self and the other with Bertha’s response to the surrounding world. Through subtle hints and Bertha’s dialogues with her maid and nanny the narrator defines Bertha’s social status of a middle class housewife, mother and hostess. The performance of these roles that are predefined and imposed by society functions as a repayment for Bertha’s illusionary securities of a loving husband, lovely child, safe home and close friends that constitute society’s definition of a happy life. Miroslawa Kubasiewicz points out that Bertha adheres to the belief of being in control of her life as she does not tend to question any aspect of her present situation (Kubasiewicz, p.58)

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what leads to even greater shock at the very end of the story when Bertha learns about Harry’s infidelity. According to Ala Eddin Sadeq is Bertha “trained from an early stage in her life to adjust to the reality of being patronized by the male members of her society in return for a luxurious and irresponsible way of living” (Sadeq, p.18). However, despite the supposed obligation that comprises part of this role, Bertha’s mind occasionally reveals a resentful standpoint towards society and its demands. In her state of childish exhilaration Bertha criticizes civilisation as “idiotic” as it does not approve of any intensified feelings and categorically condemns Bertha’s expression as “drunk and disorderly” (Bliss, p.49). Moreover, Bertha’s inability to find an appropriate response to her feelings is occasionally exhibited in a form of laughter which is instantly quieted by Bertha’s role-playing self in fear of society’s condemnation of being hysterical. Bertha’s 'bliss' is therefore very soon associated with hysteria which is in Bobby Seal’s article 'Gender, Truth and Reality: The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield' characterized as a “product of an unresolved conflict between unconscious impulses and conscious ones” that results from “the repression of one’s sexual feelings, which society of that time demanded of all, but especially of women…” (Seal). The demand of repressive behaviour confuses and angers Bertha who exclaims: “Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?” (Bliss, p.49). But at the critical moment when Bertha actually starts considering the question and formulating her own opinion, her indirect speech becomes scattered, full of hesitations and dashes: “No, that about the fiddle is not exactly what I mean… It’s not what I mean because- …” (Bliss, p.49) and ends up disrupted by a banal task of opening the front door. In her childish predisposition Bertha decides to repress those aspects of her social roles that require mature dealing, just like exerting superiority in an episode of negotiation with the nanny: 38

Bertha wanted to ask if it wasn’t rather dangerous to let [Little B] clutch at a strange dog’s ear. But she did not dare to. She stood watching them, her hands by her side, like the poor little girl in front of the rich little girl with the doll (Bliss, p.50).

Child-like Bertha feels threatened by the self-confident nanny even though she realises the irrationality of the situation. She exclaims: “How absurd it was. Why have a baby if it has to be kept—not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle—but in another woman’s arms?” (Bliss, p.51). It seems that the only motivation that impels Bertha to gather her strength and oppose the nanny is the exceptional 'bliss' she feels that day. Even better illustration of Bertha’s confusion between repressing and performing of behaviour within her social roles is presented in her attitude towards love and sexuality. Both in her speech and thought reports is she unable to express her feelings for Harry. After rushing to the telephone to talk to him Bertha craves to express her state of mind, however it is convention as well as her inexperience that discourage the articulation of her thoughts: “What had she to say? She’d nothing to say. She only wanted to get in touch with him for a moment. She couldn’t absurdly cry: “Hasn’t it been a divine day!” (Bliss, p.51). As Chantal CornutGentille D’Arcy points out, “behind [Bertha’s] discourse lies the dominant ideology of a 'civilization' that suppresses such embarrassingly feminine notions as bliss to the sphere of the unpresentable” (D’Arcy, p.257). Therefore, instead of acknowledging her inner tension to her husband Bertha becomes even more concerned and regresses to masking her words with those of a foreign language: “Nothing. Entendu” (Bliss, p.51). Bertha’s weakness is also embedded in constant affirmations that her performance within society bears the respective fruit. Her anxiety and submissiveness are reflected through the patters of her speech that conclude repetitions and colloquial exaggerations: “Really— really—she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever, and they got on together splendidly and were really good pals…” (Bliss, p.51). The unconvincing 39

character of the utterance where the couple drops from being “much in love” to being “really good pals” resonates with the fact that Bertha struggles with her incapability of passionate marital love: “It had worried her dreadfully at first to find that she was so cold…” (Bliss, p.57). Child-woman Bertha feels embarrassed and constricted in her adult married life as her childish nature cannot perform the mature form of love anticipated by the society. As William Herbert New observes: rather than partners, the men in [Mansfield’s] stories appear to want their wives to be at once mothers and obedient children… whom they consequently feel they have the right to draw from and ignore at will, while going on with the status quo (New, p.133).

Consequently, Bertha lingers in her childishness and submissiveness and openly terms her relationship with Harry as a companionship while praising their mutual frankness and modernity. Bertha’s critical experience of 'bliss' might function as a breaking point and the moment of maturation as “for the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband” (Bliss, p.57). Nevertheless, the actual meaning and notion behind the phrase remains hidden as there are several possible explanations of Bertha’s sudden revelation. Another explanation suggests that Bertha finally succumbed to the pressure of society and decided to serve her husband in every aspect while degrading into the status termed by D’Arcy as “woman-as-commodity” functioning “within an oppressive patriarchal system… which reduces woman to a mere instrument for man’s sexual and emotional pleasure within the family and private life” (D’Arcy, p.255). On the other hand, Walter E. Anderson in his essay 'The Hidden Love Triangle in Mansfield’s “Bliss”' offers an interpretation that introduces an unconventional love triangle of feminine love between Bertha and her guest Pearl Fulton while attempting to transfer Bertha’s unconscious feelings for Pearl into the conventional relationship with her husband (Anderson, p.402). In any case, it is equally important to consider the ardent and juvenile quality of 40

