Mansfield's Short Stories

Last week’s class was highly educational. Having had almost no background in Virginia Woolf, I valued not only being exposed to her work but also having it synthesized in context. Virginia Woolf surprised me in many ways – the greatest being her successful (though ultimately pyrrhic) battle with poor mental health. Indeed, I find the Leonard and Virginia Woolf relationship to be completely fascinating, and I wonder if anyone has adapted it to stage, screen, or novel. Such incredible faith and devotion is… striking.

Love is a collection of mutual needs.

I am both surprised and unsurprised that two such people of such great needs found each other – one who needed to maintain a delicate order, and the other who needed to order everything.

I am haunted.

In her work, though, I found the wordplay to be extremely entertaining – perhaps even to be expected. As stated, Woolf spent the early part of her day translating Greek. Is it not reasonable to think that one who spends that much time teasing out the meanings of foreign words would naturally enjoy playing with her own words – perhaps as a means of transmuting private eyes to public pearls?

On the subject of Katherine Mansfield, it was interesting to examine the background presented in Lee’s depiction of her and Woolf’s relationship, and it lends clues to her major themes. In particular, the “wild” life she led compared to Woolf’s also seems to inform the contrasts between their works.

If Woolf’s short fiction portrayed a sort of exploratory rumination of domesticity, then Mansfield’s short fiction feels more like a vehement reaction to domesticity – understandable considering her turbulent life, her early death, and the fact that she was married to John Middleton Murry – womanizer extraordinaire – as opposed to Woolf and the supportive, nurturing relationship that she shared with Leonard Woolf. Where the “home” provided order and succor to Woolf, Mansfield probably did not have such reassurances.

Take, for example, the home life depicted in “Prelude.” It seems almost hostile. The animals in the environs of the house will not leave one in peace. The husband’s friends create a stodgy, stifling atmosphere, and even the procurement of a meal is a horror. Witness the episode of something so commonplace as killing a duck for dinner. This would have been normal during the era before the supermarket, and any estate house would have been fed with freshly-killed animals onsite. This duck, however, does not go peacefully; it sprays blood everywhere, waddling around until the life is pumped out of it. One could easily see the duck, fat, moist, and perfectly prepared, as a parallel to Beryl who is slowly having the life pumped out of her in the house but also by the greater traditions of the society at large. Being her husband’s wife and lady of the house brings her little joy. Beryl’s attraction and disgust in “At the Bay” also seems to showcase a deep ambivalence to this social system.

Bertha’s condition in “Bliss” seems quite similar. While she dutifully views her husband as a friend, there is no spark, no fire that satisfies her. Indeed, it is not until the end of the story that she, for the first time in her life, views him with desire. Mansfield contrasts this with Bertha and Eddie’s guests, who seem to have intimate rapport. Bertha’s bliss is tinged with the knowledge of her own vacancy.

There is also an implicit criticism of female domesticity in “The Later Colonel’s Daughters.” Where in the other stories the masculine social order has merely dissatisfied the women within, in this story, the women have been hobbled by their place in the social structure. They are creatures of the house chasing after crumbs – not unlike the mouse at the start of the story. They have never been given either the tools or the opportunity to define themselves outside of the dominion of the Colonel. Once he is gone, they are even more trapped in their circumstances that they were before.

One senses that Mansfield viewed the domestic life as a trap for women, one that would eventually kill them, either spiritually or physically.