Re-forming World Literature E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Studies in World Literature
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 477

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The ground-breaking essays gathered in this volume argue that global paradigms of World Literature, often referencing the major metropolitan centres of cultural and literary production, do not always accommodate voices from the margins and writing within minority genres such as the short story. Katherine Mansfield is a supreme example of a writer who is positioned between a number of different borders and boundaries: between modernism and postcolonialism; between the short story and other genres (like the novella or poetry, or non-fiction, such as letters, diaries, reviews, and translations); between Europe and New Zealand. In pointing to the global production and dissemination of short stories, and in particular the growing reception of Mansfield’s work worldwide since her death in 1923, the volume shows how literary modernism can be read in a myriad of ways in terms of the contemporary category of new World Literature.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Bibliography

Global Modernisms

Mansfield, Soma, and the Burning Dress of Modernism

Bibliography

Of Parvenus and Pantheons: Mansfield’s Short Fiction as a “Reading Back”

Bibliography

The Art of Work: Katherine Mansfield’s Servant and Perception

Gustave Flaubert

Virginia Woolf

Katherine Mansfield

Bibliography

UK and US Modernisms

“Slippery British”: Katherine Mansfield’s Legacy in the UK

A.S. Byatt

Janice Galloway

Ali Smith

Tessa Hadley

Bibliography

“Kew Gardens” and “Miss Brill”: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as Short Story Writers

Bibliography

Katherine Mansfield’s American Legacy: The Case of Margery Latimer

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Bibliography

Poetry, Suffering and the Self

On First Looking into Mansfield’s Heine: Dislocative Lyric and the Sound of Music

Bibliography

Constructing Jealousy, Exacting Revenge: Katherine Mansfield’s “Poison” and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”

Biographical and Bibliographical Contexts

Dramatic Monologue

The Artist at Work

Conclusion

Acknowledgement

Bibliography

Katherine Mansfield: Homeostasis, Equanimity, and Fiction

Introduction: Mansfield and Mysticism

Homeostasis: Mansfield’s Irregular Regulation

Towards Equanimity

Bibliography

Fairy Stories and War

Katherine Mansfield, Fairy Tales and Fir Trees: “the story is past too: past! past!—that’s the way with all stories”

Mrs Molesworth’s Christmas-Tree Land (1884)

The influence of Walter Rippmann

Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales

Bibliography

Consuming Identifications: Food Politics in Mansfield’s “A Suburban Fairy Tale”

Bibliography

Treasure and Rot: Preservation and Bequest in Mansfield’s Short Fiction

Bibliography

Death by Ink: The Symbolism of Ink in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly”

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Studies in World Literature

Copyright

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following individuals and institutions: Valerie Lange at ibidem, for her advice and guidance during the preparation of the manuscript; Chris Ringrose, for helping to prepare the final texts for publication; the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand and especially Linda McGregor and Fiona Oliver; Ralph Kimber, for preparing the index; Peter Brooker and Rishona Zimring for their endorsements.

Abbreviations

Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Katherine Mansfield’s works are to the following editions and abbreviated thus:

CP

Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison, eds. 2016. The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CW1 and CW2 

Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds. 2012. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. Vols 1 and 2—The Collected Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CW3 

Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith, eds. 2014. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. 3—The Poetry and Critical Writings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CW4

Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison, eds. 2016. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. 4—The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Letters 1–5

Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds. 1984–2008. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Notebooks 1–2

Margaret Scott, ed. 2002. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. 2 vols. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Introduction

Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson

This collection of essays by modernist critics and scholars of Katherine Mansfield from across the world aims to engage with and challenge the widely held view that the short story is an under-researched and overlooked genre in the current understanding of world literature. By this we mean the critical evaluation of literature undertaken by critics (Damrosch 2003; Casanova 2004; Moretti 2000; Cheah 2016), through revisionary approaches to Goethe’s original Weltliteratur. This new departure is prompted by the challenges posed by the dynamic circulation of texts in the global marketplace, the diversification of media (print, electronic, downloadable, open access), production processes, and cultural forces such as postcolonialism and multiculturalism.1 In reexamining the short story genre in order to challenge the perception of its relative obscurity when compared to the novel in current evaluations of world literature, this collection focuses on the stories of the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who is often viewed as a “minor” modernist. Being considered minor by virtue of genre, output or impact, does not of course preclude entry into postcolonial and world literature studies, although the lack of critical attention to writing in such genres is a limitation of these fields that is often overlooked, as the editors of a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing point out (Munos and Ledent 2018, 1). The contributors to this volume collectively argue from a range of critical perspectives that the continuing impact of Mansfield’s work and reputation is such that, despite her publishing exclusively in a minor genre, her stories can be read in terms of the new configurations of the global marketplace that have led to the revival and rethinking of the category “world literature.”

It is perhaps not surprising that the novel continues to be privileged in research and theorizing in this recent shift to a new framework of analysis. Disciplines which proclaim a challenge to familiar binary concepts like postcolonial studies (metropolitan centre/colonial periphery) or diaspora studies (homeland/hostland, relocation/dislocation, departure/return), can be seen as yielding ground to the more universalist category of a world literature, but without undermining the genre’s dominance. In terms of a public preference, the novel’s primacy has been unassailable since the 19th century, despite competition from other genres like biography and autobiography. Indeed, the English Catalogue of Books shows that as a popular form it was enthroned in the hierarchies of genre while the short story, with its shorter length and more limited scope, was relegated to a minor place (Battershill 2018, 63).In the new millennium some overlap between the different critical frameworks of analysis means that continuities of such preference are also likely, as the same texts are often approached through more than one theoretical lens. Critics and theorists of world literature seem to ignore questions of genre when considering this recently revised category as one that principally emanates from the rapid mobilization of culture under globalization: David Damrosch (2003), for example, claims that a text enters into world literature by “circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (6). Likewise Pheng Cheah (2016) claims that we can understand a text’s worldliness by treating it as “an object of circulation in a global market of print commodities or as the product of a global system of production” (24).