Bertha’s affections as she “always did fall in love with beautiful women” (Bliss, p.51). Therefore, an actual alternation of Bertha’s perception of her own sexuality and position within the domestic circle cannot be fully realised until the climactic moment revealing Harry’s adulterous relationship with Miss Fulton. Both Harry Young and Pearl Fulton are presented from Bertha’s subjective point of view thrilled with admiration as well as certain amount of intimacy. Harry as a husband and breadwinner occupies the core position in Bertha’s world and accordingly to Bertha bears the juvenile features associated with his surname 'Young' while embracing various boyish features and interests, just as his “passion for fighting – for seeking in everything that came up against him another test of his power and of his courage” (Bliss, p.54). Bertha approves of his youthful “zest for life” (Bliss, p.54), playfulness as well as his sensual lust for beauty and food while letting herself naively mislead by Harry’s two-facedness. As a godly patriarch figure Harry searches for sexual satisfaction outside his marital bed and subsequently usurps his right to rule both heavenly entities letting Bertha, the blissful Sun, serve him by the day and Pearl Fulton representing the Moon attend the nights. Lunar Pearl Fulton functions as a contrastive as well as equivalent figure to Bertha and represents the element of newness and mystery in the life of the main protagonist. Similarly to Bertha, Pearl is also portrayed as a dreamer inclined to sentimentalism, dressed in silver-white to celebrate the beauty of spring and symbolism of Bertha’s pear tree. However, contrastively to Bertha’s energy and impulsiveness Miss Fulton is depicted as a reflective figure with sleepy eyelids surrounded by secrets and whispers. The smoothness of her expression resonates with Pearl’s own name as well as her fair complexion that is also in a sharp contrast with Bertha’s assumingly darker appearance, judging from Little B’s dark hair and Harry’s deceptive accusation of dullness of all blonde women.

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Within the course of the short story the influence of Miss Fulton brings sparks of dispute and excitation to the lives of both Harry and Bertha and launches the critical situation by fanning Bertha’s blissful state by the new waves of secrecy and mystique, while concurrently disturbing the illusion of perfection and completeness of her life. The central struggle within Bertha’s mind is centred on her desire to decipher and telepathically reach Pearl’s mind resulting from the observation of her enigmatic way of perceiving: …she lived by listening rather than seeing. But Bertha knew, suddenly, as if the longest, most intimate look had passed between them – as if they had said to each other: “You too?”—that Pearl Fulton… was feeling just as she was feeling (Bliss, p.54).

The image of Bertha’s dreamed-of connection between women is also embedded in the symbolism of the pear tree situated in Bertha’s garden. Her fascination with the perfection and exquisite beauty of its rich flowering branches induces Bertha to equate its existence with her own: “As she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life” (Bliss, p.52). Therefore, when Pearl enters the frame and engages in her own observation of the tree Bertha projects her involvement into the imagery: And the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed—almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon (Bliss, p.56).

At his moment Bertha’s supposed spiritual identification with Pearl reaches its peak. However, the climactic end of the story brings both, shattering of the pear tree imagery as well as disillusionment of the perfection of Bertha’s world. After witnessing Harry’s passionate response to Pearl, Bertha runs to the pear tree in a search of response to her concurrent state but finds none as the tree responds only to nature and not to emotion while remaining “lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still” (Bliss, p.58). As Bobby Seal points out, after the ending lines the reader is left to judge the situation of both, Bertha as well as Pearl. He observes that 42

“Pearl’s position is perhaps even more precarious than Bertha’s. She relies on her youth and looks – qualities which are by their very nature ephemeral – to attract powerful men such as Harry”. Therefore, Pearl’s own private world with Harry cannot last very much longer than that of Bertha as sooner or later it becomes a subject of the critique of society and its regulations. Moreover, apart from its omnipresent restrictions and obligations, the influence of the early 20th century society is also mockingly presented through the observation of the remaining guests at Bertha’s dinner-party. On the one hand, Bertha claims to be delighted with their acquaintance and describes them as “modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social questions” (Bliss, p.52). But after the arrival of her guests Bertha sees them only as a decorative group along with the fruits and furniture and does not care to pay much attention to their utterances. The group proves to bear features of conformity as the reader is often left without signification of who says what and can only guess the speakers by observing specific speech patterns employed by different characters, just like the heavily emphasized and exaggerated speech of Eddie Warren imitating the upper-class recitation or fashionable terms employed by the Norman Knights. After all, the opinions of the group prove to bear the same “superficial pettiness” that according to Todd Martin characterizes the group as people “who take pleasure in mocking the bourgeoisie, even as they become mere caricatures of the artists they hope to be” (Martin, p.76). Besides, it can be observed that all guests along with Bertha suffer from the similar delusion – while thinking of themselves as originals and intellectually superior they all comprise the same frame, speak the same languages and bend to the same conventions. Even Bertha soon submits to the influence and employs similar language and behaviour to that of her guests. Nevertheless, the frivolous conversations between the members of the dinner-party serve just as a parodying backdrop and a comic counterpart to the dramatic tension that accumulates within Bertha’s inner world. Also the restricted plot of the story that is narrowed 43

down to the description of banal domestic duties gives space to the workings of Bertha’s mind that is full of drama and richness, “waiting for something… divine to happen” (Bliss, p.50) while manipulating the temporal presentation and focusing of the strongest revealing moments whose strengthening and suspension contributes to the final climactic epiphany. According to the words of Nancy Gray, in “Bliss” the heroine as well as the reader are left “empty-handed at the point where we would expect to have gathered the story’s threads into whole cloth” (Gray, p.82). Story’s epiphany comes with the revelation of Harry’s infidelity, which contrastively does not contribute to the denouement of Bertha’s situation but brings a new crisis that alters every aspect of Bertha’s life. As Tom Holmes observes, at the moment of epiphany “[Bertha’s] world and the reader’s world have become decentralized. The reader now has to re-read, or reflect, and Bertha has to re-experience her whole story, or married life, again” (Holmes, p.8). However, through Bertha’s cry: “Oh, what is going to happen now?” (Bliss, p.58) Mansfield expresses not only heroine’s betrayal but also the possibility of awakening as along with Harry’s disloyalty the critical event also reveals the falseness of the whole concept of modern society ruled by pretention and hypocrisy. Bertha is therefore given a chance to reconsider her situation and acknowledge the absurdity of civilization that forces her to repress her true self and determines her identity by expectations of her husband’s world. Another discussion of succumbing as well as revolting against the rules of society is opened in Mansfield’s short story “Prelude” which offers a greater range of distinct characters while capturing their original ways of perceiving and reflecting that comprise the inner part of their characteristics. The following subchapter focuses on analysis of those aspects of the Burnell family members that contribute to the creation as well as presentation of distinctive Mansfieldian character types while comparing them to those discussed in the analysis of “Bliss”.

