Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994 by Tracy Ware

Given the current interest in Katherine Mansfield, this collection will be welcomed by many. Rhoda B. Nathan provocatively combines items of historical interest with others using contemporary theoretical approaches. So the collection includes both Frank O'Connor's sexist attack on and feminist appreciations of Mansfield. For the most part, the essays are so lively and wide-ranging that we hardly notice that the book is uneven.

There are three sections, each with a preface by the editor: "The New Zealand Experience," "The Craft of the Story," and "The Artist in Context." The last two sections could have been easily improved. Nathan has three essays on "Bliss," and no one would quarrel with her decision to republish the essays by Judith S. Neaman and Pamela Dunbar. The problem comes with Gardner McFall's essay: although it is one of three essays commissioned especially for this volume," it does not take the essays by Neaman and Dunbar into account, and so the opportunity to examine a critical controversy is missed. It might have been better to include an excerpt from Julia van Gunsteren's Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (1990), which puts the symbolic approach to this and other stories in question. Gillian Boddy's essay, also new, is also disappointing. Boddy discusses J. Middleton Murry's editing and the relation between "The Aloe" and "Prelude," unaware that these topics have been covered earlier in the collection. A little more editorial labor would have gone far. By the time Nathan writes her preface to the last section, she seems to be out of energy. Not only does she repeat points about Mansfield's brief life that she has made earlier, but she refers to George Moore,s sonnet cycle . . . Married Love," when she means George Meredith,s Modern Love.

The collection is redeemed by the five outstanding essays in the first section, "The New Zealand Experience." In Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories," C. A. Hankin offers fine readings of "Prelude" and At the Bay," with a precise account of the revisions to the former. In Katherine Mansfield: The Wellington Years, A Reassessment," Ian A. Gordon shows that Mansfield was less bitter toward New Zealand than Murry's editing led us to believe. Three other critics use postcolonial theory, especially that of Homi K. Bhabha, to reassess Mansfield from a New Zealand perspective. In "How Kathleen Beauchamp was Kidnapped," Lydia Wevers studies three of Mansfield's "colonial stories" in terms of other colonial short fiction. In "The Ghost of Katherine Mansfield," Linda Hardy traces Mansfield's influence on later New Zealand writers. In Reading with the Taint of the Pioneer: Katherine Mansfield and Settler Criticism," Bridget Orr finds Mansfield's identity "multiply determined and divided by race as well as gender, class and sexual preference." Her conclusion is worth quoting in full:

it seems interesting that New Zealand,s first author, in contrast to the great narrators of other emergent states, problematises rather than consolidates identity in fictions of peculiar polyvalency. Insofar as the Treaty of Waitangi [the 1840 agreement between the Maoris and the British] is also conspicuously a hybrid text, we might do worse than practice our reading skills on Katherine Mansfield.

As all of the critics in this section demonstrate, there are other problems for Mansfield's critics than the meaning of the pear tree in "Bliss."