The short story’s diminished status as the poor cousin to the novel (the genre against which literary developments and fashions are usually measured), and frequently at odds with its centring, normative impetus that reflects and refracts social order, is often iterated in discussions of national or regional story types. Philip Holden (2010), for example, argues that the way the short story interrupts and interrogates the national narrative deserves greater attention (442, cited by Munos and Ledent 2018, x), while Ernest Emenyonu (2013) complains that the African short story, like much short fiction around the world, is still an under-researched genre (1). Yet world literature criticism can, and does, accommodate so-called lesser writers associated with minority genres, whose work may be occluded due to the relative obscurity of their national traditions or to limited publication opportunities. The global perspective that ignores the hierarchization of genre, instead attends to the stories and narratives of worldhood that account for the past as well as the contemporary moment, and stresses the spread of a writer’s work though translation, adaptation, and various modes of dissemination.

Mansfield’s oeuvre is by any standards an exception to the usual conditions under which the short story genre is viewed as “minor”, for its publishing history and reception demonstrate all the salient features of a world literature: in her lifetime, and particularly after her early death in 1923, she had a growing following world-wide, in England, in Europe,especially in France where she lived for periods,2 New Zealand and Australia, Russia,3 and the Far East.4 Her work has never been out of print and soon after her death was translated into other languages. Throughout the 20th century her reputation as a great writer who ”raised up higher” the story as a genre was such that even a detractor like Frank O’Connor (1963) put her alongside the literary greats of modernism like Proust (140). Her crowning place among the elite of short story writers appears in various indicators of preference; for example, in Fifty Great Stories selected by William Crane as the “world’s finest fiction” (first published in 1948, and often reprinted as a mass market paperback), her story “The Garden Party” opens the volume. But she remains controversial when nationality is weighted in such selections. As Ailsa Cox points out in her essay, she was excluded from The Penguin Book of the British Short Story (Hensher 2015), because she was seen as a writer “conferring merit on [her] place of birth [i.e. New Zealand] rather than [her] residence [i.e. England]” (xiii; cited by Cox, 93). And the fact remains that her small oeuvre of approximately 216 stories and story fragments (Kimber 2015, 2), means that she often seems insignificant, and when not regarded as “minor” is seen as marginal, as, for example, writing in a “feminine” tradition. As Bonnie Kime Scott (1996) notes, “she was marginalised in particular ways during her lifetime and in rather different ways after her death” (299; cited by Kimber 2015, 3).

Mansfield’s entitlement to a place in the pantheon of world literature was something that she instinctively, even unconsciously sought through her capacity for cultural and linguistic exchange and a chameleon-like quality, partly due to her capacity to assume different guises and personae. Her work is able to occupy more than one cultural space, to move between places, attracting diverse readerships in multiple contexts of reception. As a modernist who distanced herself from any explicit associations with nationality and national definitions, she cultivated a certain ambiguity by omitting signposts that might associate her work with a particular country, place, or historical moment.5 Such placelessness and lack of a specific chronology are crucial to the cosmopolitan modernist identity for which she was known in the 1920s and 30s. There is also her passion for languages, including her facility in speaking European languages which made her more multi-lingual than most of her peers (Davison 2015, 1). Her curiosity about the “expressivity” of language, the ways that words and phrases shift and cross cultural borders, can be found refracted in numerous ways in her texts. Mansfield as translator and translations of Mansfield’s work are the subject of the essays in the recently published volume Mansfield and Translation (Davison, Kimber and Martin 2015). Among her many literary initiatives was her work as an avid translator of texts from French, Russian and Polish­—the latter two with her collaborators, S.S. Koteliansky, a professional translator and friend, and her lover, Floryan Sobieniowski—and this substantial body of work was until recently largely unexplored and unpublished;6 as Claire Davison points out, such a discovery sheds new light on Mansfield the writer (CW3, 149; 2015, 3). This openness to the malleable, plastic properties of language is a quality in her work that makes it receptive to translation, in the way that Stephan Helgesson (2014) describes as “a circulational phenomenon that moves across languages and literary fields” (484). In fact the literary innovations and transpositions that her stories have inspired among her successors and followers can be associated with translation in its widest sense, as her work is interpreted and lives on in the compositions of others; this includes its adaptation into alternative media, such as drama, cinema, music and the visual arts. Such transformations and transmedial adaptations of her writing, a rich component of her literary legacy, are evidence of how Mansfield’s influence has expanded by means of different types of translation or imitation, so making it worthy of its place among the diverse literary, generic and media repertoires of world literature.

In pointing to the global production and dissemination of short stories, and in particular the growing reception of Mansfield’s work worldwide, drawing on new scholarship that has emerged in the last decade following the founding of the Katherine Mansfield Society in 2008 (www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org), this volume of essays reveals how literary modernism can be read in a myriad of ways in terms of the contemporary category of new world literature. Indeed, the resurgence of interest in Mansfield has taken the form of a re­­-examination of the political, historical and cultural framings of modernism, with the recognition that these can be reinterpreted in broader terms of categories and definitions that were not used even a decade ago, as the essays by Ruchi Mundeja and Todd Martin make clear.

*****

Re-forming World Literature: Katherine Mansfield and The Modernist Short Story, then, offers new and innovative ways of reading Mansfield’s work that show her position in the multiply-constructed field of world literature, and that seem a logical development in the current critical revival of interest in this modernist author. The collection has been divided into four sections: “Global Modernisms”, “UK and US Modernisms”, “Poetry, Suffering and the Self”, and “Fairy Tales and War”, reflecting the breadth of topics addressed by the contributors’ chapters.