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5.2 Analysis of “Prelude” Katherine Mansfield’s primary intention while working on “Prelude” was to turn it into a novel Aloe that would trace down her childhood memories of New Zealand country life. The opening part, later named “Prelude”, was to serve as an introduction, but Mansfield’s inability to compose a longer piece resulted in cutting the original script into a shorter story that became a part of the collection Bliss and Other Stories, while the original unfinished version remained hidden from the public until Mansfield’s death and was published as Aloe by John Middleton Murry in 1930. In “Prelude” Katherine Mansfield opens a very private set of subjects as the story bears strong autobiographical features. The Burnell household comprises of very similar characters to those inhabiting Mansfield’s family circle in New Zealand, including Mansfield’s grandmother, parents, aunt Belle (Beryl), siblings and servants as well as young Kezia that represents Katherine Mansfield herself. To create a truthful portrayal of familiar background and to capture the varying perceptions of different members of the Burnell household, Mansfield employed a very specific technique known as parallax that presents a singular event through several different viewpoints while composing a kaleidoscopic image of unique versions of reality. The resulting portrayal of a 'slice of life' is in this case affranchised from any climactic experience and the lengthy fragments of the story are simply interwoven in a structure resembling the flow of a real-life experience. Similarly to “Bliss”, each fragment of the story begins in a swift in medias res opening where the scene seems to run for some time before the reader gets an actual glimpse of it. Therefore, the narrator does not usually involve in presenting the scene and the protagonists but takes them for granted while challenging the reader to collect relevant details and create a synthesis of the mosaic-like narrative.

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“Prelude” consists of distinctive fragments that are numbered and subsequently divided in a clock-like manner into twelve uneven episodes. The length of fragments differs and relates to the fact that the manner of perception of the time flow responds to the age and character of each protagonist. While lengthy reveries of Linda seem to take for hours, Stanley’s energetic nature reflects his activities in mere instances. Whereas reading the story as a whole, the reader may unify distinct fragments through repeated appearances of symbolic objects or activities. However, the primary function of the story does not lay in unifying but contrasting the individual attitudes of major as well as minor characters. As Don W. Kleine points out, “all these Burnells meet in cryptic bondage to each other, yet their respective solitudes are absurd, distressing, and more ultimate. Their lives together seem based on a vital misunderstanding” (Kleine, p.205). The glimpses of the lives of family members depicted in “Prelude” are affected and conditioned by numerous aspects including the inner conditioning of the age and gender but also the outer influence of society that dictates the roles and forms and deepens the abyss between the generations and social types of the members of Burnell family, their servants and friends. One of the most highly praised accomplishments of Katherine Mansfield is her ability to capture the world of children. By treating children individually and focusing on their unique way of perceiving as well as understanding and projecting of things and events Mansfield creates a counterpart to the uniform depiction of children in the previous era. As Delphine Soulhat points out in her essay 'Kezia in Wonderland', the depiction of children remains close to Edwardian writing and preoccupations by staging the marvellous adventures of children as an escapist strategy leading to carefree moments. Yet she qualifies such bright evocations of the mental landscape of childhood by considering this space as liminal, situated between bright naivety and darker prospects, and this gives her text a distinctly modernist tone (Soulhat, p.104).

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Therefore, Mansfield’s experimentation with Modernist engagement of inner life and psychology of characters is intermingled with her interest in the workings of children’s mind while functioning as a mirror of both - innocence which is the original feature of children’s world and corruption that indicates and magnifies the influence of society. It is the purity of perception and inevitability of its contamination that fascinate Mansfield, who pays her children and child-women much more attention and respect to anyone else. In “Prelude” the representative figure that introduces the beauties as well as hardships of childhood is Mansfield’s alter ego Kezia. Within the course of the story the reader is granted permission to enter her mind and thoughts and follow her footsteps while exploring Burnell houses and garden. In the meantime, the point of view of the little girl is carefully tailored to reflect a true-to-life experience of a child captured within the wilderness of New Zealand nature as well as harsh restricting world of adults. To create a realistic portrait of Kezia’s perception, Mansfield insists on low-angled perspective and corresponding diminution of the size of the focalizer and magnification of the proportions of surrounding scenery. According to Mieke Bal’s explanation, the perception “is a psychosomatic process, strongly dependent on the position of the perceiving body”, therefore “a small child sees things different ways from an adult, if only as far as measurements are concerned” (Bal, p.142). The reader is encouraged to face the grandness of the giant menservants, “immense plates of bread and dipping” (Bliss, p.3) or the height of “Japanese sunflowers gr[owing] in a tiny jungle” (Bliss, p.15). Moreover, Kezia’s vision is to a great extent determined by her selection of details that are to be explored and emotionally processed. Lengthy passages of descriptions are thus presented not only to create a certain background to the story but they serve as a place of interaction and emotional projection of the child’s inner world:

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On one side [the paths] all led into a tangle of tall dark trees and strange bushes with flat velvet leaves and feathery cream flowers that buzzed with flies when you shook them—this was the frightening side, and no garden at all. The little paths here were wet and clayey with tree roots spanned across them like the marks of big fowls’ feet (Bliss, p.15).

