Katherine Mansfield Essay

She was innate(p) in 1888 in Wellington, a town labeled the empire city by its white inhabitants, who sculptured themselves on British bearing and relished their citys buttoned-down respectability. 1 At an early age, Mansfield witnessed the disjuncture among the colonial and the native, or Maori, expressions of life, prompting her to criticize the treatment of the Maoris in several diary entries and short-circuit stories.2 Mansfields biographer, Angela Smith, writes It was her childhood experience of living in a society where one elbow room of life was imposed on another, and did not quite fit in that sharpened her modernist impulse to focus on moments of disruption or encounters with strange or disturbing aspects of life. 3 Her feelings of disjuncture were accentuated when she arrived in Britain in 1903 to attend ottomans College. In many respects, Mansfield remained a lifelong out side of meatr, a traveler between two evidently similar yet profoundly different worlds.Afte r briefly returning to New Zealand in 1906, she move back to Europe in 1908, living and writing in England and p subterfuges of continental Europe. Until her premature end from tuberculosis at the age of 34, Mansfield remained in Europe, leading a Bohemian, unconventional way of life. The Domestic attr performanceive Mansfields short story Prelude is set in New Zealand and dramatizes the disjunctures of colonial life by an account of the Burnell familys move from Wellington to a country village.The story takes its title from Wordsworths germinal poem, The Prelude, the first version of which was completed in 1805, which casts the poet as a traveler and chronicles the growth of a poets mind. 4 Although the Burnell family moves a mere six miles from town, the move is not inconsequential it enacts a break with their previous way of life and alerts the family members to the various discontinuities in their lives. Beneath the veneer of the Burnells harmonious domestic life are wraith same undercurrents of aggression and unhappiness.The stalk specter of a mysterious aloe plant and a slaughtered table in their well-manicured mebibyte suggests that the familys awfully nice new home conceals moments of brutality and ignorance toward another way of life that was stamp down and denied. 5 As I will propose, these two incidents echo the esthetical concept of the sublime, as they encapsulate a mysterious power that awes its beh elders and cannot be fully contained within their beauteous home.Through her sharp, dream-like prose, Mansfield deploys traditional aesthetic conventions like the picturesque while simultaneously transfiguring, subverting, and reinventing them in a modernist context. The concept of the picturesque was first defined by its originator, William Gilpin, an 18th century artist and clergyman, as that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture. 6 Thus, a scene or representation is beautiful when it echoes an already-established, artistic conc eption of beauty, revealing the self-reinforcing way in which art creates the standard of beauty for both art and life.Mansfield presents these picturesque moments in order to demystify them and reveal the prohibition and power they contain. In addition to Prelude, her stories Garden Party and Bliss dramatize the transformation and inversion of picturesque moments of bourgeois life and domestic harmony. While she seems to exhibit a certain attachment to these standard aesthetic forms, Mansfield subtly interrogates many of these conventions in a strikingly modernist way. Through her childhood in a colony, Mansfield in like manner became attuned to the violence and inequalities of colonialism.As Angela Smith suggests, her early writings demonstrate a keen sensitivity towards a crush tarradiddle of brutality and duplicity. 7 In her 1912 short story How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped, she questions and overturns the perspective of the colonialist, whose advantage point historically trum ps that of the native. The deliberate ambivalence of the word kidnapping dramatizes the conflict between the colonists perspective and Pearls joyful, eye-opening experiences during her abduction. In a similar way, empire dramatized for Mansfield the way that a picturesque, bourgeois household could suppress alternative perspectives.The Sublime In Prelude, the mysterious, sublime aloe plant disrupts the pleasant domesticity of the Burnell household. Their well-manicured yard with its lawn tennis lawn, garden, and orchard also contains a wild, unseemly sidethis was the frightening side, and no garden at all. 8 This side contains the aloe plant, which exerts a mysterious, enthralling power over its awed beholders. In its resemblance to the oceanic, the aloe assumes the quotationistics of the sublime the high grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a shop with the oars lifted.Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like wa ter, and on the green wave glittered the dew. 9 For many writers and poets, the ocean was a manifestation of the sublime because of its unfathomable power and scale that awed and humbled its observers. The aloes strikingly physiological effect on its viewers recalls Edmund Burkes sublime, which overpowers its observer and reinforces the limitations of human reason and control. In his famous treatise on the sublime, Burke writes greatness of dimension, vastness of extent or quantity is a tidy cause of the sublime, as it embodies the violent and overpowering forces of nature.10 In a similar vein, the child, Kezia Burnells first fancy upon seeing the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves and fleshy stem is one of awe and wonder. 11 In this case, the sublimity of the aloe plant disrupts and challenges the domestic picturesque as it defies mastery, categorization, and traditional notions of beauty. In its resistance to categorization and control, the sublime embodies the character of the ungovernable beautify that the Burnell family cannot domesticate and the picturesque cannot frame.As a result, in Prelude, the magnitude of the sublime interrupts and fractures the fluid surface of the picturesque by exposing the unfathomable depths beneath it. The colonial backdrop of the Burnells yard also contributes to the mysterious, underg labialize power of the aloe. This unruly part of their property hints toward a landscape that eludes domestication and serves as a incessant reminder that the Burnell family is living in a land that is not quite theirs and cannot be fully tamed.12 At the age of 19, Mansfield wrote that the New Zealand bush outside of the cities is all so gigantic and tragicand even in the bright sunlight it is so passionately secret. 13 For Mansfield, the bush embodies the history of a people whose lives have been disrupt and displaced by European settlers. 