In “Global Modernisms”, three chapters offer new and dynamic reasons for affirming Mansfield’s position as a modernist who encompasses a global reach. Enda Duffy’s truly groundbreaking chapter, “Mansfield, Soma, and the Burning Dress of Modernism”, reads Mansfield as the inventor of “a new law of attraction, and communion” namely, “tenderness” (31). Comparing Mansfield’s work to that of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Duffy points out that “the modernist prose of each of these writers became experimental in the first instance to record with an unprecedented accuracy the physical sensations, the spasms, the reactions of bodies to stimuli, of the characters it displayed” (33). The somatic response to such sensations experienced by the characters of all three authors, and Mansfield in particular, such as fluctuations in body temperature, rates of heartbeat and breathing, the ways we sense excitement and stress, all are captured in the best modernist writing as a symptomology of fluctuating life as it is lived, so that intense human energy—soma—rather than deep human feeling, becomes the goal. For Duffy, the short-story form itself, developed it has been said as material to be read during a standard train commuting time, is the literary form engaged in a race against time and for attention, and is thus the perfect soma text, a measuring machine of the pulsation of human energy, where Mansfield’s nervy, tempo-shifting writing can be read as a new literary form, in which modernism’s dream of high energy can be understood. Ruchi Mundeja in her chapter establishes a dialogue between the divergent critical discourses of postcolonial and world literature studies by addressing Mansfield’s colonial origins, arguing that “parvenus and arrivistes” (55) from the periphery resist the mainstream and so may “tilt [. . .] ‘the literary balance of power’” of world literature (Mundeja 53, citing Casanova 2004, 43). Mansfield’s “ex-centric” positioning enables her to contest assumptions of metropolitan modernism and its lingua franca. Pointing to her preference for the short story with its potential to subvert dominant social or cultural values, Mundeja argues that Mansfield offers a “reading back” (rather than a writing back) to the metropolitan centre, in an “excoriating of European epistemologies, seen as precursors to the more enabling writerly instantiations of postcolonial agency” (53). Her example of how modernism is critiqued by the outsider’s “postcolonial” perspective is Mansfield’s narcissistic anti-hero, Raoul Duquette, the literary poseur of “Je ne parle pas français”, whose “parodic performance” in his enactment of modernism “becomes a conduit to its blindspots” (59). Maurizia Boscagli turns to another socially marginal type, the servant, claiming that Mansfield shows a greater interest in the working class than many of her contemporaries. In noting the influence of Flaubert’s realism, especially in “Flaubertian elements” that she adapts (74) to her satire on the bourgeoisie, and identifying by contrast, in Woolf’s modernist text To the Lighthouse, the limited interiority of the caretaker figure Mrs McNab, Boscagli argues that Mansfield introduces sentimentality into modernist writing, and transforms it into a way of accessing “a new form of perception” (85). She examines “Ma Parker” for the way the story’s “affective excess” (88) lingers so that the reader experiences a “close distance” (86) from its emotions, rather than catharsis. Mansfield’s stylistic juxtapositions—of high modernism, realism and sentimentality—undermine the commonly assumed link between women and mass culture in which sentimentality is associated with the low brow and vulgar. Her focus on the female servant, Boscagli concludes, shows Mansfield reworking sentimentality nd melodrama to “unmake the opposition of high and low that defines so much of male modernism” (88).

The section on “UK and US Modernisms” focuses on the legacy of Mansfield and her influence in the work of other writers, both in the UK and in the USA. Ailsa Cox’s essay specifically addresses Mansfield’s legacy in the UK, with a consideration as to whether she is in fact a “British” author, as some critics have positioned her. With a comparative reading of stories by contemporary British female authors, A. S. Byatt, Candia McWilliam, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith and Tessa Hadley, Cox traces the themes and techniques in their work that link them to Mansfield, affirming that “there is so much that all these writers take from Mansfield; it is difficult to imagine the British short story without her” (110). Janet Wilson compares Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf as modernist short story writers by examining their “public garden” stories, “Kew Gardens” and “Miss Brill”, reading the latter’s dark vision as a deliberate contrast to the former’s vibrant impressionistic celebration of nature. She identifies the epistolary exchanges, reviews and other communications in the early friendship between Mansfield and Woolf to elaborate Antony Alpers’s claim that Mansfield may have inspired the theme for “Kew Gardens”. Intertextual allusions to Woolf’s acclaimed story in Mansfield’s story “A Dill Pickle”, and another possible link in “The Escape”, the chapter claims, suggest an ongoing conversation between the writers over issues of sexuality, betrayal and marriage. Both contributed in different ways to the flourishing of the modernist short story in the early 20th century: Woolf’s story, more radically experimental, has been much admired and often reprinted, while Mansfield’s is one of her most memorably affective. Sydney Janet Kaplan focuses on Mansfield’s legacy in the work of American author Margery Latimer, who had been influenced by John Middleton Murry’s construction of the legendary figure of Mansfield through the posthumous editing of his wife’s notebooks and letters. Murry’s introductions to those collections emphasized several aspects of Mansfield’s life and work that would have resonated with Latimer: her youthful revolt against provincialism, her desire to escape to London, and the interconnection between her passionate devotion to the art of writing and her personal suffering. The extent to which Latimer’s writing resembles (and contrasts with) Mansfield’s is demonstrated through a comparison between Latimer’s story, “The Family”, and Mansfield’s “Prelude”. The chapter argues that where Latimer’s interpretation of family relations differs from Mansfield’s, it is propelled by her underlying critique of American ideology. Kaplan concludes that “Latimer’s recognition of an emotional and aesthetic affinity with Mansfield is most fully revealed in the similarity of their personal spiritual quests” (152), and especially their relationship with A. R. Orage.