To emphasise the imaginative power of Kezia’s perception the narrator contrasts the internal focalization of children to the external commentary. While Kezia’s glance out of the window is that of kaleidoscopic nature through the coloured glass: “Kezia bent down to have one more look at a blue lawn with blue arum lilies… and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence” (Bliss, p.4), narrator’s depictions function as a more plain and pragmatic bridging between the fractions of the story. An important aspect characterising children’s perception is thus coined in “sensorial filters” that according to Delphine Soulhat have the power to “magnify colours and sounds, which render the children’s experience of hyper-sensitivity” (Soulhat, p.101). The state of heightened vividness that has already been explored in Bertha’s story, is in the case of Kezia similarly sparkled by the notions of rich and colourful imagination that equals the world of fantasy to that of reality: “Through a square hall filled with bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were only on the wall-paper) down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp” (Bliss, p.6). It is just one of the numerous instances where Mansfieldian characters engage the fairy tale manner of applying zoomorphic and anthropomorphic features to every-day objects. Kezia keeps seeing her surrounding in a lively way, perceiving the lamp as “the bright breathing thing” (Bliss, p.6) and the starry sky as “hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes” (Bliss, p.9) while employing typical child language, described by Monika Fludernik as a “portrayal of a figural point of view since it has connotations of lack of knowledge of the world, naivety, innocence and the like” (Fludernik, p.71). 48

Along with the creation of her fantasy world, Kezia is also the one that sets its rules. However, a critical situation emerges when children’s world collides with that of adults or when the reality of life proves to be irreversible. The best example of such critical notion is offered in the episode with the killing of the duck. After chopping off the duck’s head narrator observes that nearly all children “were frightened no longer” (Bliss, p.23) as their wonder and surprise prevailed and they no more associate the duck with the living and moving animal but perceive it as a new object. Kezia, on the other hand, senses the pervasion of the unfamiliar notion of death and shrieks in despair: “Put head back!” (Bliss, p.23) as if it was possible to reverse the event but impossible to end up in a non-existence. Such reaction suggests Kezia’s gradual maturation, as according to Delphine Soulhat she “feels fate as ominous, and this is nothing but an intuition of death” (Soulhat, p.107). Narrator’s commentary that “the white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed it in front of Stanley Burnell that night” (Bliss, p.25) closes the episode and shatters Kezia’s illusion of purity and permanency of childhood and life. The infiltration of the world of adults into that of children is mainly visible in the scenes of children’s games and role-playing. These scenes are generally composed as imitations of the conversations that children overheard among adults: “How is your husband?”… “Oh, he is very well, thank you. At least he had an awful cold but Queen Victoria—she’s my godmother, you know—sent him a case of pineapples and that cured it im— mediately. Is that your new servant?” (Bliss, p.19).

Despite the humorous, nearly grotesque character of children’s tea-party, the game offers a significant reflection of the nature of the contemporary society. As Harriett Feenstra puts it, children’s game projects their subconscious awareness “that various social roles entail particular speech patterns and behavioural codes” (Feenstra, p.64). Moreover, the linguistic imitation of social barriers also bears the role of criticism of the values and conventions of 49

society. The game serves as a premonition for little Burnell girls who will soon became society’s members and inherit the duties and restrictions that accompany particular roles. According to the rules in the Mansfieldian world, it is a moment of crisis that brings the changes and revelation within characters’ conscious mind. In “Prelude” the principal crisis does not have climactic features as that in “Bliss” but arrives at the very beginning of the story when the Burnell household experiences the uprooting of the family circle and moving into a new house in the countryside. Each character perceives this situation differently while the individual responses to the situation are recorded in distinctive accounts interwoven into the structure of the narrative. Burnell children are challenged to explore the new surrounding as “everything familiar was left behind” and “everything looked different” (Bliss, p.5). They are displaced and destabilized and to regain the balance they have to adapt to the new place and its roles. However, the situation of the Burnells is eased by the presence of Kezia’s grandmother who functions as an intercepting figure for all members of the household. According to Todd Martin “Mrs. Fairfield represents the Victorian woman and the perceived cultural stability which that presumes” (Martin, p.80). She is the practical and patient mind of the family who holds the whole circle together: “It was hard to believe that she had not been in that kitchen for years; she was so much part of it” (Bliss, p.13) More than direct insights into the character’s mind, the reader is offered her various portrayals constructed by her daughters and granddaughters whose personalities usually stand in a sharp contrast to that of Mrs Fairfield. Despite being fairly established in their social roles, sisters Beryl and Linda bear only very little of the feminine features of a nurturer or caretaker. Thus instead of following the example of their mother, both women prefer to engage in day-dreaming and abstract thoughts while embracing the roles of the “two opposing versions of late Victorian womanhood - one constrained by marriage and the other desiring it” (Martin, p.80). Regardless of the constant interactions between the two sisters and their preoccupation with seeing and being seen, they 50

do not understand each other’s perspectives and remain alienated – Linda being “mysterious as ever” (Bliss, p.29) and Beryl engaged in an egocentric observation. While occupying the role of a romantic husband-seeker, Beryl believes that her withdrawal from the urban area drastically reduces her chances for finding a respectable man and happiness in life. Living alongside her married sister, Beryl is inclined to constant questioning of her own position and prospects. According to Miroslawa Kubasiewicz, Beryl “constantly plays a role which social expectations have imposed on her, of an attractive young girl waiting for a prince who will protect her, provide her with status, and 'save' her” (Kubasiewicz, p.56). Beryl engages in a continuous self-observation and rehearsal of her social skills while projecting her adolescent view of love into private performances in front of her imaginary potential lovers: “If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself I really would be rather struck”… How beautiful she looked, but there was nobody to see, nobody” (Bliss, p.19). Beryl’s fantasy world is therefore very different from that of Linda or Kezia as it does not respond to the mystique of the substantives but centres around Beryl’s varying portrayals of self. Moreover, to prove her fitness for the role of a wife, Beryl repeatedly adopts the tasks that Linda resists to perform for Stanley – that of a companion and flatterer while claiming to enjoy the same food and sports to suit Stanley’s will. Nevertheless, in the episode of writing a letter to Nan Pym is Beryl allowed to evaluate her behaviour, dive deeper into her personality and criticize her false self, while projecting her fear of alienation from society into the process of alienation between her private and public self. She claims that “it was her other self who had written that letter” (Bliss, p.29) and within the process of estrangement she gets as far as to address the despised part of her personality as 'you': “It’s marvellous how you keep it up,” said she to her false self” (Bliss, p.30). Similarly to Bertha, Beryl’s moment of revelation is characterized by the employment of specific linguistic attributes that range from hinting to 51