14 After wars, brutal colonial practices, and European diseases had devastated the local M aori population, the bush became a haunting monument to their presence.As the Burnell family settles down to sleep on the first night in their new home, farther away in the bush there sounded a harsh rapid chatter Ha-ha-ha Ha-ha-ha. 15 In her subtle way, Mansfield unveils the voices of those whose perspectives are excluded from this portrait of nocturnal domestic harmony. In a similar way, the aloe plant exudes an unfathomable history that is beyond the time and place of the Burnells. Even its ageimplied by the fact that it flowers once every one C yearssuggests that the aloe exists on a different scale than its human beholders.16 In its ancient, superhuman scale, the aloe gestures towards the gigantic, indicating a subtle, but implicitly threatening power within, or in proximity of the home. The aloe is a kind of lacuna in the imperial landscape of New Zealand, whose power threatens the colonial household and its control over the landscape. 17 By disrupting and impinge upon the ostensibly safe domestic sphere, the aloe also echoes the unheimlich, or eldritch, an aesthetic concept explored by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, The Uncanny. The uncanny becomes, in part, an invasive force violating the sacred, domestic sphere and hearkens back to a previously repressed or hidden impulse The uncanny is something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. 18 In Prelude, the aloe is initially visualized as a threatening force that might have had claws instead of roots. The curving leaves seemed to be cliquishness something. 19 Positioned within the safe space of their property, the aloe is a menacing, ungovernable force that seems to encroach upon it.The plant becomes part of the repressed history of the landscapea history that is only apparent to Kezia, her mother Linda Burnell, and her grandmother Mrs. Fairfield, who are attuned to the forces under the surface of the picturesque exterior. Violent Underpinnings Beneath many of Mansfields pict uresque domestic scenes are moments of violence and rupture. In Garden Party, for instance, a poor man falls to his death during the preparations for a much-anticipated social concourse of the wealthy Sheridan family, undermining the convivial spirit of the occasion.In Prelude, Pat, the handyman, slaughters a deflect while the children watch with grotesque enchantment as it waddles for a few steps after being decapitated. The crowning wonder of the dead duck walking hearkens back to Burkes sublime, which is experienced in Prelude within the confines of the private residence. 20 The sublimity of this apparent defiance of the properties of death acts as a dramatic external force imposing on the observers intellect and reason in a profoundly Burkian way.But later that night, when the duck is placed in front of the patriarch, Stanley Burnell, it did not look as if it had ever had a head. 21 The ducks picturesque coverits legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of litt le balls of stuffing round itconceals its violent death. 22 In a similar way, the awfully nice picturesque house is imposed upon the landscape, as if it had never been any other way. 23 Through reconfiguration and transformation, a new imperial order conceals the fact that an older order once lay beneath it.In both cases, the picturesque functions as a way of naturalizing the violent order of domination. As Pats golden earrings distract Kezia from her grief over the ducks death, the ducks pretty garnish conceals its basted resignation. 24 There is no such thing as a pure aesthetics, Mansfield seems to suggest, as each serene moment is implicated in some act of violence, brutality, or suppression. In Prelude, the good-natured Pat disrupts a pre-existing picturesque scene in which ducks dress their dazzling breasts amidst the pools and bushes of yellow flowers and blackberries.25 Tellingly, the duck pond contains a bridge, a typical feature of the picturesque that reconciles or bridg es the gap between different aspects of the scenery. In this way, the Burnell familys cultivation of the land by set and slaughtering ducks disrupts another underlying order. Their unquestioning appropriation of this pre-existing order mirrors the way colonial life disrupt and undermined the indigenous Maori life. Juxtaposing two picturesque scenes that interrupt and conflict with one another, Mansfield questions and unravels the conventional image of the picturesque.This interplay of various opposed aesthetic orders constitutes part of Mansfields modernist style, in which aesthetic forms are ruptured, fragmented, and overturned. As the yards landscape bears traces of the Maori past, so the quiet harmony of the Burnells domesticity is underscored by deep, unspoken tensions and an animosity that hints at the uncanny. In fact, the only character who expresses any contentment is Stanley, who reflects, By God, he was a perfect fool to feel as adroit as this 26 Yet even he shudders u pon entering his new driveway, as a sort of scare overtook Burnell whenever he approached near home.27 Beneath this veneer of marital bliss and familial harmony, his wife Linda occasionally ignores her children and expresses horror towards her husband and his aggressive sexuality there were times when he was frighteningreally frightening. When she screamed at the hint of her voice, You are killing me. 28 Meanwhile Stanley and Beryl, Lindas sister, seem to have a flirtatious, indecent relationship exactly last night when he was reading the paper her false self had stood beside him and leaned against his shoulder on purpose.Hadnt she put her hand over his so that he should see how white her hand was beside his brown one. 29 Dramatizing these dynamics, Mansfield suggests that a happy household outside of town is not as dirt cheap as Stanley boasts it comes at the cost of servitude, sexual aggression, and a ravaged Maori landscape. 30 Through these layers, which Mansfield subtly str ips off one at a time, she artfully exposes the way that an existing political and aesthetic order is not what it seems to be or how it has invariably been.Her short stories are fraught with their own tensions while exposing the picturesque as false and absurd, she nevertheless draws on its conventional associations. Similarly, her subtle attempts to question colonial power are embedded in a patently idealized portrait of colonial life. Mansfield creates a seemingly beautiful or normal image, such as the happy family in Prelude, Bliss, or Garden Party, and then slowly challenges it through a subtle counter-narrative.In this way, her deployment of modernist techniques is less pronounced than that of James Joyce and her other modernist contemporaries. Just as she challenges aesthetic conventions, Mansfield unravels the readers ideas closely her own stories by presenting a seemingly beautiful, transparent narrative that is haunted by tensions, lacunae, and opacity. Like the decapit ated walking duck, these fictions of transparency and harmony quickly collapse upon closer inspection.