Three authors address other aspects of Mansfield’s work through the framework of a world literature, including the European literary and Eastern philosophical heritages which Mansfield accessed through various pathways and at different stages of her life, in the section on “Poetry, Suffering and the Self”. Claire Davison’s pioneering chapter on the influence of the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine on Mansfield confirms the importance she accorded her own poetry-writing, especially in her early years as a writer. Her copy of Heine’s Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) was a constant companion throughout her life, and Davison’s chapter explores some of the poems in the collection, tracing their influence on the literary apprenticeship of Mansfield, not only in her own poetry and early tone-poems, but in decidedly Heine-esque themes and styles that would evolve into figures of enchantment in her later, modernist stories: “the essential tension and strangeness of the lyric [. . .] in turn lends itself splendidly to the dynamics of nascent modernism” (180–1). Todd Martin takes another 19th-century poetic heavyweight—Robert Browning—focusing specifically on what he sees as allusions to Browning’s celebrated poem “My Last Duchess” in Mansfield’s short story “Poison”, exploring how she uses such allusions to enhance the theme of jealousy inherent in her story. Martin’s approach to Mansfield’s appropriation of a well-known European literary form, the dramatic monologue, written by a master of the genre, stresses how “a particular text fits within and reacts to a global literary tradition” (186). Via close textual analysis, and drawing on David Damrosch’s view that works of art refract rather than reflect their cultures (2009, 2), Martin offers an illuminating comparison between the final printed story and the original typescript, highlighting the connection between her story and Browning’s poem: in so doing, Mansfield makes an artistic choice which “capitalizes on the connections in order to establish a dialogue between the two texts, one that not only adds meaning to her own story, but which also places her within the framework of world literature” (206). Erica Baldt’s chapter, “Katherine Mansfield: Homeostasis, Equanimity, and Fiction”, explores the ways in which Mansfield uses the short story form as a vehicle by which to interrogate concepts of mysticism as they were commonly understood and promulgated in London at the time she was writing, especially towards the end of her life. Specifically, she focuses on how “Mansfield’s ability to achieve what she always sought—what the Bhagavad Gita calls ‘serenity at last’—was severely limited by pain and illness” (211). Through an analysis of several stories, Baldt demonstrates how “even as the suffering itself seems to put her further from a place of physical balance, it allows her the ‘privilege’ of seeing in a new way, of writing in a new way” (226).

In the final section, “Fairy Stories and War”, four chapters examine Mansfield’s stories from multiple perspectives: the fairy tale, both as a genre and a symbol; the notion of “treasure” as literary inheritance; and the symbolism of ink in a story about the horrors of war. As familiar literary tropes and categories, they all resonate beyond any particular cultural or national source, confirming that many of Mansfield’s sources and inspirations are rooted in a pan-European mythology, symbolism and literary practice—all indicative of her universalising appeal. The origins of the fairy tale in oral folk literature, and its importance to the short story genre are implied by world literature critic Pheng Cheah who says “stories do not originate from the teller. They come into being in response to the world and to the coming of the other. [. . .] stories can only be told if there is a listener” (2016, 298). Gerri Kimber’s chapter discusses the impact of fairy stories, and other children’s literature within a global context, on Mansfield’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Victorian children’s book Christmas-Tree Land by Mrs Molesworth. Brought up in far away New Zealand, Mansfield was deeply affected by—and related to—these very European tales, and Kimber demonstrates the resonances of their impact on Mansfield’s adult writing life; as Kimber reveals, “the marvellous itself, as Mansfield knew instinctively, is inherent in modernity, since modernity consists of an interplay between enchantment and disenchantment” (250). In “Consuming Identifications: Food Politics in Mansfield’s ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’”, Elsa Högberg argues that Mansfield’s work illuminates the crucial role of the modernist short story as a socio-political force. In her reinvention of the short story form, Mansfield explores animism and telepathy as aesthetic devices that cause an uncanny blurring of the subject-object boundary. With a particular focus on the politics of hunger and food in her 1919 story “A Suburban Fairy Tale”—Mansfield’s outraged response to the post-war famine in Germany, and the British indifference to this crisis—Högberg explores her aesthetic creation of animist and telepathic relations as an effective way of addressing social and political injustice. Aimee Gasston’s essay considers the notion of legacy in Mansfield’s work, where decay and mortality are carefully counterbalanced by art’s capacity to preserve. She argues for the modernist short story innovated by Mansfield as primarily concerned with preservation and bequest, seeking to pass on “treasure” as literary inheritance; an activity in opposition to the fleetingness inherent to the short form. She also considers whether the materiality of Mansfield’s work is itself bound up with notions of endowment, considering those rights and obligations passed on to both writers and readers through the stories she left behind. Taking the story “At the Bay” as one example of many, this chapter looks at the ways in which “rot” (a word which beats throughout Mansfield’s stories) is juxtaposed with “treasure”, setting up a conceptual dichotomy that parallels the author’s defiant work to attain posterity in the face of permanent change, brevity, disintegration and decay. For Gasston, Mansfield’s legacy is “both profound and manifold—a refulgent literature containing a myriad of carefully chosen objects, to each of which a ‘discreet, tenacious meaning’ attaches” (282). In the final chapter, Janka Kascakova analyses the symbolism of ink in Mansfield’s celebrated short story “The Fly”. Kascakova explores the possible symbolical meanings of ink in the story, arguing that its appearance and use are highly significant and closely connected to the circumstances surrounding the beginning and progress of the Great War. Mansfield’s story is, among other things, “an expression of her belief that beyond the bullets, grenades, shrapnel, gas, tanks and disease, her brother and thousands of other young men and women were, in fact, killed by ink” (301). The fly’s death thereby reflects on many aspects of human activity whose writing (that is “using ink”) contributed to the demise of such an unprecedented number of young men: the politics, the bureaucracy, the war propaganda but also education, literature and science.

