Katherine Mansfield

I was interested to learn that Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf had a somewhat vexed relationship. I can see similarities in their work, or at least in their short stories, and wonder to what extent such overlaps were coincidental or deliberate. Lee points out, “Their friendship was intimate but guarded, mutually inspiring but competitive” (381). In light of this, I read specifics in Mansfield differently than I did prior to reading Lee’s work. For example, “Prelude” seems to have much in common with some of Woolf’s short stories, particularly in its use of color, which I must admit, I have begun to focus on as a result of our class discussion on visual art.
Mansfield employs visual descriptions bright with imagery. She says of the interior design in Kezia’s house, “The dining-room window had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at the blue lawn with the blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence” (82). What this extended quotation illustrates is the prominence of vivid color in Mansfield’s writing. Perhaps this is an element of all writers of the period, or possibly, it was in reading Woolf’s work that Mansfield first saw this technique. Despite the specifics, the proverbial who came first argument, I feel that reading either one of these women can enrich one’s experience when reading the other.
There is one difference which stands out in Mansfield’s work; “Prelude,” “Bliss,” and “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” seem to involve more personal and familial type stories than those included in Woolf’s collected stories. I am well aware that this could be merely a result of the particular stories we have read by each author, but still it strikes me as curious that Mansfield’s stories seem to resonate with family and children while Woolf’s simply do not or at least they do not do so in such an obvious fashion. I wonder if this could be attributed to what Lee explains as a focus of Mansfield on having children. It appears, “Katherine maintained two entirely disparate sets of beliefs in her head: one that she was incurably ill and indeed dying, the other that she would recover, have children, live in the country with Murry and be perfectly happy” (382). I can’t help but see this split most clearly in “Bliss.”
Of course, it is only speculation but I find the mother’s place in the story to be an intriguing one with regard to the observation of Mansfield’s personal life made by Lee. Perhaps the tension that the author felt with regard to having her own family, which seems to culminate in a move to the country, the quintessential space for domesticity and the fear of her own mortality play out in the mother and the nanny in the story. “Bliss” seems to render this split visible in that the child in question is literally a part of the mother but seems as though she is not the child’s guardian in any way. This observation is perhaps clearest when Bertha mutters, “Why have a baby if it has to be kept—not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle—but in another woman’s arms?” (146). Bertha is the child’s mother, but the nanny is the one who is in control. The baby, then, may occupy the unease Mansfield experiences at the thought of having children of her own. It is made clear that the mother in the narrative loves this child. She says, “I’m fond of you. I like you,” but her place seems to be with her husband Harry and the nanny’s, as Bertha knows well, is with the child. Mansfield emphasizes this via dialogue between the two women who I feel may stand in for two distinct facets of her own personhood. The story goes on, “‘You’re wanted on the telephone,’ said Nanny, coming back in triumph and seizing her Little B” (147). I imagine this connection is a reach, but after learning of Woolf’s mental illness and the way in which it may have impacted her work and her life in general, I feel this could be a similar overlap in mental state and literary work. I find it fascinating to construct an explanation regarding one seemingly innocuous plot point in one story, the simultaneous embodiment of and longing for motherhood in “Bliss” and how Mansfield’s own conflicted feelings of having children influence this.