exaggeration and subsequent reformulation of accusations of the 'false self' by the 'true self' that is actually never revealed and functions just as a contrast to Beryl’s hypocrisy and pretention. Equally to Bertha, once Beryl gets to the core of the problem and wonders whether there ever was “a time [she] did not have a false self”, the stream of thoughts is cut off by a sudden distraction – Kezia opens the door. Beryl’s inner self which is not presentable within society is instantly buried under the public façade once she hears there is a man coming for the lunch along with Stanley. Beryl’s personality yields to the mirror reflection that confirms her attractiveness as the principal and most valued feminine feature within society and the preceding episode of revelation is forgotten along with Beryl’s aspiration for a change. The vivacity of consciousness and passivity of action are accordingly captured in the figure of Beryl’s sister Linda whom the reader gets to know at the very beginning of the story along with Burnell children and Mrs Fairfield. The initial encounter is marked by a bitter feeling as Linda is portrayed as an indifferent and uncaring mother who characterizes the unanimated objects as “absolute necessities that [she] will not let out of [her] sight for one instant” while abandoning her own children with “a strange little laugh” (Bliss, p.2). Linda’s lethargy and lack of maternal love are openly revealed before the reader and his judgemental eyes as during the course of the story she remains in the state of melancholy, interacting with others as if “from a deep well” (Bliss, p.10). However, along with the criticism the story also uncovers a sympathetic attitude to Linda’s situation. Aihong in her essay on 'Women characters in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories' articulates Mansfield’s idea of questioning the rooted belief of society that “women are born with a maternal instinct” (Aihong, p.105) and therefore childbearing and domestic duties are their prime interest in life and the only sphere where women can triumph. Therefore to satisfy the expectations of the society they have to succumb to these roles - either blissfully or mournfully. Linda is among those who mourn, therefore her roles of a wife and mother are 52

reduced to the physical performance reflected in notions of growing and swelling, while her mind remains detached and uninvolved. Moreover, she engages in a childish behaviour which is in a contrast to that of Berta as it comes consciously, functioning as a shield towards the duties of her present life. As Aihong points out, in childhood there are “no responsibilities to shoulder, no sexual role to play” and “troubles in life are taken care of by the adults” (Aihong, p.106). Therefore, instead of being a mother to her own children Linda remains a child herself while requiring the support of Mrs Fairfield: “There was something comforting in the sight of her that Linda felt she could never do without” (Bliss, p.14). Moreover, along with the regression to a child-woman and unburdening of adult obligations comes also the release from the real world to that of reverie and imagination. Linda’s passivity is very much connected to the fact that instead of performing activities in the outer world Linda stimulates the vivid movements of her mind. Therefore, an outer description offers an image of Linda as being constantly tired and day-dreaming, enclosed by the dim world of solitude, lying “in a rockingchair, her arms above her head, rocking to and fro” (Bliss, p.26). On the other hand, accordingly to Kezia’s child perception, Linda’s mind is dynamic and obsessed with details that become magnified and animated under her inquisitive gaze: In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals… and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large substantial things like furniture, but curtains and the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions (Bliss, p.12).

The lengthy descriptions of Linda’s imaginary world support the claim of her being detached from everyone and everything that constitutes the unsatisfactory reality of her life. However, despite engaging in hallucinatory reveries, Linda’s mind stays attentive to perceiving her position and identity within her family’s world. This alertness is visible in the scene of Linda’s encounter with the aloe tree. Through different perceptions of the tree Linda expresses 53

her varying desires of dealing with her present condition. By imagining the aloe as “a ship with the oars lifted” (Bliss, p.27) Linda metaphorically communicates her desire to catch the oars that “rowed far away over the top of the garden trees, the paddocks and the dark bush beyond” and flee from the traditional way of life. Aloe’s thorns, on the other hand, function as weapon that Linda uses to fight against the conventional notion of being protected and subdued by her husband. Similarly to Harry in “Bliss”, Linda’s husband Stanley is a contrastive figure revelling in the energetic lifestyle of a successful businessman and breadwinner. His pragmatic mind focused on winning and gaining stands in a sharp contrast to that of Linda who resents Stanley’s influence and criticizes the fact that by the withdrawal of the family in the countryside he created an isolated kingdom for himself. Therefore, by admiring Aloe’s thorns Linda expresses her wish to be strong and independent woman: “at the sight of them her heart grew hard… Nobody would dare to come near the ship or to follow after… Not even my Newfoundland dog” (Bliss, p. 27) Instead of dwelling under the protection of her dog-like affectionate husband Linda articulates her wishes to find protection from him and his marital demands. Nevertheless, Linda’s dreamy theories of gaining freedom do not form any actual response in her outer life that remains steady and unchanged. Linda seems to accept her fate similarly to the rest of Mansfieldian heroines: “I shall go on having children and Stanley will go on making money and the children and the gardens will grow bigger and bigger, with whole fleets of aloes in them for me to choose from” (Bliss, p.28). Her fear of the unknown, expressed in the concept of dark demanding “THEY” who “were members of a secret society” (Bliss, p.12) weakens Linda’s determination to change her circumstances. As Richard Brock observes in his discussion of Mansfield’s New Zealand Stories, Linda’s lack of resistance serves as an echo of Mansfield’s recognition of different ways in which the women of early 20th century society restricted themselves. Instead of “actively attempting to scale the walls” of the “selfimposed domestic prison” Linda lingers in the passive idle, waiting to be “let out” (Brock, p.63). 54

However, in spite of emphasizing the inalterability of women’s condition in society, Mansfield offers subtle consolations and suggestions of the changes that the future may bring for the younger generation. Kezia’s spirited and adventurous character that cherishes the beauties of nature rather than the social order implies her role of a negotiator between the social and natural. As there is no climactic event at the closure of the story the narrative is open-ended and continues to a flow in a real-life manner, abandoning the Burnell house at the moment of Kezia’s dropping of the cream jar belonging to Beryl. The reader is therefore proposed to witness both, Kezia’s wanderings in the wilderness as well as her attraction to the objects representing feminine life and role-playing. This disunity brings up the core question of Kezia’s future that overreaches the ending of the story: whether she will subdue to the demands of society and follow Beryl and Linda’s example of scarifying freedom in exchange for a comfortable life or she attempts to enforce her own unique voice to question the righteousness of the patriarch rule. Also in the rest of the short stories within the collection Bliss and Other Stories Mansfield continues her endeavour to win reader’s recognition of the problematic nature of contemporary conventions through hints and suggestions anchored in the narrative presentation of individual characters. The last subchapter of the thesis will focus on analysis of the short story “Je ne parle pas français” where Mansfield employs the third type of narrative method by portraying her main character through the first-person narration that enables her to get a direct access to his thoughts entangled in a complicated game of role-switching identity.