*****

Pheng Cheah has recently explored a “radical rethinking of world literature as literature that is an active power in the making of worlds, that is, both a site of processes of worlding and an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes” (2016, 2). This reformulation offers just one more perspective that might be tested further in relation to the continuous circulation and growing impact of Mansfield’s short story oeuvre as testimony to how worlding happens while actively contributing to this process. The chapters in this collection show that Mansfield’s is a multivalent voice, and she the supreme example of a writer positioned between different borders and boundaries—between modernism and postcolonialism; between the short story and other genres (like the novella or poetry, or non-fiction such as letters, diaries, reviews and translations); between Europe and New Zealand. This gives her work a ubiquitousness that Vincent O’Sullivan (1994) attributes to “rejection of the centre, rejection of the borders as well, the sense of discomposure everywhere, the play of feeling present and absent at the same time in almost any place” (13). In terms of the recent attempts to reconcile postcolonialism and world literature (Cheah, 2016; Ashcroft 2013; Helgesson, 2014) her stories might be seen, according to Bill Ashcroft, as belonging to a system of world literature which she entered through the network of imperial and economic power and whose “dominant discourse of imperial control” she helped to transform—even as, Ruchi Mundeja points out, by destabilizing the “literary Greenwich meridian” (67, citing Casanova 2004, 4). But Mansfield transcends such categorisations as well, because of her linguistic agility, multiple masks and guises, and ability to read the foreign; while the placelessness which makes her resist pigeonholing into any single cultural category means her stories move between multiple places and locations, open to being interpreted by different readerships according to different cultural codes and specificities. The chapters here locate up-to-date scholarship on modernism and Mansfield, synthesizing them with the different paradigms of world literature to show that despite being often identified as a minor figure within the literary canon, Mansfield, with her increasingly worldwide reputation as a short story writer par excellence, can not only be recuperated for inclusion in a global literary framework but can offer ways of reading beyond it.

Bibliography

Ashcroft, Bill. 2013. “Beyond the Nation: Australian Literature as World Literature.” In Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, edited by Rob. Dixon and Bridget Rooney, 34–46. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.

Battershill, Claire. 2018. Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. London: Continuum.

Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Davison, Claire, Gerri Kimber, and Todd Martin, eds. 2015. Katherine Mansfield and Translation. Katherine Mansfield Studies, 7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Davison, Claire. 2015. “Introduction.” Katherine Mansfield and Translation, edited by Claire Davison, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin, 1–11. Katherine Mansfield Studies, 7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Emenyonu, Ernest. 2013. “Editorial: ‘Once Upon a Time Begins a Story…’.” African Literature Today 31: 1–7.

Gong, Shifen. 2001. “Introduction.” A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, edited and translated by Shifen Gong, 11–38. Dunedin: Otago University Press.

Helgesson, Stephan, 2014. “Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries.” Interventions 16 (4): 483–500.

Hensher, Philip. 2015. “General Introduction.” In The Penguin Book of the British Short Story. Vol. 2, edited by Philip Hensher, xiii–xxxviii. London: Penguin

Holden, Philip. 2010. “Reading for Genre: The Short Story and (Post)colonial Governmentality.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 12 (3): 442–58.

Kimber, Gerri. 2008. Katherine Mansfield: The View from France. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang.

–––. 2015. Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (January–February).https://newleftreview.org/II/1/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature.

Munos, Delphine, and Bénédicte Ledent. 2018. “‘Minor’ genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning.” In “‘Minor’ genres in postcolonial literatures,” edited by Bénédicte Ledent and Delphine Munos. Special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56 (1): 1–5.

O’Connor, Frank. 1963. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. London; Macmillan.

O’Sullivan, Vincent. 1994. “Finding the Pattern: Solving the Problem: Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand European.” In Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin, edited by Roger Robinson, 9–24. New Orleans: Louisana State University Press.

Scott, Bonnie Kime, ed. 1990. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Woods, Joanna. 2001. Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

1 As evidence of how this field has taken root see, for example, the Journal of World Literature, founded in 2016. Its Editors-in Chief are David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, Jale Pala, and Zhang Longxi.

2 On Mansfield’s reception in France, see Kimber (2008).

3 On the translation of her works into Russian, first in 1922, followed by two collections in 1923, see Woods (2001, 248–49).

4 The first translation of Mansfield’s writing into Chinese, by Xu Zhimo, was published shortly after her death in May 1923, in The Short Story Magazine (Gong 2001, 12).

5 For example, a comparison of “The Aloe” with its revised version as “Prelude” shows that she removed all markers of nationality (e.g. Australia and New Zealand); she rarely if ever references New Zealand (with the exception of “A Truthful Adventure”); and often omits place names by which a city or country can be identified.

6 Collated by Gerri Kimber and published together for the first time in CW3.

Global Modernisms

Mansfield, Soma, and the Burning Dress of Modernism

Enda Duffy

[T]his woman who, living intensely in all the beauty she found around her, fought so bravely against her illness. She seemed to cut through any falseness or furry edges sharply, yet always with an underlying tenderness. (Ida Baker [1985, 157] on Katherine Mansfield)1

Energy is eternal delight. (William Blake)

This is a paper about tenderness. It might seem difficult, on first touch, to think of Katherine Mansfield as the modern poet of tenderness, yet I am struck by how the word “tenderness” turns out to be secreted at the heart of so many of her stories. “Oh, why did she feel so tender towards the whole world tonight?” thinks Bertha during her dinner-party in “Bliss” (Mansfield 2010, 68). Then here is Linda on Stanley in “Prelude”: “And how tender he always was at times like these, how submissive, how thoughtful” (62). Or Raoul to Mouse in “Je ne parle pas français”: “‘But I’m sure you do,’ I answered, so tender, so reassuring, I might have been a dentist about to withdraw her first little milk tooth” (98). In each of these cases, there is a tentativeness around naming the tenderness, a sense of the possible distance between the attachment being expressed and the expression of it.

Tenderness has been around for a long time in English literature, perhaps nowhere more famously than in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Already with thee! tender is the night”, which was recalled by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934 for the title of his last novel. In Hamlet, Ophelia refers to the tendresse in tenderness but also opens the way to the word’s contractual implications, when she tells her father of Hamlet that “He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders / Of his affection to me” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1. 3.98–99, 298). Polonius seizes on these meanings of “tender” as contract: he chides her for “having taken these tenders for true play”, he orders her to “Tender yourself more dearly”, or otherwise, he notes, “You’ll tender me a fool” (1.3.108). “Tender”, crossing over from Middle French, was already in use in Chaucer (2008), where it commonly means “youthful”: it occurs as such in the sixth line of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, where April is praised as the month of “the tender croppes, and the yonge sonne” (32). “Tender” as “young”, then, “tender” as “soft” or “sympathetic”, “tender” as “contract” and as “legal tender”: this word, index first in Middle French of a version of intense feeling, was hardened out in English to include lifespans (“tender” as “young”), contractual arrangements (“tender me . . .”), and the effects of such contracts on the economic level (“legal tender”).

