Katherine Mansfield: In From the Margin

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Tracy Ware

The odd thing about Mansfield's reputation is that so much depends upon a small number of well-known stories. Two contributors show the possibilities in the less familiar territory. In "Reading 'The Escape,'" W. H. New demonstrates that this frequently overlooked story "reveals a great deal about how Mansfield used narrative form." More specifically, he argues that this story "not only delineates . . . some familiar paradigms of power but also provides within its textual method some ways of commenting on the narrative and questioning the authority of the paradigms it uses." In "Katherine Mansfield," Alex Calder blends personal appreciation with a psychoanalytical criticism derived from Peter Brooks and Julia Kristeva to produce a lively reading of "A Married Man's Story."

Three other contributors bring new insights to established topics. In "Katherine Mansfield Reading Other Women: The Personality of the Text," Ruth Parkin-Gounelas finds in Mansfield "an inscription not of the female but of its corruptibility, and of the exploitation of feminine discourse as defensive option." In "Katherine Mansfield and the Cult of Childhood," Cherry Harkin argues that, by moving from Edwardian sentimentality to "tough-minded" Modernism, Mansfield "transformed utterly the representation of children in adult English fiction." In "The Middle of the Note: Katherine Mansfield's 'Glimpses,'" Sarah Sandley considers Mansfield's various remarks on her artistic ideals, concluding that the union of free indirect discourse with the epiphany makes Mansfield an "innovative and varied" Modernist. Both Harkin and Sandley use "Modernist" as a privileged term, even though both recognize Mansfield's debts to a range of nineteenth-century writers, from Wordsworth to Pater. One way out of that contradiction is provided by Sydney Janet Kaplan's Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, which was published three years after the centenary conferences. For Kaplan, Mansfield's "emergence into 'modernism' was not derivative of other twentieth-century writers, but a function of her own synthesis and imaginative reworking of late nineteenth-century techniques and themes." Another advantage of Kaplan's approach is that it concentrates on the fiction, not the life. Because Katherine Mansfield: In From the Margin is too concerned with the latter, it is a frustrating but valuable book.

TRACY WAKE Queen's University