5.3 Analysis of “Je ne parle pas français” The narrative method of the short story “Je ne parle pas français” is quite rare within Mansfield’s later works as the only collection that comprises of several stories written in the first-person narration is In a German Pension, composed at the beginning of Mansfield’s 55

writing career. However, in case of Raoul Duquette, the main protagonist of “Je ne parle pas français” the first-person narrative seems inevitable as it offers a direct portrayal of character’s mind and fully reveals some of his core features. Being a writer with an inclination to dramatization and theatre-like performance, Raoul seizes the opportunity to present himself within the span of the short story. As Sarah Henstra observes in her essay 'Looking the Part: Performative Narration in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield’s “Je ne parle pas français” ' Raoul’s first-person command “makes him the show’s director as well as its star, so that the theatricality of the story appears to be more directly a product of his personal outlook” (Henstra, p.132). As a commentator of his life’s show Raoul revels in exaggerated speech and exclamations: “Good God! Am I capable of feeling as strongly as that?” (Bliss, p.33) while delivering his account to an unidentified 'you' as in: “That’s rather nice, don’t you think…” (Bliss, p.33) that might either denote Raoul’s addressing the reader or his schizophrenic notion of interacting with his other self: “All the while I wrote that last page my other self has been chasing up and down out in the dark there” (Bliss, p.34). The ambiguity of the narrative is even increased by Raoul’s presentation of a wide range of different narrators that correspond with distinct identities he employs during the course of the story. According to Sarah Henstra Raoul’s monologue “establishes normative position of foreigner, lover, artist, homosexual, abandonee, and wife” (Henstra, p.139) while revealing these in a complex game of switching roles and occupations. Raoul’s first major identity is that of an aspiring writer and student of English literature. As a male and Parisian, Raoul is offered much more freedom and ambition to any of Mansfieldian women. Nevertheless, even though he chooses to lead a liberal life of an artist he soon encounters the reality and becomes bound by various demands and expectations imposed by the society that pushes artists to struggle for originality and innovatory way of expression. Therefore Raoul endeavours to win the reader and his admiration by constructing a very detailed observation, dramatization and metaphoric 56

language with tendency to adopt radical standpoints: “I don’t believe in human soul… I believe that people are like portmanteaux – packed with certain things, started going, thrown about…” (Bliss, p.31). However, Raoul’s confession produces an adverse effect as each of his revelations is accompanied by self-appreciative and congratulatory affirmations whose impression is highly satiric and according to Sarah Henstra creates an “elusive narrative gap between what a character says and what the text intends us to hear” (Henstra, p.125). The constant comments on the character and quality of presented exposures emphasize Raoul’s self-centredness, narcissism and obsessive self-observation that similarly to Beryl results from his inner feelings of doubt and insecurity. To mask the truth and win the recognition of surrounding society Raoul silences his authentic self and follows the one formed by the influence of fashionable stories presented through cinema and literature: “According to the books I should have felt immensely relieved and delighted” (Bliss, p.38). Correspondingly, through emotional alienation from the rest of the world Raoul intends to restrain his interaction with other people to a means of feeding his hunger for sensations rather than forming sincere relationships. This radical notion is visible in Raoul’s treatment of Dick, a fellow writer from London, and his acquaintance Mouse, both of whom remain a matter of interest for the main protagonist only until the possible curiosity of their story. Once it is shattered, Raoul returns to his former life while keeping only the remembrance of those moments that add to the artistic value of their story. Raoul’s struggle for recognition as a writer is according to Miroslawa Kubasiewicz connected to the fact that he cannot gain acceptance by presenting any of his other roles (Kubasiewicz, p.57). Through hints and suggestions Raoul reveals that his other major occupation is that of a pander and a male prostitute who delights in the favours and presents that accompany this job. Raoul gradually acknowledges his feminine self, exposes his girlish features and portrays himself as a charming woman: “I am little and light with an olive skin, 57

black eyes with long lashes… Plump, almost like a girl, with smooth shoulders, and I wear a thin gold bracelet above my left elbow” (Bliss, p.36). Raoul’s description according to Sarah Henstra “sets the tone for an unconventional embodiment of gender norms” (Henstra, p. 132). Therefore, along with the problematic nature of transgression between the stages of maturation that Mansfield reflected in her female characters of Bertha, Beryl and Linda, she also focuses on deviations within the gender roles. When Raoul’s feminine self takes the lead he succumbs to narcissist observation and sensitivity: “I felt hurt. I felt as a woman must feel…” (Bliss, p.38) while submitting to victimization and manipulation coming from the outer sphere of society. Raoul’s impersonation of an object of desire for others is therefore in a sharp contrast to his manipulative self of a writer that organizes story’s content and offers only subtle glimpses through which the reader gets the chance to learn about the origins of Raoul’s fragmented identity. One of the principal hints that elucidates the notions of Raoul’s character is his unwillingness to talk about his upbringing: “About my family—it really doesn’t matter. I have no family; I don’t want any. I never think about my childhood. I’ve forgotten it” (Bliss, p.34). Raoul’s negative attitude towards childhood resonates with Mansfield’s belief of its vital importance in individual’s life. Raoul’s rootlessness and alienation generates hidden longing for affection and social closeness that is reflected in the instances of Raoul’s speaking through a degraded dog-like narrator: But after all it was you who whistled to me, you who asked me to come! What a spectacle I’ve cut wagging my tail and leaping round you, only to be left like this while the boat sails off in its slow, dreamy way (Bliss, p.38).

However, each disappointment within his relationships switches Raoul’s character back to his domineering self that scrutinizes rather than feels and connects. Therefore, even the great moment of epiphany that Raoul experiences after noticing words “Je ne parle pas français” 58

(Bliss, p. 33) while sitting in his regular café cannot be perceived as ingenuous. Despite being comprised of emotions and exaggerated language similar to that of Bertha, Raoul’s revelation does not bring any actual change within his self-perception as it is based on a singular feeling whose value is substantially reduced by Raoul’s self-conscious commentary: “After all I must be first-rate. No second-rate mind could have experienced such an intensity of feeling” (Bliss, p.33). Raoul’s dramatization of the experience contributes to its portrayal as a theatrical rehearsal and ironizes his attempt to deceive the reader. As Miroslawa Kubasiewicz observes, the only conclusion that Raoul meets through his attentive role-playing is that by “refusing to recognize and accept the spontaneous voice of this other self, he relinquishes the opportunity to discover who he really is” (Kubasiewicz, p.58). However, in spite of his careful tailoring of different masks there are certain instances of Raoul’s own mockery of his pretention: “I confess that something did whisper as, smiling, I put up the notebook: “You—literary? you look as though you’ve taken down a bet on a racecourse!” Still, Raoul makes sure to close the commentary with dismissive standpoint: “But I didn’t listen” (Bliss, p.39) which baffles the possibility of a positive outcome of the moment of self-recognition. Raoul Duquette’s Paris that according to Sarah Henstra represents a cultural landscape of “exile, a setting of alienation, inhospitality, and disempowerment” (Henstra, p.136) is therefore determined to generate Raoul as “a Parisian, a true Parisian” (Bliss, p.34), meaning “gigolo, literary dilettante, homosexual, liar” (Henstra, p.126). Despite being a male and a part of the patriarch elite within the contemporary society, Raoul’s situation proves to be equal to that of Mansfieldian women. His infatuation with role-playing charade and inability to contradict the conventions contribute to the irreversibleness of his situation that will most probably continue without change throughout his future years.

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Conclusion The first part of the thesis dealt with the depiction of influences on Katherine Mansfield’s life and art while tracing their reflections in her writings. As a very conscientious and attentive observer of the world, Katherine Mansfield established her commitment towards the literary circles through a detailed portrayal and critique of the contemporary society of the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century. By focusing on her own experience of the conventionbound surrounding she favoured the familiar subjects described within their family circles as well as broader frame of society. However, for the portrayal and analysis of the aspects of familiarity of every-day life Mansfield decided to employ many of the innovatory ideas and techniques associated with Modernism and Literary Impressionism. The most thoughtprovoking concepts that influenced the writings of contemporary authors were associated with the mental switch from capturing the objective reality to the portrayal of the subjective perception and impression embedded in the minds of literary characters. In addition to the subjectivization and introspection, Katherine Mansfield also adopted the inventive notions of individualization through distinctive dramaturgy of voice, revelation of complexity of one’s identity, evocative language and fragmentary treatment of narration based on movements of mind rather than an actual plot, while adapting and encompassing these notions in the innovatory short story form. All these methods and techniques enabled Mansfield to construct true-to-life individuals whose daily experience of real world contrasts with the uniqueness of their inner worlds. Therefore, the readers of Mansfieldian stories are introduced to both, familiarity as well as novelty while witnessing the struggle between the characters’ conformity to the traditions of the middle-class life and their desire of authenticity and freedom lost in exchange for wealth and status. As a woman writer Mansfield focused her literary voice on exposing the characteristics of feminine space where the triviality of the surface contrasts with the other level 60

of meaning that condemns conventions that victimize women and force them to subdue to the patriarch rule and its roles instead of developing their unique identities. Moreover, to win the involvement of the reader and open a discussion of suggested issues, Mansfield became a supporter of 'creative' literature and employed detail and imagination to trigger the self-identification with literary characters while offering enough space within the narrative comprised of ellipses, hints and suggestions that stimulate the active participation of the reader who is challenged to analyse and interpret the situations of the protagonists dealing with existential struggle for freedom and identity. Katherine Mansfield’s technique and approach to the construction of individuals was in the second part of the thesis illustrated on exemplary stories taken from the collection Bliss and Other Stories. The selected short stories “Bliss”, “Prelude” and “Je ne parle pas française” seem to be of the greatest relevance to the topic of the thesis, as they represent three narrative methods employed by Mansfield – first-person narration, third-person narration and parallax, while offering the clearest presentation of Mansfield’s intentions and depicting the portrayal of basic Mansfieldian characters types through figures of child-women Bertha, Beryl and Linda, little Kezia and feminine Raoul as the instances of the main deviations from the official norm set by the society. Characters’ individual responses to the singular 'moments of being' are anchored in their distinctive approach to imaginative perception as well as ability to verbalize the truth. Even though the individuality of each character differs, all of the principal Mansfieldian figures share the alert consciousness that reflects their victimized situation initiated by the requirements of expected pattern of behaviour issued by society. Conventional behaviour therefore represents the surface presentation of the characters who are required to perform or aspire to perform roles of wives, mothers, or other formal members of the public. Contrastively, the inner world of characters focuses on searching for a method of independent thinking and

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recognition of authenticity that in the course of the short story comes to revelation during the brief instances of crisis affecting protagonists’ regular pace of life. Nevertheless, the outcome of Mansfield’s stories bears primarily a negative message as the revelations of the main characters usually do not evoke a solution but its denial. The reader is inclined to believe that the well-crafted masks of the protagonists representing distinct roles staged within society will remain part of their identity as the glimpse of their true self revealed in the moment of epiphany proves to be unsuitable for public consumption. However, Mansfield’s awakening of her characters along with her insistence on reader’s involvement in their construction supports the reader’s recognition of the problematic nature of contemporary conventions and initiates their debate.

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Bibliography Primary Source Mansfield, Katherine. Bliss and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922. Print

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D'Arcy, Chantal Cornut-Gentille. "Katherine Mansfield's “Bliss”: “The Rare Fiddle” As Emblem Of The Political And Sexual Alienation Of Woman." Papers On Language & Literature 35.3 (1999): 244269. Art Source. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Feenstra, Harriett. "Circling the Self: the short story innovations of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf." Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies2 (2009): 2009-2010. Web. 12 Feb 2015. Fludernik, Monika. An introduction to narratology. 1st pub. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Ford, Ford Madox. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford. University of Nebraska Press, 1964. Web. 12 Feb 2015. Furlong, Sinéad Helena. "Vision and Voice in Mansfield’s “At the Bay” and Woolf’s The Waves. Trinity College, Dublin. 89-103. Web. 12 Feb 2015. Friis, Anne. "Katherine Mansfield: Life and Stories.” Einar. Copenhagen, 1946. Web. 12 Mar. 2015. Greenwood, Lillian Bethel. The Technique of Katherine Mansfield. MA thesis. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1965. cIRcle UBC Library. Web. 1 March 2015. Gray, Nancy. "Un-Defining the Self in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield." Katherine Mansfield And Literary Modernism. London: Continuum, 2011. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 Mar 2015. Gunsteren, Julia van. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism. Rodopi, 1990. Print Henstra, Sarah. "Looking the Part: Performative Narration in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield's "Je Ne Parle Pas Français"." Twentieth Century Literature (2000): 125-149. Web. 1 March 2015. Holmes, Tom. "Katherine Mansfield as Literary Fauvist." Academia.edu. Web. 1 March 2015. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London and New York: Routlege, 1981. Web. 13 April 2015.

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Kimber, Gerri. A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story. Vol. 12. Kakapo Press, 2008. Kleine, Don W. "An Eden for Insiders: Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand."College English (1965): 201-209. Web. 12 February 2015. Web. 12 Mar 2015. Kokot, Joanna. "The Elusiveness of Reality: The Limits of Cognition in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories." Katherine Mansfield And Literary Modernism. London: Continuum, 2011. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 Mar 2015. Kubasiewicz, Miroslawa. "Authentic Existence and the Characters of Katherine Mansfield." Katherine Mansfield And Literary Modernism. London: Continuum, 2011. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 Mar 2015. Kuivalainen, Päivi. "Emotions in Narrative: A Linguistic Study of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction." The Electronic Journal of the Department of English at the University of Helsinki, 5 (2009). Helsinky English Studies: Electronic Journal. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. Littell, Robert. "Katherine Mansfield'." The New Republic, 1922. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. Manfred, Jahn. "Focalization." The Cambridge companion to narrative (2005): 94-108. Web. 12 Mar 2015. Mansfield, Katherine. The letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield: A selection. Penguin books, 1977. Print. Mansfield, Katherine, and John Middleton Murry. Journal of Katherine Mansfield. London: Constable, 1927. Print. Martin, W. Todd. "'Why Haven't I Got A Real 'Home'?': Katherine Mansfield's Divided Self." JNZL: Journal Of New Zealand Literature (2013): 66. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Maurois, Andre. Poets and prophets. Cassell, limited, 1936. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

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Mitchell, Lawrence J. "Introduction." Katherine Mansfield And Literary Modernism. London: Continuum, 2011. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 Mar 2015. New, W. H. Reading Mansfield And Metaphors Of Form. Montreal: MQUP, 1999. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 Mar. 2015. Patea, Viorica. "The Short Story: An Overview of the History and Evolution of the Genre." DQR Studies in Literature 49 (2012). Web. 12 Mar. 2015. Sadeq, Ala Eddin. "A Study of the Conscious and Unconscious Perception of the Status of Happiness in Katherine Mansfield's Short Story Bliss." Studies in Literature and Language 4.3 (2012): 15-22. Web. 12 Mar. 2015. Seal, Bobby. "Gender, Truth and Reality: The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield. “Psychogeographic Review. 18 Feb. 2013. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. Smith, Angela. "Katherine Mansfield And Rhythm." JNZL: Journal Of New Zealand Literature 21 (2003): 102. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Soulhat, Delphine. "Kezia in Wonderland." Katherine Mansfield And Literary Modernism. London: Continuum, 2011. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 Mar 2015. Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: a secret life. 1st American ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Print. Wagenknecht, Edward. "Katherine Mansfield." The English Journal 17.4 (1928): 272-284. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. Whitridge, Arnold. "Katherine Mansfield." The Sewanee Review 1940: 256. JSTOR Journals. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction." Collected essays. Vol. 1. Hogarth P., 1967. Web. 1 Mar. 2015.

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Resumé (English)

The literary work of Katherine Mansfield is mainly characteristic for the uniqueness of its writing style and innovatory approach to the exposition of the inner life of characters. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the main formative influences on Mansfield’s literary voice, provide a characterization of the Mansfieldian literary persona and examine how the author deals with the construction as well as reflection of character’s inner world. The first part of the thesis offers a theoretical background that deals with the possible inspirations of Mansfield’s themes and technique. It traces the main notions that enabled Mansfield to construct individualized literary characters with specific narrative presentation, manner of perception and level of awareness of inauthentic behaviour within contemporary society. The second part focuses of a close analysis of Mansfield’s literary style within the selected short stories from Bliss and Other Stories collection and considers the effects of different perspectives employed by the characters while commenting on their relationship to the core questions of role-playing, convention and self-recognition.

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Resumé (Czech)

Charakteristickými rysy literárního díla Katherine Mansfieldové jsou hlavně jedinečnost stylu a novátorský přístup k vykreslení vnitřního života postav. Cílem této práce je přezkoumání klíčových vlivů, které se podepsaly na povaze její literární řeči, představení charakteristických stránek jednotlivců a objasnění procesu, kterým autorka postupuje při utváření a vykreslení jejich vnitřního světa. První část práce poskytuje teoretické zázemí, které zkoumá možné inspirační zdroje ovlivňující náměty a techniku Katherine Mansfieldové. Taktéž zaznamenává hlavní metody, které autorce umožnily vytvořit individualizované literární postavy se specifickým narativním projevem, způsobem vnímaní a úrovní povědomí o neautentičnosti jejich vystupování uplatňovaného v souladu s konvencemi dobové společnosti. Druhá část práce se zaměřuje na podrobnou analýzu autorčina literárního stylu reflektovaného ve vybraných povídkách ze sbírky Blaho a jiné povídky. Prostřednictvím rozboru jsou zohledněné víceré roviny prezentace postav, které úzce souvisí s problematikou konvencí a sebeuvědomění.

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