All of these meanings are subsumed by Katherine Mansfield in her letters to John Middleton Murry, where “tenderness” is one of her most valued words:

Last night, there was a moment before you got into bed. You stood, quite naked, bending forward a little—talking. It was only for an instant. I saw you—I loved you so—loved your body with such tenderness—Ah my dear—And I am not thinking now of “passion”. No, of that other thing that makes me feel that every inch of you is precious to me. Your soft shoulders—your creamy warm skin, your ears, cold like shells are cold—your long legs and feet that I love to clasp with my feet—the feeling of your belly—and your thin young back.—Just below that bone that comes out at the back of your neck you have a little mole. It is partly because we are young that I feel this tenderness. (Letters 1, 86)

Tenderness, here, twice: the power of these lines, I propose, comes not just from their palpable intimacy, but because Mansfield is doing something amazing: she is inching, in her language of intimacy, away from more conventional 19th-century languages of love and towards one built around physical sensation and affect. It is not, as she says, “passion”, by which she means sexual desire, the force that fascinated many (mostly male) modernists, from Freud to D.H. Lawrence to Joyce. Neither is it quite “love”, whether we think of that feeling within the classical categorizations as eros or agape, as an invention of the “amour courteous” tradition, or in terms of the bourgeois version of love at the service of the family romance plot. That bourgeois, 19th-century romantic version of love is what Joyce ([1922] 1986) satirizes in Ulysses, with the interpolation “Love loves to love love [. . .] Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly”, after Bloom, arguing with the drinkers in Barney Kiernan’s public house, has unconvincingly defined love as “I mean the opposite of hatred” and is derided by one of his interlocutors as “A nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet” (273).

No, Mansfield’s tenderness, this essay claims, is a new, modernist version of human connection. It is a filiation nurtured from an intense physicality. We have many words in modernism for the opposite to “tenderness”: ennui, alienation, modernist angst. Modernist art teems with glamorizations of this opposite phenomenon and of its dark allure, from Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Katherine Mansfield, in stories such as “Miss Brill” and “Je ne parle pas français”, and in the trick ending of “Bliss”, often appears to be working in that predictable modernist idiom, looking down upon lonely, loveless existences. (At least Mann’s Aschenbach in Death in Venice finds his Tazio, and Prufrock dreams of mermaids; Mansfield’s Miss Brill has only her boxed fur collar in her bedsit.) Nevertheless, I think the real pleasure of Mansfield’s stories, and certainly of her letters, strangely, is the opposite. Amongst the modernist cavalcade of proofs of the impossibility of real human connections, she is the unlikely witness to—or possibly the inventor of—something quite opposite: a template, of a new law of attraction, and communion. She took a word, tenderness, bandied about in English literature for almost a millennium, and made it the name of a new life-register. Katherine Mansfield, then: the inventor of modern tenderness.

To clarify: this essay does not claim that Mansfield, as the “woman writer”, is simply being more empathetic, kind or caring than the rest, that, as they rushed to delineate modernist angst, she championed an alternative empathy. (It claims, au contraire, that she was more completely and profoundly modernist than they.)2 To begin to sketch the scope and significance of Mansfield’s tenderness-text, let us juxtapose it with the achievement of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In a diary entry in 1941, Virginia Woolf (1984) wrote the following:

Joyce is dead. I remember Miss. Waver, bringing Ulysses [. . .]. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came and I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, “still there is something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature” [. . .]. I bought the blue paper book and read it here one summer I think, with spasms of wonder, of discovery. (352–53)3

The encounter described here between Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf, who would soon write the short story that would eventually become Mrs. Dalloway, and Mansfield, soon to write “Bliss”, is surely a key node both of modernist anxiety-of-influence and of modernist cross-inspiration.4 Note, however, not merely Woolf’s acknowledgement of her jealousy, both of the innovative power of Joyce’s writing and of Mansfield’s ability to appreciate it, but her description of this jealousy as a spasm. Naming the experience a spasm, she recognized it primarily as a physical sensation, an experience that passed over her body. William James, older brother of the proto-modernist novelist Henry James and a towering figure in the history of modern psychology, had in 1884 written the key essay “What is an Emotion?” in which he professed to solve one of the oldest controversies in the study of feelings when he declared that emotions were first experienced upon the body and then, recognizing them, one knew one had had that emotion (1884, 188–205). That is, emotions were not first mental recognitions, of which one then noted symptoms upon one’s body. Woolf’s spasm of jealousy exactly followed this logic: the physical sensation precedes the acknowledgement of the feeling. More, I want to suggest that it was that same logic at work in Joyce’s prose that Katherine Mansfield noticed when she declared that “still there is something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature”. Here, if you will, is a moment of cultural transmission: Mansfield, on reading Joyce, brings out even more in the texture of her own writing the very embodied “tenderness” she was already predisposed to celebrate; Woolf, in describing her own discovery of what Joyce was attempting as a “spasm” she herself experienced, was still putting into practice, years later in her diary, the commitment to recording a particular kind of embodied and tender experience that she had first seen Mansfield acknowledge as the greatness of Joyce’s prose. In this sense the throwaway term “spasm” may be Woolf’s acutely accurate way of putting her finger on exactly what Joyce, Mansfield and herself had each achieved in modernist prose.

Hence to this essay’s thesis: the modernist prose of each of these writers became experimental in the first instance to record with an unprecedented accuracy the physical sensations, the spasms, the reactions of bodies to stimuli, of the characters it displayed. To show how this worked on the page, consider a single scene in Ulysses—let us imagine it was the one Mansfield read—the end of the “Lestrygonians” episode. Here Bloom, after his lunch of a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of wine, has just turned the corner into Kildare St., when he sees Blazes Boylan, the man who will soon be in bed with Molly, Bloom’s wife. Bloom panics:

Mr. Bloom came into Kildare St. First I must. Library.

Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turned-up trousers. It is. It is.

His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right.

Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady. Yes it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.

Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?

Didn’t see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.

The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.

No. Didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate.

My heart! ([1922] 1986, 150 [U8: 1167–1179])

Bloom could have stood his ground, confronted Boylan—and transformed the plot. But he doesn’t. He scuttles away, and Joyce, writing like a zealous movie cameraman who wants to capture every tremble and fluctuation of a victim’s body and face, gives us not deep thoughts on Bloom’s cowardice, not a report on Bloom’s feelings, certainly not a wistful hymn to Bloom’s lost love (as Conrad, James or Hardy would each have done). Rather, he gives us a second-by-second account of the exact symptoms of body changes Bloom exhibits. We witness his reddening face, his shortening, panting breaths, his faster-beating heart, and the exact movements of his fluttering hands. The key line is “His heart quopped softly”: the central physical experience that is being recorded here is Leopold Bloom’s rising and wavering heartbeat. It is flanked by a quick note of Bloom’s sudden blush (“Wine in my face”), his altered gait (“Swerved”), his shortened breath (“with long windy steps”), and his now pounding heart (“Moment more. My heart!”). All are unmistakable, transmitted in telegraphically-brief sentence-fragments.

If this is a primary pillar of Joyce’s Ulyssean modus, Virginia Woolf in his wake accomplished a similar turn even more thoroughly, in her own style. In fact, when Clarissa Dalloway, at the denouement of Mrs. Dalloway, faces a crisis less immediate but even more resonant than that from which Bloom fled, Woolf launches nothing less than a mini-manifesto for this kind of writing. At her party, Clarissa hears of Septimus Smith’s suicide:

Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident: her dress flamed, her body burned. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, burning, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation and blackness. For she saw it. But why had he done it? ([1925] 1990, 184)

“Always her body went through it first” is a summation of William James’s account of emotion; then comes “her dress flamed, her body burned”. Here is the flaming dress of modernism. Djuna Barnes (1937), in an even more accurate phrase in her novel Nightwood, terms it “the trepidation of the flesh” (41). Here, in Mrs. Dalloway, it delineates merely a rise in body temperature, a hot flush, an intense version of Bloom’s “wine in my face”. Yet this simplicity belies a Jamesian revolution in the representation of human well-being in the novel in English, in which the annotated somatics preceded any account of motivation as a means to get at feelings. The key is that Woolf transmits feeling, emotion, by delineating physical sensation. The logic of an older narrative form is reversed: now we as readers get the annotation of somatic reaction from which we can if we wish infer emotion, what we call feeling, and from which we assume we can discern motivation. The soma-text fronts, or substitutes for, the feeling-text.

Next, let us consider how this works in the stories of Katherine Mansfield. Our text-case will be the story that takes a somatic state for its title—“Bliss”, written in 1917:

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!—as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of the late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? (2010, 68)

This is the second paragraph of “Bliss”. In this story Mansfield trumps Woolf’s “burning dress” in advance with her evocation of the whole body as incendiary device. There is an avant-garde joke from 1915 by Francis Picaba, in which he entitles a drawing of an electrical spark plug, taken from a technical manual, “Portrait of a Young American Woman in a State of Nudity” (see Duffy 2009, 14–16). In “Bliss”, Bertha Young’s body functions literally as a kind of spark-plug, a point at which forces and currents of energy converge and are transformed and transmitted. First, as in Joyce, the text allows us to consider affects by reading soma-symptoms evident in, and generated in, Bertha’s body, where they are first read by Bertha herself. To the extent that the story operates as a stream-of-consciousness narrative, it offers a continuous close reading by Bertha of the symptoms of her own body:

But in her bosom there was that bright, glowing place—that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable, she hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look in the cold mirror—but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips. (2010, 68–69)

Here, as in Joyce, is the measure of one’s breathing, as it is annotated in modernist prose. Bloom’s “long windy steps” is matched by Bertha’s barely daring to breathe. Here too, very much in the terms outlined by William James, is a person knowing her emotion, and trying to name it, after it has first appeared upon her body. This is how the story names, in Bertha, “bliss”.

But what is bliss? It is happiness, but intensified. Here is a story about an intensity, a nexus of undefined feelings. It is this intensity that Bertha calls “tenderness”, when she asks, “Oh, why did she feel so tender towards the whole world tonight? Everything was good—was right. All that happened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss” (76). This tenderness, then, is not a heightened state of some known feeling (such as “love” or even “joy”), but rather a heightened state of intense physical being—an extra aliveness. This intense aliveness manifests itself in the story in an excess of energy. In Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, the somatic symptoms being recorded evidence themselves upon the bodies of flâneurs—which is to say, upon moving bodies. In “Bliss” this movement is upgraded to the point where it is registered as a continuous expenditure of energy from the body of each character, and in each case the somatic symptoms manifest themselves as modulations of the characters’ energy. Energy, as tenderness’s charge, is under scrutiny in “Bliss”.

Mansfield’s story, I propose, is primarily concerned with the project of annotating aliveness, which it denominates “bliss”. It effects this by marking the signs of energy in Bertha’s dynamic body in particular. Joyce’s text, as we saw, annotates the symptoms of human response upon Bloom’s body in movement; Woolf goes further, but, as a close reading of many passages in her work would show, her symptom-textuality is constrained by attention to matters of possible motivation as she lays out Clarissa’s stream of consciousness. We might think of Woolf’s modernist prose project as a writer’s struggle on the one hand to get beyond the dictates of the psychologist William James, with his stress on the primacy of the physiological and symptomological evidence of bodily changes, and on the other, to evade the example of his brother Henry James, whose prose wove elaborate speculations regarding possible motivations around every action and movement. Mansfield, instead, nowhere more than in “Bliss”, hones in mercilessly on the reading of the human organism’s own physical energy.

She is not, therefore, concerned primarily with feelings, or with the way in which new knowledge, gained during the story, alters how Bertha feels. The story is not an account of a woman who must control or conceal her feelings or who must gather more information to have insight—the terms in which “Bliss” is conventionally read. In such accounts the story exists to show up Bertha as a naïve young wife without knowledge, in a tale that is centrally about how she discovers that her husband is having an affair. In this reading, “Bliss” is a vignette of a blighted life; the title is ironic, and more likely than not refers to the phrase “ignorance is bliss”. To read it as such, as a bitterly ironic snapshot of a blindly happy young wife who gets her comeuppance and is forced to face reality by the last page, is to see Bertha just as Leopold Bloom has often been seen: as a pathetic cuckold. I submit that just as Ulysses does not in the end care about Molly’s affair, even if it hangs upon it whatever vestiges of conventional family-romance plot the novel contains, “Bliss” is not centrally concerned with Harry’s affair with Pearl. The narrative of the cuckold is simply the oldest plot in the comic repertoire (favoured by Boccaccio in The Decameron, for example); here, in the early 20th century, it is pressed into service as the frame on which is draped matter much more interesting to the denizens of modernity. This matter is energy. Hence, to a thesis on these texts: in these modernist works, the old concern with feelings—with the inviolability of love, for example, the slow curdle of jealousy, the admirable sense of rootedness generated by the ability to trust—gives way to a new concern. It is one we are only coming to terms with as readers a century later: the issue of human energy. Energy, an intense aliveness as an end in itself, is what is celebrated in “Bliss”.

It might be pointed out that the short story is the ideal vehicle for this modernist turn to human energy. The short story may be thought of as a closed economy, like a state or a company. Within this economy, forces circulate. Readers have been trained, given the modern short story’s origins in the detective story from Poe to Conan Doyle, to think of this primarily as an economy of information. In terms of its account of information-impact, “Bliss” concerns Bertha’s ignorance, and her discovery of her husband’s lies. We tend to read the short story’s feeling-displays as reinforcing the text’s informational “revelation”. Reading for feelings, “Bliss” reveals the superficiality of feelings among these affected bourgeois-bohemians. This reading of the text as a magical revelation of the fakery of feelings on display is mitigated only by intimations of queer desire between Bertha and Pearl. I want to suggest here, instead, that “Bliss” involves us in an economy of circulating energies. Like the atom, whose structure was uncovered by another New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, in 1919 (see Kelman 1969),the story contains, and pulses with, energies. Readers track the economy of energy, and are energized by the text.

Consider “Bliss” as an energy vortex. The “bright glowing space in Bertha’s bosom” with “its little shower of sparks coming from it” is only the beginning. First, there is the rush of Bertha’s every move: as the story opens “She wanted to run instead of walk” (2010, 68); soon, “running up the steps, rattling the letterbox [. . .] she seized her bag and ran upstairs to the nursery” (69). Before the party, “Picking up the cushions [. . .] she threw them back on the couches [. . .] suddenly hugging [one] to her, passionately, passionately” (72); as the party begins “she flung down on a couch and pressed her hands to her eyes”. The whole grammar of the story echoes Bertha’s breathless rush. Next, the other versions of human excitement here act as her foils: her baby, who “saw her mother and began to jump” (69), her husband Harry, who worries that he will be five minutes late: “He loved doing things at high pressure . . .” (74). The guests too are mostly impressions built around their energies. Eddie stresses unlikely words in every exclamation, to exaggerate the account of his life lived in extremis, all coded as a specific rhythm of male queerness; Pearl Fulton, in contrast, is the languorous one with the “cool, sleepy voice”: “What was there in that cool arm that could fan—fan—start blazing—blazing—the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do with?” (75).

Pearl’s cool arm, touching Bertha’s hand: the energy in this energy economy is not contained exclusively in the characters’ bodies. Rather, it radiates out into the very matter of the house, the garden, the meal, making it all vibrate. There is in the story an economy of heat and cold, of light and dark and of moon and fire that is not merely symbolic. Light effects, from cinema, are everywhere: “For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusty light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air” (69). Soon we are told: “The fire had died down in the drawing room into a red flickering ‘nest of baby phoenixes’, said Face” (77), while the enigmatic pear tree at the end of the garden “seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, the point, to quiver in the bright air” (77). Then, there is the story’s economy of heat and cold: Bertha feels how “the cold air fell on her arms”(68), while Pearl Fulton, described by Harry as “cold like all blond women” is the one with “that cold arm” (71). This symphony of dark and light, heat and cold, maps the energy vectors in the atmosphere that is the medium for the characters’ energies and languor. The enclosed space of the short story can barely contain this energy, this electricity, that pulses through the characters’ bodies and across the air they breathe. The short story’s style, with its dashes, repeated words, and telegraphic directness, monitors, seismograph-like, the energy relayed.

So is “Bliss,” then, a vitalist tale? Is it a work of Britain’s best-known vitalist offshoot, Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism? John Middleton Murry’s modernist life virtually began when he moved to Paris and read the works of Henri Bergson. Yet it would be very faint praise indeed to describe “Bliss” as merely an exercise in modish vitalism. Nevertheless, it is a short story about Bergson’s “élan vital”. Both Mansfield’s “Bliss” and Bergson’s “élan vital”, however, beg to be contextualized. One such context is the medico-scientific project, underway from the mid-19th century, to retheorize, literally, what it meant to be alive—to isolate and understand the continuous processes that implied aliveness.

Recently, a new environmentalist neo-vitalism has emerged, asking us to consider if apparently inert matter in nature—such as a rock or debris in the gutter—might not in fact be alive; around 1860, the simpler but much more daunting project was to isolate what kept living things alive. Key in this history was Claude Bernard (1974), who defined life as a struggle between the “milieu intérieur”, the processes that go on inside your body, and those of the “milieu extérieur”, the physical and other forces outside it (84). Darwin (1872), particularly in his final book, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals